Heisenberg83
Newbie
- Jan 20, 2019
- 30
- 7
I want to share our journey so far to get some feedback, advice and motivation for the future.
Ok let’s start from the beginning. My partner and I started an affiliate site 8 years ago way before I found this forum. I’d always been interested in IM since I was a kid and like a lot of people I dreamed of earning a passive income. I’m a developer in my full time job and do a lot of work with WordPress sites among other things for a large company so I have the skills to build affiliate sites and create custom plugins etc. I also work from home and have enough slack in my time to do some other work.
The main impetus to build our site came when a colleague at work suddenly became rich when he decided to add affiliate links to his personal site that he’d been running for a few years. His site was based around his hobby and was a project to build a complete database of the collectable products he loved. He already had a forum attached to his site and was well known in the community of these collectables. His site is pretty much number one for any searches of these products. So it was like shooting fish in a barrel in his case. The products in his niche if you can call it that have a large price range from a few dollars upwards and get pretty pricey.
In our case my partner was into another kind of collectible so we thought let's try and replicate his success. It didn’t happen as you probably are guessing. It’s not to say we’ve had no success. We have had moments of success with this site and other sites/ideas where we’ve had spurts of income say around $300-$600 but nothing has ever gone nuclear and it was probably a case of being lucky at the right time and it never lasted. Usually the idea would get banned lol.
Our site is an attempt at a complete database (by no means complete - maybe around 20% complete, 2050 items) of the collectables with site features such as people can register and manage their collection. Surprisingly we have 5,430 members registered and I’m not sure how many of those are spam but we do get genuine contact from some of them. We are also on the first page in google for a lot of the collectables that we have in the database. I’ve noticed recently our product pages have been getting higher in google results whereas previously if we did a blog about a specific product that would get quite high but the actual product page would be several pages down. I’m not really sure why because I’ve done everything by guesswork with no real strategy other than to copy my ex-colleague. He’s far too rich to bother with hassle such as work now lol. His site is his work basically for his whole family.
Each collectable in the database has details about it, a picture and links to amazon US and UK. There are also listings from eBay for both US and UK based on the name of the collectible or we can add a custom string where matches aren’t good. We get slightly more income each month from eBay rather than Amazon I’d say.
We built the site with literally no care for SEO and for quite a while the site was non mobile friendly and didn’t get attention very often from us. We’d kind of get interested from time to time but never really for long. Last year around this time I brought the site up to date a bit by applying bootstrap to the mixmash of a theme that I’m using. I made it responsive and improved the site search so it could search on attributes of the collectible etc. We have seen a reasonable traffic increase I’d say but again no major improvement in earnings. We’ve made very little effort on the content this year though.
Here are some site stats:
Last year at this time
This year
I guess we keep running this site in the hope that one day it will just spike and we will get good earnings. We realise we need to put in more effort. My partner is going to set herself goals on how much content she should write which will include blog posts and adding more items into the database.
Also after reading this forum I sometimes wonder whether we have gone down the wrong path and tried to copy my colleague when this was never really something that was going to work out. Personally I’d like to apply my skills to smaller niche sites that are more distilled and targeted but the issue I’ve always had is that I never know where to start and get overloaded with info. I kind of need to have a very good idea in my head what I need to do or I question everything and never actually get started beyond setting up a dev site. I’m totally lost for example on how to select a niche and search for keywords.
I guess as a goal I’d like to be running a network of niche sites earning reasonable amounts from each and that would add up to more than my earnings from my main work. Maybe this is something that is not realistic these days I don’t know. I’m quite open to new ideas but I do feel maybe wrongly that if I could just improve my affiliate site skills I could actually make a success of that.
What do you all think? Pull no punches lol.
Ok let’s start from the beginning. My partner and I started an affiliate site 8 years ago way before I found this forum. I’d always been interested in IM since I was a kid and like a lot of people I dreamed of earning a passive income. I’m a developer in my full time job and do a lot of work with WordPress sites among other things for a large company so I have the skills to build affiliate sites and create custom plugins etc. I also work from home and have enough slack in my time to do some other work.
The main impetus to build our site came when a colleague at work suddenly became rich when he decided to add affiliate links to his personal site that he’d been running for a few years. His site was based around his hobby and was a project to build a complete database of the collectable products he loved. He already had a forum attached to his site and was well known in the community of these collectables. His site is pretty much number one for any searches of these products. So it was like shooting fish in a barrel in his case. The products in his niche if you can call it that have a large price range from a few dollars upwards and get pretty pricey.
In our case my partner was into another kind of collectible so we thought let's try and replicate his success. It didn’t happen as you probably are guessing. It’s not to say we’ve had no success. We have had moments of success with this site and other sites/ideas where we’ve had spurts of income say around $300-$600 but nothing has ever gone nuclear and it was probably a case of being lucky at the right time and it never lasted. Usually the idea would get banned lol.
Our site is an attempt at a complete database (by no means complete - maybe around 20% complete, 2050 items) of the collectables with site features such as people can register and manage their collection. Surprisingly we have 5,430 members registered and I’m not sure how many of those are spam but we do get genuine contact from some of them. We are also on the first page in google for a lot of the collectables that we have in the database. I’ve noticed recently our product pages have been getting higher in google results whereas previously if we did a blog about a specific product that would get quite high but the actual product page would be several pages down. I’m not really sure why because I’ve done everything by guesswork with no real strategy other than to copy my ex-colleague. He’s far too rich to bother with hassle such as work now lol. His site is his work basically for his whole family.
Each collectable in the database has details about it, a picture and links to amazon US and UK. There are also listings from eBay for both US and UK based on the name of the collectible or we can add a custom string where matches aren’t good. We get slightly more income each month from eBay rather than Amazon I’d say.
We built the site with literally no care for SEO and for quite a while the site was non mobile friendly and didn’t get attention very often from us. We’d kind of get interested from time to time but never really for long. Last year around this time I brought the site up to date a bit by applying bootstrap to the mixmash of a theme that I’m using. I made it responsive and improved the site search so it could search on attributes of the collectible etc. We have seen a reasonable traffic increase I’d say but again no major improvement in earnings. We’ve made very little effort on the content this year though.
Here are some site stats:
Last year at this time
This year
I guess we keep running this site in the hope that one day it will just spike and we will get good earnings. We realise we need to put in more effort. My partner is going to set herself goals on how much content she should write which will include blog posts and adding more items into the database.
Also after reading this forum I sometimes wonder whether we have gone down the wrong path and tried to copy my colleague when this was never really something that was going to work out. Personally I’d like to apply my skills to smaller niche sites that are more distilled and targeted but the issue I’ve always had is that I never know where to start and get overloaded with info. I kind of need to have a very good idea in my head what I need to do or I question everything and never actually get started beyond setting up a dev site. I’m totally lost for example on how to select a niche and search for keywords.
I guess as a goal I’d like to be running a network of niche sites earning reasonable amounts from each and that would add up to more than my earnings from my main work. Maybe this is something that is not realistic these days I don’t know. I’m quite open to new ideas but I do feel maybe wrongly that if I could just improve my affiliate site skills I could actually make a success of that.
What do you all think? Pull no punches lol.
