ProInterneter

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.

I’ve been reading 45n5’s Make Money Online blog and I think Mark has some really great posts and ideas over there. He also offers a lot of tools for free such as 19pages.com, a site that provides code so you can Mini Sites for free.

Anyways, Marks post from yesterday about Setting up a Lot of Sites that generate a small amount of money each day, it really struck a chord with me. Why don’t these things make sense to me until I hear someone say it right in face? I’ve always thought that the only way to do it was to make one big site that generated a lot of money - or several big sites that generate a lot of money.

I’ve been hacking away at some different ideas today. I created a blog for Computer Animation Videos, a blog for NFL Football Videos and a mini site about Cleveland Ohio. The blogs are on blogspot (free) and the Cleveland Mini Site is on a subdomain of a site I already own. I’ve installed Analytics on all of them and threw up some AdSense, so we’ll see if I can drum up 30 cents by the end of the day tomorrow.

I’ve been researching topics for a new blog, looking though blog catalog and mybloglog, and I realized just how many defunct blogs there are littering the internet. It’s of no real concequence except maybe to the people paying the hosting bills or the person who wants to claim the url for a defunct blogspot blog - but it’s staggering how many blogs you can find that haven’t been updated for months (or years).

I’ve tried and learned a lot over the last several years. Maybe one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you can’t just slap up AdSense on a random webpage and then expect the money to roll in. Many of the defunct blogs that I visit have a few posts, and a lot of ads. Google, Amazon, AuctionAds… They’re all there. It’s pretty obvious that these people thought “I will slap these up and then I will be making money!” - then 3 days later when they realize that even their own mother won’t visit their blog, they throw their hands up in disgust and walk away - leaving their blog to float in the abyss of the internets.

It’s been said a million times but I figured that I could write it down here so my tens of visitors could read it: You have to build traffic. Without traffic, you will not make any money. Build quality content. Build traffic. If you accept this, the money will eventually come. If you try to do it backwards, you will get nothing.

Since being accepted to NeverBlueAds, I have been testing some different keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo. I have come up with a few ideas of campaigns that I would like to try, and through my testing I have found that Google can be a lot more pricey than the other two search engines.

I found one example where Google wants to charge me more than 2x the price (per click) that Yahoo or MSN would for running ads on the same keywords. I figure that even though Google is the most popular search engine, as long as Yahoo and MSN can deliver clicks, it really doesn’t matter where the clicks are coming from. The only real disadvantage would be that I would be able to make the connections between the Yahoo ads and my Google Analytics, to see which SERP Phrases are ultimately resulting into NeverBlue conversions.

This table compares Google and Yahoo, based on a $30/day limit, for a specific keyword.



Right there you can see the difference. Google wants way more cash from me, and promises less than half of the clicks that Yahoo will provide. Of course, this is all estimates at this point. My guess is that every average business owner just goes for Google and thus inflates the prices. Since I don’t have a lot of cash to play with at the moment, I will go with Yahoo to begin with. I will have to explore if they have some sort of conversion tracking system.

As I see more and more referral programs surface across this blogging niche, I can’t help but think about “The Rich Get Richer“. DealDotCom and BlogRush are the two latest examples. These programs feed off the popularity that is created by the big name blogs, and then the big name bloggers cash in via the referral programs.

DealDotCom just went live this morning. Their first deal is selling Easy Member Pro for $148.50. Now I think it is fair to estimate that at least 500 people have signed up for DealDotCom under John Chow, though this is a total guess (based on his 13,000 direct Agloco referrals, I think this is reasonable). If 1 out of every 100 referrals buys Easy Member Pro, John Chow is going to get $51.97 per sale - or about $259 today alone.

BlogRush also burst onto the scene a few days ago. I didn’t look at it until a friendly blogger said that I should check it out. I signed up and then noted their referral program. You get more and more spots across the BlogRush network as your referrals get more page views on their blogs - so again, the big name bloggers are going to get a lot more referrals, thus getting their blog shown more across the BlogRush network, thus getting even more visitors to their already popular blogs.

I am writing this more out of frustration than anything. The more that I become involved in the world of blogging, the more I wonder why I haven’t been involved for a much longer time. I’ve been developing websites for many years now - why I have been so oblivious to the idea of making money online? It certainly feels like an uphill battle.