**Read from bolded to skip the introductory mumbo jumbo if you wish. Similar in style to what some others here are doing I have decided to set up a thread to journal my first plunge into Internet Marketing. I have been doing research on and studying Internet marketing for the past 12 months now. I have no prior experience however, this is my first actual "course of action" online. This blog is NOT my long term "plan" as far as making money online is concerned. I have several big idea's and will be simply using this blog as a stepping stone to experiment with and hopefully learn from all the knowledge I've gathered this past year. As I'm working full time now, I also plan on using this blog as an income substitution so that in a few months time I may begin working part time and be able to allocate my free time and effort to much larger, more resource consuming projects I have planned. The Experiment The niche is a relatively saturated one. There are over 7 million pages indexed on google though approximately 300-400 thousand of those are dedicated to the subject. I do not plan on ranking number 1 or even on the front page in the short term. I may or may not get there in the long term and it is not my focus. The keyword is a high paying one. The cost per click is anywhere between $1 to $4-$5. My expectations are that I will receive about 40% of that per click. (?) The blog is less than one week old. It is a wordpress blog, hosted on my own domain. I have installed an automated SEO optimizer which saves me time doing it myself even if at the sacrifice of some accuracy and control. I have adsense running, it blends in extremely well. Unfortunately I am receiving some irrelevant ads on my front page, though I will wait a week or two before writing google about it. I have no knowledge in the subject matter. I am, like many of you (even if you don't admit to it) involved in this purely for financial gain. The subject matter however is quite common and one that is widely known enough that even a laymen like me has a good idea on the matter. However, to avoid competition from specialty/expert sites, my blog will be written from a first person angle of someone wrestling with the issue himself. As such it will allow me to be more anecdotal and personal, avoiding me getting caught up in expert warfare I would probably lose. Niche Information: Saturated, moderately to highly competitive niche. Limited advertisers, however a high Cost per Click. 12 possibly attractive keywords, ranging between 5000 to 450.000 searches per month, all highly competitive. Keyword value ranging between $1.50 to $6.50, averaging above $4.00. A lot of available affiliate products for each keyword variation. Pays high commission, conversion rate should be high as the niche targets a motivated group. My goals and expectations: I do not expect any revenue or profitability within the first one month. A minimum goal of $15 per week profit during my second one month period. 850 Uniques during the course of my second one month period. (average 28 a day). My goal is week on week traffic growth of 8-10%. A weekly 20% revenue growth rate from week 5 on until I hit 100$ a week profitability. Estimated time is 15 weeks or a little under 4 months from today. As I am living in Canada this income will translate to over 500$ a month for me. My traffic growth may not necessarily be proportionate to my expected income growth. I will slowly diversify my income streams into including affiliate products as well, which is accounted for in my expected income growth rate. The above rate is an average, there may be weeks far less and weeks far more depending on when I introduce affiliate products and how successful they are. I will not spend a dime on advertising as the purpose of this blog is to generate a modest income stream to allow me to live on a part time income while I develop and manage my large project idea's. It's also going to serve as my "training wheels" so to speak, to test what I have learned and how well I can implement everything in to a moderately successful marketing package. My COA (course of action): 15 posts before engaging in any form of marketing. Maintaining an average of 4 or more weekly post updates to my blog for the next 8 weeks. 3-4 Weekly submissions to various article directories. Becoming a member and posting daily on 3 related message boards. Link to my site in signature. Consistent posting on relevant yahoo answers questions. Will attempt to maintain a non spammy composure in my replies and hope to get best answer in some or even most of them. 5 Daily answers. Networking with blogs(bloggers) related to but not in direct competition to my niche. Consistently during each week. (hard to be more specific in this case besides committing to networking to some extent each week) Directory submissions. I will begin marketing affiliate products slowly but surely as I begin gaining more readers and more importantly, gaining their trust. Keep in mind that I have NO marketing experience whatsoever, I have no SEO or coding knowledge besides simple HTML and this will be my first "baby project" As such my goals may seem high or over confident. However I set the bar moderately high to where I will certainly have to stretch myself to reach but I do not believe it is unattainable. In tandem with this project and my 8 hour job I'm also going to be learning web development from the ground up (html, css, javascript and all that good stuff) from freely available online tutorials at home. This means my time is going to be stretched thin, however I fortunately have someone that will help me write content and market this blog project which will save me a lot of time and effort that I can use to learn web development (which is proving to be a major headache using these tutorial sites. :\) I am going to be updating this journal regularly on how my experiment is going along, the actions I have taken and whether or not I am meeting my goals. I hope that this will help me keep myself accountable and motivated, while also helping me organize my thoughts and plans in a neat page. I also hope to hear suggestions and idea's from other members that maybe we can all learn from.
good luck on the blog, it is definitely possibly if you put your mind to it. the actions you stated are definitely good ones for starting out. i hope it works out for you!
Thanks guys. Creating the plan is much easier than making it happen though. Hopefully having laid it out here infront of me will serve as enough motivation to dedicate myself to following through with it. If you have any suggestions or idea's as to how I could improve or tweak this plan or how I could achieve my goals I would greatly appreciate it.
Ah, I remember my first blog...I definitely didn't think it through like you, that's for sure. Good luck with it, it's bloggers like you who plan that keep me motivated for writing on my own blog.
Not much new to update. Adding some new posts, an average of 1 or sometimes 2 a day. I will probably have enough material to begin marketing the blog within the next 10 days or so. I'm also building up my SEO foundations right now, so that when I do start marketing my blog I should be indexed relatively quickly. I've worked on my ad relevance, most of my ad's are now targeted except for an odd few that aren't which I believe is because of a lack of advertisers in the niche. (There's less than two dozen). No clicks yet, obviously, though I'm very curious to see how much they'll convert too. With the economy in a slump and advertisers running for cover I wouldn't be surprised if click rates were considerably lower than that displayed in googles keyword tool.
I've been getting about 20 uniques or 80 impressions a day for the past couple of days from just pinging two of my posts to a large list. I'm not doing any marketing though whatsoever, of course, as I'm still building my post count up. This is my 4th day and I have 5 posts up so far. If I maintain a 3 post per week average throughout the year that will already transfer to an archive of over 150 posts which will definitely help with some search engine love. The niche is competitive however, so I'm not pinning my hopes on google too much. I'm going to be making a legitimate myspace profile (of course solely for the purpose of plugging my site, however it's going to be done in a very subtle manner) and begin building my friend list which I can leverage in the near future when my blog kicks off. Someone gave me an idea today for a niche that I thought was probably extremely saturated. Nevertheless, I gave it a check and I was surprised to see that despite the very high search numbers, it was quit uncompetitive (relatively) with a disgustingly high CPC. I took a look at clickbank to see if I could find a product to plug, but there were only a handful and they were all crap. Does anyone know of any other good affiliate sites for ebooks? Particularly related to health? I might jump in anyway in a couple of weeks when I have this blog standing on it's own two legs, make an automated blog for this other niche and milk it for a few extra dollars. I don't want to get caught up with a lot, because like I said, this is my first foray into IM and I'm building my skills for a much bigger project so I don't want to do more than just dabble for a while and create a solid part time income.