I’ve just had a look at the figures to the end of July 2010 and the site has so far made £1,156.00 for the year, which is already more than the whole of 2009 and still 5 months to go along with the Christmas trade

I know it’s not a fortune but I think it justified my asking price, if it keeps going as it is I’m hoping it will make over the £2k mark for the year and doubling 2009 income, this is all organic traffic, so apart from a portion of the ECU/hosting price it basically pays for a nice holiday or 2,000 items at the Pound Shop

Here’s an image of the traffic stats for 2010.

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

A few months back I had a cull of domains because I just had too many and thought i’d never get sites done on them all, so I sold a few and just trashed the ones I knew wouldn’t actually make any decent amount of money, I registered some that had around 50k local exacts but the products only cost a few pounds so the commission generated from the sales would have been peanuts and been very uninspiring.

Anyway back to the cull, I managed to get down to around 130 domains, but today I now sit at 174, more than I’ve ever owned! I need to stop now, I think i’ve got enough to be getting on with, when I actually think about how many domains I have to develop I think I’m going to have a panic attack

Anyone else the same?

The site is Mens Polo Shirts, Price Tapestry was easy to work with and integrate into the wordpress pages, the support from David at Price Tapestry is exceptional, any questions I asked were answered quickly and most often with amended php pages to enable what I was trying to do.

To celebrate the launch of the site I am running a competition to win a Ralph Lauren Polo Shirt, anyone is welcome to enter

Now the next stage is to get it making money!

I use Easy Content Units for a lot of sites, sites that don’t require a lot of products or just for individual product price comparison, for this purpose ECU is amazing and I will continue to use it for that purpose, but I wanted something that could put a lot of products on a wordpress site, easily, and without having to sit there creating post after post after post and so on until I became so bored I shot myself, or something.

I came across datafeedr, which on the face it was like “BINGO” i’ve found it, but then there’s always this thing in my head about giving the customer a price comparison, I always think if you give them a choice of merchants and prices they are more likely to buy through one of your links than spend time searching the internet themselves, which is why i’ve opted for Price Tapestry.

I only signed up to it Wednesday evening but the installation process was painless and I have managed to load feeds into the basic store layout and it seems to work great, but I bought this to work with Wordpress so it’s going to take me a while to get that perfected and i’m spending some time going through the forum seeing what other people have asked and what can be possible with it, I have actually managed to pull search results into wordpress but I now need to look at the layout options possible and I am not a coder so it could take me a while, the support from David seems fantastic and already i’ve got two adapted php pages from to work on.

I’m quite excited about getting this site set-up, I will make a post on it when it’s up and running, and like with most things I want it done asap so hopefully i’ll be making a post with the site pretty soon!

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

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

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

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

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!