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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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Justin Dupre beat me to posting about this but heck, that won’t stop me.  Around 11pm last night I got an email stating that my Google Adwords account has been disabled.  I twittered about it and a sleuth of other affiliates had their Adwords accounts disabled as well.  Google really hates affiliates with a passion.  Here’s the email:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

* Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
* Sites that charge for “free” software
* Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
* Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
* Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

Here are some interesting things to know.  I’ve never ran a rebill, ringtone offer or any other prohibited niches on Google Adwords.  I had a few ads disapproved a while back for running polls on the Google Content Network.  I also have not ran anything in this account for probably a year.

Whatever algorithm Google is using to suspend these accounts is way over the top.  All they are doing is pissing off customers who could potentially spend a lot of money with them.  Most affiliates are smart enough to have diversified at this point.  Those affiliates who still want to run Adwords campaigns are going to do it anyway.  About a year ago I wrote the post “It’s Time To Get Shady Baby.” If an affiliate wants something bad enough, you aren’t going to be able to stop them.

Go get your hustle on!

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