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50 Affiliate Sites: Getting Organized
May 04, 2006
I've decided to do things the smart way with my latest goal. Instead of blindly blundering around, throwing up sites willy nilly wherever an idea might take me, I'm spending these first few weeks getting organized.
(Now, some of you who have been regular readers of this blog for a long time might think I'm procrastinating as usual, but really, truly, I'm not. Much.)
Here's the thing. I want to build my non-datafeed-based sites around tightly targeted niches, using three or four well-picked merchants. I also want to try for some unique mixes of merchants for my datafeed-based sites. There's little point in building all these sites and not getting much further along then where I'm currently at right now when it comes to affiliate income.
As well, I'm aiming for a lot of diversity, and since it's May right now, I'm going to focus on the Christmas shopping season, the health and fitness area (for January) and women's gifts and flowers (for February and next May).
All of this means research, research, research. I've also started a notebook to help me brainstorm a bit when I'm not near a computer. A spreadsheet is helping me keep track of my new sites, letting me see at a glance what still needs work (right now? All of them!) and where I'm at with ones currently under development. I also have documents set up listing all my merchants at each of the networks I belong to, and what sites I'll be using with each of them.
One of the things I've been doing, and will continue doing this week and next, is buying domain names and throwing up simple two to three page sites now, with some quick, focused pages targeting the keywords for each particular niche. This was something that Chris suggested a while back - you get these new domains up and live and spidered, and if Google wants them to play in the sandbox for a while, at least the process will have started and hopefully the sites will emerge in time to catch some of those holiday clicks.
I'm also trying to get my days organized better. I find that when I don't have an offline business deadline to work towards, I can really fritter my time away (big surprise here, huh?) So I'm structuring a semi-routine that will, hopefully, be something I can stick to. I'm not a big fan of routine, but on the other hand, sometimes a bit of structure can help me just start doing.
Since I'm currently posting to between 7 and 15 blogs a day, this semi-routine has been very helpful in making sure I keep to my blogging commitments, too.
"Just doing" is really the whole point of this new goal for me. That, and keeping my mind off of all my new Adsense-based sites which are currently sandboxed.
So this week, because of all these extra tasks, I'm working on just one site for now. It's a datafeed-based site, and I'm hoping I will have it done by the end of the week.
There's one really good thing about blogging about a big goal like this. It makes me start doing, instead of spending all of my time just playing with ideas!
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Posted by BJ at 10:53 AM in 50 Affiliate Sites Challenge | Permalink
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Comments
Look forward to seeing how this all pans out for you :)
Dave
http://blog.brightonvibes.com
Dave
Posted by: Dave G | May 4, 2006 12:09:00 PM
You're idea is such a good one that Linda Buquet mentioned it on her 5 Star Affiliate Blog - big huge congrats!!
Tara :)
Posted by: Tara | May 4, 2006 12:55:50 PM
How will you make your datafeed sites unique?
Posted by: Mads | May 5, 2006 4:01:49 AM
How will I make my datafeed sites unique? By being very creative :) Seriously, though, I'm using a mixture of methods, some more time-consuming than others. There's manual tweaking, php includes, and various php scripts. It will be interesting to see what works best.
Posted by: BJ | May 6, 2006 11:32:34 AM
BJ are you using any software right now to organize your sites? mine me just the ticket for you... best of luck with building 50.. that requires some laser focus.
Posted by: Jon | May 6, 2006 6:28:25 PM
sorry for the typo in the last post LOL.. I type faster than my brain keeps up ;0
Posted by: jon | May 6, 2006 6:29:29 PM
Hi, Jon - no, I'm not using anything other than spreadsheets and Word docs to organize my stuff. I took a look at your software - it looks pretty good.
Posted by: BJ | May 7, 2006 11:09:01 PM
