Two weeks ago, my wife put up a niche web site showing a number of comparative products within that niche.
She used the automated Vendiva Price Comparison Service to show regularly updated prices for a number of different merchants, and she also put links to Amazon and highlighted that they offer free delivery too. It’s a fact that in most cases Amazon offer the lowest price and in any case anything over £5.00 is now free delivery.
She spent at most 3 part-time days working on the site, probably about 15-18 hours in total – “if that” she’s just said to me.
Last night we sat down to check traffic to our sites and saw that the site she built 2 weeks ago had received a jump in traffic and received 18 unique visitors yesterday. More importantly, 2 of them had used links that took them to Amazon.
She checked Amazon this morning and saw that one of those visitors had ordered the item that they had searched for and found on her site, earning her approximately £13.12 ($18.70). She won’t know the exact amount until Amazon dispatch it and it turns into earnings in her affiliate panel.
I think that’s probably a lot more than most people earn with AdSense every month…
The wonderful thing about all this is that other than add more products to the site – which she’ll do when she finds a few moments each day (and which will generate even more traffic) – she won’t have to do anything with the existing products that are on there. People will continue to find the site using the same search terms they’ve done over the last few days.
As traffic to the site increases, so will her earnings. All passively. All done on autopilot.
We put the conversion solely down to the fact that she shows a range of prices and merchants for each product she’s promoting.
All prices are clickable and take the visitors through to the merchant site using her cloaked affiliate link.
All prices are auto-updated several times a day using direct feeds from the affiliate networks.
This is a dynamite method of instantly gaining your visitors trust. And more importantly from your point of view, their gratitude.
After all, you’ve just saved them a lot of searching around for the best price available, and if they click the links through to the merchants sites they can see for themselves that the prices are accurate and up to date.
Getting the traffic is easy enough, getting people to click your affiliate links is harder.
You can make it much easier using the same methods as my wife does.
Here’s a picture of the gradual increase in traffic over the last few days. My wife has done nothing to promote the site other than create it and give it a backlink from two other sites to get it indexed naturally which we think helps. (Ignore todays traffic of 2 visitors as it was still quite early when I took that snapshot.)
You can do exactly the same thing as she is. What are you waiting for?
-Frank Haywood
Hey Frank
I just finished teaching my wife how to set up one of these sites and she finished her first one yesterday.
I’ve started the traffic generation strategies I use and she’s eagerly awaiting her first sale. She’s waiting to ‘see it to believe it’, but if it turns out well for her she’s intending to turn it into a full-time job. Well, I say, full-time, but she means 2 or 3 hours a day!
Of course I already know this will work for her, but she’s doing a Jerry Maguire thing: “show me the money!”
Amin
Congratulations to your wife Frank. You say she spent, say, 15 hours? Well, that paid her back just over $1 per hour which may not sound that great to some readers…. but….
The fantastic part is now the work is done, every order after that increased her pay (hourly rate for work done ONCE!). The nice thing is that since it’s online, it’s evergreen now. It’s not like it was a one time email blast.
Great job. Now, all you need to do is spend a little bit of work on getting traffic. After 100 sales, you’re wife’s hourly rate just shot up to over $100/hour for the work she put in.
Amin:
If you’ve done your homework correctly she’ll start to see money in 3-4 weeks, and that’s a huge incentive to keep going. 😉
What I did for Sue was set up a series of visible steps for each of the sites that she’s been working on.
#1 – Using the SeoQuake addon for Firefox, she can easily see when the sites have been indexed and how many pages.
#2 – Using StatCounter.com so that she can see the traffic increasing to the sites and what keywords people are using to find her sites and where they’re coming from.
#3 – When traffic starts going to Amazon, she can then check the Amazon associates panel to see if anything has been ordered and what link activity has been going on by looking at the Amazon reports.
Those 3 steps have really kept the excitement going for her when she’s been working on sites she didn’t want to.
It’s especially good as the site she’s just made money from was one of the sites that she was finding painful to work on. But I knew the niche was a good one and I had the right keywords for her to use, and sure enough it’s starting to appear in the SEs.
That sale yesterday has made it all worthwhile for her, and seeing her excitement at making recurring money from effectively nothing has made it all worthwhile for me too. The site will start to rank well in time as long as we build backlinks 😉 and add new content. Eventually it will have a life of its own and we won’t have to spend any time on it.
Jason:
Yes, she thinks it might be less than 15 hours and I just checked and she’s put 7 products on the site, so each one took roughly 2 hours.
This includes the time it took her to do the research, edit the images, write some text, create the price comparison and put everything up. This is a WordPress based site using the Mandigo theme I mentioned in another post, and she’s using the free WP plugin we’ve written to display the Price Comparisons.
And you’re dead right about the work only having had to be done once. I’ve just checked through StatCounter to see where the traffic is coming from, and we’re already #1 for a pretty strong search term, and on the first page for others.
Finally, that’s an excellent point about the 100 sales and I hadn’t thought of it in that way. It doesn’t matter if it takes 12 months to make those 100 sales, the fact is eventually she *will* make those 100 sales, and her hourly rate *will* be over $100/hour for the time it took her to do the work.
And that rate will only increase over time as she makes more sales of those items.
Now THERE’S a future headline for a sales page. 😉
Cheers,
Frank
Hi Frank,
When are you going to update your blog?
How’s the progress of your wife’s niche site? Your readers would like to know more. 🙂