Pro Interneter

I’ve been trying more things out with making money online. In December, I had an Amazon Blog going that made me $15. In January I scrapped that blog and tried using an Amazon Script that created an entire store, but I got about zero visitors the entire month.

I add Adsense to the pages leading through to my Free PHP eBook, and that made some loose change. I didn’t post those AdSense until the middle of January, so hopefully February will bring more - though at this rate, I won’t be getting a Google payout anytime soon. Eventually I will revise my PHP eBook and perhaps 1) Give away the first few sections for free, then 2) charge a small fee for a much longer version of the PHP eBook.

I worked with Blog Project A and made some strides with the Ticketmaster Affiliate program.

January 2008 Income Report
Adsense: $3.80
Amazon: $0.00
Ticketmaster: $23.00

Total: $26.80

(Dec Total: $26.30)

I made $15 on my Amazon Affiliate Site in December, but things have taken a nosedive since Christmas. I have almost zero traffic and of course that converts to zero dollars on the affiliate end.

I am trying to get back in the habit of posting on that site, and considering if there is something else I can do to improve traffic. I am not creating thoughtful posts about products, but simply posting the basic info along with links to Amazon. That seemed to work well enough in December, so it simply might be connected to my posting frequency.

I’m a little down about making money online at the moment - I made some money via Ticketmaster off of one event on Blog Project A, but since posting additional events, I haven’t generated any more income from Ticketmaster. Also, Blog Project A is getting good traffic, but the pages per visit are still around 1.5 - 1.9 … Not exactly the sign that people are stopping in and shopping around. I expect this is because people are often landing exactly where they want to go, to find the information that they want - but it would be good if I could get them to stick around for a while.

December was the first month where I generated any measurable amount of money online. I didn’t start using Amazon or Ticketmaster until halfway through the month, so January should bring in more than December.

I’ve been learning a good amount about what works and what doesn’t, so I look forward to growing this in 2008.

December Income
Amazon.com : $15.32
Ticketmaster: $10.50
AdSense: $0.78

Total: $26.60

As I mentioned earlier, I have begun working on some Amazon Affiliate SEO tactics. On solution to the outgoing anchor text issue that I am testing, is the idea of putting NoFollow tags in my Amazon Affiliate links. My idea here is that I can use Keywords for Anchor Text, and not give up the juice that those keywords hold for my page. Usually whatever you use as Anchor Text for a link, that anchor text will be associated with the page that you are linking to - not associated with the page that you created.

I haven’t been able to find anything that says “Yes, it will keep the anchor and associate them with your current page” - and I suspect that it may not be the case, but I have created a few test pages using NoFollow tags, and we’ll see what happens over time.

In the meantime, I have read some things that suggest the using “click here” as anchor text for your outgoing links will actually increase the traffic that you send to that link - and in the case of an Amazon Affiliate site, that is exactly what you want to do. My basic theory is to action for long tail keywords, talk about the item for a bit and then get those people to link over to Amazon via my site.

As a general update, my Amazon site got 2 visitors on Tuesday and 0 visitors on Wednesday. My Amazon Affiliate account says I have recorded 22 click-throughs, so I wonder if those are the result of Google following links where I didn’t use NoFollow, or if my reporting is so far behind that I have really had 22 click-throughs? It seems that I should be getting at least 1/20 conversion rate, so I’m thinking that these 22 click-throughs came from somewhere else… or actually it could be from another site where I posted one Amazon Affiliate Link - the Amazon reporting tool isn’t particularly useful.

I have begun work on my first Amazon Affiliate site, and have run into some interesting questions regarding SEO. While my Chicago Hot Blog has been getting some good Google-organic traffic from my SEO, the first thing I noticed while building this Amazon Affiliate site was that I am going to be creating a lot of outgoing links that contain my target keywords. For instance - if I am creating a page about a Star Wars DVD, I am going to use the words “Star Wars DVD” as my anchor text for my Amazon link - but then that will reduce my SEO power for that specific term.

I have considered using “click here” links, but then I think I would lose a lot of click-throughs. I am going to poke around the internet for some answers, but I haven’t found much Amazon Affiliate SEO info at this point. I will have to try a few different ideas and see what works the best - either way, it will be nice to see if I can bring in a few bucks here.