Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

If you missed part 1 & part 2 of the Building an Audience With Datafeed Sites, make sure you go back and catch up.

After I built the site & got some links I just let it sit around for a while and get indexed.  It got indexed pretty fast.  Initially a couple thousand pages were indexed.  After a bit that fell down to 271 pages.  I suspect there was some sort of duplicate content penalty that caused me to lose those indexed pages.  Regardless, the total number of indexed pages has remained around 270-300.  The site has been online since approximately January 2010.  Over that course of time the traffic has grown steadily month over month.  Below you will find traffic stats since January.

I hope to see this traffic grow continually month over month going forward.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that this site has not converted well AT ALL.  Here are some stats since January 2010:

Clicks Through a Product Affiliate Link: 659
Click Through Rate: 7.58%
Sales: 6
Conversion Rate: 0.91%
Gross Sales: $197.40
Commissions: $29.61
Total Cost: ~$27-$30

As you can see this has NOT been a super profitable venture to date.  I’ve made back around what I spent to create the site.  The positive side is that since this is organic SEO & the traffic keeps growing, i’m sure that more sales will trickle in over time.  The site certainly won’t lose money.  The question becomes can you create more of these sites and scale them?  I think that you can.  Although i’m basing that on theory alone, I believe that if you make a lot of these types of sites you are eventually going to hit a profitable one.

This site is getting traffic so i’m going to work on getting a better conversion rate and figuring out other ways to monetize the traffic and report back to you with what I find.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

In Part 1 of this case study I discussed what I did to setup this datafeed site.  Part 2 is what I did to promote it.

I’m going to be honest with you.  I don’t have crazy blackhat methods.  I just have some simple, straight forward things I do to try to get a site to rank in the search engines.

The first thing I concentrated on was simple on-page SEO.  I made sure that every post had appropriate title tags & meta data as well as H1 tags (using a plugin).  I also made sure that no affiliate links were visible, everything was cloaked.

Next I needed to get some links.  I like social bookmarks as i’ve had a lot of success with them.  I almost always use Amit aka Red_Virus for social bookmarks.  You can order his services HERE.  Tell him Ad Hustler sent you and I guarantee you’ll get awesome service (no, i’m not making a commission).  I sent all of the social bookmarks to the main domain.  Ideally, I would have liked to get a few social bookmarks to each interior page but I haven’t been able to come up with a good & easy way to do that yet.

I decided that I want to diversify the links a bit so I went over to Fiverr.com and ordered an edu link package.

That’s it.  I didn’t do anything else to promote this site.  After completing these steps I still wasn’t indexed and had not received any traffic yet.  I decided to just leave the site alone for a little while and see what would happen.

Excluding the datafeed script because i’m using that on multiple sites, my total investment in this site so far would be around $32

Part 3 will discuss whether or not I got any traffic or sales.

Any questions so far?

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

I like to keep things diversified so i’m willing to try anything that can run on autopilot once it’s setup.  I started thinking about playing with datafeed sites when Nick Mattern put out Review Plugin For WordPress.  I consider him a friend of mine so I bought his software and started playing around.  (Please keep in mind that even though this is the software I used for this case study, Nick no longer owns the product and I’m not sure about the quality of the newest versions).  Here are the steps I used to build a datafeed site:

Step 1 – Pick A Niche

The first thing I chose was the niche I was going to use to build out this site.  I considered different affiliate programs at CJ, Linkshare & Shareasale. Part of my consideration was how many items they had in their datafeed as well as how much information the datafeed contained.    I eventually settled on 1 affiliate program that had about 3,000 products in their datafeed and the niche was based around fashion with a decent commission rate (20%).

Step 2 – Buy Domain

I bought a domain with the main keywords related to the niche located within the domain name.

Step 3 – Setup WordPress & Datafeed Plugin

Setting up wordpress is pretty self explanatory.  I used the “Review Plugin For WordPress” as my datafeed importer.  Quite honestly I only wanted the software for this feature.

After I cleaned up the database file that I downloaded from the affiliate network I started the import process.  The process of importing a datafeed to wordpress is pretty simple.  You need to setup a template which grabs all of the information out of the database and places it in the correct place on the page.  Here in the post template I used:

Title of Post: [PRODUCT NAME]

Body of Post:

[PRODUCT NAME] – [$PRICE]

[PRODUCT IMAGE LINKED WITH AFF LINK]

Product Description: [PRODUCT DESCRIPTION]

[PRODUCT NAME] is currently in stock at [MERCHANT NAME]

For more information about this item please click here. <—AFF LINK

If you have already purchased [PRODUCT NAME] please leave a review below.

This post template would allow all 3,000 products in the database to have the same look when they get published to WordPress.  Rather then publishing everything at once I opted for a drip feed.  I let the posts feed into the wordpress site over a period of 6 months rather then all at once so that it would look more natural to search engines.

Tip:  Since i’m hosting this particular site on a crappy shared hosting plan, I found that the import process would continually freeze up.  I guess the process takes a lot of resources on the server.  The fix I found was to break the datafeed file into smaller files and import that way.  I just wanted to mention that in case you hit a glitch like I did.

After this step my datafeed site had posts and new ones appeared throughout each day.

Step 4 – Find a Decent WordPress Theme

I used SkinPress – Simple & Free

Step 5 – WordPress Plugins

Here you will find a linst of the plugins I used & why:

Review Plugin For WordPress – Used for importing the datafeeds

Akismet – To keep the Spam under control

All in One SEO Pack – To auto-create appropriate SEO tags.

Link Cloaking Plugin – This allowed the tons of affiliate links all over the site to look like internal links ie domain.com/goto/1 – I thought it would be better for SEO then rogue affiliate links all over the place.

Scheduled M.I.A.s – I was having an issue with the scheduled posts actually going live when they were supposed to.  I kept getting the error “Missed Schedule” so this plugin fixed that issue.

WordPress Suicide – To get my post template correct I needed to try it a few times.  To retry I needed to remove everything that got imported into the database.  This plugin can clear your posts database.

WP Super Cache – Speeds up WordPress when you have tons of posts.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Allowed each product listing to show several links to similar products.  Kind of like an Amazon cross sell.

———————–

That’s everything I did to get the site online.  Next was promotion which will be Part 2 of this case study.

Any Questions?

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

It’s no secret that the best traffic sources have begun a war against affiliates.  Rather then fighting back, a lot of affiliates are getting frustrated and moving to new traffic sources to avoid the issues and hopefully make some easy money.  At the end of the day, the easy money at these “new” traffic sources will dry up due to affiliate over-saturation.  Although I’m not one to run around and say the sky is falling, I do believe in heavy diversification.  You can’t build an empire on a house of cards so you need to have multiple streams of revenue.

This brings me to the concept of building an audience.  I think that a lot of affiliates forget that there are other ways to get traffic then simply buying it.  There are several ways to do this.  You can collect email addresses, build an rss subscriber list, or build a search engine optimized content website.  I love making money without expending much time or money to do it.  A few months ago I was brainstorming what has made me money over the past few years.  I was looking over my books and realized I was still making money off some old PHPbay sites that I have.  Over the years i’ve made a lot of money on those sites, although the eBay Partner Network now completely SUCKS.  I went and checked the traffic stats on these sites and they were each still pulling in significant traffic.  I hadn’t done much off page SEO to these sites at all yet they were still sucking people in.  This gave me the idea to create a few new SEO sites to see if I could generate some money off of them using a different affiliate program.

This brings us to datafeed sites.  I know some people who bank pretty hard on datafeed sites so I decided to give them a try.  I will also be sharing what I did and the results  as a multi-part case study.   Stay tuned.

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler

This is a guest post by Internet Gangsta Kris Trujillo From CashTactics.net

The Holy Grail of Local Offline Advertising

About a year ago I got into advertising in local classified ads.  When I first started out I was quite surprised by the return on investment that I could make in certain niches.  However… my ultimate goal was to advertise on a Billboard!

Now, you may think that Billboard advertising is expensive… But I will be the first to tell you that it really isn’t. Often times I could pick up advertising spots in local areas for cheaper than the cost of adwords in the same geotargeted location.

I got an idea a few months back when I saw a “Single in McKinney” sign. I had recognized the little black and white message in several other suburbs.  So I figured to myself… If they are successful enough to have these signs on every major intersection than how profitable would it be to purchase a spot on a Billboard.

I did some digging around.  On average you can get a Billboard spot for $500 for 30 days. Talk about CHEAP.  While on the phone with some of these Billboard companies I asked questions like “how many people pass the sign in a given month” (impressions) and they would give me their best guess.  See, companies that place Billboards have to know their numbers.  And if they don’t… Then their no good.

Anyways… After some more research I thought I would start out advertising on a bus… So I jumped in with $1000.

The bus company I went with was “trimet”.  They are the mass transportation providers in the Portland Oregon area.  I used to work for Trimet when I was in highschool.  So I contacted a few people that I know still worked there and I got in contact with their marketing department.  Sure enough… Trimet offered many different marketing plans.  I just had to pay for the banner creation and placement for a 30 day period.

I found that my $1000 could grab 3 banners roughly 6′ wide by 2′ high for 30 days.  That didn’t include the actual banner design. So I had my banner created and placed on 3 different buses.

The trimet marketing department estimated that a banner placed on the right side of the bus would be seen about 300,000 times in 30 days.  That means that my banner would would receive 300,000 impressions in any given month. Now, I had 3 banners placed.  Thats a total of 900,000 impressions combined.

For my $1000 spent and my 900,000 impressions received I spent a total of $0.001 per impression.  If I had continued to use the banners then the cost would go down as I would not need to pay for more banners.

Okay so we’ve figured out the cost of my advertising… Now let me give you some hints on promoting other people’s offers. You have to be careful how you promote when it comes to billboards or other mobile advertising.  If I was to promote a netflix offer I couldn’t just put up a netflix ad.  Instead I had to tailor the advertisement in such a way that people would want to go to my landing page instead of the traditional netflix page.  To combat this you can create your advertisement with the city in mind.  For example, Portland is known for rain. So… every one of of my advertisements played on the rainy portland days.

My banners looked like they were washing away from the rain AND the URL was memorable to Portlanders. I won’t give you the exact URL but here is an idea of what I used… “StuckInsideWithNetflix.com”.  Do you get it?  People are stuck inside because of the rain… and they have netflix to watch videos!

Anytime you can humor your audience you will grab their trust!

My landing page had quite a few hits. In the 30 days that I had the advertisements running I had approximately 10,000 hits which equated to roughly 1.1% clickthrough rate. And my actual landing page was just a HUGE banner… And honestly… I had it stuff the netflix cookie onto the visitor incase they decided to leave and visit netflix direct.

So let me talk to you a little about what I made that first month.  I spent a total of about $1000 so in order for me to make a profit I had to convert roughly 45 people to break even.  To be honest with you… I didn’t make my goal… I was short of my original spend by $100. BUT … that was ok and here is why…

If you remember we spent $500 to create the actual ads.  This was a cost that I didn’t have to spend month after month.  Instead I just have to spend about $500 each month that I want the advertisements to continue running. So in two months if my profit remains the same I would have spent a total of $1500 and made $1800… That is only $300 profit for two months… But what about three months?  Or 4? $2000 spend for 3 months with roughly $2700 profit! $2500 spend for 4 months with roughly $3600 profit.

Do you see how you can benefit from this?? It may take a while but that is only because you have initial costs to create the actual ads.  You don’t have to pay for new ads every month… You can re-use ads month after month until you want to change up your campaign.

So… If you haven’t looked into advertising on a Billboard or some sort of Mobile advertisement I would highly suggest you give it a shot… Just remember… If you don’t risk it you won’t make it.

Kris Trujillo is an internet marketing veteran and writes CashTactics.net

Ad Hustler | Subscribe To Ad Hustler