One thing I’ve noticed is that many marketers suggest you put up vague links that say things like "Click here to visit the … website" or "Click here to buy this at …" I’ve tried this on a couple of websites and I have to say, my old method seems to work better, my old method simply being a link in the post wherever I mention the product with the product name hyperlinked using an affiliate link, and a link such as "More info about …" or "Buy … " at the end of the description or post.

I’ve never been one who believes in all that silliness of telling your visitors that you’re using an affiliate link. Who cares? Links are links and everyone knows that. Common sense says if you can make a few pennies from linking to something you were going to link to anyway, you should do it and anyone who thinks bad of you because of that is probably a socialist. ;) (Private joke here. LOL.) All I can say is that I’m a capitalist and I’m proud of it.

Through Amazon, I’ve made a total of $253.51 this year from a few sites I run that I haven’t updated in a long time. I wish it were more money but frankly, when I built these sites, I knew nothing about keyword research or promotion, and even now that I do, I don’t usually bother with any of those older sites. Many of these older sites also promote extremely low value products. To be exact, it took 576 products sold to make that income, which comes to a commission of just a hair over $0.44 per sale.

According to my Amazon report my conversion rate is 6.77%.

I have just put one site online that links to Amazon and another affiliate program that I do okay with which pays me a 5% commission, and the sites I previously built to test out the "Click here to visit the … website" or "Click here to buy this at …" method of linking are about to be converted back to my previous way of linking so I can check for an increase in sales and conversions.

Back to the topic of this guy’s advice. I don’t know him, and I don’t know if he’s an honest fellow or not, but everything he says makes sense to me, and I’ve been using Amazon to monetize my websites since 2001.

I’ll be reading more of his stuff.

I have two days left in this week and I have about 16 more pieces of high-quality content to create for my current website project. Since I’m serious about this challenge I’ve set myself, this means it’s time to get back to work.

I intend to persevere, work hard, and deliver!

Amazon Affiliate Links Do Make Money - Read more posts like this at Perpetualized

The haves do the work, even if they hire it out. No matter how it happens, in the end, the work does get done.

Have nots do some work, but maybe not the work that needs to be done to move a website towards its earning potential. They might think of themselves as hard-workers, but in the end, the truth is that they either do too little, or waste time on the little things that don’t do anything to move them forward.

That’s me. I work hard, and I work a lot, but I don’t always (almost never) work at what really needs to be done.

Since I’m practicing self-discipline now, I’m changing that. And yes, despite my prior rant against accountability, I have a spreadsheet that makes me accountable to myself for what I’ve accomplished.

Nothing fancy. I have a set number of pages of real content I want on each site I build, based around good keyword research (as opposed to bad keyword research—at a time when I’m really not 100% what the difference is :) but nevertheless I move on…).

My spreadsheet has a single column where I input the current number of pages of real content I have on a site (excluding any standard pages such as privacy, about, contact, blah-blah). I update the number whenever I add content to a site. So there you go. Simple. Easy. Only someone who is lazy wouldn’t update it… (I am self-disciplined, I remind myself. I’m not talking about me.)

I wrote previously about how I had looked at my report (this same spreadsheet, from which I learned the undeniable truth about how much content I’ve actually not created for all of my websites) and come to the conclusion that I had issues I really needed to face.

I’ve never really given my business a chance to grow into something because my work ethic sucked.

It’s time to change that, so here I am, practicing self-discipline and trying to become the person I want to be.

When I looked at that spreadsheet, it was clear to me that all my bellyaching about how much work I’d put into my websites and how little progress I’d made was more than a little skewed. I don’t know what all the work is that I’ve been doing, but I’ve clearly not been doing it with any kind of focus or plan. There’s no regularity to the pattern, no signs of systematic follow-thru or follow-up on any of my web projects to date.

For me to really make the changes I want to make, that has to change dramatically. I have to pick one path, one method, and stick to it until the end. Minor course corrections are always going to be okay, but massive overhauls of how I’m trying to do things won’t work. Because frankly, that’s probably what’s been throwing me off track all along.

So, I now have a plan—and I’m quite excited by it.

The Difference Between the Haves and the Have Nots in Web Marketing - Read more posts like this at Perpetualized

When I need to go in one direction or the other with a plan, I generally try to keep an open mind. I don’t wait for a sign, but when one crops up, I try to always pay attention.

I have a tendency to accept positive signs and ignore negative signs. The reasons why I do this are simple. I tend to believe God doesn’t punish us on Earth for wrong decisions we make here. I think he’s saving all that up for later. :o But when we make a right decision, I think we often see the benefits of that decision sooner than later.

Of course, making a wrong decision can lead to negative consequences, but those are likely of our own making, not divine intervention.

I realize this doesn’t sound entirely rational, but what with faith is?

Anyway, I’ve been seeing a lot of signs lately, and it all goes back to a particular epiphany I had in June of 2007. I went off track after that epiphany and didn’t do what I set out to do based on something I felt like God had put in my heart in answer to a pressing weight I’d been feeling with my work life. I intended to build my own website empire. I didn’t because I kept getting distracted with the next best way to build it.

Of course, over that course of time, I’ve learned so much that I almost think I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t gone through those times. Right now, I feel on the cusp of finally understanding the big picture and seeing how it will really be possible to turn my obsessive website habit into a true money making venture.

I had a re-epiphany a few months ago, and things are really starting to fall into place. I feel compelled to try to stay on track this time and not be distracted by other ideas and thoughts. Here’s praying it happens, because I certainly keep seeing the signs that I might finally be on to something.

Do You Believe in Signs? - Read more posts like this at Perpetualized

I am still tracking for a solid $1 a day, and I just finished another site. Or partially finished, I should say. I will be adding more content over the next couple of weeks, until I reach 20 – 25 pages, possibly 30. Heck, I could probably do more than that, but I’m going to start there.

The thing is, I don’t like the idea of all my income coming from one source. I want to diversify and I think I’m going to do that. This particular site is well suited to affiliate promotions and at the moment that is the way I’m going to go with it.

In fact, I might stick to affiliate promotions as much as possible because this does give me the best chance for diversification.

I’ve created this one site in April. I did a couple in March. At the moment, this gives me a total of 49 websites, but this includes all the domains I own including the many personal sites I run.

I have found it difficult to separate out the sites based on what their purpose is, so I’m just going to go with this number in the future for all my forecasting. It’s easier that way. Of course, this is going to give me some really bad forecasting models, but maybe that’s best too. I do too much forecasting anyway.

I look back and realize I’ve already learned a few things that make it apparent I have made some bad domain decisions even with these new domains I’ve purchased, but at least I have discovered this early enough to make changes in my future domain purchases. My fast or slow? decision seems to have panned out for me.

I’m going to have to figure out how to track some of this stuff so I can be more effective. I’m also going to have to get back to work!

Website Empire Road Bumps - Read more posts like this at Perpetualized

I won’t go into too many details here, because I think I’ve been pretty clear that although I run my websites as a business, I think of them in my head as a hobby. Life is busy for me most days and I don’t want to add the pressure of running a home-based business to myself. I know this is self-deception, but I’ve also made clear in the past that I thrive on self-deception when it comes to procrastination and work.

This girl I’ve been following seems to be on the track to really making it with her own website empire as she approaches $28 a day in earnings. However, she’s building sites at the speed of light. Her plan as she’s said is to just get the sites up and then build links to them and push their rankings up. She’s going about that phase of things in a way I wouldn’t but mostly she’s just waiting until she gets all these sites online and filled with content.

This is good for her productivity, it appears, because she certainly has the websites to prove it. However, this all out rush to put up a ton of websites and then go back to them to fix them and rank them and then start earning “real” money from them seems shortsighted.

Here’s why.

I actually toyed with the idea of my own headlong rush to create lots and lots of websites and then worry about generating income.

Then it occurred to me quite suddenly that if I pursued such as path, I would be shooting myself in the foot.

Where’s the opportunity to learn from your mistakes? Where’s the chance to make minute, or significant, changes to your methodologies if you set a course and plow straight ahead?

It doesn’t make sense to me to build site after site without taking the time to learn from the building, ranking, and earnings of each one.

So it comes down to this. I’ll be following each site I build through the whole process of structure, content, ranking, and earnings before I move on. Technically, I’ll probably have more than one site going at a time, but I won’t be holding back on any particular phase of my empire building so I can “batch process” or otherwise “assembly line” my websites.

I prefer to learn as I go.

Can you imagine discovering a key factor in increasing site earnings only after you’d built 100 to 200 websites? What if it was something that wasn’t that easily fixed, like a domain issue? (Remember the still ongoing controversy about hyphens versus no hyphens and .com versus .org versus .info?)

These are very good reasons, in my opinion, to take it slow(er).

Fast or slow? Learn as you go… - Read more posts like this at Perpetualized