Finding a Website Topic/Niche

Without doubt the most important step toward building your affiliate shopping site is actually choosing the right topic/niche to base it on. You will be spending a ton of time and energy on this website with very little in return at first, so you want to make sure you have a great deal of interest and passion in the subject you will be created your site around.

This post is not about research or any tech stuff just yet, we will get to that later. This post is about pulling together a short list of topics that you might want to take on our journey together as we progress through each step of this affiliate site series.

Let’s put together a list of our top 5 things we love to do, buy, or in general find ourselves immersed in whenever we are participating in it. A quick idea would be to think of something you would be doing right now if you were not reading this post!

This is my quick list……..

1. Playing Guitar
2. Using iPhone
3. Taking Pictures With New Camera
4. Working Out

I could only come up with four, then I got a headache, so four is good for me. Now its your turn!

Now with your list constructed we need to turn our ideas into what possibly could be potential products we may sell on our site. This is a breakdown of what I mean.

Let’s take the #1 topic on my list which was “Playing Guitar”, this is pretty simple to break down into Guitars or Musical Instruments for a possible product topic. Next would be even easier because I would be looking to sell iPhone stuff or cell phone related products. Here is how the other two would look.

It’s as simple as that! Now my list looks like this.

All you have to do now is come back with a list of  product subject of your own.

How To Build Dynamic Affiliate Shopping Sites

This is the introduction to the series in which I will show you how to build dynamic affiliate shopping sites using Popshops.com. Each part of this series will follow up from last and get you well on your way to finally getting your own affiliate website up and running, and hopefully making sales!

The idea behind this series came from months of researching and developing my own affiliate websites and then turning them to profit. I want to make it as easy and as fun as possible to create your own affiliate site empire using simple and easy to follow methods.

Here is a little look at the kind of site we will be working on…

Our demo site as you can see is a cell phone store, but you can work on any kind of site you like. If you don’t have any idea of what niche you want to start on, I will also help you find ideas that might help you get started in your own journey.

Here is the main outline of our project…

Series Introduction

Part 1: Finding a Website Topic/Niche

Part 2: Researching The Niche/Competition

Part 3: To Build a Blog or E-Commerce Site – What to use and where to go?

Part 4: Picking The Right Keywords

Part 5: Optimize Your Site For The Search Engines

Part 6: Site Promotion Techniques – Backlinks – Comments – Articles – Press Releases

Part 7: Social Media Sensation – Facebook – Twitter

Part 8: Google Adsense

Part 9: Site Analytics

Part 10: Other Monetization Ideas

Part 11: What To Do Next

Things as always could change as I go along in this project depending on questions/feedback. But I will keep as close as I can to the outline above.

By the end of this series you should have a fully functional dynamic affiliate website that you can then hopefully start to make some sales with. You will also be equipped with the tools and techniques to get you ahead of your competition, without breaking any rules!

Who’s in!?;)

I did not give up, I just took an extended break from any kind of Internet Marketing related banter, and  instead got down to some real hands-on learning the hard way project type stuff.

After a very inconsistent 2009/early 2010 I decided to try something new. Gone was my idea to carry on writing articles to promote Clickbank products, I even stopped blogging on my other sites, as well as this one. I just could not get anything to stick at the time, and I found it pretty boring!

I also stopped buying into random IM products/launches, unsubscribed from all the “gurus” mailing lists which did not really help at all, although I did keep a couple of gurus that I found the most helpful. I went back to the drawing board and re-started myself.

Going back to my novice web design background I wanted to try something I’d not done before. I still wanted to sell stuff online, but I wanted it to be genuine real products that had nothing to do with ebooks or anything like that. I heard the conversion rate on physical products was higher anyway.

Data-Fed

Data Feeds were the answer I was looking for..

Boring explanation from Wikipedia coming up…

Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used by real-time applications in point-to-point settings as well as on theworld-wide web. The latter is also called Web feed. News feed is a popular form of Web feed. RSS feed makes dissemination of blogs easy. Product feeds play increasingly important role in e-commerce and internet marketing. Data feeds usually requires structured data. At the present time unstructured data, e.g. HTML pages, dominate the Web. As a result, data feeds have the potential to make a bigger impact on the Web in the future.

The good thing about Datafeeds are that I could build my own website around them, I could get back to coding in PHP again, and I could finally sell real products that I had a real interest in. Perfect!

I found a great website that combined datafeeds from CJ, Linkshare, Share-A-Sale and many more, which saved a bunch of time for me. Plus, I could pretty much sell anything I could think of!

In the next few posts I’ll cover everything in more detail, parts might get a bit technical, but it should still be pretty easy to follow along with(I hope).

Just a warning:: In the time off my grammer and spelling have not improved, so don’t expect that to change!;))

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. Good to be back:-)

Things have been slow over the last couple of weeks, which is making me think that maybe Santa Claus visits on a more regular basis than my Clickbank checks?;) However, not to get too disheartened I continue to be productive and plan other options that I may want to try and test over the next few days.

Some days affiliate marketing is about as frustrating as trying to flush a beach-ball down my toilet! You have a great few days and then nothing for weeks, similar to to the situation a constipated donkey would find itself in.

But as this is a challenge I did not expect it to go easy anyway, so I’ll take everything in step and try to learn as much as I can from it.

With Christmas just around the corner I have been leaning more toward physical products in Commission Junction, and have been researching select products at Plimus too. I’ve been asking around and it does seem that around this time of year down-loadable products do suffer a slow down, with people pushing more for physical products instead.

To get an idea of what people are buying I have been researching using Ebay Pulse, which shows you the most popular searches people are making at Ebay. The other method I’m using is Amazon.com. I visit Amazon and search a category from the drop-down box, then I sort the order by bestselling first.

Using both of these methods I can get good ideas of what hot items people are looking at buying right now. Obviously I can use my Amazon affiliate link to promote the product, but I always look first at cj.com to see if I can get a better commission rate than the 5% I get from Amazon.

I’ll be using more articles and other free promotion ideas to try and make a few sales with the physical products I select.

But for now, back to work.

Part 3 is now upon us. We have covered how to get your stats and conversions from your articles in the last two posts, so we will use this post to cover the final stage of our analysis which is to grab our stats from the articles that link to the sub-domains we have created.

The goal for my articles that link to my sub-domains are completely different from my direct linking articles. When I use a direct affiliate link in my articles, I intend for the reader to read through that article and click on the link to be taken directly to the products sales page. I’m hoping that the reader then purchases the product so I can earn a commission.

When I use a sub-domain mini-site I want the reader to again click the link in the article, but this time they will be taken to my mini-site where I want them to enter their email so I can send them a pre-written follow up email sequence hoping that they make a purchase via a link contained in one of those emails.

It’s common knowledge that building an email list is more valuable than just sending someone right to a sales page, then losing them forever. Sure you make a commission from a sale, but if you get their email you have the opportunity to make the sale many times over with related products you offer in your email sequence.

I will now show you how to track your stats and conversions if you use articles that point people to a sub-domain opt-in page. I want to find out what percentage of people that visit one of my articles, then go on to fill in the email form on my mini-site to opt in to my email list.

By the way, if you want to find out how to create sub domains, and why I do it, then visit my post all about creating sub-domains.

I have several articles pointing links to my mini-sites, and as they are not affiliate links I cannot use any tracking ids in them. However you can still see how many clicks and visitors each one of your articles brings to your site by using your cpanel on your domains. So let’s do just that, but first we need to find out how many views our articles have received so far.

Using ArticlesBase I visit the statistics page and gather up all the views from the articles that are sending people to one of my mini-sites. In total I have 5 articles that are pointing to my mini-site opt in page, the product being promoted via the follow up email is another Clickbank product.

From the 5 articles combined I have received 120 views. Now I need to work out how many of these visitors actually clicked my links, and then went on to enter their email into the form on my mini-sites.

To find out how many visits my sub-domain sites got, I need to enter my domains cpanel(control panel). You can find out how to do this again by clicking on the sub domain link above. What you are looking for once you are in your cpanel is the Awstats icon below.

Once you click and enter Awstats you will be presented with the next page which will display to you a list of your sub-domains to pick from.

All you need to do once you get to the step above is select what sub-domain you want to see the stats for, then click on the small magnifying glass(red circle) above.

The next page you will come to is full of stats all about your sub-domain. But what we want to get from this page is the amount of visitors to your sub-domain min site, and we can do that by viewing this next part which is pretty much at the top of the current page.

Because I know that only my articles are sending people to this page, I can be sure that those 56 visits above are all coming from people that have read my articles. However, if you get traffic to your sub-domains from other sources there is still a way to find out what articles are sending what traffic.

You want to look further down your Awstats page for the “Connect To Site From” section. This section should look something like this…

Not only does the information above tell you how many visits you are getting, but it also gives you the exact article that is sending the traffic to your sub domain mini site. And because we have this information we again get to see what the best performing articles are. Who needs tracking ids anyway;)

I recommend studying all the stats in Awstats. I think Awstats is underused my most site owners, which is unfortunate because it can be a goldmine of information.

So from studying the Awstats info above,  I now know I have had 56 visitors from my articles to my mini site page. And as we discovered from the start of this post I have also had 120 viewers to my articles, so we can now work out the click through rate of the 120 people that click the link and are taken to my mini-site where I want them to enter their email.

Here is the sum….

56/120 = 0.46 *100 =46%

Nearly half of the viewers that read my articles want to click through to visit my mini-site! At 46% that’s awesome! But now I need to find out how many of the 46% actually go on to submit their information to join my list for that product.

I use Aweber to capture all the visitors email info, and then send those people the follow-up email sequence promoting my product. Looking at the Aweber stats I can see that so far 8 people have actually signed up by using their email on my mini site. So each one of these potential customers will be sent my email sequence as soon as they sign up to get more information from me.

Let’s work out the next sum which will find out what percentage of people that visit my mini site, actually feel the need to enter their email info to learn more about the product I am promoting. It looks something like this…

8/56 = 0.14 * 100 = 14%

So my conversion rate for email captures is at 14% which is also pretty good. Now as I did in part 2 of this stats tracking post I want to work out what the percentage of viewers to my articles, then go on to opt-in to my email capture list. Here is how that looks…

8/120 = 0.06 * 100 = 6.6%

It seems that my conversions on articles that link to my sub domains are performing better than the articles that link directly to the product sales page. But as I am yet to make a sale from this email sequence yet, I can’t get a number for the main conversion which would be the visitors to sales number.

However with such a high percentage of people visiting my sub domain site from my artilces, I’m hoping its just a matter of time.

Now I have some real stats to test with, and tweak until I can get as higher conversion rate as I can. Without collecting all this data I would be writing articles with no idea of how they are ever going to perform.

But now I have numbers to compare new ideas and techniques against, thanks to just a little work, and a good ol’ calculator.

I hope you got some good information from these posts? And as always, any questions feel free to leave them below in the comments.

]]> http://www.flopidle.com/971/affiliate-challenge-how-to-get-your-article-stats-part-3/feed/ 1 http://www.flopidle.com/957/affiliate-challenge-how-to-get-your-article-stats-part-2/ http://www.flopidle.com/957/affiliate-challenge-how-to-get-your-article-stats-part-2/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:11:05 +0000 admin http://www.flopidle.com/?p=957

This is the practical part of the post where im going to pull all kinds of numbers from my articles, clickbank, and also some sub-domains to find out how they are all performing up until this point. I’ll then use this as a guide as to what I need to change and improve upon to hopefully increase my final goal, which is more sales.

Lets get right down to business and find out how the first article that made a sale for me is performing. This product is listed in Clickbank, and I’ve used this article to promote it using a direct link via a PHP redirect from Articlesbase.

So the first step will be to head on over to Articlesbase and click on my articles statistics page to get a look at what views this article has taken so far.

Here is the stats for that article ..

The important parts to get from the stats above are the total article views, which in my case is 290. The next part you want to make a note of to move on to the next step is the date of the article submission. The article above was first submitted on 10/22/2009(US Date Format).

So to recap… Note down your total article views, and also the date of submission.

• 290 Article Views
• 10/22/2009 Date Of Submission

Now I have this info I can then move on to the next step, which means we have to visit Clickbank.com and log into our affiliate account.

Once inside your CB(Clickbank) account you need to enter the analytics section. To do this click on “Reporting” in the navigation bar at the top of the site, then click on “Analytics” in the sub menu. You should now be on a page full of stats and other fun charts to browse through. But what we want to focus on in this step is this part…

What you want to do on this analytics  page is make sure the “View As” option is set to “Affiliate” as above. If not then just hit the small circle right next to the affiliate option. You should now see some different stats displayed.

Once we have our affiliate stats displayed, we now need to change the default date. What we want to do here is change the date that is currently displaying our affiliate stats, to only display our stats from the exact day we submitted our article that we noted down from the article page in the first step.

So in my case I want CB to show me my affiliate stats from 10/22/2009, to this present day. Here is how to do it.

Look for the “Date Range” part as above. Click on the drop down arrow and select “Custom range”. Once you select custom range your analytics page should update and display your custom date input, it’s here that you need to enter the date your article went live.

As you can see I entered 10/22/2009 as my start date, and then selected today’s date which just happened to be 12/08/2009 at the time of writing this post. Once you hit GO your analytics stats will again update showing you all the clicks to your affiliate products from your start date, all the way down to the current day.

For this next part to work, it’s critical to use a tracking ID with your Clickbank hoplinks whenever you write a new article. I cover this in detail in my clickbank tracking post if you want to find out how to do this.

If you are using tracking ID’s in your hoplinks, we are going to make use of them in this next step.

What we are going to do now is narrow down all the analytics data by selecting tracking ids from the CB menu on the left side of the page, you should see something like this.

You will notice many different options on the left of this page like Hops, Order Form Impressions, Sales and so on, you have the option to select Tracking ID’s in each one of these options to narrow down your stats, but as I know this article already made a sale I decided to narrow my tracking id’s by clicking the sales option.

If you are yet to make a sale, using the Hops option and the tracking id within that menu will do just fine. Again once you click on Tracking ID your page will again update with new information, and it’s in this information that we need to look for the tracking id we used for that particular article.

In a nutshell what you see above is my articles tracking id and how many clicks it has attracted, which I narrowed down by using the custom date range. So since this article was published it has taken 41 clicks on the link contained within that article.

Now what we need to do is remember our total article views from the first step, which will let you see how many times your article has been viewed by people. In my case this article was viewed 290 times already.

I have two numbers to work with now that will tell me what percentage of people that read my article, actually click through to the products page via my affiliate link. The two numbers are…

• 41
• 290

To find out the percentage all you have to do is simply divide 41 by 290 then multiply by 100.

41/290 = 0.14 *100 = 14%

So this article has a 14% click through rate, which I believe is not too bad, but I think a good avg CTR(click through rate) would probably be about 30%.

However this article did make a sale, so while im at this point I’ll also figure out what the actual sales conversion rate is for this product. To do this I’ll use the 41 hoplink clicks because its this number that is showing me the actual visits to the products sales page. As I’ve only made 1 sale so far from this article the sum will look like this….

1/41 = 0.024 *100 = 2.4%

A 2.4% conversion rate for this product, which again I believe is a pretty standard percentage for downloadable products.

Now im aware that my article has a 14% CTR, and this product coverts at 2.4%. But again I want to go one further and work out what percentage of people that view my article actually buy this product.

1/290 * 100 = .34%

.34%, obviously I need to work on improving this in the future, but at least I know what numbers im dealing with, so I now have a target to compare any improvements up against.

14% People Click The Article Affiliate Link.

2.4% People That Clicked The Article Link Buy The Product.

.34% People Visit The Article, Then Go On To Buy It.

That’s my benchmark above. Can I beat it when I use sub domain mini sites rather than direct links? Find out in PART 3.

Ok I lied! Because this post is so long and I really want to go into detail, I’ll be extending this into a 3rd part. Next post will show you how I get my stats and conversions from my sub domains.

In this 2-part post I wanted to share with you some of my article stats and conversions so far, but instead of just writing it down I thought I’d show you how I’m going to figure it all out, as I do it.

I’ll use 3 articles that I have written to demo how im going to get all my number and figures. I’m going to start with the very first article that made me my first sale a couple of weeks ago, this article is directly linking from my affiliate link to the products sales page(Clickbank Product).

The next article I will pull the stats from is one that is actually linking to a small mini site I created to get the visitors information. So rather than the person clicking on my link in the articles and being taken to the products sales page, they are instead taken to my mini site where I hope they enter their email information so I can start to sell them a product via a pre-written email sequence.

The third article I wanted to take a closer look at is for a CPA offer I picked up on Commission Junction(cj.com). It’s from this type of article that I want to get the visitor to click on my affiliate link within the article, which will then take them to the vendors website where I hope they will take action and enter in the information required for me to get the small CPA commission.

So here is what I should end up with…..

• Direct Linking Article Stats And Conversions.
• Article Stats And Conversions That Links To My Mini Site.
• CPA Article Stats And Conversions.

Here is what I should find out….

I want to know what percent of people visit an particular article, then want to find out more by clicking on my links within that article.

Direct Article Links

I want to know how many readers to my articles went on to visit that products sales page via my link. This will tell me two things…..

1) If the article I’ve written is doing its job by making people want the product, or at least to want to find out more about it(Meaning they click through to find out more).

2) What the products sales page is converting like. Say if I send the vendors website 600 visitors, but it does not turn one of them into a buyer, then I know that there could be an issue with the sales page, or product itself. So I can them move on to another related product and try that one.

Article That Links To My Mini-Site

1) Again, I’ll find out how this article is converting readers into clickers;)

2) I’ll know the number of people that hit my opt-in page and enter in their information, and the number of people that hit my mini site page and leave. This will tell me if I need to change my mini site so that I can increase the number of people that visit it and then want to submit their emails.

CPA Offer Articles

1) Conversions from my articles to my CPA offer page.(Direct link again)

2) It’s meant to be easier to try and get people to just enter some simple information, without  them parting with any cash as they would do for a product. Some CPA offers only really need a valid name, address and email for you to actually earn your commissions. Then from that point onward the vendor will sell to that possible customer via their own email sequence. Your work was just to get them on that list!

Ok, I think I covered what I want to find out by doing all this. The next post is going to be purely practical, and follow me along as I work out all the numbers and stats to give me the information I require. I’ll either post it today or tomorrow;)

## Just one thing. As im using Articlesbase as my main article directory, they don’t actually allow direct links within articles. So when I reference a direct linking article in Articlebase, I actually mean a redirected direct link using PHP -> Find out what im talking about go here -> Php Redirect Post.

Last weeks sales kinda sucked like a cheap plunger! What I’m doing now is looking at all the stats to work out what my conversions are, and I don’t mean just the sales conversions, I also want to get a guide as to where my conversions are at for my opt-ins too.

This is a basic outline of what I’ll be looking at…

The picture above displays the steps I’ll be taking to workout how many views an article gets, then I’ll work out the percentage of people that click on my links within my article, and then find out the percentage of viewers that actually make a purchase or opt-in once they have clicked on that link.

Finally I want to find out exactly what percentage of people that view my articles actually get to that final step of either making a purchase, or opting in to my mini site email list. For this step I’ll miss out the middle part which is the “Clicks” on my links percentage, and just go directly from article views numbers, to sales/opt-ins.

At the end of working this out I should have 3 values(as above) that will let me know my conversions for each one of my articles. What I will be able to tell once I have this info is how different articles perform when trying to turn viewers into possible buyers.

For the articles that link to my opt-in mini site pages Ill have to work out what percentage of people that do opt-in, eventually buy from my follow up email sequence. But the most important thing for now is for me to find out what article style coverts the best so I can use the same writing style for any follow up articles that I write.

You can work out so much information by finding out the percentage values of your conversions, and tracking stats in as much detail as you can. Then you can test ideas and techniques to refine it even further, and hopefully improve upon your end result which would mean more sales for you.

Next post: I’ll share my own conversion values with you;)

I recently downloaded another cool iPhone app that would give me Clickbank sales stats on the go. The app is called CheckCB and it’s currently available as a free download right onto your iPhone.

The CheckCB application is an easy way to keep up-to-date with your Clickbank accounts even when you are away from your computers. It also allows you to store multiple Clickbank accounts that you can switch from one to the other at the touch of a button.

What also put this Clickbank app ahead of some of the others is the fact that you have the options open to check your daily sales, your weekly sales, and also your previous Clickbank pay-checks.

You may have also noticed the “News” section in the app that will keep you up-to-date with all the latest Clickbank news and new features.

To find the app just click on the app store icon on your iPhone, enter the search section and look-up CheckCB ->

Download and install the app as usual. Once on your phone all you have to do is open up CheckCB, enter in your Clickbank account usernames and passwords, and then browse around the live stats from your accounts right on your iPhone ->

Let’s just hope your stats are slightly more impressive than mine!;)

Let me know what you think about CheckCB in the comments below.

Following up from the first article sale came sale number 2 on Monday with a commission of $13.18. This second sale came from a different product than the first, and yet again it was from one of the products I did not really give much hope for. Shows you how much I know right;)

I now have two different products that both made sales via an article, so I entered phase number two of my plan which was to focus my attention and effort on the products that are selling right now.

I spent most of Tuesday writing 4 more follow up articles for each one of the products that made a sale. Each product now had 5 total articles including the one that made the sale pointing to the same product, only this time I focused on different keywords for each one of the articles I wrote.

To keep the creation juices flowing I then decided to round off my day by writing two more articles for a new CPA offer I picked up on Commission Junction. This CPA product is a lead generation offer that will pay me for every qualified lead I bring to the products site, who then submits an email and other information required for me to make that commission.

That took my total article count for Tuesday to 10! It was a lot of writing, and just more proof that it really does help to actually know something about the subject you are writing about.

I have a total of 63 articles now live at various article directories, however both sales came from ArticlesBase which seems to be my favorite site to submit articles to at the moment.

Over the next few days I’ll be tracking stats from the articles to see what kind of changes they bring if any. I’ll also bookmark and build some back links to the new cpa offer articles as well hoping to get them as many views as possible to promote this offer.

Last weeks total sales were $32.36, which is $167.64 short of the $200 per week affiliate challenge target. This week so far $13.18.