[James Bond Next level]

(03-04-2018 10:13 AM)This Is Trouble Wrote:  

"For the first month of your main site, what were the results in terms of number of visitors and money?"

$0

Probably 0 visitors too.

I just started writing for the hell of it. No idea it would turn into a 6-figure business at the time.

It is always a poor idea to have this mindset that you KNOW your product is quality, but to be unsure if the market wants said product. It sounds like you are married to your idea, even if it's a bad one.

(Not saying yours is, but that's the underlying tone of your post -- you don't know if the market wants it.)

Thanks for the answer guys !
In a way it's reassuring, at least I got already several hundred visitors. Now I'm more motivated to push it on long term.
As for the market, I saw what appears to be similar websites in english (not in french as far as I can tell) that were doing well AND there's no denying all the personal development products are more or less doing well. For the rest, my mindset is to market the shit out of it (did that yesterday at a real estate meetup).

I understand what you mean about "married to the idea", but for the record, I already completely changed my website concept. The 1st one was launched for half a month, then it took me 2 more month to change all the idea behind.

[nomadbrah]

(03-04-2018 04:46 PM)RagnarLothbrok Wrote:  

Niche sites with affiliate marketing is actually pretty simple stuff if you think about it. All you need is three things:

1) a product or a service you can be an affiliate for that has a juicy commission
2) enough eyeballs, aka traffic to your website
3) a convincing sales pitch inside the blogposts that make people click on the affiliate link

From my experience, the hardest part is getting the traffic. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding large Facebook groups in your niche and becoming an active poster in those groups. That can get you 1000+ visitors for every blogpost you share in those groups, depending on how many members they have. The problem is, that this method is not sustainable and it won't lead to many affiliate sales because those visitors have very low buyer intent. Instead, most niche sites will have to rely on search engine traffic, i.e. getting the right blogposts to rank high on Google and then putting the affiliate link in front of the eyes of people who have actively searched for a solution to the problem that you are offering within your blogpost. That's really the hardest part about this business model. Once you have a couple of good blogposts that rank high for a number of important keywords, it should be relatively easy to make a few hundred dollars per month.

I started my niche site in April 2017 as a little side project. Didn't make any money from it for more than 6 months. Didn't get any traffic from Google until November. Then in December a couple of blogposts started ranking high, including my best and most important post which contains an affiliate link to a product with a 40$ commission per sale. Suddenly traffic was there and I made a hundred bucks in December from affiliate sales. In January affiliate sales went from 100$ to 600$ (all from one single post) and I get about 100 daily visitors from Google now. I haven't written any new blogposts since last summer and I have probably invested less than 100 hours in total in this project. Unfortunately, the niche I picked is very limited in the amount of potential products that I can be an affiliate for.

Did you do any promotion or linkbuilding?

[RagnarLothbrok]

(03-05-2018 09:56 PM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

(03-04-2018 04:46 PM)RagnarLothbrok Wrote:  

Niche sites with affiliate marketing is actually pretty simple stuff if you think about it. All you need is three things:

1) a product or a service you can be an affiliate for that has a juicy commission
2) enough eyeballs, aka traffic to your website
3) a convincing sales pitch inside the blogposts that make people click on the affiliate link

From my experience, the hardest part is getting the traffic. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding large Facebook groups in your niche and becoming an active poster in those groups. That can get you 1000+ visitors for every blogpost you share in those groups, depending on how many members they have. The problem is, that this method is not sustainable and it won't lead to many affiliate sales because those visitors have very low buyer intent. Instead, most niche sites will have to rely on search engine traffic, i.e. getting the right blogposts to rank high on Google and then putting the affiliate link in front of the eyes of people who have actively searched for a solution to the problem that you are offering within your blogpost. That's really the hardest part about this business model. Once you have a couple of good blogposts that rank high for a number of important keywords, it should be relatively easy to make a few hundred dollars per month.

I started my niche site in April 2017 as a little side project. Didn't make any money from it for more than 6 months. Didn't get any traffic from Google until November. Then in December a couple of blogposts started ranking high, including my best and most important post which contains an affiliate link to a product with a 40$ commission per sale. Suddenly traffic was there and I made a hundred bucks in December from affiliate sales. In January affiliate sales went from 100$ to 600$ (all from one single post) and I get about 100 daily visitors from Google now. I haven't written any new blogposts since last summer and I have probably invested less than 100 hours in total in this project. Unfortunately, the niche I picked is very limited in the amount of potential products that I can be an affiliate for.

Did you do any promotion or linkbuilding?

I did very little promotion or linkbuilding. I think I dropped 10-15 backlinks on forums and on the comments section on other blogs in my niche. To be honest, the first few months were very discouraging. There was zero traffic and I assumed that I have to build backlinks if I ever wanted to rank high on Google. That took away most of my motivation because I didn't want to spend much time on linkbuilding and SEO. It turned out that you don't even need much linkbuilding and off-page SEO. However, I am sure that I still have a lot of room to grow. I want to focus more on SEO and try to rank higher for the important keywords. And I guess good linkbuilding and SEO would have helped me rank much faster on Google.

In terms of promotion, all I did was posting the more interesting articles in those Facebook groups I mentioned. I found three groups with about 50,000 members in total. I think that also helped me a bit with SEO.

[nomadbrah]

I have a niche site started in October doing 200-300 USD. Not much promotion at all except finding a hole in the market and writing good content. I think it soon will have earned enough to warrant the time spent, then it will be nice hourly wage from there. It has a limited growth potential though.

[Luther]

I have an idea for a hustle that would require a high quality web site with interactive features. I need the customers to be able to submit/send files to me. Also need the website to be able to accept orders and process payments.
I'm successful blue collar but nearly computer illiterate. I know very little. So my basic questions are:

How hard is it to learn to build a website like that? Like I said, right now I wouldn't even know where to start, but I'm smart enough to learn anything.
Are there programs available to help me build a website that complex?


Roughly how much would it cost to have someone build a website like that for me?

* I know this is a little off topic. I didn't think it was worth starting a new thread and it sounds like you guys know what your talking about.

[This Is Trouble]

Pretty simple. Basic WordPress site + a checkout service like Stripe or PayPal. You could learn how to do most of it with YouTube.

As far as price, you'd probably be able to hire a Filipino or Indian remote worker for cheap to do something that basic. Of course, that cheap price may come with it's own set of headaches.

[Eddie Morra]

What do you think of adding curated content to a niche website and monetizing the comment/summary section with affiliate links?

[This Is Trouble]

(04-20-2018 02:33 AM)Eddie Morra Wrote:  

What do you think of adding curated content to a niche website and monetizing the comment/summary section with affiliate links?

Many comment sections on many websites are just cesspools of stupidity.

I've never tried it though.

But I think people are likely to go comment on the MAIN article instead of leaving it on the curated site.

[Eddie Morra]

(04-20-2018 05:06 AM)This Is Trouble Wrote:  

(04-20-2018 02:33 AM)Eddie Morra Wrote:  

What do you think of adding curated content to a niche website and monetizing the comment/summary section with affiliate links?

Many comment sections on many websites are just cesspools of stupidity.

I've never tried it though.

But I think people are likely to go comment on the MAIN article instead of leaving it on the curated site.

What I meant was when you curate content, to comment on the particular article yourself, giving your opinion, summarize the relevance etc. and recommending a product or service that is related in your summary. Thanks for the feedback though . Good thread! I'm trying to put together my own niche website. I had tried it years ago, but fell into the SEO link building, black hat game. Want to do it right this time....

[Krimson Killa]

How would you guys make money off of a general travel site? I'm thinking of documenting my travels through the Middle East with detailed guides on every place I visited. I guess I could advertise certain products, tours, hotels, and companies and make money off of affiliate marketing that way. Not sure how else to go about it.

[This Is Trouble]

Understood. I can see this working, but it would be hard to rank. Google is likely to give more love to the original.

[qwertyuiop]

(04-20-2018 12:32 PM)Krimson Killa Wrote:  

How would you guys make money off of a general travel site? I'm thinking of documenting my travels through the Middle East with detailed guides on every place I visited. I guess I could advertise certain products, tours, hotels, and companies and make money off of affiliate marketing that way. Not sure how else to go about it.

you need traffic. from there the monetization is the easier (can still be tough).

[icrus]

Hoping someone knows how to see who linked to you from Facebook.

I have a short-term traffic spike (300 visitors in 2 days) to a rather unpopular article in the last two days and I can see in my analytics that almot all traffic is coming from Facebook. So I'm guessing someone must've shared it on their page or linked to it.

My question: can I somehow find out where?

Jetpack and GA just gives you Facebook as a source but not the exact link where the traffic came from. Or I don't know how to find it. I tried googling for a solution but couldn't come up with anything that made sense. Searched for it on FB myself but also no results.

Cheers.

[john1565]

Superb post! Everything was in detail! Now I am browsing your sites! (You can check from Google Analytics! Ha! Ha! )

[This Is Trouble]

(05-22-2018 04:11 AM)icrus Wrote:  

Hoping someone knows how to see who linked to you from Facebook.

I have a short-term traffic spike (300 visitors in 2 days) to a rather unpopular article in the last two days and I can see in my analytics that almot all traffic is coming from Facebook. So I'm guessing someone must've shared it on their page or linked to it.

My question: can I somehow find out where?

Jetpack and GA just gives you Facebook as a source but not the exact link where the traffic came from. Or I don't know how to find it. I tried googling for a solution but couldn't come up with anything that made sense. Searched for it on FB myself but also no results.

Cheers.

I still haven't figured this out.

I'd be curious too.

[This Is Trouble]

I'm beginning to toy with doing major email lead efforts on my niche sites.

Loading up the auto-responder (I have hundreds of emails I've written over the past years) and just selling the same products that I do on the site as is.

I'll update this if it's successful.

[chickenadobo]

(05-22-2018 04:11 AM)icrus Wrote:  

Hoping someone knows how to see who linked to you from Facebook.

I have a short-term traffic spike (300 visitors in 2 days) to a rather unpopular article in the last two days and I can see in my analytics that almot all traffic is coming from Facebook. So I'm guessing someone must've shared it on their page or linked to it.

My question: can I somehow find out where?

Jetpack and GA just gives you Facebook as a source but not the exact link where the traffic came from. Or I don't know how to find it. I tried googling for a solution but couldn't come up with anything that made sense. Searched for it on FB myself but also no results.

Cheers.

Go to Facebook, search for your domain name (ie. mydomain.com), go to the "Posts" tab and see if it shows up there.

[This Is Trouble]

I spun up a new site last week and started hitting ranking within a week of posting.

May be some new Google voodoo, although admittedly it was really low competition. Still, nice to know it can be done.

[inostranec]

(06-18-2018 02:06 PM)This Is Trouble Wrote:  

I spun up a new site last week and started hitting ranking within a week of posting.

May be some new Google voodoo, although admittedly it was really low competition. Still, nice to know it can be done.

Niche/affiliate site as usual? One of my good friends is basically living on affiliates. He is doing really good. He always buys traffic though. I wonder if he would succeed organically.

[This Is Trouble]

(08-08-2018 09:08 AM)inostranec Wrote:  

(06-18-2018 02:06 PM)This Is Trouble Wrote:  

I spun up a new site last week and started hitting ranking within a week of posting.

May be some new Google voodoo, although admittedly it was really low competition. Still, nice to know it can be done.

Niche/affiliate site as usual? One of my good friends is basically living on affiliates. He is doing really good. He always buys traffic though. I wonder if he would succeed organically.

Same system I've been using for several years now to great success. Money keeps rolling in and I don't even bother buying ads. I save the money for my Dropshipping and olive oil ventures.

[utterbbq]

Hey guys,

So what do you do when your website is done? Do you do any marketing like payed ads or something? Or will the site simply grow by itself if the content and seo is good enough?