So this site has been up about a month. It was indexed pretty quickly and ranking for some long tail keywords in the first 7-10 days, at which point I decided not to check my stats again until a full month had gone by.
I’ve worked on this site with my son (he’s learning how to use WordPress and write content) for about an hour a day for the past month and it’s time to fully review the results of our efforts.
First, I’ll let you know what we’ve done…
Tasks We’ve Done on the Affiliate Site
In the first week I registered the domain name, set it up in my hosting account, installed WordPress, added a WordPress theme (free one), set up the user profile and plugins, finding affiliate programs, etc… I even got the first two or three posts up within that week. At the end of the first week we had a nice base to work from and I had a little bit of social bookmarking, which led to the site being indexed quickly.
The second week was mostly about adding content and we also started getting some links and thinking about what strategy to use for link building and promotion of this particular site. Since the site is based on reviews of electronics products we decided that social would be important and decided to start using the Twitter account that was set up for it.
Our focus is on long tail keywords (product names, model numbers, reviews type searches, etc) so we’re also doing some article marketing on this one. The first article was about Blu-ray players and it went to Ezine Articles, then we did a few other smaller articles for guest blog posting.
Side Note: I had originally intended to use a few link building services to boost this project in rankings, but if you’re following the recent news around the web a lot of those link building networks were recently de-indexed so I’ll just stick with article marketing and guest blog posting.
In the third week we put together a report about shopping for Blu-ray players and distributed that on the web via sites like Scribd and SlideShare, etc… Added more content to the site and continued to work on getting links for those long tail keywords.
In the fourth week we slowed down a bit due to some distractions, but still were able to update the site with a few more product reviews and articles, and we also were able to add two more articles to Ezine Articles and get a few incoming links around the web. Not nearly as much work as I wanted to get done, but some is always better than none.
Results of the Affiliate Effort After One Month
I’m happy to report that we’re still ranking pretty well for a handful of long tail keywords. But, definitely need to rank better and for more.
I haven’t been able to give link building the amount of attention that I really should, so I need to work on improving that over the next month or so to get that up.
I’m also extremely happy to report sales are happening already! I didn’t really expect much in the first 30 days, but there have been a few Amazon sales of blu-ray players. Yay for referring sales! So that’s my little side project for the moment.
Some Closing Thoughts Today…
I’m glad that my kids are showing an interest in what I do online and they are fascinated by the idea that they can work for themselves and not have to go out and find “a j.o.b” to be able to support themselves in the future. For me, that is what’s truly important right now.
They see the news and the economy in our area right now and they worry what the future holds. It makes me incredibly distraught to have teenagers that worry so much. I don’t remember being so worried at their age.
Lately they’ve both been seeming a bit frustrated and the Trayvon Martin news story has thrown them for a loop. They’ve seen it on the news at home and it has been discussed at length in their schools. They don’t understand how such a horrible thing can happen – and quite frankly, neither do I. How did we as a society get to this horrible place where such tragedy exists?
And not just this particular news story… but many that we’ve seen and heard this year. My heart is heavy from it all and I find that most days I can’t watch the evening news or read the newspaper. On a few days I’ve even had to close my Twitter stream to avoid the constant stream of depressing truth. I know it won’t go away when I ignore, but I have to be careful not to allow it to consume me.
Now that I’ve gone WAY off topic and ranted and rambled a bit…. I’d love to hear from you. What are you working on? Do you have any questions about my side project here? Or maybe you find yourself struggling with the emotional toll of the world like I do? Whatever it is, please leave a comment below.
Transcriptionist, passionate cross stitcher, writer at heart, wife, mom, and finder of lost shoes… Loretta Oliver, married to the comic book geek of her dreams and mother of four amazing young men, has been working from home full time since 2001. With a busy transcription service business, a few niche sites, and a handful of other internet marketing projects on the go, the computer is always fired up and the ideas are always flowing.
A Gigantic Thank you very much, I thought that the article was incredibly educational I’ll revisit to see what additional great information I can recieve here.
I had 4 of my sites bounce back Monday and Tuesday and were covering the top 5-1 spots in google and I made $113 from amazon during those two days…but today all 4 of the sites dropped to page 4 plus hard to imagine how nice it would be to have all my sites where they belong (at the top) all the time.
Awesome that your kids are interested – I love that and wish mine would be, too!
Did you start a new EZA account for this? And with Twitter and such, are you reaching out and talking to people, or just sharing your stuff? I have so much trouble actually ‘relating’ to people in my niche accounts…
Found you on a WAHM blog. I’m definitely impressed with how many pages you built in such a short time. After years of marketing for other small buisnesses, I decided to take my first affiliate venture. We are going at about the same pace. I officially launched about 5 weeks ago. So far long tails are good however – there is still so much more to do.