Affiliate Marketing.....The Journey continues......

It's been a while since I posted my low cost internet marketing journey on this blog. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. After my first sale on Amazon, almost 2 years ago....I lost focus and put most of my energy into another business venture.

=======>Fast forward to the present time.........

It seems like while I was in hibernation, I had managed to earn my first check on Amazon...and surprise surprise, also got my associate account closed because I failed to respond to an email that needed confirmation that my niche site was not for children under 13.

The good news is that the helpful members of staff at Amazon advised me to open another account as  well as that I was to be paid for my old efforts.

==========>Which brings me here...........

How Am I doing Affiliate Marketing Now?

Nothing much has changed. Upon resuming, my first instinct was to find a person that I've always looked up to online...i.e Robin.  Her methods have always resonated with me. There's no "shiny object" syndrome with Robin and that gives me peace of mind that with her I can build a long term business.

I was using as many free resources as possible in the past...with a huge success on Hubpages BUT as it turns out all my hubs were deleted eventually. It seems like all web 2.0 sites always act in this predictable manner. One minute writers are earning good incomes with them and then, boom!..with no notification whatsoever, their webpages are offline.

Robin started her affiliate marketing career using free pages as well. I was relieved  to find out that she now teaches that one must own their content by writing for their own self-hosted Wordpress sites.

Getting your own Wordpress site is not expensive at all. It is a worthy investment considering the risk of writing on a free platform like Hubpages. 

Needless to say, I am done with Hubpages and now write on my niche site which I've paid hosting for.

I still swear by the Jaaxy Keyword Tool and also apply what I learn at Pajama Affiliates (Robin's group).

This blog will keep me focused and will also help me to collect my thoughts, diarize my affiliate marketing journey and just sharing the tools that I use along the way.

Besides paying for the training that I will need now and then, I still plan to do this business on a low budget, combined with discipline and sweat.

I will share where I am with my first WordPress blog soon. Till then.....

An Amazon sale...yippee!!

It has been a while since I updated this blog.  Funny how life just gets on the way when we plan to achieve something!  I was so busy with my self improvement blog that I sort of abandoned my niche site.  I use the niche site to test the Jaaxy membership tool.

Despite the recent Google changes, all keyword focused posts and hubs that I did using Jaaxy continued getting consistent traffic, with no hitches whatsoever.  One of the things I've been thought by Kyle and Carson (Jaaxy owners) is not to game Google by plastering my keywords all over my blog posts.  This may be one of the reasons why none of my sites have been penalized.

Read my Jaaxy review.

Anyway, I decided to stop by at Amazon today, and lo and behold! I had actually made a sale.  I've sold Clickbank items before, however this is the first time I made sales with Amazon.  The conversion rate is quite high (12,75%) too.

The Amazon niche that I'm promoting is an evergreen type yet laser  targeted.  It does not bring much monthly traffic, however the traffic inflow to my niche site is consistent.

Now that I know what is working with Amazon, the only thing left is to rinse and repeat. I'll be applying the same strategies I learned from Jaaxy to my other blog that is more focused on Clickbank and Adsense.

While I'm at it; I'm more than thrilled to report an increase in my Adsense earnings as well.  I do not qualify for the first check yet, however I am getting closer by the day.

Coming to Squidoo...I'm officially throwing in the towel on that one! 8 of my lenses have been locked...despite them giving him 100 points for conformance.  Some of these are actually old lenses that have been there for almost 2 years.  I won't be bothering with them from now on, and will throwing my energy publishing on my own sites.

After seeing their point system, I was more than convinced that such incidents will be a thing of the past.  My niche site has proven over and over again that Google has no issues with my content therefore I won't allow Squidoo to drive me to doubt myself.

Without wasting time...let me go back and rinse and repeat what is already working!

Till next time.

How I use Hubpages for traffic generation

I am on my third week of my experiment and journey and I must say that I have achieved quite a lot, all thanks to Jaaxy, Hubpages, Blogger and Squidoo.

When I started this,  I was mainly exploring the viability of Hubpages as a Squidoo alternative.  After 30 of my lenses were locked, I had to abandon my account and I focused on my offline business.

It occured after a while that Squidoo has been through this locking and warning lensmasters before and surely it will continue existing still, so I decided to give the Web 2.0 sites another go.  Instead of going directly to Squidoo,  I decided to start with Hubpages.

With everything I've learned about keyword research with Jaaxy,  I decided that this time I will go for less competitive keywords as well as niches that are not very crowded.  As we speak, I only have 2 hubs on my targeted niche as well as 3 others that are not niche focused.

My first step though was to build a Blogger blog for my chosen niche.  With the help of the Jaaxy keyword tool I optimized the blog for search engines as well as put in a few keyword focused posts as a start.

I also looked up the competition analysis results on Jaaxy and I realized that no one is using the high ranking free sites to target the keyword i.e Hubpages, Squidoo, Youtube etc. Needless to say that I dived in and created my first keyword focused hub, squidoo lens as well as a blog post.

Try Jaaxy for free

It has been 3 weeks and I get daily traffic to my niche hubs, with 50% of the traffic coming from Google, 30% from pinterest and about 10% from other Hubpages users. My hubs are already ranking on the first page of Google.

The cool thing about Hubpages is that they already rank well with Google, hence I managed to do so well with my hubs within a week  or so.  What I learned from +Jennifer Ledbetter is that, your own website or blog takes longer to rank compared to these free sites.

Initially, I was confused as to whether I must spend more time on Hubpages and engage with other users.  I've decided against it because my main aim is to generate search engine traffic to my hubs and then point it to my Blogger niche blog.

The blog is getting some organic traffic already, however Hubpages is still the main traffic source so far.

I've realized though that Hubpages does not allow your own affiliate links in hubs, hence I am focusing on them as a traffic generation method rather than an income generating site.  They do have Amazon and Ebay modules though, as well as Adsense.


Instead of putting my own affiliate links, I used their Amazon modules for product recommendation.  It will be an added benefit if I earn income through those, but right now they are not the main focus.

I'm also starting to see some daily activity on my Adsense account although it is not amounts worth writing home about.  I may share these figures on a monthly basis as well.

To recap, this is what I've done so far (3 weeks):

• Performed a keyword search on Jaaxy
• Created keyword focused posts on Hubpages, blog and Squidoo.
• Pointed Hubpages and Squidoo to my blog.

Beyond sharing the hubs and lenses on social media, I haven't done much promoting on them.
I also intend to look further into Jaaxy's competition analysis and create more posts for my niche keywords.

As for Squidoo, I will write separately about the progress there.  After such a bad experience as having 30 pages of content being deleted, it becomes difficult for me to make a decision to put an effort on the platform.

Try Jaaxy keyword tool for free (no credit card is required)