A couple of weeks ago when I posted the list of work at home jobs, I was surprised to see that hardly anybody had clicked on the link to read more about how to do affiliate marketing. It has a bit of a learning curve but when it’s done well, it can create a stream of income that requires no work once it’s setup.
I decided to do an experiment and follow the steps and document it here to see if it will work. I’ve tried it once before and while I have made more than it cost me to build the site, I made the mistake of picking a product that I didn’t know much about.
This time, I’ve decided to take my post from Friday about creating a professional blog and create a site just for it. The difference between having the information here and on its own site is that people looking for blogging information aren’t necessarily going to find my post from here very easily in a search engine.
As I said in the “work at home” blog post, there’s a tutorial at HQHow.com which details how to do affiliate marketing. Here are the steps from that tutorial and how I am doing them for this experiment.
- Choose a product. This step of the tutorial involves researching products to see what you might want to sell and creating a broad list of possibilities. For this experiment, I’m skipping these because I already have 3 I know I want to use.
- Keyword research. Just like the tutorial says, I used Google’s Keyword Tool to research search terms that people often look for. I tried several variations to find a phrase that met the criteria specified in the tutorial. I eventually ended up focusing on the phrase “pro blog” to use for my site.
- Picking a product. I chose to feature 3 products which were all discussed in my blogging tutorial. They are products I use and recommend and happen to have affiliate programs for – HostGator.com hosting, Thesis for WordPress theme and Bookmarking Demon social bookmarking tool. I also recommend other products within the tutorial which don’t have affiliate programs but that’s ok too. These 3 products will be my affiliate links on my new site and the way that I can earn money.
- Registering a domain. Based on my keyword research, I decided to reserve probloghq.com as my domain name. Having the search term in your domain name gives your blog a boost and more people will be able to find it.
- Choosing a host. I used HostGator just like I’ve recommended before and just like the tutorial recommends. Since they allow unlimited domains hosted on one account, I just simply added this new site for free.
- Affiliate Landing Page. I used the affiliate landing page template from the tutorial to create the site to make it easier to get going.
- Website Contents. I already had the content mostly created because I was going to use the information from my previous post. I simply broke it into multiple pages in this case. If I didn’t already have it created, I would need to work to build at least 2-3 pages for the site that speak about the product(s) I’m featuring. Having this amount of content helps the search engines pick the site up.
- Building backlinks. I used Bookmarking Demon to submit my site to social bookmarking sites automatically which is much, much quicker than doing it manually.
- Checking your site is indexed. This will be my next step. It takes about a week for Google to pick up a site so that people can start finding it. I will report back on this as well as if I’ve made any money.
Time spent: 4 hours
Money spent: $9 (for domain registration)
I don’t know for sure that this will make much money but I’m hoping that it does (obviously) not just for me but for other people to see that it can be done. I’ll update you next week to see if it worked.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting.
I would wait until you are getting targetted visitors before you decide whether it works or not
Glen
Hey!
Great post and nice that you are following HQhow’s tutorial.
Im also trying it with various different sites.
i havent got the whole backlink thing down.
Is bookmarking demon really that good? Dont you need multiple accounts with each social network site in orwder for it to work?
Im currently making links through comments on dofollow blogs and writing articles and making a squidoo lens for each site.
Also actively reading warrior forums.
Nice blog you have here!
All the best
Diggy
Hi Glen,
I planned to wait until next week when it will be picked up by search engines. I debated including the link to the site here but thought people would benefit from seeing it (though I didn’t hyperlink it so they’ll have to manually go there).
Hi Diggy,
Thanks! Yeah, I really do like Bookmarking Demon. It doesn’t get my site submitted to all 107 but it does submit to as many as it can so I end up with over 50 each time which is a great use of my time. I use it on my blog as well as the two affiliate sites that I’ve experimented with. I read about a woman once who decided to do it all manually and it took her 8 hours just to setup the accounts and that doesn’t even include submitting them.
btw, Glen is the author of the HQHow.com tutorial so I’m happy to see him stop by.
This is interesting. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I’m enjoying watching your blog mature and grow!!
Looks good, Shannon! I like how you picked multiple products in the same genre to promote, using steps that are easy. I’m interested to see what happens in a couple weeks…!
Thanks for the information. I have tried some advertising on my site, but have not had much success (little or no income). I really enjoyed reading your post on designing a website with no experience. I am following your instructions and making design changes on my site. I hope it turns out as well as yours did.
I am anxious to see your progress with affiliate marketing as well.
Hi Clara,
Advertising via things like Adsense is overrated in my opinion plus it makes people click away from your blog. If you haven’t already, be sure to read the PDF written by Chris Guillebeau called “279 Days to Overnight Success.” It’s the model I use for my blog and the key is trust and people don’t generally trust sites as much that run ads. Plus, you can make more in the long run if you avoid ads, build trust and sell your own products to your readers. Good luck with your site, fellow Thesis user!
And Clara, this is a great post from Copyblogger regarding content marketing which is what I was talking about above.
Content Marketing 101
Hey Shannon, Im just curious how its going with your case study?
I just started one a week ago, http://www.rocketfrenchhq.com. Site is up, now Im making backlinks and going to work hard to get it to rank on page one for Rocket French Review.
Dont think that will be so easy.:P
Ciao
Diggy