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Following on from our Interview with Frank Paul about how to make money from your existing website, we talked to Paul Bryant from www.moreniche.com about creating a website from scratch specifically to make money from it.

In the interview Paul provides loads of great advice and tips and finding your target audience, which networks to choose and how to get converting  traffic to your site (and to get them to come back again), so read on…

Could you provide a bit of information about yourself?

I started at MoreNiche in April 2006 and quickly began learning from the rest of the team including my boss who had started MoreNiche up from nothing.  In September 2006 I started my own affiliate sites in my spare time. I did this so I could learn more and understand affiliates better. My first affiliate site (with the exception of Skinned Banana) was in the Forex niche. I quickly started building more sites and I now class myself as a successful affiliate as much as I am an affiliate manager.

As well as looking after the products and affiliates on MoreNiche I also run more than 10 affiliate sites of my own in the Forex, pet, dating, and gaming niches. These sites earn me a 4 figure sum each month which is a very nice addition on top of my full-time wage! So, although just over 3 years experience is not as much as many people in the industry, its 3 years of quality experience from both sides of the fence – as an affiliate and an affiliate manager.

What are the first steps when looking to create an affiliate website solely to generate revenue?

Well the first thing to do is establish the niche you want to operate in. What you need is to find a niche that has not been fully developed yet and is still in the growth stage of the product life cycle. Google Trends is a great way to track a products life cycle.

In addition you need to find a niche that pays good commissions. I never really understand affiliates who are happy to promote products that only earn you 5% commission – even if the average order value is £100 you still need a hell of a lot of sales to make it worthwhile.

Once you have decided on your niche you need to do some research. Find out what other affiliates are doing, see what products are out there and what their affiliate programs are like, and find out what customers think of the products and the niche.

Once you have generated some ideas from all of these it’s time to start planning how you will promote the niche products. Product review sites work really well in a lot of niches and that’s a route many of our affiliates go down.

Then you start putting it all in to practice!

Are there any common mistakes people should avoid?

One of the most common mistakes I see as an affiliate manager is people having so many ideas that they are constantly jumping from one to the next without really seeing one through long enough to make it a success.

This is very easy to do and I have fallen in that trap myself. However you have to take a step back and prioritize – you will make a lot more money if you do.

Another common mistake is not having direction with your site. It’s easy to start changing your intended direction without realising. The thing to remember with building a site to generate revenue is that you need to build trust with the surfer and then get them to you conversion pages (the ones that convince them to buy and make you money) as quickly as possible.

You have to be careful not to jump straight in to the hard sell and lose your surfers confidence. Equally your aim is to make money so you don’t want to give them lots of free information but never push them towards a sale. It’s a careful balancing act which takes time, patience, and above all split-testing.

Another mistake I would mention here is not taking time to analyze your site and surfers. Tools like ClickTale and Google Analytics makes it easy to understand surfers and their behaviour so you should use them to your advantage.

You need to know who your surfer is, how they found you, and how they use your site. Once you know this you can give them the information they need faster, get rid of or improve your weaker pages, and highlight what traffic is not work and which traffic you need more of.

Are there any verticals you would advises caution against entering (and why)?

To be honest, probably not, because what isn’t a good vertical for one affiliate could be the perfect one for another. It all depends on your own viewpoint, experience and knowledge.

There are some such as credit cards and even price comparison websites that although are potentially very lucrative are also insanely competitive and I just wouldn’t consider.

Unless you know the marketplace or can see a gap that you can fill you should avoid these ultra-competitive niches. Unless you get lucky you are unlikely to find much success there.

Instead concentrate on niches you already know, have an interest in, or simply that you can see good potential in entering. I would also strongly advise affiliates to spread their risk across different niches, products and networks. Never put all your eggs in one basket as they say.

What tips would you give when choosing the domain name and the domain extension?

Personally, I always go for domains that contain keywords Im targeting in them. I do have one or two that don’t and that are brandable instead but unless SEO is your strong point it is a little easier to rank a domain with your targeted keywords in.

However, its important not to overdo it with the keywords. One or two is best, three is ok as long as the domain is not too long as a result. You want the domain name to memorable.

As for extensions, this depends on what countries you are targeting. If you are only targeting one country such as the UK (ok not technically a country!) then it makes sense to register a country specific domain name such as .co.uk as this will help you rank in the country specific search engines.

If you are targeting a worldwide audience then .com still rules the roost.

My preference is to try and register domains where I can also register the .com – even if I will use the .co.uk version for the actual site. This way I can redirect the .com in case anyone mis-remembers the extension. It also means I can potentially expand to an International site in the future.

Targeting specific niches is becoming an increasingly common tactic. Can you explain the theory behind this?

Well the theory is this. A specific niche can be easier to enter and get traffic for than a wider industry. For example the weight loss industry has a huge amount of niches from fitness and exercises through to diets and slimming pills.

If you were to try and enter weight loss in general then you probably wouldn’t know where to start and that lack of focus could mean your site suffers and you find it hard to get traffic.

If instead you decide you want to enter the weight loss slimming pill niche then suddenly everything is a lot clearer. Of course there are still lots of micro niches within the slimming pill niche (for example the different types of pills such as hoodia, fat binders, appetite suppressants, etc) but its much easier to put a site together.

You can also then find a lot of long tail keywords in that niche and build a very authoritative site around it. I think it’s easier to build trust with a niche specific website than it is a broader one because you can really showcase your knowledge of that niche. It’s also a lot easier for you to manage and understand your surfers.

Of course, you always have the option at any point of entering other niches. For example once you have made a success of a slimming pill website you could move on and replicate what you did on a diet program website. This spreads your risk across multiple sites and multiple niches, you just have to make sure you don’t fall in to the trap of jumping from one site to the next too quickly.

How does a small site with little or no budget go about getting traffic?

It’s not as difficult as some people believe – there are loads of free ways to generate traffic. SEO is probably the thing that springs to most peoples minds but a lot of people will tell you that isn’t free either as many people will pay for links. However there are a number of ways you can get traffic and/or boost your SEO for free. Some of my favourite ones include:

• Article marketing
• Squidoo pages
• Free Press Release sites
• Classified ads
• Forum posting
• Content exchange
• Blog commenting
• Social bookmarking
• Video submissions
• Offline leaflet distribution

All of the above are great ways to drive traffic and most of them help you rank better in the search engines too when done correctly.

The main advice I would give to affiliates in the position of having little or no money is to get a site built (you can even do that for free with the likes of WordPress and Squidoo) and then start working your way through the list above.

It’s best to mix the techniques up a bit so probably choose 3 or 4 techniques to do at the same time. It will probably take a little longer to get results than if you had money to throw at it buts its more than possible to earn good money without spending anything.

One thing I would say though is that once you do start earning – reinvest your income in to your sites. You have to speculate to accumulate and reinvesting those profits will allow you to grow much faster and earn even more money sooner.

How do you get people to come back to your site to make repeat purchases?

This is where offering something of value comes in. If you have done a good job at building up trust and authority then people will naturally return to your site.

I read an article today actually that I found myself really agreeing with. They basically said that if you build the trust and manage to sell someone a product they love then they will keep coming back to see what else you recommend for them.

Amazon do this very well with their personal recommendations based on what you previously bought or said you liked. The idea is basically the same even for an affiliate.

Another way to do it is to provide good ‘sticky’ content such as quizzes, polls, tools, etc. These give people a reason to return to participate. Communities such as forums are also a great way to get people coming back to your site, and from there you can sell to them again.

Finally, and this is one of my favourite methods, is to build a good email list. You do this by offering everyone who visits something good in return for them providing their email address.

You can give away a tool or an ebook or you could write your own mini email course with the help of auto-responders. The key thing with an email list is to build trust. Do not immediately try selling to them. Instead setup a series of good quality informational emails with little or no sales pitch.
Over time gradually start pushing them towards the purchase. When done right an email list not only gets more people back to your site (always link to your site in the email) but it also adds profit to your bottom line.

In addition it’s also another method of spreading your risk. If you ever suddenly lose your search traffic because of a penalty you still have a source of traffic and income from your email list.

Are there any resources/ articles on the internet you use that you would recommend people read?

Well, firstly if I may plug MoreNiche a little – every affiliate who signs-up to MoreNiche gets access to a range of different guides and videos. These guides help to explain how to get started and how to best implement various techniques. In addition we also have a forum and an excellent support team to provide help on a more one2one basis. You can sign up to MoreNiche here: www.moreniche.com

For learning how to improve the conversion rate then you wont find many better resources than http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com

For SEO then the StomperNet team offer some great videos and articles: http://www.stomperblog.com

For PPC then Perry Marshall is probably the most famous PPCer: http://www.perrymarshall.com

Finally the tools Google offers cannot be ignored – even if you hate Google! Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Keyword Tool, Website Optimizer, and Google Trends are all incredibly useful.

Thanks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Interviews, Promoting your site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.