Building A Passive Income With Affiliate Sales
The last couple of days have been pretty busy as I wanted to kick off October with a good start towards building a passive income online. My current focus is to really build up on affiliate sales, particularly with Amazon and Overstock in time for the holidays and Christmas shopping season.
Despite the low commission rates from these affiliate programs, they are great for generating passive income websites. First off, both Amazon and Overstock are trusted websites that most online shoppers are familiar with and I can usually get a conversion ratio around 15%, compared to the typical 1-3% of most affiliate products. But most important of all, they both put buyers in a browsing mood. I could target a low competition product keyword that only pays out $1 commissions, but there’s also a very good chance the buyer will also buy a bunch of other unrelated crap just to fill the free shipping requirements and sometimes expensive electronics and appliances. And since people don’t tend to order just one thing when they shop on Amazon, I can get higher commission rates easily and give myself an instant “raise” towards a good passive income.
So far, I’ve been working on building up the content on my first three sites. Again, my plan is to slap up as much content on my sites as quickly as possible to target as many buying keywords as I can. I’m adding articles targeting the “green” keywords as taught at The Keyword Academy and putting adsense on my article pages, but I’m also going straight for searchers who are ready to buy with review posts with very specific product names and model numbers. I’m only putting adsense on my article posts so I don’t lose traffic to my affiliate links.
Since the beginning of the month I’ve added 91 400+ word articles and 150 product reviews to my first three sites. Site 1 and site 2 are in the same niche (site 1 is targets pink fairy costumes and site 2 targets pink fairy wands) however site 1 was created back in January 2009 and has a ton more backlinks compared to site 2 and thus it’s much easier to rank keywords on this site compared to site 2. Just a random mention of “pink fairy wands” or “wands that pink fairies like” on a post on site 1 with no backlinks or on page SEO for the term will rank in the top 10 while site 2 (created in July) still languishes somewhere on the 3rd page.
This confirms my plan to focus on a large site in each niche rather than a bunch of mini blogs for each keyword. I can leech off the authority that each site gains when targeting new keywords in the niche and I’ll be able to aggregate the power of my backlinks under one site. On the other hand, the advantage of having separate sites would be to have multiple listings for a key phrase, but this would be too time consuming and difficult to maintain as I’m just starting to build my network. Better to have one site in the top 5 than a bunch of sites somewhere on page 2 or 3.
After mass content creation on each site I’ll move onto building links both from articles and from my own satellite web properties, web 2.0 pages, or mini blogs. Each main niche has a collection of satellite sites and while I’m not directly monetizing these sites, they also tend to rank on page 1 for easier key phrases. My satellite sites thus serve two purposes: to funnel more traffic to my main sources of passive income and to provide link juice to my main site. I’m planning to build at least 2 links to each post with some form of the main keyword as anchor text and then I’m going to stop and see what happens, move on to my next site and repeat the entire process over again.
So what makes me think that all this work will pay off? In just the first 6 days of October, the simple changes I’ve made to site 1 has already resulted in more affiliate sales than I’ve had in the entire month of September from that site! Proving that in order to build a sustainable source of passive income on line, the law of truly large numbers rules. The plan for this week is to build a crap load of links to sites 1-3, work on getting adsense articles and reviews written for sites 4-6, and add content and links to my support sites.