Bootstrapper Notes

Writing, Writing and more Writing!

I have been writing my heart out this last week.  After reorganizing my priorities, I feel like a new man.  I have been cranking out content for a new pet related site during the last week.  I am up to 29 articles so far this week.

Maybe I should back up a bit - I am getting ahead of myself.  I have started a new direction in my affiliate marketing department here at the Bootstrapper World Headquarters.  I am going to be creating content based sites with affiliate links worked into articles of original content that I am creating myself - for now.

My plan is to build out 10 of these sites with a minimum 100 pages each.  When I hit 50 pages on this pet site, I will build a new site focusing on a different market entirely.   The new site will initially just be a shell site of about 5 content filled pages.  Then I will continue to add content of about 5 pages per week to the pet site while I build out this second site at about 5 pages per day.  Then I will repeat in yet another market.

By the end of the 2005 I hope to have 10 of these sites with between 50 and 150 pages per site.  At some point this year, when these start generating revenue, I plan to spend half of that revenue to hire writers to generate the content.  You can get these 200-300 word articles written for $5 to $7 each.  This will hopefully start a snowball effect - more content equals more revenue equals more pages written by writers equals.....you get the picture.

I will keep you updated on a weekly basis, probably on Monday mornings as to how these sites are developing.

Reorganizing my priorities

Last Friday my new Dell laptop finally arrived.  I spent most of my weekend getting all of my software that I use daily for my web business installed on it.  I all installed a wireless network in my house, which is really cool.

So on Saturday night we got all the kids together and I was sitting in the easy chair doing some work.  My Wife turned to me and said, "...so are you going to generate more affiliate sites now that you can work and watch TV?".

This started a long conversation that I had been having only with myself.  I have felt for awhile that I am spreading myself really thin, and none of my sites are receiving the attention they deservere.  I have two other sites than "Project X" that require daily interaction on my part: answering emails and placing orders with my drop ship distributor.  All the affiliate sites I have do not really require any regular work at this point.

The problem with my affiliate sites is that they used to work really well, but now they are really suffering.  Sure they still bring in more money than most affiliates probably earn, but not as much as they used to.  I knew this would happen when I built them - they are short tem sites, that eventually get filtered down in the rankings by the search engines.

So I really need to focus my efforts for the next 6 months to build some long term affiliate income.  Sites that will rank really well for a long time.

Here is my list of priorities and cuts for the next 6 months:

Priorities

1. Continue to build up 'Project X'.  Build up the affiliate network.
2. Service my two drop ship sites to give the customer the best service possible.
3. Build new content rich affiliate web sites by writing unique articles.
4. Focus on revenue generating activities.

Cuts

1. Limit my blog and forum reading.  I spend way to much time each day doing this.
2. Stop adding content to Shop-Quik.com.  I will leave the site up for a while just to see what happens with the 25 posts I have done so far.

So there - I have actually written them down - now I just have to follow thru.  I will not stop posting at BootstrapperNotes.com, so don't worry about that!  I will still be posting my progress about 'Project X' and other new affiliate sites I am starting.  I have big things in the works - so stay tuned!!

Keeping Tabs on Your Sites

I just stumbled onto a really cool tool for those of you who are creating sites.  The site is Site Report Card.

Just punch in your URL and it will spit out all kinds of interesting things about your site. 

The coolest is that it shows how many pages of your site are in each of the search engines.

This one is going in my favorites!

Launched the Affiliate Program

The affiliate program for Project 'X' is officially launched!  I have spent the last several days running a miriad of tests to be sure that all the sales were tracking properly and when subscriptions renewed they were also tracked.

So far I have 5 affiliates signed up.  The old 80/20 rule applies to affiliates just like everything else.  Actually, probably less than 20% of your affiliates will drive the majority of the affiliate sales.  So you need to keep looking for good affiliates all the time - many who sign up may never get around to putting your links up.

I am in the process of getting my program listed on the many affiliate directories scattered across the web.  I also paid to announce it on one very large affiliate forum.  I deemed this was a good buy because of the quality of affiliates that are active on this forum.  These affiliates are the ones I want.

I will also be very committed to researching affiliate sites that I find thru Google, Yahoo and MSN - then approach them about becoming an affiliate for my site.  This will be a long term effort that I will probably never stop.

From what I have read, building an affiliate program takes time - like 6 months or more before you really start to see the fruits of your labor.  Thats okay, I did not expect this to be an overnight success!

Search-Optimized Domain Portfolio Sells for $164 Million

I think I am in the wrong business!

Link: Netcraft: Search-Optimized Domain Portfolio Sells for $164 Million.

Internet marketing firm Marchex Inc. has finalized a deal to pay a whopping $164.2 million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. The deal, along with the recent sale of a misspelled domain name for $112,000, offers evidence that mistyped URLs and other "accidental traffic" have become big business.

If you have done any surfing on the web, you have definately run into one of this companies sites.  They generate revenue thru PPC advertising like Adsense or deals with Overture and other PPC search engines.  I read one article that said "If you saw the size of this guys checks, your eyes would pop out and bleed."

The interesting thing is that this business model is not dependent on the ups and downs of search engines.  Many of these domains have links from other sites, so the traffic comes from many sources.  Since domain names only cost $8.95 or less, you would only need to generate .02 cents per day to break even.  Not a hard thing to accomplish.

Shop-Quik.com is indexed in Google

I just checked and Google has indexed 25 pages of my Shop-Quik.com site.  Thats the good news.  The bad news is that no visitors have arrived thru Google.

I have decided to keep adding content to this site until there are 100 posts before I decide if this little experiment is going to move forward or not.

February 2005 Sales Roundup

I thought you all might be interested in some sales figures for February, 2005.  Remember the site finally went live on February 23rd, so there is not many days worth of data to report.

Total Free Trial Orders: 2
Total Subscribers: 0
(the 2 'free trial' orders above have not yet converted to subscribers which happens 10 days after they order the free trial - which is why I have zero subscribers right now.)

My goal is to be averaging a sale per day by July 1, 2005 - so I have a long way to go.

Trying something new

With the cost of PPC search engines eating my lunch right now, I decided to try a different approach.

I found a site awhile back that focuses on my target demographic.  They have an advertising program where you pay-per-click, but only 20 cents per click.  I ran a test back in December and January pushing an affiliate program in the same market as my site.  I was able to break even as an affiliate, which mean as the merchant I should be able to do better than that.

So last night I plopped down $100 of my bootstrapper cash.  The advertisements started running today, so we will see how it goes.  My cart has a built in affiliate program, so I am using this to track the clicks, sales and ROI for each of my advertising ventures, including the PPC engines like Adwords and Overture.

The ad is not simply a big banner (which the browsing public is typically blind to), but rather an in-line text add between two paragraphs of the articles.  It looks great, and will hopefully deliver targeted consumers.

I will let you know how it goes.