Welcome to the final Monday post of the month, and the conclusion of our affiliate blogging experiment. I know this has been a bit of an unusual direction for Otaku Journalist, and thank you so much for sticking with me this whole time. One of my most important goals with this blog is to help people make a living writing about the things they are most passionate about, and for me this is one of the most independent ways to pursue that goal.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the numbers! Last week I hypothesized that STEM Toys For Girls would not make any money yet and…

Unfortunately, I was right. Looking at the orders report, you can see that while there were 13 different clicks on the site (and 5 on products), nobody bought anything.

The way it works is that when somebody visits your affiliate site and clicks on a product link, Amazon assigns a cookie to their Amazon account for 24 hours. If they buy anything within the following 24 hours, you make a commission on it. In this case, out of the very few people who visited the site, nobody bought anything within that time period.

Here’s an example of a healthier conversion rate, taken from another of my affiliate sites:

Notice that even with 9,000 clicks, my conversion rate is still just 4 percent here. Not everybody who visits your site is in the mood to shop, so obviously, your chances of making money this way significantly increase the more clicks and traffic you get.

In the Orders Report, I can check out what people are clicking on. With a data sample this small, it’s not really worth analyzing which products are resonating with people.

In the interest of full disclosure, not a single affiliate site I have ever created has made money in its first month. That’s probably because I don’t use any tactics to escalate traffic early on. Instead, I slowly add more and more content to my blog until it becomes a top search result.

That’s why I so strongly emphasized testing your topic in Google Keyword Planner. You want to make sure it’s something low competition enough that your site will be able to appear on the first page of search results for that topic early on.

There are a lot of below-board techniques for speeding up your income rate, none of which I recommend. Instead, here’s what I’ll be doing to increase traffic to my site, and therefore encourage more clicks to my affiliate links:

• Increase its amount of valuable content. You may have noticed that there are only three pages on this site, same as last week. (I got busy, OK?) A site that small doesn’t exactly encourage you to browse around for a while. If I want to increase my chance of showing up in searches—and retaining visitors who do find it—I should add more posts. And of course, these posts should be helpful and informative, not spammy.

• Share my site in relevant spaces. I could post in forums for parents and educators interested in STEM toys. I could leave comments on other STEM related blogs, and include a link to my own site when it’s helpful. While we often think of it as annoying to share our blogs with strangers, there are places where people would not only not be irritated, but actually enjoy the fact that we shared.

• Live my life. There’s always a chance that, even after putting in a lot more work, this blog won’t be a moneymaker. So I’m not going to obsess over it. In order to make sure the time I put in is productive, I won’t check my Amazon Affiliate stats daily, only on the days after I post an update. The point of so-called passive income is that you put in a lot of work up front and then put it on the backburner, so eventually I’ll do that.

Right now, I’m putting the finishing touches on the affiliate marketing guide I mentioned at the beginning of this series. When it’s for sale in February, my readers will be the first to know.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this short blog-along helpful!

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Previously:

How to design and launch your niche affiliate blog

Choosing keywords and content types for your affiliate blog

Finding a topic for your niche blog

Photo credit: Matthias Ripp

Can you believe we’re already three quarters of the way through January? That also means we’re three quarters of the way finished with this niche affiliate blog-along.

As promised, this is the week I actually share the blog itself. Previously, I chose a topic, picked keywords, and decided on content to write for it. Now it’s really coming together:

As you can see, it’s fairly simple. I only have three pages up so far, even! But let’s break down how I did this and how much it cost me to get started:

1. Went to my hosting provider, Bluehost, and bought a domain name for $11.99. By the way, I already pay about $70 a year for Bluehost, since I host more than 20 domains for myself, family and friends. If you don’t already have hosting, Bluehost starts at $3.50 a month. For my purposes, let’s take one month of my Bluehost install, or $5.85.
2. I went to my Amazon Affiliates page and created a new affiliate referral code, “stem4girls-20.” This was free and took five minutes. After I set it up, I made sure that every time I link a product from Amazon on the site, it includes this referral code within the URL path.
3. Installed WordPress on stemtoys4girls.com and applied a WordPress theme to make it look pretty. Since I do this a lot and want unique looks for my sites, on Black Friday I bought 12 premium WordPress themes for $25, but you could also easily use a free WordPress theme. Let’s count this theme, Birch, as 1/12 of that, so $2.
4. I added in three pages of content, and I was ready to go. It took me about one morning to get everything set up. So total investment: $19.84 and six of my billable [working] hours.

Overall, it’s not a bad up-front investment, especially compared to a lot of other kinds of businesses. For example, I’m launching a T-shirt line for Gunpla 101 this week, and that cost over $200 because I had to pay my designer, Ben Huber, for his fantastic work. Still, I expect that I will end this month at a loss for Stem Toys For Girls. Why? Sites simply don’t become authoritative overnight. I can mess with keywords all day long, but people aren’t stupid. This site is brand new and looks it, and it’ll take time for it to acquire an audience, no matter how much I put my heart into it.

That said, let’s take a look at some of the ways I am trying to help it convert (that’s business jargon for “refer sales”) from Day One:

• I have a link from my site to Amazon right on the front page. One of the first things you see when you visit the site is the call to action, “Shop for STEM Toys on Amazon.” If you’re browsing this site, I’m hoping, it’s because you are looking to buy stuff, so this helps.

• On internal pages like this one, I link to products multiple times. The image, product title, and “get it here” button all link to the same place, so whatever is natural to users will work. This is the same thing I do on Candle Fandom every time I list a shopping guide.

• I use my own words. I can’t stress it enough that the whole purpose of this exercise is to make a living off of your own writing, not to churn out spammy content you don’t care about.

So there you have it. Next week, I’ll share my earnings report (if there’s even anything to report) and wrap things up. If you’ve been working on an affiliate blog, please show me! I’d love to see it.

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Next:

How to encourage people to click

Previously:

Finding a topic for your niche blog
Choosing content and keywords

It’s only been one week into this niche affiliate blogging experiment, but already progress is happening! For one thing, my latest affiliate blog, Candle Fandom, just made its first referral. I only made $5, but that’s money I didn’t have before, and it’s money I earned writing about a hobby I like, that I would have been satisfied writing about even for free.

Secondly, my friend Colette Bennett has already found success implementing affiliate strategies for her Asian skincare blog, Chok Chok Beauty. Colette says:

“I started my blog in December 2015 and had no idea how to set up affiliate links. Lauren gave me a few tips that I really appreciated—thanks to her advice, I racked up $40 in sales in my first week using the system!”

Way to go, Colette! Notice, by the way, that neither of these money-earning blogs are soulless endeavors, but built around topics we like to write about already. I’ve read way too many sleazy affiliate marketing tutorials to bring another of those into the world.

So now it’s time for me to tell you about the affiliate blog I’m building specifically for this blogging series. The topic is this: STEM toys for girls.

STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, is a block of topics that historically have had less female participation. As a result, fewer women than men occupy these rewarding, often lucrative careers. Even at the fairly diverse company where I work as a Web developer, I am the only woman on the team. Plus, when I worked at ReadWrite, it was part of my job to highlight STEM toys for kids, girls in particular, so I know a lot of them already. It’s something I care about a lot!

On the more technical keyword planning side, here’s what I did to verify that this might be a topic that will earn money.

1. I went to Google Keyword Planner and selected “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category.” I typed in “STEM girls.”
2. I scanned the list of result to find Google searches that have low competition, but still get 1,000+ searches a month. That way, I can create a site that Google considers an “authority” on the topic and shows up as a top result for this search prompt.
3. I discovered that “Women in STEM” and “What is STEM?” are phrases that people type into Google between 4,000 and 6,000 times a month, but are listed as “low” competition keywords. Bingo! I’ve decided that these are the keywords I’m going to target.

Notice how even though I’m writing on the topic of STEM toys for girls, I am choosing to target related keywords and not that exact phrase. The same is true for Candle Fandom—candles are a very high competition keyword, but “great scented candles” and “candle DIYs” are not. Just because the topic you want to cover is high competition doesn’t mean you can’t use it for your site if that’s your passion. As a close-to-home example, “Anime” and “Gundam” are very high competition, but “Gunpla” is not. Hence, Gunpla 101!

Now that I have a topic that’s both important to me and potentially valuable to people who search for it, it’s time to set up a site. I immediately bought stemtoys4girls.com (slim pickings, I know) and started generating blog post ideas. Here’s how I am choosing to structure my posts:

• Authoritative posts. As a professional journalist, I love to research and learn new stuff. It’s surprisingly easy to know just a little more than average about things. These posts will outline my findings about topics like “What is STEM?” and other relevant information.

• Tutorials. “How to do X” is one of the most common things typed into Google. here’s a huge gap in things people want to learn to do and actually helpful tutorials to help them do it. I will do this in the form of shopping guides and lists of ways to get girls involved in STEM.

• Reviews. Any Amazon Affiliate “guru” will tell you this is the number one most converting type of content. But I don’t go to many, or any, sites that JUST review stuff. I would wonder, “who are you to review stuff?” So I want to do these, but not overdo them.

Next week, I’ll share how to publish content that makes money—but also expresses your voice.

How’s your affiliate blog coming along? I’m looking forward to your comments. And if you’re not along for this particular ride, we’ll be back to the regularly scheduled Otaku Journalist in two weeks.

Next:

Design and launch your niche blog

How to encourage people to click

Previously:

Finding a topic for your niche blog