Jul31
Just wanted to say another quick thanks to Red Letter Days for the Q2 incentive prize I received of a Logic iSTATION iPhone/iPod Dock.
The great thing with Red Letter Days is you don’t even need to make that many sales to receive a prize, no matter how small it’s always nice to receive something for any affiliate efforts, on top of the nice commissions already!
May11
Just recently I have been setting up some affiliate sites for other people (see here) , in the last four weeks, two of which I spent in Poland, I have made four sites and I’m working on 2 more now, but this then made me think “DO YOUR OWN” to myself, after all I have plenty of domains sat there waiting to be developed.
So this is what I’m going to do, I am also going to pick one, possibly foodmixers.org.uk and document the whole process of building it, getting it into the Search Engines, and then hopefully making some cash on it!
In April I attended an SEO Course at the excellent SEO Junkies, I think I’ve got a decent grasp of on page SEO and wanted to get more insight into Link Building, I had been using profile linking a lot and it worked but I wanted to know how to do the kind of Link Building you might do if Argos came knocking on the door, the course was great, it confirmed the stuff I already knew and gave an insight into a few other bits of SEO, when you’re at home working, learning things by yourself, you never know if what you know is right, so it was good to confirm some of that knowledge with people who do it succesfully every day for major clients.
As I am now working 3 days a week in my main job, I have more time to work on the affiliate sites I have and it would be nice to at least double the amount I make at the moment , fingers crossed!
I will start the ‘Building a Niche Affiliate Site’ series very shortly 
Feb25
I know it’s almost March but I thought I’d report the final figures for 2010 for the White TV niche site, the trend continued since the October YTD update and the final profit the site made was £2215.43.
An increase of just under 100% on 2009, so if I’d actually sold it for the £2k figure I was looking for last March the new owner would have pretty much made their money back without even doing anything to the site, luckily for me I pocketed the money instead, it works out at an average profit of £184.62 per month.
I am in the middle of actually making the site into a WordPress site, and will actually make it a lot better in terms of the comparison prices with individual posts for each TV and hopefully it will increase sales.
The site received an average of 2,957 unique visitors per month, the highest income came from Amazon at £1172.71 followed by eBay at £548.15.
This is from a keyword with just 1,900 local exact match on it, when I see people answering questions negatively about if you can make money from a site/product with so little exacts it makes me laugh, it all depends on what the product is, one of the sites I sold just before Christmas only had exacts of 880 but made £3k every year.
I’ve set up a little group of Niche sites since January too, babydolls/org.uk which sits top of Google for ‘babydolls’ already likewise with babydolldresses/org.uk which sits top for that term too and babydollnightwear/co.uk which is sitting in second, as you can imagine it was quite pleasing on the eye making those sites, they are seriously thin sites for now and have made sales so I can’t complain.
I’ve got a to do list with about 4,342,101 things on it, I’d love to post more often about how to do certain things and make this blog a bit more interesting but 1) I feel so busy and 2) I don’t do anything groundbreaking that you haven’t already read elsewhere
Jan31
I thought I would make another blog post, considering the last one was a long time ago and a few things have happened since then.
December has always been my best month of the year, October and November are close too but the final Xmas push has always seen me do ok, this year I wasn’t so sure how it was going to pan out considering my Adwords account had been banned earlier in the year so I’m relying on purely search engine traffic.
Fortunately I managed to make just as much as last year but this time there was no Adsense to take out of the profit so I’m happy with that, saying that I still would have preferred to make much much more!
In December I decided to sell off one of my Football Stadium Tour sites, it was one of my first proper affiliate sites and I’d say one of my favourites, it had over 3 years proven income and I thought if I managed to sell for a decent price I’d have money to inject into all the other projects I had and look for new ones.
The site sold the same day I put it up for sale, it went with another Stadium Tour site which was thrown into the deal.
It’s the first money making site I’ve ever sold, I was a bit apprehensive after it had sold, I’m not sure why, at one point it felt like that was all my affiliate income gone, which it wasn’t, far from it, but that’s how I felt, once I’d started looking around for new opportunities that soon went!
The first purchase I made was for cyprus.org.uk, the domain was on Sedo so I made a bid, then it was put onto auction, don’t you just hate that! So bang went me getting it as cheap as I wanted, I did go a little over what I wanted to pay but I’d had it in my head that I was going to own it, I paid £1,451 for it, my ‘second’ max bid I’d given myself was £1,500 so I’m glad it stopped where it did, I love Cyprus and have been so many times, that’s why I wanted it.
I’ve registered a few other domains since, and bought a couple, multigym.net is one I’m looking forward to developing, I wanted the .co.uk but I wasn’t going to be paying €14,500 for it and I’ve ranked .net domains before without a problem so consider it a bargain at $209!
January 2011 has seen an increase in earnings from January 2010, with no Adwords, and also around 50% of January 2010 earnings was from the Stadium Tour sites I just sold, so all in all I’m pretty happy with the way things are going.
Jul22
I’ve just got back from almost 3 weeks in the USA and it’s taken almost a week to get back in the mood for working again, we drove Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles via Las Vegas, I only checked my earning stats once while I was there, I didn’t fancy having a massive phone bill when I got back so turned off data roaming and connected using Wi-Fi spots whenever we stayed somewhere decent enough that had them!
With not being in the mood to work I started to think that once again I just have too many domains and realistically will never get them all done, it’s better that I focus on 1 or 10 instead of hundreds, with that I’ve decided to get rid of loads of domains and work harder on the ones I really want to work on and grow, the Polo Shirt site for example, I also bought a couple of domains/sites on Acorn Domains that I’d quite like to develop too, Aftershave for Men and Spares.
I’m pretty complacent when it comes to Affiliate Marketing, I’ve just been happy with whatever income it brings in, even though I’d love to do it full time, and never really push myself to make sites make more money, so it’s about time I pulled my finger out and did just that, I want to be able to move to the sun and work by my pool
This is one of my favourite pictures from the US trip, from the top of the Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago
Hi, I'm Darren and I like affiliate marketing.
My blog is just for me to write about what i’m doing in affiliate marketing, I'll post on how some Niche sites are doing and also any tips I may find useful, you can also Hire Me to make affiliate sites for you.
