Affiliate Project had a great time at the A4u meet-up last night
It was a great evening. Gary and I went up to London to attend our first social event as affiliates. We had a great time and met some great people. We also got some great advice so thanks to everyone we spoke to at the pub. Our heads were a bit fuzzy this morning back at our daytime jobs due to the free bar which we took advantage of. We also managed a few games of pool in between mingling.
Great organization by the people who ran it so our thanks go to them. We hope to keep going to these and are also looking at the possibility of attending the Expo in October.
Affiliate Project attending the A4u London Meet on Thursday
We are having a rare night off on Thursday to attend the London meetup organised on the affiliates 4u forum found here http://www.affiliates4u.com. We are looking forward to meeting other affiliates and feel we can go along with some confidence now we have earned some money from the affiliate industry and our first affiliate site. We have seen the list of attendees and it looks to be a great evening with some great companies attending as well as the affiliate networks and lots of other affiliates. We are of course looking forward to the free beer as it will be good to unwind a bit so we might be the ones constantly at the bar! If you are going look out for us and say hi. I believe name badges are being prepared and ours will have our names, Gary and Paul, as well as affiliateproject.co.uk. We already have a some names to look out for through people who have introduced themselves through this site. We will try and post a post meetup article, although it may have to wait for the heads to clear.
Affiliate Project’s first niche site produces some income
We have had a purchase through our first nice site www.powerplates.org.uk. We also know that the site is starting to attract traffic and visitors. We have been working hard to improve the SEO on the site to keep it high up on google and it is currently on the first page so we are pleased with that. We have also been busy keeping the site up to date. Some prices have changed and we have increased the products we offer and compare to keep up to date with the market. This can be time consuming and therefore we are looking at product feeds and how we can utilize them in the future. We have also purchased some further domains and are busy working those. We are still enjoying the affiliate business and are working hard in our spare time to maintain the project and move it forwards.
How to use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find search volumes for niche keywords
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a very useful tool for any affiliate to help find information about keywords and how they are performing in Google’s search engine. This is a very useful tool when thinking of a niche affiliate site so that you can check things like the search volume, the advertiser competition and the average search volumes for those keywords.
Once you have found you niche idea, use the keywords tool to check how many people are searching for those specific keywords. This will help determine if you can potentially make money from your niche site through affiliate links.
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool will also show you the Estimate Average CPC (Cost per click).
For example, this blog site Affiliate project, type in those keywords and below will show you an example screenshot of the keyword CPC, Competition, Search Volume for previous month and Average Search Volume.
Example 1 – showing Google Adwords Keyword Tool for keywords affiliate project in broad term (any match for that search term):
Example 2 – showing Google Adwords Keyword Tool for keywords “affiliate project” in exact term (any match for that exact search term):
As you will see from the 2 screenshots above (hopefully as the images are quite small) that the broad term gets approx 5,400 search hits a month for those keywords. Now people will be typing in those 2 keywords. In the 2nd screenshot our exact search is only 16 on average but was 140 in February, so not many people using the exact search term “affiliate project”.
You can either use those keywords to try and optimise your site via SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or you can improve your search results by buying these keywords after signing up to have a Google Ads account. Once you add those keywords, this would allow you to be added to the sponsors section on google’s search engine if someone searches for those keywords.
Now an example niche site that we have recently done is power plates or www.powerplates.org.uk , Vibration Fitness machines which are currently quite popular amongst celebrities and sports professionals, so we thought it might be a good niche site with quite a lot of keyword search volume, approx 9,900 in Jan/Feb on average for the exact search term “power plates”. Go ahead and find your niche…
To summarise, follow the basic steps below:
- Go to google adwords keyword tool
- Enter your niche keywords and characters shown to show the results, click Get keyword ideas
- Change the columns to show all
- If keywords entered is more 2 or more words, then change Match type to be exact to give you the exact search for “keyword1 keyword2″ in quotes. This way you can target a specific search.
- Click on the Approx Avg Search Volume to sort by column, this will show the most searches first
Working hard
Well we haven’t blogged for a while so just wanted to update you regular readers. We are working hard on our next two sites. We have turned it into a competition and have given ourselves 1 month to write the sites and launch. Whoever makes the most money in the first month buys the other a beer! Needless to say with this incentive it’s full steam ahead.
We have also been busy updating powerplates.org.uk where we have taken on board peoples comments and improved the site. At the moment using some web stats we can see traffic coming to the new site so we are really pleased with the start it’s made. We are also busy looking to improve our SEO as well.
powerplates.org.uk – ranked #9 on first day
With the SEO we have done on our first day of launch we are ranked number 9 on Google for an exact search of “Power Plates”. We feel this a great achievement for our first niche site. We have had some useful feedback as well so already have some improvements we will be making to the site. We are really enjoying this and the buzz we have both received from creating and launching the new site and this site is great. We look forward to this continuing as we create more sites. We are finding our way in the affiliate world and are already networking to get help and to offer our advice where we can.
Affiliate Project launches first site – powerplates.org.uk
After some hard work and steep learning curves we have got our first niche product site up and running. It’s live and we have started to run SEO on it to try and improve the search ratings. We decided to target the fitness and leisure industry. The reason being we are both keen on keeping fit so we have an interest in this area. Gary had been hearing about an up and coming fitness trend called vibration fitness and had specifically heard about Power Plate machines and their increasing popularity. So we set about looking for domain names and other websites already out there. We wanted to create a site that reviews brands and machines and various price ranges and that also explains what vibration fitness is, how it can benefit and give links to reputable stores to purchase from.
Hence www.PowerPlates.org.uk was born. Have a look and see what you think. We would welcome any feedback, positive or otherwise as we want to learn from what we have done well and also learn how we can improve.
Being our first site we faced a few challenges along the way. These included how best to design the site and write it. Also trying to not make it too complicated and also to get the content right. We have been thinking is the site right, should we continue but reading other affiliate blogs we have learned not to give up, to take these challenges head on and persevere as ultimately it’s best to keep going and get the site out there and improve it rather than waste the time and scrap the work done.
It has been great learning for us and ultimately this is why we are doing it. To learn a new skill and to make some revenue, especially in these hard times at the moment. We have thoroughly enjoyed the venture and are proud of it. Will it make any revenue? Well only time will tell but it hasn’t put us off and we already have our next two domain names.
Progress Update
We have almost completed our first niche site. Currently we are waiting on confirmation of sign up from a couple of affiliate networks before we can finally go live. This niche site is in the fitness and leisure area and we hope that it will do well.
Meanwhile we are not resting on our laurels. As there are two of us on this project and we now have more experience in web development we have decided to take on a site each. They are both related to each other so we can assist each other and bounce ideas off of each other. They are both in the financial area. This is the benefit of having two of on this project. We can both take on different ideas and run with them, making sure we update our current sites and this blog at the same time. As we are doing this in our spare time at the moment this is crucial as individually our spare time would be halved but having two people allows us to double our efforts. Sure the rewards are halved but we think the benefits of working together outweighs this as we can double the input and hopefully in the long term double the return.
We have registered the two new domains and are busy looking at design ideas and affiliate networks. We’ve already done some research on keyword hits and other websites out there to get an idea of what we should expect. We will keep you posted.
New plugin we are using
We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.
Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.
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