Plan For Making Sales Online During Christmas Shopping

I was going to title this post, How I Made $17,347.41 In 3 Months! But then realized it was just a load of what Biff got in the Back to the Future movies – which was fun to watch with the kids recently, thanks for asking. Michael J. Fox, since I know you’re reading this: I love Marty McFly. You are, sir, my hero.

I think I have ADD, or ADHD. I’ll try to stay on point.

Do Your Christmas Shopping Here!

By the way, that pic will link to a spot I’d like you to check out – an Amazon partner – “just on the in case” you are Christmas shopping. Thanks for your support!

Getting back on task, this money-making-sales-online idea is:

1) Untested (By Me)

2) Original (To Me)

3) A Great One! (Me Be Thinkin’)

Take it or leave it, I think it will work, and it’s what I’m going to be doing learning what I learned with (drumroll?):

Tha Ama-Freaking-Zonian Proft Plan . AKA “The Amazonian Profit Plan Heck Yes I’m An Affiliate” e-book.

Here’s the general game plan, or idea (I deal with fuzzies, so I don’t know if “plan” is a good word, more like, here’s the game intention):

1. Find Products That Look Promising – Using Amazon, Consumer Search, Google Shopping and the like. Find well-reviewed items I can sell somehow – and I’ll be using the affiliate programs I currently am affiliated with (go figure).

2. Build Hubs, Squidoo Lenses…Or where appropriate, use my existing sites.

3. Drive Traffic To Them Using Current Tools (Magic Submitter, ArticleRanks, Magic Article Submitter, ArticleBot, PressBot…basically everything that Incansoft sells!…along with Unique Article Wizard and now: The Link Juicer thanks to Michelle’s recommendation.)

Sound pedestrian? More of the same? It is, but it works when I do it. I’ll be taking a handful of items, from a mix of niches, with this criteria in mind:

• Quality product, according to reviews already online. Why? I don’t want bad press getting in the way (although my winningest product had NO REVIEWS and NOBODY was affiliating with it until after I started to make some good money with it — go figure, it was wide open and a risk, but a quality product).
• Christmas-gift focused. Why? With Christmas so far out, I’ll have time to rank, get people interested, etc. And I’ll be a monkey’s turd if I don’t take advantage of that this year…last year I took some very poor advice from someone who didn’t think targeting holidays was wise…shame on me.
• Get products that can be competitively positioned – so if there are competing products, I’ll be going for the one I think (and reviews say) is the best.
• I can sell the product on Amazon. OK, what if you live in Colorado? Can you still use this plan? YES.
• You can try the Google Affiliate Network, eBay, Commission Junction, PepperJam Network — look into “Hay Needle” stores – they have nothing but “variety, sweet variety” as their motto goes.
• MUST have higher traffic than I’m used to. Why? Because of Dave’s A 30 Day Guide To Making $1000 post.

Dang that guy – he’s a load of information. What’s impressive, too, is that his style of marketing is gutsy and different than what I’m used to.

Just please do NOT send him the pics he’s asking for in that post…I have 5 daughters. What do you expect me to say?

What is most remarkable? He is going after the high-traffic words, 1k searches a day, using WordTracker (Aaron Wall mentioned that as well – I was too cheap and still am too cheap to add another monthly subscription – but it’s $59 or so a month compared to similar programs charging much more, worth a look).

This is a BREAK for me – I go after low-hanging fruit, easy to rank and get paid for – but makes sense and worth a look. Heck, the guy is making the income I want…definitely a voice to listen to.

More Specific Plan:

1. Pick out 3-5 products that I currently do not have a website for per se. Use current promotionals that I can get higher commission on.

2. Build them on HubPages and Squidoo, possibly Blogger. Write reviews, link to the product in a text link with a picture above that link – or use the existing Amazon modules and re-write the descriptions…

My tip, for what it’s worth given I haven’t made a dollar on this experiment: Use the “bestsellers, most gifted, most requested,” etc. parameters at Amazon to do some research.

3. Backlink…which I just learned from Dave should occupy 80-90% of my time. This is a big change for me – and makes sense give the competition factor. If you are doing micro-sites, like I’ve been, then you get trickle traffic. It converts well, however, but it’s still a trickle.

You also don’t require a ton of backlinks for that sort of traffic and keywords. Oh, and in case you don’t think Trickle Traffic pays, here’s a recent screen shot:

Passive Income with Little Traffic To Micro Niche Site

Using this micro-niche style of keyword research, I’ve actually received CRUMMY traffic, although I’m in the #1 spot for the generic term and product term of the keyword – but it converts. Not a lot of backlinks needed…

BUT

Targeting bigger words traffic wise makes more sense on a Web 2.0 site – and heck, even for a website if you can get it ranking – and if I had the type of traffic I’d like?

Yikes. Lookout, active income, I’m going on vacation!

This will require more linking, and on web 2.0 sites will be able to hit them aggressively (don’t do this for a new site – you’ll risk winding up in the sandbox). But I’m geared for that, who am I kidding?

Keyword Research:

A) Begin at the shopping sites, as noted. Scrap the competition checking (taking a risk). Use AdWords (since I don’t have WordTracker) and Google Trends to find lucrative-looking traffic words: 1k searches a day or more.

B) Use the Google Wonder Wheel to find terms that could be inner pages on Blogger (or other lenses/hubs), and possibly use them as LSI terms on the properties themselves. I will be using these to also generate topics for the articles I will be submitting, using The Link Juicer (review on that when I can), ArticleRanks, Unique Article Wizard, etc.

Note: The Link Juicer adds links to your backlinks – it’s part of the service, I’m going for 1500 links a month I think it is, 50 links a day, spread out over my properties. It also is lucrative to me because it is cheaper than Magic Submitter, and requires LESS writing – time is of the essence.

Oh, did I mention it’s FREE for the first 30 days? I didn’t? The Link Juicer is FREE the first 30 days.

Continue your page here…

C) Make sure the product is actually something that would make a good gift – this is where reviews really help, and Google Trends: searching for similar products will indicate that.

In case you didn’t know: A search of the GAKT will indicate the months in which a keyword had piqued in monthly search volume. Translation: Look for keywords, products or topics that have a high end-of-year search volume…

This is a targeted, Christmas season shopping campaign – and I’m not building sites on these properties that are self-hosted because I want to see if I can rank for these terms.

I usually already know this since I target low-compete terms. This time it’s different.

But if I do rank, then I’ll proceed by picking the most beneficial, profitable keywords and using these properties for backlinks to those self-hosted sites.

Using Hubs and Lenses etc. as a testing ground this way isn’t something I’ve done personally, and here’s the thang: Hubpages, etc. are already authority sites, so in theory they can rank better quicker for a term – not a guarantee you can do that with your own sites.

Reason being you need to get your new sites linked up, gain authority, etc. The web 2 sites have that in spades.

It makes sense in theory – but I’m not trading out my websites in favor of web 2.0 sites for sure! The big kick for doing things this way is to minimize my own risk in buying domains that might not go anywhere

ALTHOUGH: all of my sites have been profitable save one, but again: they’re not targeting the “hairy-scary” keywords…

These secondary properties should give me a second tier of income if this plays out. And the obvious point is that since you do not keep 100% of the earnings off your commissions on these public sites, you SHOULD target the bigger traffic keywords!

It takes MORE traffic to generate the income when you don’t keep 100% of the commission…which is what I never liked about these types of sites.

Oh, and it helps that my article-bombed Squidoo lens is generating an income on its own! It was originally nowhere – if you read that post again you’ll notice I was using Squidoo’s own metrics for judging the effect of my article bomb.

Bunny Trail Alert!
At the time I didn’t realize there was a way to check ranking on a lens or Hub using Rank Checker, which is what I typically use, comes with the SEOBook toolbar and free plugins.

Then I made the happy discovery that I could actually use the Rank Tracker from SEOPowerSuite to do this: it checks Squidoo ranking, Hub ranking, etc. in the top 100.

(By the way, Rank Tracker is totally free – you can upgrade but even if you don’t, you should learn more about Rank Tracker here – you should also check out their other rockin’ tools.)

Long and short of it is that I found out my A-Bombed lens was #10 for the term I wanted, and it points to my site as well as makes its own sales. Heck if I don’t love that: a backlink that sells.

/ Bunny Trail Alert

I’ll keep y’all posted on this as it comes to fruition. In the meantime, feel free to do it yourself (I’m guessing all of you already are doing this, but it’s an A-HA! moment for me).

Coming up will be a candid discussion I recently had with a Facebook acquaintance, who asked the question,

“Where do I start making money online?” It may just surprise you, unless you knew me. Then you’d expect my reply. (I hope.)

Tell me what you think, and spread it around, and add in your two cents. It will be in 2-3 parts…it’s a (not surprisingly) long reply.