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So, What's My Purpose? - 50 Affiliate Site Challenge Update
May 10, 2006
I'm still deep in research for my 50 Affiliate Sites Challenge, and while I've been having a lot of fun playing around with niche ideas, I noticed I kept asking myself one question over and over again.
What am I looking to do with these 50 affiliate sites?
It's one thing to blithely announce to the world that I'm going to sling 50 affiliate sites out there by October. I'm on the impulsive side and a firm believer in The Art of Inspired Action. Since I'm a master procrastinator, I've been learning that when I feel inspired, the best thing to do is to run with it.
I know this goes against all sorts of conventional thinking. But my main problem online has always been procrastination, and taking Inspired Action and then sitting back and mapping my way afterwards definitely works for me.
Which brings me back to these 50 affiliate sites. While I've been researching merchants and niches, jotting down all the ideas that come to me, playing around with domain names, planning individual site strategies and all that kind of stuff, I kept asking myself, "what's my purpose? What do I want these sites to do for me, overall?"
Not being able to really answer this question made me sit down and really think about it. For me, getting clear on why I want something has always been the first step towards creating it in my life.
So here's what I want my 50 affiliate sites to do for me.
1. I want to develop each one, send them out into the big wide Net and not really think too much about them again.
I can handle constant development, updating and tweaking on a handful of sites, but when doing a big batch like this, it's just too much to base them on a plan that requires a constant hands-on approach. Passive income is all the craze these days, and it's not passive if you've got to spend a ton of time on maintenance and continued development.
2. I expect these sites to become a good source of reliable (reliable overall, rather than individually) supplementary income.
I don't expect these sites to be at the core of my online business. They're part of a diversification approach that will help me avoid putting all my eggs in the Adsense basket. I also don't want to put the amount of work into each of them that would be required if they were to be major sites in my overall strategy..
3. I expect to make between $50 to $100 per site, on average (calculated across all 50 sites).
For me, this $50-$100 per month goal is a very reasonable one for Adsense-based sites. But I've never tried to do this with my affiliate sites. I don't, unfortunately, have any sort of system or formula that I've developed when it comes to affiliate sites. In the past, I just had a tendency to throw stuff out there and see what sticks. But despite developing a handful of sites that "work", it's not that easy to see why a site is working well (or not).
I'm being pretty organized about these 50 new sites, though, so who knows? Maybe some sort of system or at least series of steps will emerge.
4. I expect a few sites to come up as real winners.
Or at least point out some niches that work well. When that happens, I'll be popping these sites out of the batch of 50 sites and straight into my group of sites that I work on frequently.
Well, I don't know about you, but I feel a lot better now that I know exactly why I'm doing this!
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Posted by BJ at 01:43 PM in 50 Affiliate Sites Challenge | Permalink
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Tracked on May 11, 2006 6:52:22 AM
Comments
Hi BJ,
I was reading about your 50 affiliate site quest. I've been studying Alice Seba's Affiliate Marketing Sweetie course. If you need a resource on building affiliate you should check it out. Not saying you need it. Just a thought. I'll be looking forward to hearing how you are doing with the 50 sites.
Posted by: Joseph | May 11, 2006 12:59:03 AM
BJ,
Great update as usual, glad to hear that you are conquering your procrastination - I have the same problem. Fortunately, the discipline of blogging is helping a lot.
Have you had a look at RSSGM (www.rssgm.com) for CMS? If you're into PHP tweaking it might suite some of your sites.
Posted by: Peter | May 11, 2006 6:50:11 AM
How is it possible for you to get $50-100 per month? I set up three adsense sites in January and I'm still only making around $10 per month for each of them :(
Posted by: PhiMix | May 11, 2006 8:00:20 AM
Hi BJ, How do you plan to promote your 50 sites? Will you use Adwords? This is a great idea, and I look forward to reading about your progress!
Posted by: Mindy | May 11, 2006 11:54:59 AM
Peter, I hadn't heard of RSSGM - I'll have to check it out.
Joseph, I like the name of Alice's course :)
Phimix, four months isn't that long to be in the Adsense game. If you're relying on search engine traffic, don't give up on your sites yet. And make sure you're doing all the things you can do to optimize your sites both on page and off page (getting external links is the biggie here). Your niches are also very important - I tend to spend a lot of time looking for niches.
Also, while I do have a "method" of building Adsense sites that do pull in a small individual amount each month, I came to this method through a lot of trial and error. I don't know that I can say my method is a good one, either - it's a TON of work, definitely NOT a "magic bullet" type of system. If it were, I'd be writing an ebook right now :)
Mindy, I do have plans to start using Adwords, but not for these sites. For my Adwords campaigns, I will likely be building landing pages off of existing (or new) sites. The only promotion I intend to do with these sites is getting external links and maybe writing a few articles, and for the ones for which I'm using a blog platform, submitting the feed URLs to the RSS directories.
Posted by: BJ | May 11, 2006 7:17:46 PM
BJ, any recommendations for the RSS directories to submit to, there seem to be thousands out there.
Thanks!
-Brandon Hopkins
Posted by: Business Cards | May 16, 2006 3:10:25 PM
