Hi all
I present you a particular journey, aiming at being successful with affiliate websites. What is special with this journey, is that i will be focused mainly to establish the processes that would enable me to reiterate easily and semi-automatically a first success.
Objectives
- set a first website, winning more than 1500$/month
- build the tools and processes to do a second successful website easily.
Budget
Almost illimited. I am ready to spend 4k or 5k on the content if it brings me $$$.
What I did currently
Ok, I work on this project since one month already. I published a Wordpress, with some articles, but I found the approach too slow, and difficult to be automated. So, I started to think, and to innovate...
First step: Building an application for external writers
My approach has been simple: hiring writers, giving them the keywords and the thematic, receiving the articles, checking each of them, request a lot of work. Many of us would do that with an Excel sheet to track everything, including the keywords that are used in the article. But quickly, it starts to be a mess.
One of the problem is mainly for structured data. Each writer has its own way to enter data (such as product reviews, with rankings, etc.), which should be reviewed manually and not parsed automatically, which is a big problem for my goal. I want to be able to automate the full thing.
What I did to tackle this issue has been to develop an application from scratch. You will find some screenshots to understand the principle. It enables to set up keywords, to enter information about the writers, the cost of each article, to offer an interface to the writer where he can write the article, with live statistics about the usage of the keywords, etc. And more: it enables to set-up easily forms so the writer can just fill the needed fields. Let's take a product review where the writer needs to enter the ranking of the object for instance according to different criteria, and set up an average calculated automatically, it would be very easy to do.
NOTE : I dont plan to sold it, this is not the purpose of this thread.
The last screenshot is the "writer view", eg the interface used by external writers to enter their article.
Second step: Bye bye wordpress
The development of the "writer article management" application took me two weeks. During the development, I started to think about an easy way to export articles, to format them like I want, to present structured data easily with a fully customized way, and to set-up very quicly new websites for my future projects.
I came to the conclusion that Wordpress is too complicated. With Wordpress, you don't have the full control of your website: you cannot develop quickly plugins or API you want, themes are just a mess to customize, etc. After a few tests and few reviews, I opted for a flat-file CMS called "GRAV CMS", which is perfect for my need.
Main advantages:
Third step: Customize a theme
The advantage of Grav CMS is that you don't have to select (and to pay) a Wordpress theme. But any HTML/CSS theme can be easily used. So, I choose one, and I customized it. I developed the needed elements onto Grav CMS to design a SILO structure, which is now fully automated.
I set up the tree of my pages (infinite level if needed, there is no limit), and my code automatically presents the right menu on the sidebar. Easy and efficient.
If I need to set up a new website, I just have to copy the whole directory and the new site is almost ready.
Four step: Setting-up everything in music
I have currently 4 freelancers working for me, writing articles. Weekly budget: ~50$. I have almost nothing to do: the articles are automatically well-formated, and in one-click I can post them on the website.
Fivth step (ongoing)
Many affiliation programs have strict rules that you need to comply with. The idea is to produce the code to comply with these rules automatically.
For instance, on Amazon, the price and pictures need to be refreshed every 24h at least. I made a short plugin to do it using Amazon Product Service API.
With Grav CMS and the library "apai-io" (search on Google), it took me 2 days. Done.
I need to do the same for some other stuff requested by affiliation programs. This is ongoing.
Sixth step: Implementing better features than Amazon (ongoing)
While coding, I saw that I have the capacity to do some things that even Amazon or other vendors do not provide. An example: filtering products by their characteristics. Most of APIs are not well-coded, because their database is just a mess. If you already have played with Amazon API, you know it.
Let's say that you are looking for all fridges (this is an example) which can fit a small space, you cannot. This is incredible. So, I developed some code to parse automatically all the descriptions of various APIs to get all details of any product, in a structured way. There are many example like this: colors of items, dimensions, weight, technical characteristics with are mostly in the description and not structured.
The next step will be to offer to the customer a sortable table so the visitor will be able to select exactly the product he wants.
Next steps
I present you a particular journey, aiming at being successful with affiliate websites. What is special with this journey, is that i will be focused mainly to establish the processes that would enable me to reiterate easily and semi-automatically a first success.
Objectives
- set a first website, winning more than 1500$/month
- build the tools and processes to do a second successful website easily.
Budget
Almost illimited. I am ready to spend 4k or 5k on the content if it brings me $$$.
What I did currently
Ok, I work on this project since one month already. I published a Wordpress, with some articles, but I found the approach too slow, and difficult to be automated. So, I started to think, and to innovate...
First step: Building an application for external writers
My approach has been simple: hiring writers, giving them the keywords and the thematic, receiving the articles, checking each of them, request a lot of work. Many of us would do that with an Excel sheet to track everything, including the keywords that are used in the article. But quickly, it starts to be a mess.
One of the problem is mainly for structured data. Each writer has its own way to enter data (such as product reviews, with rankings, etc.), which should be reviewed manually and not parsed automatically, which is a big problem for my goal. I want to be able to automate the full thing.
What I did to tackle this issue has been to develop an application from scratch. You will find some screenshots to understand the principle. It enables to set up keywords, to enter information about the writers, the cost of each article, to offer an interface to the writer where he can write the article, with live statistics about the usage of the keywords, etc. And more: it enables to set-up easily forms so the writer can just fill the needed fields. Let's take a product review where the writer needs to enter the ranking of the object for instance according to different criteria, and set up an average calculated automatically, it would be very easy to do.
NOTE : I dont plan to sold it, this is not the purpose of this thread.
The last screenshot is the "writer view", eg the interface used by external writers to enter their article.
Second step: Bye bye wordpress
The development of the "writer article management" application took me two weeks. During the development, I started to think about an easy way to export articles, to format them like I want, to present structured data easily with a fully customized way, and to set-up very quicly new websites for my future projects.
I came to the conclusion that Wordpress is too complicated. With Wordpress, you don't have the full control of your website: you cannot develop quickly plugins or API you want, themes are just a mess to customize, etc. After a few tests and few reviews, I opted for a flat-file CMS called "GRAV CMS", which is perfect for my need.
Main advantages:
- to set-up a new website, a simple copy of files is enough. Time needed: a few seconds.
- In addition, the CMS enables to develop plugins very very easily, without understanding all the classes of wordpress which are very complex.
- No headache with .htaccess, with permalinks, and so one. It just works.
- No articles. Everything is a page, and each page is a directory on your filesystem, with subdirectories. So you organize very easily your "tree", which is perfect for SILOs.
- Lastly, the website accepts use TWIG as the template system, which is very good. And more: articles can be written with Markdown, then formated with a plugin or with TWIG. Which is just perfect for my reviews, as I just need to modify a few line to change the way all rankings and reviews are presented.
Third step: Customize a theme
The advantage of Grav CMS is that you don't have to select (and to pay) a Wordpress theme. But any HTML/CSS theme can be easily used. So, I choose one, and I customized it. I developed the needed elements onto Grav CMS to design a SILO structure, which is now fully automated.
I set up the tree of my pages (infinite level if needed, there is no limit), and my code automatically presents the right menu on the sidebar. Easy and efficient.
If I need to set up a new website, I just have to copy the whole directory and the new site is almost ready.
Four step: Setting-up everything in music
I have currently 4 freelancers working for me, writing articles. Weekly budget: ~50$. I have almost nothing to do: the articles are automatically well-formated, and in one-click I can post them on the website.
Fivth step (ongoing)
Many affiliation programs have strict rules that you need to comply with. The idea is to produce the code to comply with these rules automatically.
For instance, on Amazon, the price and pictures need to be refreshed every 24h at least. I made a short plugin to do it using Amazon Product Service API.
With Grav CMS and the library "apai-io" (search on Google), it took me 2 days. Done.
I need to do the same for some other stuff requested by affiliation programs. This is ongoing.
Sixth step: Implementing better features than Amazon (ongoing)
While coding, I saw that I have the capacity to do some things that even Amazon or other vendors do not provide. An example: filtering products by their characteristics. Most of APIs are not well-coded, because their database is just a mess. If you already have played with Amazon API, you know it.
Let's say that you are looking for all fridges (this is an example) which can fit a small space, you cannot. This is incredible. So, I developed some code to parse automatically all the descriptions of various APIs to get all details of any product, in a structured way. There are many example like this: colors of items, dimensions, weight, technical characteristics with are mostly in the description and not structured.
The next step will be to offer to the customer a sortable table so the visitor will be able to select exactly the product he wants.
Next steps
- Reastically, I dont expect to be on the road of winning money before the end of the month as I need to finalize my full system. I can already interface with many vendors/affiliation programs.
- The priority for me is to have all tools to work comfortably: I put the money on the table for the content, and the remaining things are done with a few clicks. I don't build an affiliation website, I build a factory of affiliation websites with reusable components. This is key for me.
- I am sure that such process can beat a lot of competitors. Why? Because 99% of webmarketers fall into one of these categories:
- They are not putting real money on the table, especially for content,
- They are alone, which is linked to the first point.
- They are technically limited by their knowledge or by the tools they are using. And believe me, Wordpress is limiting you indirectly by its complexity (find a good way to make a SILO website for instance... only shitty plugins).
