I set this site up for two reasons really, 1. I love the show and thought it’d be good to have quotes from the show in one place, and 2. as a bit of an SEO play about.
The site is The Inbetweeners, if you are not aware of The Inbetweeners then part of the description from the Channel 4 website is: “The Inbetweeners follows four friends as they navigate the minefield of the Comprehensive education with their hormones at full blast. There’s vomit, offensive language, and a trip to Thorpe Park.”
So mainly I was looking to see how well it could rank, I never did any link building or anything else for the site, just the normal submit URLs to Google and Yahoo and within the first week the site was ranking page one of Google for the main terms I wanted which were ‘Inbetweeners’ and ‘Inbetweeners Quotes’, before long it was ranking number one for ‘Inbetweeners Quotes’ and still is, both on Google and Yahoo.
The site gets on average about 100 uniques a day, i’d say about 75% of those come from the keyword ‘inbetweeners quotes’, there isn’t much you can sell to do with the show other than DVDs so I just put up links to the DVD at Amazon and play.com, to date it has sold around 20 DVDs so at least it’s paid for itself.
To make the first blog post look less lonely I’m going to write about a niche site I made last year just before Christmas.
It didn’t make a fortune but it was some nice pocket money, the brand is in the domain name which was a bit risky but I didn’t realise about brand domains until earlier this year, now I avoid them like the plague!
The site in question is Philips Arcitec which is an electric shaver for men and I thought it would sell well being near to Christmas, girlfriends and wives buying these for their man and I was very pleased with the results from it.
I created the site in photoshop then chopped it up and saved as html, as you do, and added price comparison tables manually, which I was updating almost daily with the Amazon price changing constantly, very annoying! (Thank god for ECU!) I started promoting the site using Google adwords and then it started ranking ok and sat at number three in Google behind Philips and Amazon (I’ve just checked now at it’s currently number one, no wonder I sold one this week!) The site is now actually made using a css/xhtml template and using Easy Content Units for the price comparison, makes life a whole lot easier.
So as you can see, for the period of Sept – Dec 08 the site made £534.14 not amazing but nice for just one niche site.
As the standard complimentary blog post was titled Hello World! I thought i’d start with that as it is the first post on my own personal blog.
Why have I started a blog? Well everyone else seems to have one so I thought why not, sometimes I get excited and want to tell someone about it so this may be my outlet to do that, I can’t promise to give any valuable information as I just do what I do and things happen and I don’t always know why. This is mainly related to my affiliate marketing activities, for example having sites that seem to rank top in google and others that don’t and not being able to pinpoint why this has happened.
I can’t remember too much about exactly how I got into affiliate marketing but it must have been about 7/8 years ago when I first came across it, I had bought one of those local county information portals and was looking of ways to make money from it and that must have been when it started, I remember the first sale coming through a friend buying from ASOS, I think it was about a pound commission but it still felt good.
Despite that I didn’t really do much more with affiliate marketing for a few years, my first proper site was selling Little Britain Dolls when I found out they were going to be a big Christmas seller, I registered littlebritaindolls.co.uk and the .com, put up a simple one page site and linked into IWOOT, If I remember correctly I made £115 that christmas selling the dolls and other Little Britain merchandise, from then I was hooked, it took a while for me to stumble across something else to promote though but these days ideas are never ending and now I have more domains than I can cope with, just like any other Affiliate I expect.