NoobProgrammer's First Journey - Amazon Affiliate Site

I discovered this site a day ago and have been interested in getting started with IM (Internet Marketing) for a few months now but hadn't found a lot of good resources until now. I have three ideas right now that I want to turn into sites, but for now I am just going to focus on the first idea. It will be an Amazon affiliate site.

Once I get this site up and running, I will invest some time in my other sites. I am going to try to post my progress daily ( if there is any news) on what I am up to and how things are going.

I have purchased the domain for the site I am going to focus on. My goal for tomorrow (Monday) is to get Wordpress installed on my Virtual Private Server (VPS) and to get all of the domains pointed from namecheap to my server. I have a full time job so I have to manage my time well.

So far, I have spent about $10 dollars for domain name registration with namecheap.

To do:

-Get Wordpress installed on VPS. Point all domains toward server so I can see Wordpress basic site.
-Find a good Wordpress theme, get it installed, and work up a basic draft of my site.

I will write more tomorrow.

Welcome to Black Hat World and good luck with your journey!

Wow, it took you 1 day to take action? Good job!

Although, with just 1 day as experience, have you researched what niche to target already? It's the most important thing to do as you might not receive a good ROI without it. Btw, what is your goal with this journey?

However, best of luck with your journey! I will be following.

Best,
hekke

hekke said:

Wow, it took you 1 day to take action? Good job!

Although, with just 1 day as experience, have you researched what niche to target already? It's the most important thing to do as you might not receive a good ROI without it. Btw, what is your goal with this journey?

However, best of luck with your journey! I will be following.

Best,
hekke

Click to expand...

Thanks! And yeah, I am just trying to get started ASAP since I heard the hardest thing is just getting started!

And yes, I have researched my niches. For this first site I am choosing a review type site for technology related products that are sold on Amazon. I am a little worried that this niche may be inundated with competition, but I figure this is my first site and more to get my feet wet, why not just try it!? Also, I had already purchased the domain before I found BHW (Black Hat World) so I want to go ahead and try to use it. Once I get it up and running I will start working on some other site ideas that I have.

I have a shorter term goal and a longer term goal. My short term goal is to get my sites up to $500 a month in revenue. I plan to sink ALL of this revenue back into the sites themselves to improve them. My longer term goal is be able to quit my ridiculous 9-5 job. It is what most people consider to be a "good" corporate job with a good annual salary but I absolutely hate the corporate work style.

I would like to spend $100 or less for this first site. So far, I have spent $10 for the domain, and I am "borrowing" web hosting from myself by using it on a VPS I already have. Because of that, I am not going to assign the costs of hosting to this project. I am thinking about next purchasing some articles from some of the sellers in the BHW forums. So I will need to research some good ones.

As a side note, in case it will help anyone else. I couldn't get to Black Hat World on my work computer because of their security. I am now able to view it by using Putty, Chrome, and a VPS test server I have. I could have started bringing my personal MacBook to work but that would obviously be a little more conspicuous and I would have to use my cell phone data plan! I am using Portable Putty to setup an encrypted SSH tunnel between it and my Ubuntu VPS. Then I used a proxy switching extension to modify Chrome's setting to use my SSH tunnel rather than the regular internet connection.


Tech Related Product Amazon Affiliate Site:
Visitors: 0 (site is not live yet)
Revenue: $0.00
Expenses: $10.00 for Domain Registration
Gross Margin: $-10.00

NoobProgrammer said:

Thanks! And yeah, I am just trying to get started ASAP since I heard the hardest thing is just getting started!

And yes, I have researched my niches. For this first site I am choosing a review type site for technology related products that are sold on Amazon. I am a little worried that this niche may be inundated with competition, but I figure this is my first site and more to get my feet wet, why not just try it!? Also, I had already purchased the domain before I found BHW (Black Hat World) so I want to go ahead and try to use it. Once I get it up and running I will start working on some other site ideas that I have.

I have a shorter term goal and a longer term goal. My short term goal is to get my sites up to $500 a month in revenue. I plan to sink ALL of this revenue back into the sites themselves to improve them. My longer term goal is be able to quit my ridiculous 9-5 job. It is what most people consider to be a "good" corporate job with a good annual salary but I absolutely hate the corporate work style.

I would like to spend $100 or less for this first site. So far, I have spent $10 for the domain, and I am "borrowing" web hosting from myself by using it on a VPS I already have. Because of that, I am not going to assign the costs of hosting to this project. I am thinking about next purchasing some articles from some of the sellers in the BHW forums. So I will need to research some good ones.

As a side note, in case it will help anyone else. I couldn't get to Black Hat World on my work computer because of their security. I am now able to view it by using Putty, Chrome, and a VPS test server I have. I could have started bringing my personal MacBook to work but that would obviously be a little more conspicuous and I would have to use my cell phone data plan! I am using Portable Putty to setup an encrypted SSH tunnel between it and my Ubuntu VPS. Then I used a proxy switching extension to modify Chrome's setting to use my SSH tunnel rather than the regular internet connection.


Tech Related Product Amazon Affiliate Site:
Visitors: 0 (site is not live yet)
Revenue: $0.00
Expenses: $10.00 for Domain Registration
Gross Margin: $-10.00

Click to expand...

So far so good with the expenses.

I've seen some threads where the OP starts off by spending hundreds of dollars on tools that aren't even relevant to what they're trying to accomplish.

Ok, so last night (Monday night) I managed to get the domain for the new site pointed from namecheap to my VPS on digital ocean. I am getting quite good with this now and have turned it into a simple process of pulling up some text config files and changing a few values. I was able to easily get the test index.html working and got awstats running and secured on the server.

I am glad I never installed a GUI like cpanel and just managed everything from Putty (command line). I can really see now how easy it would be to write some Python or bash scripts to automate a lot of this in the future. Plus, I do not have to worry about some of the security issues that some of these free web based graphical GUIs supposedly have.

Next, I made a quick backup of my VPS and then started the process of installing WordPress. I was surprised by how simple it was installing wordpress but it did take quite a while to go through all the steps. The digital ocean guide I was using definitely made everything easy. I completed the wordpress setup by logging in and creating the admin password and all that. I picked out a great theme I found for Wordpress which built off of the Bootstrap 3 framework. This will make it easy for me to make modifications because I have experience with Bootstrap and like the grid based approach they take.

I thought a lot about the site and kind of drafted up how it will look based off of some other sites I was looking at. I have also been thinking a lot about the content and originally was going to buy the articles/reviews. Instead, I have decided to simply write the articles myself to make the reviews more relevant to the user. I actually have a lot of experience with the products I am going to be reviewing and so I feel like I can add some real value to the user. I want them to come to my site, unsure of which brand to go with and leave knowing exactly which product they want to buy.

The next step this week is to start writing the articles. For the few products that I haven't yet tried, I am going to buy them off of Amazon and test them out. Amazon has a good return policy and so I can always return the product If I don't want to keep it.

What I need to learn a lot more about is actually SEO! I know the basics about what tags and what google's algorithm looks for, but I don't know some of the latest techniques and have not yet had a highly ranked site. I know that backlinks help quite a bit and but don't know a realistic strategy to getting them. I will have to read more here and then probably reach out to other websites and try to get links.

I am interested in trying more Facebook marketing so I am going to open a Facebook account specifically for the site. I am also going to market the site highly on Twitter. I am continuing to work on my Twitterbot and made some big breakthroughs today with understanding how their Rest API works. I hadn't done a lot of API programming before and so didn't really realize how they actually work.

I have a few ongoing websites that are all small JavaScript based web tools. I want to increase their SEO and so I am going to start adding some articles to them. Probably going to buy some articles form the BHW marketplace for them.

Tomorrow I am going to write the first article for the affiliate site.

Update:

I thought I was going to write all the articles for my site myself but after writing a few I am wondering if it might not be best to just buy them. I am not the worst writer but I am also not the best. I am waiting for two articles for another site I have that I bought on Fiverr. I am going to start looking now in the BHW forums for reasonably priced content for this new affiliate site.

Please let me know if you have any article producers that you absolutely love!

Outsourcing article writing is probably the right decision. It leaves you with more time and energy to focus on more important things.

Well, I got my first paid article back for one of the non-Amazon affiliate sites. I found the person off of Fiverr and they were one of the highest rated sellers on there. The article is honestly sucks and is not fit to publish. I could write a much better article than this on my worst day. I think it is a combination of a non-english speaker and/or a word spinning algorithm.

I will have to see If I can find some better content providers. It may be that for what I want to spend right now (5-7 per 500 words) that there are just no decent writers who will work for that rate. If so, that is fine and I will just write all the articles myself until I start getting some decent return from one of the sites. I can spend 30 min to an hour a day spinning, rewriting, and writing my own content if I need to!

Good luck with your journey !

I have decided not to make any updates to the two JavaScript tools/sites that I have because there is no easy way for me to monetize them and they are in two categories that have a lot of competition. So, I am not going to write any articles for them or anything.

So, my plan now is to focus completely on writing articles for the Amazon Affiliate site. I want to try to write all the base articles I need by the end of this long weekend. Then, I am going to market the site using Twitter, Commenting on Disquss and other comment forums, and maybe some Facebook marketing. I am not going to worry about SEO right now because I feel there is too much competition for this niche in google.

My twitter bot is coming along, I just had to make some modifications to my algorithm because I now need it to use an SQLite3 databse to keep traffic of my twitter followers.

Things are going good! I have written most of my initial reviews that I need and just have one review left to write before I can start promoting my site via commenting and Twitter. I actually bought a new domain for the site but I think it sounds a bit less spammy than my original domain. My original was in the form of "bestAffliateNicheProduct" and the new domain I have seems a lot more legit to me.

I now need to find out though if I can just do a redirect from the new domain to the current for now? And would that work for SEO? What would google do when it encounters a site at bestAffliateNicheProduct" and then my new domain as well? Will have to look into this....

I am going to have to start managing myself a lot better because I think I should have gotten more done by now. My goals for today are:

1. Write my next article review.
2. Create redirect to new domain.

Also, I got my other article back from Fiverr. This is for one the sites that I am no longer working on because of how difficult it would be to monetize them. The article is just not good. Just shows that Fiverr, at least for articles is not a good content source. I did also get a Logo done for that same site from Zarak designs which I found in one of the Black Hat World marketplace forums. I was fairly impressed with the results and for 15 bucks he also delivered the source files. I will probably use them again!