Some Sanity Check questions

[Luckbox]

Hey all,

I'm new to affiliate marketing and I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the various tools and services offered. What I wanted was to share my plan of what I wanted to do and my goals over the next 6 months and get a sense of what is possible and what isn't possible.

Right now, I'm trying to keep things simple. I can add to the business model as I learn and understand things. I have picked a niche, and I have obtained both .com and .co.uk domain names that I think are ok (I have zero clue, but if it all goes wrong I will do a review of what I did wrong). Here's my plan.

Jul 1 - Sept 30 (Drive traffic to blog - organically)
Write a couple of blog posts a day in my niche. Possibly release one a day and keep a stock of back up posts for when I take days off (inevitable as I'm a Ph.D student).
There will be affiliate links in the posts, mainly amazon affiliates but will start to research other relevant affiliate offers.
Learn SEO.
My primary metric is visitors to the sites.
My secondary metric is speed of the sites.

Oct 1 - Dec 30 (Monetize gently)
I should, at this point, have a stock of blog posts available. I will still write the majority of posts but at this point, depending on where I am, I can test other writers perhaps.
Depending on where I am with traffic to my site, I might investigate the use of social media to channel traffic to my sites, maybe with paid ads.
My primary metric will still be visitors to my sites.
My secondary metric will be sales.
My tertiary metric will be how high my pages rank on google.

My expectation is I make a loss in the first six months, especially as I'm paying for hosting for 12 months and the domains I bought plus a logo from Fiverr probably. But I would like to have made a sale or two and if I do, then I will keep going. If I do not, then I will stop the project and review if I should continue.

Thoughts? Also is this worthy of a follow along as I blunder my way around?

Oh, and a question. I intend my .com and .co.uk sites to be clones of one another, they will have the same content for the most part, with subtle differences for each territory. Will I be penalised by google for having the same content on both sites?

- Joe

 

[T J Tutor]

Drive traffic to blog - organically

So, organic traffic is a tertiary traffic source. It comes after paid traffic and social traffic. The biggest issue you will have with organics is you can not target the audience. This will result in some domain authority issues if you are not skilled with organics. You can set the keywords, but you cannot set the demographics.

Monetize gently

No such thing!

My expectation is I make a loss in the first six months

I cannot express to you enough that expecting losses as part of your plan is horrible. First, you are not going to have losses as you are spending a small budget to establish site, content, and experience as well as collecting data. That's what you are buying and you are not losing money, you're investing in business. Get the "loss" thing out of your head when in this industry.

Next, I understand you know you believe that this is going to bring you some level of accomplishment, but we are in an industry that changes daily. Your plan is more like a 30 day plan that you are stretching out for 6 months to a year. That's insane. Spend the same amount of investment with paid traffic and start earning reasonably well within a couple or a few months.

 

[Graybeard]

Write a couple of blog posts a day in my niche. Possibly release one a day and keep a stock of back up posts for when I take days off (inevitable as I'm a Ph.D student).

The SEO organic metrics for *your niche* are going to matter A LOT.
65 Blogging Statististics to Help Your Content Creation in 2020
^^ This is a long list of 'talking points' --most seem sensible to me ...
You will notice their references to blog interrelationships with other media for both inbound and outbound support.
Both Inbound paid advertising, and; Inbound social media touting and promotion --will help to generate Inbound Organic SEO traffic.
The odds are long for a blog surviving as a stand alone entity --there are 500 million blogs --maybe 200,000 get noticed?

 

[Luckbox]

So, organic traffic is a tertiary traffic source. It comes after paid traffic and social traffic. The biggest issue you will have with organics is you can not target the audience. This will result in some domain authority issues if you are not skilled with organics. You can set the keywords, but you cannot set the demographics.

Yes, I do understand this to a certain extent although I assume people searching for specific keywords naturally means that your demographics are a little more specific than a random member of the public clicking a random link.

I cannot express to you enough that expecting losses as part of your plan is horrible. First, you are not going to have losses as you are spending a small budget to establish site, content, and experience as well as collecting data. That's what you are buying and you are not losing money, you're investing in business. Get the "loss" thing out of your head when in this industry.

Next, I understand you know you believe that this is going to bring you some level of accomplishment, but we are in an industry that changes daily. Your plan is more like a 30 day plan that you are stretching out for 6 months to a year. That's insane. Spend the same amount of investment with paid traffic and start earning reasonably well within a couple or a few months.

Sound advice. This is more about managing my own expectations. From what I've read online, starting a blog from scratch is not a quick process and results come slowly. I don't have any clue where to begin with paid traffic and that's my problem. It's one of the things I hope to learn about while I'm here but as I'm sure you can appreciate, there's a lot to learn and I don't want to overcomplicate a business model at the start.

The SEO organic metrics for *your niche* are going to matter A LOT.
--link removed--
^^ This is a long list of 'talking points' --most seem sensible to me ...
You will notice their references to blog interrelationships with other media for both inbound and outbound support.
Both Inbound paid advertising, and; Inbound social media touting and promotion --will help to generate Inbound Organic SEO traffic.
The odds are long for a blog surviving as a stand alone entity --there are 500 million blogs --maybe 200,000 get noticed?

Thanks, that's incredibly helpful.