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jcorkern

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This is one post that I really do not know exactly how to handle, but I am going to do my best to show everyone here that if you choose wisely and work hard and smart that you can make your dreams come true online in a short time with SEO and online marketing.

I started a project 1 month ago to this day, the 16th of last month, and would like to share the results and encourage you to do the same in your life. The first thing I would like to state is that this is not the first time this has happened to me, in fact it has happened repetedly to me since I started SEO and internet marketing.

Anyone can do this with proper research and applying some basic knowledge backed up with a little elbow grease to boot.

I guess the first thing to get out of the way is the sticker shock that likely most will feel when they see it, so let's start here. The proof is in the pudding, right? First month revenues on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

That link is to a screenshot of the first month revenues, you can enlarge it to see the numbers, but to make it easy, there are $40,810.79 in sales from the 16th of last month until I took this screenshot about an hour ago.

It was a brand new url, brand new site and a product that has been on the market for a couple of years already. This was done with nothing but SEO and it happened in the first 30 days.

The product was chosen with care, which brings us to the first point. Choosing what to market online. As the economy is in a recession, few would guess that any business would do that well in the first 30 days, right? Well, if you think about the habits and needs of people, it is easy to narrow down what you should be marketing online when you really start to think about what wil be and is important to people right now.

What are you willing to spend money on right now? When you find a product or service you think you would like to promote, ask 50 people if they would buy what you are thinking about marketing, and more important, "why" they would buy it. Take notes and sit and think about the answers they gave you. I can promise you that just talking to 50 people before you commit to a project can be the best decision you ever make in online marketing.

While you are talking to them, ask what they would search for if they were to look online for something like the product you are discussing with them, write that down also, because it is likely a lot different from what you will get from any keyword tool. And this is where you get your quick launch traffic from, since most are using keyword tools that can be manipulated by software and other marketers checking the comp out, it is easy to miss the real keywords that real people use. I get my keywords from "People" since they know how they would search for it, and this will give you loads of priceless long tails.

The next thing is making sure you have the right url and site. Sure, you can beat out the comp with any url if you want to spend the extra resources to gain 20% more links after onpage (I know, I have never stated this before, but the URL plays a huge part in a quick launch). Then once you have the right URL, you must have good copy and a clean, professional looking site that is not weighted down with too many features and gadgets that can distract the visitor.

I see a lot of sites that have loads of what they call "interactive" stuff on the site, but these are generally distractions, and you drive potential customers away with all of these gadgets. Keep them focused on why they came to your site for to start with. If you look close at the screen shot the conversion rate in over 4%, that is over 4 times the national average. But the site has good copy, decent prices and keyword targeted visitors. Make sure your titles, tags and onpage is top notch.

If you have the money, the first thing after you are ready to start should be a press release, this will give you some good authority links fast. Then do a full run on directory maximizer, yes, it is important, or I would not tell you to do it. Then dust off the pen and paper (keyboard and word?) and get to writing and mass submitting articles. I do not care what some will tell you, unless you are submitting them to several dozen directories at the very least, you are wasting your time with articles.

You can have some good fun with the next one, and that is blog commenting, dig in and have some fun, read some interesting blogs and get the link juice flowing back to your site.

Now for the hard part, and I mean this is the hardest thing you will ever do. Believe that you can and will make it happen. It is always easier to sit on the fence and talk about the big one that got away than to face the hard truth of reality, and that is if you are scared of real success, then you will never attain real success. The reason I say this is because it is a lot easier to follow what most parrot online instead of being a little different and going in a slightly different direction.

I have shown you that you can do this. I am not some rocket scientist with a degree in anything. I have a highschool education, but have learned to not follow the crowd. Step away from the same ole, same ole. Learn to listen to people who are not in the marketing field, like potential customers and they will tell you exactly how to make big bucks. And you really should believe it since they are the ones willing to spend their money based on what they tell you. Remember, people are the basis for success online, get your answers from them, then make the site and search engines work for you so that they can find you.

I hope that just 10 people will take this to heart and come back here in 30 to 45 days and blow these figures out of the water, or even come here and say they added 2 k to their income in one month. The point is that with a lot of planning and a little knowledge and work, anyone can do well in a short time with seo and very litte, if any money required.

Please, take the challenge and go out over the next 30 to 45 days, use what I just taught and show the world that it was done by you also.

Hope to hear from you soon with your success story.

Jim

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Thank you Jim. I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate you sharing your success story and lessons with us.

I hope our regulars by now know what a pro you are and for new members I will tell you Jim is someone you really need to learn from. You can take every post he writes very seriously and this one is priceless.

Jim, even though this is inspirational, I'm going to move this post to the main affiliate forum so it's higher up and will get more views. I'll leave a marker in this forum so people can find it here too.

Thanks again for the great case study!!!
You rock!
 
hey Jim I have a couple questions for you regarding this post if you wouldn't mind...

1. who do you choose to run your press releases through? And if there are multiple products on the site are you doing multiple press releases?
2. what do you mean by, "do a full run on directory maximizer"? Are you talking about the site directorymaximizer.com?
3. Could you go into a little more detail about the format of the site you built. Are you making blog posts on this site? Is the site set up like rosalind gardner's 101date.com with lots of free content as well as sales or is it much smaller/simpler and more straight to the point? How many pages is the site at launch?

Any info would be much appreciated!

thanks
 
I use several press release companies, but the main 2 are 24-7 press release.com and prnewswire when I need authority links. The top submission level gives you links from yahoo , msnbc, fox and other "authority" sites, and this helps with initial boost on a project.

I also have a press release account with officialwire for google news, and there are several others that are pretty good that are free or cheap for google news. Google news with just free press releases puts you in the top 10 automatically because of the google news feeds for any keyword you want. I can have first page for a few hours for the keyword "weight loss" or any other word or phrase once you know how to do it with a free or cheap press release service. Ok, I guess I need to move on, because I could write a book on press releases alone.

Directory maximizer is a directory service, they will submit your site to over 1k directories, and it is worth it. I know, a lot of people say it is not, but they are the same ones telling me that my stuff does not work while trying to keep up with or catch me. And you can do them all at one time because it will take months for some of them to approve them and get spidered anyway, so it will be a steady and slow building of links.

The site....hmmm. I believe i started that one the first couple days with wordpress and then switched it to my system that I had developed for my affiliate sites, but that is not that important. wordpress, setup with pages for categories is just fine to do this with if you are limited on income to start. Google loves their code.

As far as layout. I always lay them out as close to an e commerce site as I can because it is the most simple form of navigation that you can get for the visitor. This particular site had 5 categories and then an average of 5 products per category to start, but i always build content, write articles and submit them for traffic and links.

If you have any other questions, just ask.
 
wow you are a machine. I understand everything and just have a couple more questions to tie everything together. Since it's an e commerce site I'm assuming you have a shopping cart set up on the site itself instead of having a link to the merchant site, is this correct?

In your first post you talk about asking 50 people which I thought was interesting and creative but since you have 25 products at the launch are you just asking people about your niche and what keywords they use to search that niche or did you break down each product? I'm confused here

That's all for awhile b/c this is a lot to work with and I appreciate the quick responses
 
Yes, it is e commerce now, but that was an affiliate site to start with with my system. It looked like an an e commerce site, as all of my big money makes do that sell products, but the "buy now" buttons are loaded with affiliate links that put them straight to the merchant sites product page.

In other words, I have a category page with 5 products in tables with a very short description and no price. Then they can click a more info button to the product page where it has an image, the ability to look at the image in a larger format, a description and a price with a buy now button. If they click the buy now button, it takes them to the merchants product page.

My sites have pretty intense backends and all have an e commerce feel. They look like an actual e commerce site.

This allows me to decide if I want to buy the product and brand my own version, setup a cart, merchant account and so on.

As far as asking the 50 people, I do it in general, not for each product. To give an example, if i were interested in water timers, i would ask people what they would search for if they wanted something to water their flowers or garden while they were away for the weekend and wanted to automate it.

Now, as far as products, you would have 5 different water timers, 5 different hoses, 5 different nozzles and so on. Basically sister components of the water timer that I want to sell. But I would not ask for each specific product since the others are usually add-on sales anyway, they are just a way to up sell.

Btw, I am not a machine, I just have a decade of experience, and in this field, that is a long time. I have made a lot of mistakes and learned from them.
 
I am still pretty new at working online and I agree with you. There is much to learn, but if you have the time and patience, you can make anything that your heart desires happen.
 
Which free press release sites do you like to use?


It does not matter as most of them will hit Google news if you get the phrase you want to target in the beginning of the title. Like, if you wanted to hit google news for the keyword "cat food" You could have a press release title something like this.

New Cat food Brings Green Living To Your Felion

You would likely come up for cat food and green living. So you can target multiple keywords in one title.
 
so are you using this for clickbank=esque products (ebooks, software etc,etc)?

and when you say you link to merchant sites product page do you mean you send them to the landing page or straight to the payment area?

Lastly on these ecommerce type sites do you worry about caputing their emails to build a list??

thanks for the tips...you've really cleared up alot of things that i wasn't grasping!

Rich Jackson



Yes, it is e commerce now, but that was an affiliate site to start with with my system. It looked like an an e commerce site, as all of my big money makes do that sell products, but the "buy now" buttons are loaded with affiliate links that put them straight to the merchant sites product page.

In other words, I have a category page with 5 products in tables with a very short description and no price. Then they can click a more info button to the product page where it has an image, the ability to look at the image in a larger format, a description and a price with a buy now button. If they click the buy now button, it takes them to the merchants product page.

My sites have pretty intense backends and all have an e commerce feel. They look like an actual e commerce site.

This allows me to decide if I want to buy the product and brand my own version, setup a cart, merchant account and so on.

As far as asking the 50 people, I do it in general, not for each product. To give an example, if i were interested in water timers, i would ask people what they would search for if they wanted something to water their flowers or garden while they were away for the weekend and wanted to automate it.

Now, as far as products, you would have 5 different water timers, 5 different hoses, 5 different nozzles and so on. Basically sister components of the water timer that I want to sell. But I would not ask for each specific product since the others are usually add-on sales anyway, they are just a way to up sell.

Btw, I am not a machine, I just have a decade of experience, and in this field, that is a long time. I have made a lot of mistakes and learned from them.
 
I am so sorry it took this long for a response, was just browsing and ran across it, must have missed the reply email from 5 Star.

Yes, we have email captures on every page of the site. i offer newsletters, special reports or "insider" information as a free download and sometimes I use coupon codes I get from the merchants to get the opt in.

I never use pop ups or pop unders or any of the standard email capture methods. I just have a nice form and the offer and i get opt ins at around 1.5 to 2.25 %.

On my ecommerce sites, everyone has to give an email address for shipping and tracking info, so this is the additional 8% pop once a month on average per site. Emails have a great conversion rate if you have a good and continuous relationship based email program. it is a lot of hard work for one dedicated person, but it is well worth the effort.
 
Hello everyone, I decided to stop in and give and update on the project almost 3 years later, and this should give most everyone here some serious motivation.

Last years earnings: last year | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

This is an e commerce site so you have to consider the cost of products and everything that goes with being a merchant of this scale, but it would provide a nice living if you had the top positions with an affiliate site in this same niche, and yes, it is a niche, not broad spectrum by no means.

Now, when you see the total, do some quick math on a 10% commission, what if it were 15 or even 20%? This site runs totally on SEO and the social media needed to help with SEO and always has from day 1.

I know most of you here are still learning the ropes and can not get into e commerce at this point, and you should not get into e commerce until you get affiliate marketing down to an art. But this is possible. You get the right site, with the right products in the right positions and you can make 20 to 100 k per month as an affiliate, and you can do it in less than 3 years.

I am going to give all of you a hint to finding these home runs, but it is still going to take some serious planning before you register the domain. The Domain is one of the most important things you choose when launching a new program, because in reality, this is what you are wrapping your whole business on.

You need to choose a domain that is brand-able yet has the top keyword phrase in it if possible for the niche you are entering.

An example is if I were going after a niche in the weight loss niche, i would do a domain something like braviereweightloss.com. I would not get anything like weight loss books, weight loss pills or any other variation in the domain.

There are several reasons for it, first, google is starting to lean heavy in favor of branded sites, next is that you can still get all other phrases on the site as a whole with probably no more than 10 to 20 great pages. You start your SEO on the longtails and work your way up the ladder. If you get weight loss books in the URL, you are really changing directions when you get that phrase and want more keywords, with the other domain, it tells google that it is about weight loss in general.

Your going to hit a lot of phrases that do not produce and a lot that do, so you have to plan for having to go to the top tier keywords eventually, so why not make a name that is easy to remember and brand? What if you decide you want to transfer to e commerce and develop your own product?

Your already branded, your already trusted, think it might give you a jump ahead of the competition?

You may miss in any niche when having tunnel vision, but if you plan to take it all, make the right plans before you start anything.

Now for picking the niche. Always go for the main ones long term, you just do it in steps, and the longtails are what you step on as you climb to the top. Weight Loss is a great example. Buy the domain to brand and get weight loss in the url.

Folks, you cant miss this way, you may lose on a lot of long tails, but they are just a short step from the next groups of longtails. this gives you maximum growth with a steady effort.


They are out there, go find one and start building after laying out a detailed plan and you will increase your chances of success.

Yes, you can have this too, but will you make it happen?
 
WOW Jim, what an awesome success story. And really great info from someone who's been there and actually did it!

Thanks for following up to share your progress and advice with us!
 
I have no preferred back link building method, and anyone who is partial to one method will never see results like this. You need links from all kinds of sites, pages and platforms. Diversity in link building as well as a diversity of anchors and building up your velocity to be able to stand against the comp is a good starting plan. The best methods is make sure you have good content in something that is hot and let the world know, you will not need to build links long, the general population will soon take over the link building for you if you do it right.

Just to let everyone know, this is not a fluke, I actually have 3 sites that produce at this level, and 11 total that produce about 1/4 of this or a little higher, and twice that many that do well over 100 per month. This is not a fluke, it is not an accident. I have a friend that has a ( 1 ) site that does over 33 million a year. You can do this if you study, prep and are not afraid of money.

Sorry for the edit, but figured someone would want proof, so here is one more, just wanted everyone to see it is not a fluke. http://www.flickr.com/photos/32286688@N04/6884429375/in/photostream
 
Hey Jcorkern,

It's been a while since I've been on these forums as well!

Congrats on your success!

From your post are you stating that eCommerce is a much better business model?

I currently have an affiliate website that nearly gets 100 hits a day and have been thinking for a while as to whether I should take the eCommerce route.

If you could give any tips on this transfer that would be greatly appreciated.
 
We could do with some more quality posts like this. I have found it very inspiring
 
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