A New Affiliate Marketers Journey

If I appear to have been absent for a little while, it’s due to working out how to build my own website.  In my last post I mentioned that I felt that I could have a lot more control over AdWords if I was directing traffic to one of my sites rather than an affiliate site where you have no control over what happens.

I looked at a number of free and trial web builders and found that the one I could use easily with good results was Site Spinner Vs from Virtual Mechanics - they have a 15 day free trial and it’s worth a look - very much a point and click type of site - http://www.virtualmechanics.com/webhelp/sitespinner.html

I built http://www.wii-downloadreviews.com/ with it which gave me an opportunity to play with AdSense as well - I made some AdWords campaigns and sent traffic to it - it gave me a chance to look at stats etc which wasn’t bad and I made some sales though it which paid for the domain registration.  It took me a while to work out how to use and build, but again this was a learning process.

I now felt I was ready to jump in and join the big time - my thoughts were these:

I now knew how to word and run an AdWords campaign - I also knew the issues around building a website including working out how to upload the site to the server via an FTP program (File Transfer Protocol) - Now it was time to put these skills into place.  As far as Click-bank is concerned, while some of their products may be good, the majority appear to be Internet marketers trapping want to be Internet marketers into buying how to become an Internet marketer type ebooks and programs - some thing I shy away from.  From my initia.l Blog, the journey has been to self teach myself rather than buy ebook promises - to date I’m still about par on spending versus income, however I now have a wealth of knowledge that I did not have when I begun.

I wanted to build a website that had a physical product range that would not go out of fashion and that would be in a market that was to continue to expand.  In short investing in a web building tool that I could use to promote a relevant information site coupled with needed products.  I went back to the good people at WallCann who suggested that I look at their range of mobility and health related products.  Many of these are based around the ageing population market which fitted like a glove to my goal.

To get an idea ( and I would really appreciate some feedback) have a look at www.life-bestbuys.com this is purely a product sales platform.  I had a think and registered 2 domains - www.legaids.com and www.life-aids.com- I purchased a copy of ShopFactory as I had heard good things about this and the trial version seemed quite good.  Again this was an investment but I knew after a chat with WallCanns Senior programmer, Michael, that I did not have the time or energy to become a fully fledged HTML programmer -

Have a look at www.legaids.com- I have sat up nights - worked weekends - got up early mornings to get this project done (It involved a huge amount of research).  I am actually proud of what I have accomplished - This is a very relevant product range in today’s society - the pricing of the products which I researched is very competitive - there is around a 10% commission on sales via WallCann and the initial AdWords campaigns I have been running over the weekend have had a better hit rate at a lower pay per click as I can modify the site as I gain a better understanding of search terms.

I think I really got lucky with the photo site Dreamstime where I paid around 20 - 30 cents per photo I downloaded - I was fortunate enough to find a range that fits like a glove to the material.

Australia is an ageing nation so if I get the marketing right, this should begin to provide several sales per day over the next few weeks.

As far as marketing goes, I’m going to go heavy on article marketing combined with an e-newsletter sign up with  monthly relevant articles - product reviews and as the list goes relevant free ebooks (and no - none of them will have anything to do with Internet marketing)

Until next time

Mark

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.