My Second Web "Affiliate Programs" Experiment
Earns $1,000 a Month (Update: up to $3,400)

[NOTE from Allan Gardyne, CEO of AssociatePrograms.com: You don't have to be brilliant to earn good money with web affiliate programs. In this article, Rupert proves that his first affiliate success wasn't a fluke.]

By Rupert Farrow
of AssociatePrograms.com

My second affiliate site has earned over $1,000 a month for the last two months.

This article shows you exactly how I did it, how long it took and why I think Site Build It! is an essential tool for anyone who wants to own a popular and profitable affiliate web site.

Now I return to affiliate marketing as the master...

Actually, I'm not the master but at the time I thought I was the greatest affiliate on the Internet. This isn't a bad attitude for an affiliate to have since I wasn't being paralyzed by all the things I didn't know. I was focusing on what I did know.

What I'd proved was that Site Build It! works and I had succeeded even when I knew nothing about affiliate marketing.

If you haven't read about my first affiliate site, you can read my original Site Build It! case study here. It covers the basics of using Site Build It! and getting started on an affiliate site. It also discusses what you need to do once you have a site up and running.

This case study has many more ideas for affiliates who already know the basics. I won't bore you (and me) with all the details covered in my first Site Build It! case study.

Better planning from the start

I've never been a hard-core planner. In fact, the thought of planning something is usually enough to deter me from doing it. Luckily for me, building affiliate web sites is as easy as making breakfast. There really are only five main steps and Site Build It! makes each one easy to do.

1. Think of some topics you might like to do a site on.
2. Do some keyword profitability research with Site Build It!.
3. Research affiliate programs that relate to your topics.
4. Write a web page on each keyword, optimizing it with Site Build It! tools.
5. Drop in your affiliate links

The keyword research just takes a few clicks to do with Site Build it!. I already had a couple of ideas for affiliate web sites. One idea was desktop computers. After doing about three keyword researches with Site Build It!, I found that there were some very profitable keywords in this topic.

Let's just continue on and I'll show you what a profitable keyword niche looks like.

Profitable keyword niches are where you find them

Site Build It! is the best tool on the Internet for finding a profitable topic for your affiliate web site. It finds related keywords and ranks them in order of supply and demand. Profitable keywords are search phrases that have a high demand and low supply.

Take a look at my keyword list. Sorry it's a little bit coffee stained and creased but as the main plan for my site, it was carried around and referred to quite often.

This keyword list is ranked in order on demand, with the most searched phrases appearing at the top of the list. I simply scanned down the list and built a page for each keyword that looked profitable.

You can see that I highlighted the profitable keywords in the list. These keywords were the basis for my site. Further keyword research in Site Build It! uncovered many more profitable keywords on the topic.

It is very important to do as much research as possible before you start building your site. I suggest you do extra keyword research with the Wordtracker free trial. You can sometimes find a few extra keywords by doing this and you can also double-check your most profitable keywords before you start.

For example, "cheap computers" looks to be a very profitable key phrase. The demand figure is so high (above 25,000 is very good). I did further keyword searches using "cheap computers" and found other profitable keywords such as "cheap computer cases" and "cheap computer desks". The topic was looking very promising with a wide range of other profitable keywords related to "cheap computers".

Can you see the theme building in the keywords? You probably won't be surprised to find out the domain name I registered for my site was...

www.cheap-computers-guide.com

This allowed me to have my most profitable keyword in my domain name and it helped me optimize my index page for the keyword "cheap computers". I raced ahead writing articles on how to build your own cheap computers from cheap computer parts. I wanted my site ready for review by Yahoo! as soon as possible. The sooner I got into the Yahoo! directory the sooner I could put up my affiliate links.

This brings me to my next topic, choosing the right web affiliate programs.

Where does the affiliate money come from?

Now I had a topic or theme for my web site, I had to find an affiliate program that would provide me with all the different product links.

I was looking for an online store (with an affiliate program) that I would feel comfortable buying from. When I looked there were quite a few online stores that had over-priced products.

In the end I decided to go with www.TigerDirect.com. They have a massive range of products and you can earn up to 4% commission if you make over $10,000 a month in sales.

This wasn't the highest commission I'd seen but if you take into account the competitive prices and wide range of products, choosing this affiliate merchant made sense.

Why not have a look at www.TigerDirect.com and see for yourself what a wide selection of cheap computer products thay have?

I can't stress enough the importance of partnering with a good merchant.

Site Build It! search engine optimization works

My site ranks very well with Google. Take a look at my rankings for the following popular and competitive keywords. I took these screenshots on the 3rd of April 2003.

For the keyword "cheap computers" – ranking number 1...

For the keyword "cheap computer parts" – ranking number 3 and 4...

For the keyword "cheap computer systems" – ranking number 1 and 2...

For the keyword "cheap computer cases" – ranking number 1 and 2...

There are many other keywords that I have number one rankings for but instead of showing them all to you I'll just show you my traffic stats.

The table below shows my traffic statistics for the last 12 months. The domain was registered on the 24th March 2002 so this is pretty much a record of my traffic stats since the site began.

As you can see, there has been a fairly steady increase in traffic since the site's inception. I've added more pages as time goes by, optimizing them to be found for new search phrases.

Site Build It! tracking puts you in charge

Site Build It! has great tracking. The in-depth statistics tell you what pages are bringing you traffic and what keywords people are using to find your site.

I didn't really see the point of all this information for the first eight months and I never used these stats in my first site.

Recently I've really appreciated seeing the keywords – or key phrases – people are using to find my site. Some of these keywords I hadn't actually optimized any pages for. So I went back and added these keywords to my pages and, as a result, managed to get a little extra traffic.

Take a look at this table taken straight out of the Site Build It! traffic stats page. It shows me what pages get me the most traffic. This allows me to focus my affiliate links and selling techniques on the most popular and profitable pages. Talk about saving me time!

It becomes instantly obvious which pages should get the majority of my attention. Traffic stats like these become priceless as your site starts to mature and you start to get serious. The most popular page is the main page.

The comprehensive tracking in Site Build It! also tells me where your traffic is coming from and what pages my visitors leave from. You could pay a great deal of money for this kind of tracking separately and then have to go through the trouble of setting it up. With Site Build It!, powerful tracking is integrated from the start and is always there when you need it.

Site Build It! pays for itself many times over

Affiliates don't put links up and optimize their web sites just for fun. Every affiliate wants to make some good money.

With a little more affiliate knowledge, I have made a much more profitable site. Hopefully, you have learned something from these two case studies and can go directly to the stage I'm at now.

Let's see how much money my site has earned. Take a look at the table below, it shows the traffic, commissions and sales figures for my site over the last 12 months. If you are interested in my earnings per click over the last 12 months, I earned $0.033 for every click through to www.TigerDirect.com.

As you can see my monthly commissions are above $1,000 now. For those of you who doubt the importance of affiliates, take a look at my sales figures. My traffic resulted in over $150,000 in sales for TigerDirect over the last 10 months!

Wouldn't it be nice to have 3 or 4 web sites that are all as profitable as this one? Site Build It! makes multiple sites possible by taking all the time consuming work out of building affiliate web sites.

Site Build It! the bricks and mortar of affiliate business

After reading about my second site, are you impressed?

There are any people on the Internet who will promise thousands of dollars to you if you take part in their scheme. All I can show you is how I built a web site part time that earns over $1,000 a month in commissions.

Many Internet entrepreneurs would call what I did the hard way to earn a buck. In some respects, I agree with them but what I have now is much more solid than anything created through hype and spin. I have an Internet business and one that was built during an IT recession.

So would I go through this all again and build another site with Site Build It!? You bet I would.

Site Build It! made my success possible because of all the work it does for you. Here are all the things I didn't have to worry about:

• Quality web hosting – SBI! includes the best web hosting you can get
• Researching profitable site topics – SBI! includes the most advanced keyword research tools available
• HTML and building pages – SBI! has easy to use page design tools that don't require any HTML knowledge. All my pages were optimized for top search engine rankings
• Awesome traffic stats that help me achieve a really profitable site.

Site Build It! doesn't just exist to make you a cheesy marketer, it exists to help you become a shrewd webmaster.

In a few years' time my site will still be there, generating commissions. If you're serious about quitting your job to make money on the Internet, you need a site that will work in the long term.

There is no way to cheat your way to long-term success and there is no other tool that will help you more than Site Build It!

Future directions for my site

The next feature of Site Build It! that I want to explore is the MailOut Manager. This allows you to collect email address from your web site (without installing a script) and send out a newsletter. I've started collecting email addresses and will send out my first newsletter soon.

Building a list of people who are interested in the topic of your web site is a great way to make extra sales. You can also archive the articles online and use them as new pages for your site.

Another feature of Site Build It! that I have recently taken advantage of is the SiteSell Value Exchange. This is a quality link exchange program where the content of your site is matched up with other sites and links exchanged to maximize Google page rank.

I have also been posting on message boards that have been archived online. This allows me to get extra links to my web site. Getting new links helps boost PageRank and ultimately improves your search engine rankings and traffic.

My site is spidered by Google regularly now and it only takes a few days from when I put a page up to when it appears in the search engine rankings. This encourages me to put up new pages. In the future, I intend to do more keyword research with Site Build It! and find some new profitable phrases to build pages for.

April 5, 2003

UPDATE, July, 2003:
[NOTE from Allan Gardyne] Commissions have declined a little, perhaps mainly because Rupert has been working on a new SBI! site. The latest commission check was $806, which is still very useful for a low-maintenance site. The good news is that it looks as though adding Google's AdSense to the site will bring in an extra $1,000 or more a month. Those keyword-rich pages are proving very useful with AdSense.

UPDATE, February, 2004:
[NOTE from Allan Gardyne] I guess I taught Rupert too much. He's now working only a few hours a week for me and concentrating on several of his own affiliate sites (yes, he's bought his own SBI! to start his own business!). Since this report was published, Rupert's cheap computers site has had to compete with a rash of copycat sites and had to cope with major upheavals at Google.

In spite of that, it's January total revenue was still over $1,100. The site's recent monthly revenue has varied from about $1,000 to $3,444, a combination of affiliate commissions and advertising revenue. In spite of all the competition, those keyword-rich, search engine friendly pages created using Site Built It! are still proving very useful.

Read Case Study #1

Allan's End-Dec/2004 Update

Allan's End-Dec/2006 Update