How to come up with Niche ideas?
How to come up with Niche ideas must be one of those top questions most Affiliate newbies want answering.
Many people will have different ways to find or think about new niche ideas, some will go very targeted and some more generic and work on building on it over time. I guess it boils down to a few things;
Can you make a quick buck from a very targetted popular niche with less time and effort involved?
This comes with its own challenges if you are hoping to rank in google, you will need to do your research here which could take more time than putting the site together. If the niche is too small or you don’t have an interest will it ever rank well if you cannot do the content for the site. Also are the domains for your chosen keywords going to be available.
Can you find a niche that is up and coming such as a pre-release or coming out soon.
1 example I found today was http://www.avatardvd.co.uk, no 1 in google for avatar DVD and has made record sales in the US already selling over 6.7 Million copies so far in only 4 days. I suspect most of these will have been online and pre-orders. Being ahead of the game could make that affiliate site a nice little earner.
Or do you go big and work at a Bigger Site but you may not make you money straight away?
Think you can beat the competition, the big players. Do you have something unique to offer or are you just going to throw up as much content as possible so it ranks and hope you get those clicks through to the merchants.
We here at Affiliate Project are always having meetings and the top topic of discussion is which direction do we take. We’ve only been doing this for over 14 months and have only worked on niche websites. We have learned lots along our journey and brought some good and bad domains, quite a few of our domains are undeveloped because of some of reasons above such as having no interest, too generic, too competitive, not enough time. Try and think outside the box, do your research and try and do something you have an interest in.
How Affiliate Marketing has changed our lifes
Paul and I started Affiliate Marketing just over 1 year ago and we’ve both found that our lives has already started to change. I thought it would be interesting to share this with others and for others to feel free to share their stories on what has changed in their life since taking the move from a typical job into the world of AM.
1. We’re working our butts off every single spare moment we get. We do far more hours work than before. I guess this would be the same for any new start up business. If you want to succeed then you have to put the time and effort in.
2. I get far less sleep. Paul still manages his time better and hits the sack earlier. I’m slightly different as I cannot switch off that easily, plus I have a 6 month old little boy who still likes his milk dream feed.
As we are both still working part time, most of our AM time is in the evenings and with a few odd hours at work. Shh!!!
3. I didn’t use to drink coffee at all. I’m now drinking 2 cups of coffee every day, probably because of the lack of sleep and the fact that Paul and I like to meet a couple of times a day to discuss affiliate project stuff, and the odd dream that one day soon we’ll be out of our day jobs having the meeting on the golf course, where as I think we both know that there will be far more work at that stage. Nice to have these thoughts though.
4. There is so many more rewards and a sense of achievement which motivates us to do more. We do get lots of ups and downs like when we get a google slap or our sites drop in position or the merchants data feeds are just crap, but this only challenges us further to get to the next stage
5. Paul is now keeping the local brewery in business and I’m on first name terms with the lady at my local grocery store. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but we do tend to drink more beer now.
6. Take aways and convenience foods are becoming a twice weekly event for me because we have limited time with full time jobs, kids to look after and then Affiliate Marketing on Top as well.
7. Our wife’s are getting less attention. I even forgot about our anniversary but it wasn’t the marriage one. It was the anniversary since we got together. That’s what I keep saying though to try and dig myself out of this mess.
8. We both have more ambition, where as before we were clock watching until we could get home and just chill out thinking is this 9-5 job what I’ve got to do for the rest of my working career, feeling stuck in the rat race as changing careers is almost near impossible without having different skills and all that crap that comes with looking for a real job!
9. Everything we buy now is almost always online. I have to look to see if there is a merchant affiliate program and then I’ll even start thinking of new potential niches
10. I’m getting softer as I get older or maybe its the fact that A. I still owe my wife for forgetting her anniversary or B. I know that one day soon I’ll be able to pay for all these extra things. I know this is not a good thing and should live to my earnings rather than more than them and I do try. Trust me my friends know that I’m frugal with my spending!!
I’m sure we could probably go on more and I’m sure in the next year we’ll have a load more to add.
We still wouldn’t want to be doing anything else right now. There is some exciting times ahead for us with a massive site we’ve been working on with another Affiliate we’ve partnered up with. More on this will be announced nearer the time.
How has Affiliate Marketing changed you?
Update on our Affiliate adventure
We thought we would just give our readers a quick update on our progress and what we’ve been doing the last few weeks as we didn’t want our readers thinking we’d given up on Affiliate Marketing. We’d not been able to update this Affiliate blog as much as we like because our main focus has been on developing more niche sites and a couple of bigger sites.
Well its been crazy for us the last few weeks, well in fact since the new year we have been on the go every spare hour we can get. Still we are working part time and hoping to achieve our goal by this time next year and be able to afford to live off our Affiliate earnings to cover our current 9-5 salaries. I would say we are just about on target for achieving this goal. We have seen an increase pretty much every month except for february which was slightly down from January, but that was expected with the January sales.
We have probably about 4-5 more niches which we are promoting and trying to get ranking. We have a new deals site we’ve started along with another Affiliate Stuart Smale as we’ve worked with him in the past. The site is starting to take shape and Stuart has done some great coding. We will give out the domain name when its ready and will be looking for feedback. This will be a good expirement as its very competitive and is a big risk. We suspect we’ll need to use PPC initially. We also have a couple of other bigger niche domains which we will build over the next couple of months too.
In addition to building new niches we’ve been trying to plan our day so that we do mainly content and promotion type work during the day time when we can. Obviously this can be tricky with normal work to do so that we don’t lose our existing jobs. Then in the evenings we do design of the sites and get the new niche sites developed and hopefully looking good. This will also involve getting the data-feeds working using PHP and MYSQL.
Anyway not much juicy stuff to report right now, will try and keep it updated with more juicy stuff in the next coming weeks.
Highs and Lows of Affiliate Marketing
Here at Affiliate Project we seem to have come to a bit of a crossroads. We are doing really well at the moment, January was our best month so far commission wise which is great for us and puts us on a great high, however both Gary and myself realize we need to start taking this project to the next level. So while our niche sites are great and are fulfilling their potential we know that to do this full time as a successful business and to get to our aim of leaving our current jobs and pursuing our dream we need bigger sites.
To be honest this is where the low is coming in at the moment. We are struggling a bit. Each day we sit down and think where are we going and what can we do. We can carry on with creating niche after niche which sure will add to the overall value however the big affiliates all say you need a bigger site. I think this is the stage at which a lot of affiliates might give up. Not us though. We know we can do this, we know it will take hard work and we know it will take time. So hopefully now after a good chat and with some focus we can progress towards our goal of becoming full time affiliates. If you have any advice for us we’d love to hear it.
We try and write this blog from the heart. We know this industry isn’t a quick win or a chance for an easy income. We know it takes hard work and dedication and we have put in so much effort over the last year that we know we can make it a success. Hopefully in a years time we can look back on this point as a turning point to becoming full time affiliate marketers.
On the positive we are attending the Affiliate meet up in London on Thursday up in Canary Wharf. We attended this shortly after we started a year ago and as newbies we didn’t really know what to expect. A year down the line we are looking forward to meeting up with the networks we have been using, meeting some merchants to see if we can promote their products and meeting up with some fellow affiliates to talk shop. Oh and of course not forgetting the free food and drink and the chance for Gary and I to enjoy a rare night off. We are not expecting much work to be done on Friday!
Welcome to 2010. Hoping for good things from Affiliate Project
Well the clock has ticked over to a new year. Wow where did 2009 go? We have come on leaps and bounds since we started this project back in February 2009. We are looking forward to writing an update on our first anniversary of the project at the beginning of February so we will write more on our thoughts on our first year then.
Meanwhile just thought we’d wish everyone a happy New Year and share a few of our aims for 2010 and our year ahead. We are going to keep going with some more niches to increase our income and hopefully bring us further along the road towards our goal of going full time. We also realize we can’t go full time on niches alone so have a couple of ideas up our sleeves for some bigger sites. So we will be working on these as well.
We are looking forward to meeting more and more affiliates and are already forming some great partnerships and friendships within the industry so we look forward to meeting more people and making some more contacts. We also hope to meet some of you readers in the flesh and maybe share a beer or two over the coming year as its nice to put a face to a name. We are looking at attending an affiliate event in February in London so hope to meet some of you there. We are also looking to attend the A4u expo in London in the Autumn as this will also help us and enable us to see how far we have come since we first started out.
We also hope to expand our skills, which to be honest we are doing all the time. We may look at exploring PPC and some other areas we haven’t yet explored. So while there will be a fuller post on our achievements in the past year in February we hope this will let you know some of our plans.
All the best for 2010. May it bring you all you want.
Affiliate Project work with Affiliate Newbie on niche sites
Recently we got a message from Stuart Smale (Smale Media) asking for some help on setting up his product data feeds into his niche websites using PHP and MYSQL. He found us through our How to pull product datafeeds using PHP and MySQL and display into your Webpage post. Since helping Stuart with some basic guidance,he has gone on and very quickly figured out how to do this and now has this running on his site instead of using EasyContentUnits, which although is an great tool to use, isn’t that great for SEO because the free version uses javascript which search engines cannot index.
Between us we’ve also improved my original php script to include some nice new features such as adding in a clickref to help track which products are most popular. Also adding into the script, how to pull in the merchant logos as these aren’t in the datafeeds supplied by the merchants. I was very impressed with how quickly Stuart has come on since he didn’t have this knowledge until recently. In fact Stuart has also spent quite a bit of time looking into pagination and also auto updating his feeds, something on our task list. Stuart has kindly shared these ideas and the code with us so this has been very helpful.
We have made a good contact and look forward to working with Stuart more in the near future. We’ve now added him to our MSN Affiliate Friends and been in regular contact over the last few weeks sharing ideas and opinions. This just goes to show what a good industry Affiliate Marketing can be, you could have friends who are effectively your competition but still share and discuss ideas and help each other out every now and again.
I would also like to mention some of the work Stuart has done on his niche sites. He certainly has a couple of good niches with some high search volumes and I think its only a matter of time and a bit of hard work and he’ll be seeing the rewards for those sites. The first site is children’s shoes and something that people may think will these sell online. Well I think there will be a percentage of people shopping online for most things you wouldn’t usually buy because you can get them cheaper and also use voucher codes. We recently did this with our little girl because we already had her feet measured up, then new the size and went searching online.
Another site Stuart has done and now using the product data feeds with his own database is Larder Fridge which is a really nice simple design, so very easy to use. He’s using pagination as some pages have a lot of products. I do think Stuart has a good eye for design.
Thanks Stuart for getting in contact with us and we hope to see you grow and succeed in Affiliate Marketing. Good luck mate
New site launched in Furniture sector for A4U competition
Following on from Paul’s post about the launch of his oak furniture site. I was a little slower in launching my site partly because I chose to design the site using a different wordpress theme. My site is called Oak Dining Sets which is designed to be a one stop shop for oak dinging table and chair sets from the top oak furniture retailers. This site is using data feeds to populate the products from different merchants and different networks soon once I get accepted to more merchants programs.
We only entered the Affiliates4u competition here a few days ago so it was pretty quick to get these sites up. Paul had launched his site oak console tables site a day or 2 before mine so he had a head start. His site was soon indexed and ranking on the 4th page, hoping to climb. Mine was launched soon after and got indexed the same night and was sitting on the 1st page of google. I checked this morning and although the site was already indexed and ranking, its now dropped. I checked Google Webmaster Tools and there aren’t any problems but it does show no urls indexed. I’m hoping this will change soon.
I now have to add more merchants products, continue to add content both on-site and off-site and do lots of back links. The good thing about this competition is we get to swap links with other related sites and it also motivates us to get more niche sites done and makes it interesting and not boring.
Paul and I have a wager on who can make the first £50 in commission. The first to acheive this will get a free beer from the other. This again helps motivate us. Goodluck Paul 
We will be updating our progress on here and also on the a4u head to head competition thread.
Free links to your site when people cut and paste your content using Tynt Insight
I recently discovered this cool new tool called Tynt Insight which basically tracks who is copying your content from your site. This is being used by many big sites to protect their content. The Daily Mail are even using this to reward them for creating the content they get a free link back to their site or the page where the content originated from.
The way this works is you copy a simple bit of javascript code and add this to your website. This javascript simply adds a attribution link to your page where the content was copied from. This has many benefits, some of which includes:
- See what content is being copied, this helps you know what content on your site is interesting and popular with real-time reporting
- More traffic and more page views as you’ll attract other visitors from those links back to your site
- Better Search ranking because you’ll have more referral links to your site
- Improved Content Visibility with a useful auto tweet tool
Apparently some sites are getting over 1000 links back to their site each day.
Have any other Affiliates used Tynt Insight? Feel free to test this out by copying the content of this article and paste this into your blog site
Google dropped my site again :(
UPDATE: Site back at number 1 as of today 27th Oct 2009, was it something I did?!?!? very strange
Google can be both your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Today it’s the latter. We have a site maternity swimwear which has been ranking at no 1 for well over 2 months now. We had some problems before with the ranking of this site, and what appeared to be a yo-yo effect. We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure the site was developed according to Google’s guidelines.
We haven’t had any recent major changes to the site so this leaves us really confused as what could be causing the issue. The site is being updated on a regular basis for fresh content. My thoughts are its possibly due to either of the following:
- Back links to our site may have dropped, I did notice a couple of hundred back links from 1 site to our site no longer there
- Back links from this site (which has now been removed in an attempt to fix the problem) Maybe these links although all one way aren’t relevant. Obviously this will reduce the number of links but will try to focus on more organic relevant links. I know I have added a link back from this post but couldn’t resist as this will be a PR2 link, so even if it helps initially, at least will get us some more sales until we get more relevant back links.
- Google crawled our site and found 404 pages, possibly due to our Web host (EUKHOST) having problems yet again. We did notice that some of these page URLs had been added to our robots.txt file, thanks for doing this Google.
This is somewhat frustrating when this happens, especially because the site is generating quite a lot of sales. If we were full time and this was happening across several sites, then our earnings could fluctuate and would not be a good business.
Plans for the future going forward is to pick ourselves up and try and establish no 1 position again through more relevant backlinks, maintain updating the content such as offers to the site and also look into dedicated hosting in the near future. Additionally we’ll be looking at developing sites that don’t necessarily rely on SEO such as membership/community sites.
A4U Expo been and gone, Affiliate Project Duo Gutted we couldn’t attend
Myself and Paul really wanted to attend our first big affiliate event. The event of the year in the world of Affiliate Marketing. The A4U Expo.
We’ve heard a lot about how important the event can be as there is so much information and tips many newbie affiliates and even old timers learn and take something valuable from the event, and you’d hope so given that the cost of the event is around £300.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make the commitment due to my wife being heavily pregnant and about to drop any day now, and my Affiliate Partner in crime wasn’t able to get the time off work. However we will hopefully be able to attend the A4U Expo in London as full timers next year.
If anyone did go let us know what it was like, the top 3 things they got out of it. Also like to hear how smashed you got
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