For sale is my website www.whitetv.co.uk.
The site went live in Feb 09 and you can read here how it started, in my post I mention I couldn’t find many white TV’s but I just wasn’t looking properly and since added a lot more which is probably why the commissions increased in February.
In 2009 the site made £1135.29, So far in 2010 (jan-Feb) the site has generated £325 in commission, below are the stats for February, the site generates most of it’s income through Amazon.
The site is number 1 in Google for the terms:
“White TV”
“White TVs”
“White LCD TV”
“White LCD TVs”
“White Televisions”
“White LCD Televisions”
I am looking for £2000 for the site
Edit ** A few more stats/revenue figures
I thought I would make a post on how one of my niche sites did in 2009. 
The site is White TV which as the name suggests is about white televisions, so a pretty niche niche if you like.
A bit of history about how the site was developed, in January 2009 I set up a design contest at Digitalpoint for the design of the site, I paid around £95 for the design and about £25 to have it coded. I would update the site with new TV’s and prices manually until Easy Content Units came along, which was like a godsend as I was getting fed up with researching and updating the site.
At this point the site wasn’t ranking very well in Google, the content wasn’t too good as I’d written it myself and I’m hopeless at writing content! A search of Google for ‘White TV’ brought up 325,000,000 results and 190,000,00 for ‘White Televisions’ so I thought I better do something about it.
Around the middle of June somebody posted on the A4u forum about content writing so I thought i’d give them a shot and I was pleased with the results so had them write content for the White TV site a few weeks later, I’m not sure exactly when it was or how much a part these changes made to the site ranking, but the site is number one in Google for most of the keywords you’d think of for this niche ‘White TV’, ‘White Televisions’, ‘White LCD TV’ etc.
So how did the site perform in 2009?
Commission for Feb – Dec 09 came in at £1135.29
Looking at where the sales went shows:
Amazon – £793.02 – 72 sales
Play.com – £119.20 – 99 sales
Play.com pay such an aweful commission rate, if those sales had gone through amazon or even anywhere else I’d have been looking at an extra £900 based on average commission figures, as frustrating as it is I always include Play.com in most sites as I think a sale is a sale and the customer may end up getting there from elsewhere anyway.
On the last update I did to the site I noticed fewer new White TV’s which is probably why i’m doing this post now, I’ve noticed a couple of other White TV sites popping up in Google now, they’ve certainly ranked page 1 quicker than I did though 
Today I received this tasty sweetie hamper from Red Letter Days as part of their Christmas incentive.
I will certainly be trying to increase sales to Red Letter Days so as to move up a tier to gain an even better prize!
Luckily I like everything that’s in it
Red Letter Days Christmas Incentive Sweetie prize
Someone sent this to me today and said it was me, I couldn’t actually disagree with them
As I’m sure with most affiliates I spend so much time in front of the PC, which as well as working on affiliate sites I get distracted by looking for new sites to make and then realising I have enough to get on with, so distraction probably plays a big part of why I sit in front of a PC for so long.
Life as an affiliate
Last night I set up a new niche site, Cufflink Box, it took about 2 hours to do (as you can probably tell!)
Normally when I do these kind of sites I just submit the URL to Google, Yahoo and Bing and then link to it from an older site of mine and depending on the product place an ad on Gumtree, just from doing this I’ve seen quite a few sites sit at 1 or 2 in Google quite easily and other times take an age to index, but what else should I do, what do you do?
I don’t expect this to make any decent money to be honest, I’m not sure why I did it, I get bored sometimes working on bigger sites and create a small one that doesn’t take so long to set up, I need to learn to be more patient I think!!
I set the site up for PPC just for Cufflink Boxes and not cufflinks and have already made a sale, £1.16 from John Lewis, happy with that!
Following on from my previous post about my AW stats for 2008 I’ve been looking at my AW stats for 2009.
I’ll go straight into listing my top 5 (number of sales):
1. Buyagift.co.uk – 771 sales
2. Getting Personal – 192 sales
3. Play.com – 146 sales
4. Activity Superstore – 116 sales
5. Red Letter Days – 18 sales
As you can see Buyagift.com are still my top selling merchant, with the total top 5 selling almost 200 more items than the previous year, Play.com is in at number 3 but because of their silly commission rates the total commission is less than Red Letter Days, in fact Activity Superstore generated 1500% more commission than Play.com
It is a bit disappointing to generate £23k in sales and not even receive 1% in commission, with using Easy Content Units I always include Play.com as I think even pennies is better than no sales, but very frustrating when you can sell a TV on amazon and get around £20 commission and the same at Play brings you £2.
I’m not sure if I am too happy with my 2009 affiliate marketing, in terms of commission I would have liked more but then I think that comes with the more you make the more you want to make, I want this to give me a full time income, November and December generates more than my day job it’s just the rest of the year I need to get sorted, I feel I’ve learned a lot in 2009 as I’ve actually made a bit more effort to and things can only get better
If, like me, you have a restriction on the amount of SQL databases you can have on your hosting then this is a little tip that I had trouble finding out when I wanted to create more Wordpress sites.
I have a restriction of 15 databases with my 1&1 hosting account, I started to look around for a new host but didn’t really fancy moving all my domains as it would be a bit of a nightmare, so this is the solution.
In your wp-config.php file you can change the prefix of the tables that are created, the default is ‘wp_’ so you can change this to anything else, for example ‘ps_’ or ’sq_’, this will enable multiple installs of wordpress on one database.
As I’ve said before I don’t really pay too much attention to stats or which sites are making what, I really should as then I’ll know if it really is worth promoting some sites or not, whereas now all I worry about is the overall profit of my sites and while that is more than my PPC cost I don’t get too fussed.
Anyway, I was looking at my AW stats for the year and thought I’d look back to see what it was last year, so my top 5 top selling merchants for Jan08 to Dec08 were…..
1. Buyagift.co.uk – 1031 sales
2. Virgin Experience Days – 9 sales
3. Iwantoneofthose.com – 6 sales
4. Brown Bag Clothing – 3 sales
5. Getting Personal – 2 sales
As you can see it’s heavily in the favour of Buyagift.com, in 2009 this has dramatically changed and I’ll do a post after Dec 31st to show how it has changed because of the implementation of Easy Content Units in my sites.
My income in 2008 didn’t just arrive from AW but it even shocked me to see how much of my income came from Buyagift.com
I received this today from Buyagift so thanks to Graham, Dan and everyone else at Buyagift!!
.
I’ve promoted buyagift since I first started in affiliate marketing, and it’s things like this that makes me continue to promote them, and now I have my own blog I can thank them publicly
Now to find a longer straw!
I started to outsource my content writing as quite frankly I am no good at it, I found a great content writer who advertised on the A4U forum and they have written some great content for me, I’ve even found myself enjoying reading some of the content about subjects you never thought could be interesting. I even believe some of this content is the reason why some of my sites rank as well as they do.
Sometimes i’m after content to be written a bit quicker, I can be impatient at times, so I took a look over at digitalpoint for some content writers, advertising for people with a good grasp of English, I’d get plenty of messages from people willing to do the job and the rates were silly, so I gave some a go.
Now there’s a big difference between understanding English and writing in English it seems, they can write English words but cannot make it flow in English very well, “The hat he wears is blue. The blue hat can be worn on the head”, the sctructure of their writing seems to be a lot of sentences put together to form some content.
There are also some very good writers on digitalpoint, I think it just takes a bit of trial and error to find the good ones, but given the choice of paying $4/100 words(ok) over £15/500 words(perfect) I’d rather pay more every time.