Affiliate Marketing – Part 1

By e-scaping | Published: November 5, 2011

So, I thought I would update you guys with how the whole monetisation of websites is coming along from my first couple of months within the affiliate marketing industry.

So far I have recouped 90% of my initial investment over a period of 6 months.
The money was originally invested in a few domain names bought from fellow domainers, but mainly through purchasing FTR (free-to-reg) domain names.

I have managed to recoup the majority of my investment by either designing and building websites with affiliate links via amazon, or buying and selling domain names on their own.

I came across the idea of monetising websites via this book by George Marshall called “Get out while you can – Escape the rat race”:

Buy the book – Get out while you can – Escape the rat race

You can read my review of this book here.

Amazon Affiliate Script – Fresh Store Builder

Now, I wanted to point you guys in the direction of a tool called Fresh Store Builder. If you want to find out a little more about this tool, then read this Fresh Store Builder Review.

Now this tool will initially cost you to set up but will make the ability to build monetised websites easy to setup, simple to maintain and great to monetise and you can find that tool at Fresh Store Builder.

Using all this to learn website design

Now you may be asking that “although it’s great to monetise websites, etc, but how does this help me learn…?”

Well, the great thing about FSB (fresh store builder) is that you can create your own themes, alternatively just manipulate the themes you already have at your disposal.

So FSB will Help you learn design via photoshop or GIMP, leading you to play around with CSS, moving on to writing a bit of content and dabble in a bit of SEO to promote your website.

With all these skills coming together you can build up your portfolio and skill-set making you a hell of a lot more employable than you already are!

So go on, give it a go!
Fresh Store Builder

Posted in Affiliate Marketing | Comments closed

Buying Domains – A Mini Experiment

By e-scaping | Published: August 16, 2011

3 years ago was the point in which I very first started getting into website design.

Since this point, I have had 2 front-end development jobs. 1 of which was 18 months as a junior web designer and front-end developer, and the next 18 months is with my current employers as a middle weight front-end developer.

Alongside my full-time job, I used to do a spot of freelance work, but never really liked the idea of working with clients for pittance. So affiliate marketing was the next natural step to try and earn more money on the side and I have now been researching and learning this trade for around 6 months now.

At such an early stage in my affiliate marketing career, to me, success is deemed as a domain name that returns enough revenue to pay for itself. Anything more than the £8 reg fee of the 2 years it is in my name is a massive bonus.

Buying various niche domain names

During the last 6 months, I have purchased numerous domain names of differing quality, value and potential.

I guess every domain name has potential, but I guess this potential depends on your expectations, abilities, knowledge, resources and belief that determines whether a project will ultimately fail or succeed.

One Word Domain Names

Now there has been a lot of forum threads, blog posts and general conversations mentioning exact match domains (EMD’s). The idea behind EMD’s is that Google and other search engines provide a “bonus” level of importance to websites with keywords held within a domain name, almost as if it adds to the authority of the website/domain depending on the keywords of the domain and how that matches to keywords used throughout the  site.

Some (the majority?) suggest that a domain name that has multiple keywords but all in one word (no hyphens) will be given a “bonus” in Google SERP’s, where as a hyphenated domain will not get this bonus.

dust caps

One of my first domains that I developed was a wordpress blog setup to recommend various style dust caps.

Each product page/post has an image, maybe around 100 words about the dust caps, a price and a buy now link.

Now this domain purchase was a .org.uk domain.
I bought a .org.uk dmain mainly because the .co.uk domain was taken, I didn’t want the hyphenated .co.uk version, and because I am very much a cheap skate and don’t like to pay more than reg fee for a domain name at such an early stage.

Now this niche is neither highly priced (around £5 – £10 per set) or high search volume product (getting around 500+ visits a month), but I am happy to say it has paid for itself within the first 2 months since it went live, which to me is deemed as a success. So for the next 22 months return is then deemed as a profit.

Cheap Bean Bag

Now this domain name was a little off the cuff.

I wanted to experiment with the idea of catching people that were already on the route to purchasing an item and were looking for the best price possible – hence the “cheap” prefix in the domain name.

Again, this keyword/domain is not particularly high in search volume (Google analytics reports around around 600+ visits p/m), but the price per item is a bit better at around £40 – £80+ per sale.

Unfortunately, cheapbeanbags.co.uk was already taken, and after contacting the owner and asking how much he wanted and with a price tag of £250 attached to that domain name, I moved on to the next best thing – The non plural version of that domain name.

Now this domain was setup on the Amazon Affiliate store script – Fresh Store Builder (read more about fresh store builder here).

Again, within 2 months not only had this domain name paid for itself, but it had also made profit. So again, I have a domain/website that has been a “success”. So it was time to carry on experimenting.

Domains with hyphens – No exact match bonus?

So after the previous 2 one-word domain name experiments, I though I would give the “dreaded” hyphenated domain name a try and see what sort of results I get.

I done some research for keywords, products and search for domain names that were free to register (FTR), and stumbled across a potential high(er) search volume niche, with the hyphenated spelling actually proving to be the correct spelling of this product type, with that product being high-top trainers.

high-tops

So high-tops.co.uk was my first step into the world of hyphenated domain names, with the idea of experimenting it’s determined “value” within the likes of Google and see what kind of traffic and commissions I can make from it.

Google’s keyword tool reported that there were searches in excess of 18,100 local exact searches for this term, so I thought I would give it a pop.

Well, this was yet another “success” story, in the sense that again this domain name had exceeded paying for itself, but this time within it’s first month!

Currently getting around 70+ unique visits a day, at time of writing this website is my highest traffic site of 2000+ visits per month.

But, conversion isn’t great at all, which I think is mainly due to the fresh store builder not being the best platform for this type of product because each product page displays only one product size, so if a user gets to a page and the high-tops are not in their size, obviously this product is not going to sell… but again, this domain has already paid for itself a few times over, so the hyphenated domain name experiment is deemed a success in this instance.

Double Hyphenated Domain Names?

So, with the .org.uk, non-hyphenated domain, “cheap” prefixed multi-keyword non hyphenated domain name, and hyphenated 2 word domain name proving to be beyond a “success”, I have recently decided I will try a double hyphenated domain name – but – potentially not in the manner you might be expecting…

electronic cigarette is the niche I will be trying next using double hyphens to separate the keywords.
Why double hyphens? Well, this is a growing niche on a rapid scale, meaning all variations of the non-hyphenated and single hyphenated versions and domain extensions had been taken, also do you remember how much of a cheapskate I mentioned I was? well, with all of these factors playing their part, I recently purchased the FTR domain name: electronic–cigarette.co.uk

Now even I will admit that this domain name looks pretty damn ugly and maybe deemed by some as non-trustworthy, but remember to bare in mind that for a domain name or website to be deemed a success, it only needs to pay for itself within the 2 years it is registered in your name.

This domain/website has literally only just gone live, so as soon as I have some results, I will be sure to post an update. So if you are interested, be sure to pop back to see how things are going.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Domain Names | Comments closed

Fresh Store Builder – Amazon Affiliate Script

By e-scaping | Published: July 19, 2011

Since around March 2011, I have been looking into the idea of setting up websites and monetising them via affiliate commissions or Google Adsense.

I liked the idea of setting up an amazon affiliate store front and finding a solution that was both quick and easy in order to get sites on multiple domains in order to monetise them effectively and efficiently was fairly high up the list of requirements.

Amazon Store Script

During a few months of research, toying around with the likes of WordPress as a product review/recommendation platform and trying various other amazon store scripts that can be found on the net, I stumbled across fresh store builder, which is a fantastic amazon store script which allows you to automate the adding of products, categories and subcategories, etc, whilst also giving you the freedom to add your own textual content for any given page.

Amazon Affiliate Script - Fresh Store Builder

 

Fresh Store Builder

The interface and usability of the fresh store builder as an affiliate store platform is pretty sweet, with a nice navigation area in the admin which gives you access to adding or editing categories and subcategories, you can change the look of your store by choosing from the 4 default theme templates or for those of you that are a little more advanced in graphic/web design, you could even try modifying your chosen template, giving you complete freedom of how your store looks.

Auto Populating Amazon Store

When you have set up a subcategory or category, you have the option of  setting up auto product population based upon a keyword search, browse node or ASIN.

Now although this is a fantastic option for populating a website from zero to hero within a couple of clicks and a few minutes, in order to be found in search engines you will of course need to be providing Google with unique content, but it still gives you a head start when looking to populate your store.

Success Rate of Fresh Store Builder

Now I have installed the fresh store builder on to a couple of my domains, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the almost instant results from some of these websites, with a handful more than paying for themselves within the first couple of weeks of being live.

A domain that has been less successful (so far) is Chiminea, mainly due to the fact they are yet to be indexed by the search engine behemoth that is Google.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Store Scripts | Comments closed