Affiliate marketing is next

Okay, it’s time to move on to the next project in my quest to have a six-figure income through websites and affiliate marketing.

So far I’ve been researching ways to develop Internet traffic through natural ways such as Yahoo and Google search engines, blogging software, and direct links.  My sites are slowly improving in traffic flow, but it’s going to take a while at this rate.

From what I’ve seen and what feedback I’ve received, people like my blog articles.  I’ve received several e-mails and comments on my sites where people say that they like what they see and have added my feeds to their Google home pages.  Comments like that are always a moral booster, but I’m still not seeing the amounts of traffic that would relate to a small percentage of people clicking on my sponsor links, which in turn creates income for me.  Right now it’s still quite low.

My Intruder Prevention website (- UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com) does okay at times, though at least on that site the people who have visited have clicked on the links more often than the visitors on my other websites.  It has a the highest conversion ratio out of all of my websites.  The sponsors there also happen to pay me more on average than my other websites.  I like this site and I’m currently researching more ways to better improve the SEO, whether it’s adding a daily blog and discussing current home security issues, or finding a way to add more videos, or finding ways to add other sections, period.  As it’s been stated before, when making real websites, content is king.  Especially good content.

Right now my Florida Project website is the top one in my collection.  The people finding my website through the different search engines is at an all-time high, and on the occasion I’ve been receiving high-powered links from other websites.  This is awesome except for the facts that I still need to have more unique and daily visitors, and Google Adsense doesn’t like it when I receive a bunch of traffic from one source.  They’ve stopped logging those visitors in the channel I have set up in my Google Adsense account.

Screw ‘em as far as I’m concerned.

I’ll be on the lookout for other sponsors for that website.  I was only using Google Adsense as a way to offset the small costs of owning and hosting my websites.  If this is how they treat legitimate traffic, then it’s time for me to move on.  I wasn’t planning on using Adsense once my websites were popular enough, anyway.

I love my Florida Project site and will continue to update and add new content to it every day or so.  I can easily see that website leading to bigger and better things in the future.  It takes a while to scan, edit, upload, and make the new pages, but I’m amused and see it as a hobby instead of the money-making website it will be in the near future.  It’s also a great way to try out new SEO techniques to boost the natural traffic even further.

As far as the future, I’m looking at creating landing pages for the sole use of affiliate marketing.  The pages themselves won’t require much editing once they’re created, whereas the real work will be working with programs such as Google Adwords.

For my future websites, right now I’m considering going back to using Macromedia Dreamweaver like I did when I first started creating websites a few years ago.  It was hard at first and had a fairly steep learning curve, but then again I was trying to make complex websites at the time.  Life became a lot easier and more consistant with my websites when I learned about and started using Content Management Software.  In this case I’ve been using Joomla, though I believe that it’ll be overkill for the type of websites I’ll be creating.  I’ll have to go through my how-to guides for Dreamweaver and see how to create templates and do everything else that I’m planning on doing.

The Adwords program is where it’ll get interesting since I’ll be paying for combinations of key words and also writing the advertisements.  The thing to take note is that it’s real easy to blow through a large marketing budget if you’re not careful.  One of my assignments at my previous place of employment had me working with Adwords and researching certain key word combinations dealing with engine parts and “new old stock” car parts.  We didn’t have a large spending budget and my boss never showed me the final results, but it was good experience researching the different names for the engine sizes and in turn seeing which combinations were used by other online auto part companies.  The fewer the results, the cheaper the keywords, but it was also that many fewer people using those terms / phrases.  The more common terms had more results and would therefore cost more to use them effectively.

It’s a delicate line that I will be experiencing very soon.  If my Adwords strategy is correct and my landing pages have a professional enough look to create a decent conversion rate, then I’ll be seeing a profit almost immediately.

That’s the joy of this type of online work.

There’s a great risk of failing or just running expensive marketing projects, but if proper research is carried out and good techniques are used, then the rewards will be plenty.

I aim to be one of those inspirational website developers that newbies are inspired to become.

And of course, I want to be that way in less than a year from now.

The clock is running . . .