Research the market and find suitable offers.
Once you have your WordPress site set up and have had a play round with it to see how things work and perhaps tried some different themes, you will be ready to set up shop. The first thing we must do then is to find products that sell and the only way to do this is by research.
Why do people buy (on-line)?
People obviously buy things that they want and can often find the best deals on-line but keep in mind these 3 reasons:
1. desperate?need
2.?intense obsession
3. ?irrational passion
Many people have a?desperate need, for example, facial?hyper-pigmentation seen here: ?http://dermnetnz.org/common/image.php?path=/colour/img/chloas1.jpg or?some kind of medical condition. As you can imagine people with a condition like this will probably ?be?highly?motivated?to buy something to ‘fix’ the problem. The next category ‘irrational?passion’ covers areas like animals or cars. ?Some people spend a fortune fixing up old cars, they spend time on polishing and repairing them and think of little else. They just really love cars and are highly motivated to buy. The last category is irrational passions like Pokemon trading cards (often associated with cartoon characters) and collections like military badges, stamps, spoons etc.
My business model
In short the plan is to create a website to?genuinely?’help’ people find or get what they want or need. Which is of course what I am doing (hopefully) for you now. ?If you want this to work long term you don’t want to be a?scammer?because very soon you will be found out and your hard work invested in you business will be wasted, so the logic is to be honest and provide the best information you can. ?One film director once said something on the lines of ?”If you make a good?movie they will come in thousands, make a great movie and they will come in their millions”. In other words do it right. Do your research and try out products yourself so you know it is safe to?recommend?them. So the first stage of our business model is to make a good site for a product or range of products, do the marketing get the products selling then repeat the whole set up with a different product or range of products.
Stats
Before we go much further we need to make sure we have some web stats in place so that we know that things are working. Probably the best simple way to do this is by setting up a Google analytics Account. In a nutshell, when you have set up the account you need to copy the analytics code and paste it into the bottom of each of your WordPress pages using the HTML editor. When this is done Google will track hits on your site.
Getting Serious
Yesterday (29/07/2011) I decided to go to boot camp to make sure I am really giving you the best advice. Because I was so impressed with ?Unstoppable Affiliate that I decided to go to the next level (boot camp) at Unstoppable Affiliate Coaching. The course is run by?Andrew?Hansen. I have just started looking over the course material and noticed a few things that I like. Week one is about developing a positive mental?attitude?and getting linked up with other members so that you are not in this alone. The idea being get motivation from the course and be able to pose your questions to Andrew himself. You don’t have to listen to may of the training videos to know this guy has a wealth of experience. I will have to say that I already know a lot of the theory and it gives me confidence that he is saying all the right things. The difference between us is that he has made plenty of money from this game and I have been?procrastinating?for to long. I am therefore pleased to see that I have an action check list to follow and complete each week and have been told to schedule time for link building and content creation 6 days a week. So it seems that I am off to a good start. The first webinar is on Wednesday so I am looking forward to that. (Update: It was very good, lots of other people on the course talking too.)
I have also?committed ?100 per month to a link building program for my website ?http://www.english-club.org.uk. Listening to Andrew’s link building videos made me realise that I could easily move up to top place for my key words. One that particularly interests me is ‘Learn English Skype‘ currently my site is on page 3 yet after an SEO evaluation, I noticed that I was getting an on-page score of 90% (this is a none WordPress landing page). The page at number 1 scores less than my page (about 75%) but he has about 4000 links and has a page rank of 4 compared to my 160 inbound links current page rank score of 1. My objective now is to up my link building program and catch up. I was surprised that he has not had penalties from Google because his domain age is less than a year which perhaps means that you can build links at about 20 per day rather than 10. Anyway I have a page ranking tool on?http://www.english-club.org.uk so you can keep an eye on it. If it goes well I will let you know which company I have used to help me. By the way, I am running an affiliate program on this site if you want to sign up for it. Look at the bottom of the page and follow the link to Clixgalore who are managing the system for me.
One other thing that I have got from Andrew’s course is some advice about some useful plugins for WordPress and some useful advice about themes. I have loaded an SEO assistant plugin to help keep my WordPress page titles and meta tags up to date. It seems very handy. I will have to say that I was rather ignorant about WordPress plugins and the range of free stuff available. It is well worth checking out what is available from your admin page and a doddle to install. I may have to have a go at writing one myself.
My Niche and Example Website
Week 2 of Andrew’s course is about niche research. Andrew says that niche research is probably the most important factor in the whole process which?determines?success or failure. This is backed up by what I have read on other sites particularly at www.wordtracker.com. Because this is so important, I am now planning to dedicate a whole section on the subject, but for now though, I am going to use one of the pre-researched niche suggestions that came with the course to see how things go. (If you can’t wait, I suggest that you sign up for Andrew’s course.)
The Single product model
My target niche is the Nikon D3100 camera. Using the Google Keywords tool, I have made the observation that there are 450,000 global exact match searches, 1,000,000 global phrase searches and 1,220,000 global broad searches. ?I have built a WordPress site and generated some original content based on what I have found on the Internet and my own experiences with the camera. I bought the domain names, nikon-reviews.info and nikon-review.info in order to get some key words into the domain name.
.info’s and new domains
I have since been told that there is some?controversy?over the subject of “.info” domains not ranking well in searches but I have not found anything conclusive in the favour of either argument. However, to play it safe I will probably opt for more traditional “.com”, “.net” or “.org” in the future. There is also some issue about the names being new and thus it is not a good idea to build links too fast. The?recommended?pace being not more than 10 per day for new domains. You can see my example site here:?http://www.nikon-reviews.info.?Both domains point to the same site.
On-page SEO
Currently at the time of writing 18/08/2011, there are no visits on the site. The site has been set up based on my understanding of the “single product model” as outlined on Andrew’s course. I am pretty good at on page SEO but I have not done anything this time as the WordPress template (Thematic 0.9.7.7)?claims to be the “ultimate SEO ready template”.
Work in progress … come back in a few days to read some more. If you register yourself, I can drop you an email if I have something interesting to tell you. Do it now. Cheers!
