In today’s update, I want to share some exciting initial results and tell you about the two most important factors that lead to great rankings for the sites in this project.

First (new) Commission!

There are currently three sites in the Throw Money At It project. #1 is a product-review site that’s already earning a steady income, #2 is a brand-new AdSense website and #3 is a product-review site that has been around for a while, but has never made any money (~200 clicks sent to a product that just won’t convert – time to change products).

On this last site, I added five new product reviews that I had ordered from one of my content sources. Only about a week after being added, most of these articles are already on the first or second page. Here’s a snapshot from my rank-tracking report:

Most of these keywords are what I’d consider “medium competitive”, since they are keywords for popular products, that have many affiliates building review sites and articles and competing for the top spot.

A few points to consider:

• The fact that the content is very fresh helps. It’s not unlikely that those rankings would drop again, if I did no further promotion.
• The keywords in question do not have very high search volumes, but they are “product name review” keywords, which are usually great in terms of conversions.
• One of the reviews earned it’s first commission of $39, after sending just nine clicks through the affiliate link.

While the site is nowhere near recouping the roughly $1K investment I’ve made in it so far, I take this early first commission as a good sign.

What about the AdSense site? It’s filled up with a dozen pages of decent content and I’ve had several types of links built to it, but it has not reached any front-page rankings yet and traffic is still practically non-existant.

On-Page Optimization

If you’re wondering what kind of magical super-backlinks I used to make the rankings for site #3 shoot up like they did and maybe wondering why I didn’t do the same for the non-performing AdSense site, the answer is simple: there are no magical backlinks involved.

In fact, the great ranking results site #3 is getting have almost nothing to do with backlinks. There are two “secrets” to those rankings that I want to share with you right now. Secret number one is what I call “Rich Content Optimization”. I’ve written a short guide on this topic, that you can get completely for free, here. In a nutshell, these are the elements I put on a page to get high rankings out of the gate:

•  Lots of Content
  I’m talking about 800 words minimum for a page I actually want to get ranked in Google. 1000+ words is better, 2000 words is great. Google clearly favors content-volume these days.
• Quality Content
  As explained in part 2 of this project, I use high-quality, well researched and well-written content only. Even though I still have a couple of sites with low-quality content that are doing okay and making me money, I’m doing far better with the sites where I’ve invested a bit more and published only the cream of the crop.
• Images
  I use a minimum of two images per post or page (that’s excluding logo/header images or anything in the sidebars). Ideally, I want to have one image for each segment of an article, so that you can always see at least one image as you’re scrolling through the text. Images definitely help not only with rankings but also with user-engagement and conversions.
• Lists and Formatting
  I try to have at least one part of the text in list-format, either as bullet-points or as a numbered list. I also use sub-headlines to segment the text. I don’t know if Google pays any attention to well-formatted vs. unformatted text. I suspect they do. What I know for sure is that good formatting can increase conversions dramatically.
• Video
  If possible, I add one video to each of my target pages. Google is loving video right now and if you get a listing that includes a video-thumbnail, it does wonders for your click-through rates.

Here’s an example of such a video-thumbnail in the Google results:

All of the above makes for content that is way easier to get ranked and get good results from than your typical 300-words-for-3-bucks article or auto-scraped content. But there’s one more factor that comes into play and while I don’t like it, I can’t deny it.

Site/Domain Age

For my underwhelming AdSense site, I know that I need to add some more media (images, video) and tweak the formatting here or there, but what I also know is that rankings won’t happen over night. One big reason that rankings did happen more-or-less over night for site #3 is that this site is already more than one year old. The AdSense site, on the other hand, hasn’t even seen a full month pass, yet.

Apart from the amount and quality of content and apart from backlinks, site age is definitely an important ranking factor. It will take at least a few months before my new site gains Google’s trust, in my estimation. Until that happens, I won’t be going crazy on spending money for backlinking services. I will keep a steady flow going, but I don’t expect floods of traffic within the first few months.

I am considering experiments with aged domains or pre-existing websites, but haven’t made final plans yet. Maybe there’s something in there for a site #4? I’ll let you know if I decide to go ahead with this idea.

That’s all I have to report for now. As you know, SEO is a rather slow process, so I don’t expect anything dramatic to happen anytime soon. I do hope that I can get some top 5 rankings pretty soon and maybe a few more commissions. I will, of course, write another update, as soon as something worth reporting transpires.

All the best,

All Posts in the “Throw Money At It” Project:

1. Part 1: The Project
2. Part 2: Outsourcing Content
3. Part 3: Real-World On-Page SEO – currently viewing
4. Part 4: Results After Two Months

There are countless ways of making money online and I cannot cover them all in this post. However, in terms of monetizing a website, there are four very common methods: Renting out ad-space, using AdSense or similar contextual advertising, promoting CPA offers and promoting products as an affiliate.

These four methods are arranged neatly along a sliding scale and understanding them makes for a good foundation of knowledge about website monetization in general.

So, let’s go right ahead and examine these four methods.

Qualification vs. Payout

The “sliding scale” mentioned in the title has to do with how much you get paid for each of the monetization methods in relation to how difficult it is to qualify for payment. Here’s an illustration:

On the x-axis you see the four major methods, renting out ad-space, AdSense, CPA offers and affiliate sales. The labels going from “minimal” to “high” along the y-axis have two meanings: On the one hand, they describe the potential payout and on the other hand, they describe how hard it is to make the payout happen.

If that doesn’t immediately make sense, don’t worry, I’ll go into a bit more detail on each method right away:

–

Renting out Ad-Space
If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ve probably come across several that have small 125×125 pixel boxes in the sidebar, displaying ads. Sometimes, some of the boxes read “Your Ad Here!” or something along those lines. That usually means that the owner of the blog is renting out this space on his site for advertisers. A product owner or company can call them up and arrange to have their ad placed in one of the boxes for a set amount of time and a monthly fee.

Once the ad is set up, the blog owner gets paid no matter how effective the advertisement is. The only pre-requisite for getting paid, is that the blog continues to be visited by many people, but the payment stays the same regardless of whether the blog’s visitors actually click on the ads and/or end up buying something from the advertiser.

In other words, there’s no obstacle that you need to get your visitors across, in order to make money. The downside is that you won’t get paid a lot for renting out ad-space and you need a hell of a lot of visitors to make this kind of monetization lucrative at all.

By the way: Not all banners are rented out ad-space. A banner could also contain an affiliate link to a sales-offer or a CPA offer.

–

AdSense
I’m sure you’ve seen many, many AdSense ads already. Whether you’ve clicked on any or not is a different story, but there’s no doubt that AdSense is a very popular way of monetizing a website. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what AdSense ads usually look like:

Don’t bother clicking, by the way, it’s just an image.

AdSense is something you can plug into your site and it will automatically serve up these small text-ads that are relevant to your content. I.e. if you write something about cars, AdSense might display ads for car insurance offers.

Behind every AdSense ad, there’s a person or company paying for clicks. As an example, let’s say a visitor clicks on an insurace-related ad. The advertiser will pay Google a certain amount, for example $0.60 for that click. Google, in turn, will pay half of that to the person who’s site the ad was displayed on when it got the click.

Depending on the subject, these clicks can cost more or less and in turn, the ads on your site will not always net the same amount per click. Usually, you’ll get only a few cents per click, however.

You can easily make a few dollars by using AdSense on your site, even if you don’t get tons of visitors. You can potentially earn more per visitor compared to renting out ad-space, but the visitors need to actually click on the ads, otherwise you don’t get paid. So, the threshold is a bit higher, but you get more in return.

–

Affiliate Sales
Selling products as an affiliate is a very simple concept: You send visitors to a sales-page with your special affiliate link, and every time one of those visitors makes a purchase, you get a cut of the price. This is basically your reward for sending the visitor to that product-page and making the sale possible.

What’s very attractive about affiliate sales is that the payouts can be very high. You will typically get paid between 50% and 75% of the purchase price (at least for info-products and downloads). If you are promoting an expensive info-product, you can earn up to hundreds of dollars every time someone buys through your affiliate link.

The downside is that you only get paid whenever someone makes a purchase. In other words, the threshold is very high and you’ll never see 100% of the people clicking on your affiliate links ending up buying the product (0.5% to 3% is more realistic).

–

CPA
CPA stands for Cost Per Action and the reason I saved this one for last is that, in a sense, CPA represents the “sweet spot” between AdSense and affiliate sales.

As the name implies, with CPA, you get paid whenever a visitor performs a certain action. The action required is specified by the advertiser. For example, for many offers you can make a CPA commission, by sending a visitor to a page where they have to enter their e-mail address (in other words, they sign up to a mailing list). Other offers require the visitors to fill out a survey-form.

As you can imagine, it’s easier to get someone to supply an e-mail address than it is to get someone to make a purchase. The payouts for CPA offers are typically quite a bit higher than what you get for AdSense clicks – usually in the range of a few dollars.

To get back to the above graph, with CPA, the threshold isn’t very high – visitors have to do more than just click, but they don’t have to spend actual money – and the potential payout is quite good.

–

So, Which Is Best?

You can’t really say that any one of these monetization methods is better than the others. That’s also something I wanted to illustrate in that graph: The two factors of potential payout and qualification for payout usually balance each other out fairly well.

Whether you get thousands of clicks for a few cents each or send thousands of visitors to a sales-page and only a small percentage of them buy the product, you’ll end up with similar profits.

You can optimize any of these methods to make you lots of money and I’m sure there are people making a full-time living on each one of them. Ultimately, it’s a question of what suits you best.

What monetization method do you prefer? Which ones have you tried and which ones would you like to try? Let me know down in the comments!

Cheers,

Today’s post is a very special one, because it is the first in a series of interviews with Internet marketing experts from many different fields of expertise like SEO, PPC, social media etc.

My first guest is Gary Gregory from Google Sniper Keywords. He is probably the most experienced Google Sniper out there, with over 100 sniper sites under his belt. In the interview, we talk about some of the most common difficulties people have when they start out with online marketing, find out what Gary’s manual and training is all about and learn why it pays off to be stubborn, in this business.

Below, you can find the download link as well as the straming player for listening to the interview. Enjoy!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download Link

Affiliate marketing is probably the number one thing that most internet marketers do to make money. As you might have already read in the RQR Glossary, affiliate marketing comes down to promoting and selling someone else’s products in exchange for commissions for every sale made. In this RQR Basics article, you’ll find a more in-depth explanation of what affiliate marketing is and how to get into it.

Example

It’s often easiest to understand a process by just looking at a concrete example, so here’s an example of what an affiliate sale constitutes:

1. You sign up with an affiliate network (more on those below) or sign an affiliate contract with a manufacturer.
2. You choose a product to promote. Let’s say you choose an ebook that teaches people how to improve their golf swing. (There are thousands of products in hundreds of categories to choose from, out there – I’m just picking a random example out of the air here). Let’s also assume that the ebook costs $25.
3. You receive a “personal” link. When someone clicks this link, they will arrive at the sales-page for the golf ebook.
4. You place this link on your blog, in an article, on a website, in a forum or where ever else one can place links. As a concrete example, let’s say you write a post about golfing on your blog and add the link and a recommendation for the ebook.
5. Someone reads your blog-post and is interested in the book you recommend, so they click on the link.
6. They see the sales-page of the golf swing ebook and decide to buy it.
7. Since they arrived at the sales-page through your personal affiliate link, you get paid a commission for the sale. In the case of a $25 ebook, you would probably get around $15 for this sale.

That’s basically how one affiliate sale could happen. It’s actually quite difficult to make a good example of an affiliate sale because there are so many different products that you can promote and there are just as many different ways of promoting them. Let’s take a step back from this and look at the abstract of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing always involves a manufacturer (buildings to the left) with products on offer. The affiliate (A) promotes these products to potential customers (guy on the right). The customer buys the products and pays the manufacturer. The manufacturer in turn passes part of the proceeds on to the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a true win-win situation between you and the manufacturer of the product you are promoting. You get paid without having to manufacture and ship products yourself. The manufacturer benefits from your marketing efforts, without taking a risk. Since he only pays part of the money he makes from each sale you refer, this is basically risk-free marketing. Compare that to more traditional marketing methods, where you might spend thousands or even millions for large billboard, TV or newspaper ads and not get a buying response from the customers at all, and you quickly see why manufacturers like to offer affiliate deals.

Affiliate Websites

As I mentioned briefly above, you need some place to put your affiliate link, so that people can find it and click through to the manufacturer’s sales-page or shop. There are many options for link-placement, the most popular being:

• In an article.
  You can publish an article (e.g. “How to Improve Your Golf Handicap”) and publish it on an article directory. In this article, you can endorse a product and place an affiliate link (see Article Marketing for more details).
• On a blog.
  Maybe you blog about golfing or you start a blog about golf specifically to affiliate-sell golf products. On your own blog, you can basically place the affiliate links wherever you want. In posts related to the product makes most sense, of course.
• On a mini-site.
  A mini-site is a small web-page built around your affiliate link. In the case of our example it could be a mini-site focused completely around improving your golf-swing. It could be just one page, promoting the affiliate product or it could include a handful of pages, including some free tips, maybe a survey or some other content to keep visitors interested.
• On a forum.
  Most forums won’t allow you to place affiliate links directly in your posts. You can use a forum as a stepping-stone, though. If you post relevant and interesting content in a golf-forum and link to your golf-blog in the signature, you can increase the visitors to your blog. These visitors will then find the affiliate links on your blog.

Volume

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Any potential customer will need to pass through several “gates” before they make an actual purchase. It begins with the potential customer being somewhere “out there”, with a general interest in the product you’re promoting or perhaps with a certain problem they need a solution for.

The first gate they need to pass is that they need to find you and your site or article somehow. Usually, this happens via search engines. One of your articles, forum-posts or blog entries could show up in the search engine results when someone enters a golf-related keyword.
The second gate is that they need to visit your site/article/blog. After all, the search engine serves up multiple choices and even if yours is among the first to be listed, they might not decide to click on your particular entry.
The third gate is when they see the affiliate link on your website and decide whether to follow it or not. You have to get them interested enough to actually want to click on that link.
Once they’ve done this, it’s up to the manufacturer to get them through the fourth gate: Actually deciding to buy the product.

As you can imagine, there will always be countless visitors who jump off and don’t pass one of these gates. Out of a thousand people who search for a solution for improving their Golf handicap, maybe 400 will find one of your articles. Out of those, maybe 100 will follow through to your blog. Out of those 100, maybe 30 will decide to click on your affiliate link and of those 30 people left, maybe one person will actually buy the product. These numbers are hypothetical, of course. Depending on your market and how well your websites and articles are written and designed, these numbers can vary greatly.

The number of “gates” customers must pass through can vary. It is worth noting that fewer “gates” doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Often, the opposite is true: Some customers need a lot of convincing and won’t buy if they get directed to the sales-page too quickly. If they get to read up on the subject first, see a couple of pages and many different arguments, they might be much more willing to buy, once they arrive at the sales-page.

Bottom line is: You need to get a lot of people to see your affiliate sites. This is why most internet marketers are also very interested in SEO (search engine optimization) and other techniques for maximizing visitors to websites.

Benefits

• It can be free.
  You can use paid methods for promoting products and increasing traffic, but it’s absolutely possible to rely completely on free methods.
• Saves you a lot of hassle.
  You don’t have to make products yourself. Especially for material goods, this saves you a ton of effort that otherwise goes into production, storage, shipping etc.
• It’s very scalable.
  See my post titled The Nr. 1 Reason to Get Into Affiliate Marketing for more on this.
• It can be risk-free.
  Since you can promote products without spending any money (or with spending only very little), affiliate marketing can be practically risk-free. If your campaign fails and no one buys the products you’re promoting, you don’t lose any money.

Drawbacks

• No guarantee.
  The flipside of the “no risk” factor is that there is no guarantee any of your campaigns will be successful. You might try to promote the hell out of something but never see any good conversions.
• Time consuming.
  Setting up affiliate sites, filling them with relevant content, writing good sales-copy, optimizing your pages for search engines, publishing articles… These are all things you need to do to a certain extent, as an affiliate marketer. They are all more or less time-consuming and it can take a while before you see any pay-off. Expect to put in many, many hours before seeing your first sales.

Where to Find Affiliate Deals

There are so many affiliate networks out there, I doubt I’ve seen even half of them. And apart from the networks, many companies offer affiliate deals individually, if you just look for them. Finally, you can strike your own affiliate deals with practically anyone if you know how to implement them and can negotiate.

Let’s begin with affiliate networks. These are marketplaces where manufacturers/authors can list their products and affiliates can choose which ones to promote. Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks. Further popular choices are Commission Junction, Paydotcom and Shareasale.

Some companies offer their own affiliate programs. A good example of this is amazon’s “Associates”, which offers affiliate deals on all their products. Not so great for books (they’ll net you a few cents per sale, at best) but pretty good for some of the other, higher-priced products that amazon offers. To find more affiliate deals, simply look for manufacturers and online stores in your targeted product niche and search their websites for affiliate pages. Or write them an e-mail and ask them about it. If they have an affiliate program, they’ll be more than glad to help you sign up and get started (remember: More affiliates means more money for them).

I will be posting mini-reviews of different affiliate networks and programs in the near future, so stay tuned.

Okay, I think that about covers it. If you have any further questions, let me know down in the comments.

That’s it for now,