The Online Sunshine Plan

How I created an affiliate site that met my passion

So I farm. It’s a living, not a hobby. Pays my room and board. Once I get it profitable, it’s going to be paying for more than that…

But I’m fascinated with making this farm sustainable and so this involves the cows I’m raising. Turns out that grass fed beef is healthier and better for the environment than other beef. And we’ve only been finishing them on corn since after WWII.  It’s got better flavor and besides that, they are interesting to raise.  (Love to be scratched where their horns should be – and between the shoulder blades.)

So I created this affiliate blog over at http://grassfedbeefcattle.blogspot.com/.

The basic idea of an affiliate site is to push a particular product as an affiliate sales outlet – this becomes the one product which all the pages link to. And those are all affiliate links to that product. So you get a percentage of any sales.

Steps to do this:

First, I made a short list that I checked on Google Adwords Keyword Tool External to see what of what I was interested in actually had search traffic and how much advertising was being spent on it (one indicator of probable sales.) “Grass Fed Beef” came up nicely.

Next, I looked for an affiliate offering that matched what I was interested in. (Remember, that you want to match a product to your passion so that you can write about this at the drop of a hat. Content – fresh content – is King.)

So I searched for “‘grass fed beef’ affiliate”. And, luck would have it, I found someone in Montana who sold beef via affilates as well as online directly. 25% commission.

Next, I chose a Blogger blog and caught up some keywords that I could save as blog domain names until I got around to creating this site. Chose “grass fed beef cattle” as something that would work. It’s another profitable keyword – and note that “grass fed beef” is in that phrase. Blogger was chosen as I later intend to create an online sales site for Missouri grass fed beef and so wanted this as a test drive. As well, Blogger gets picked up rather quickly by Google, so this will have traffic pretty quickly.

Next was to set up the analytics for this. I created one account and put all four Blogger blogs under it.

After that, I went out to pick out a new template for this – didn’t have to, but wanted this to be more professional than the generic templates. Check out BTemplates (http://btemplates.com/) for some nice ones.

Installing that per the instructions, I then pasted the analytics code right into the template – last thing above the </body> tag. (I’m having trouble getting Google to tell me how to add Webmaster Tools, or that would be the next step here.)

Then I added some social widgets over to the side to make it work.

Now for the content:

Research was the next key point. While I set up a Google Alerts for this that fed right into my Google reader, I also wanted some authoritative articles I could use. So my next step was to search for “filetype:pdf grass fed beef” – which gave me several pages of pdfs which I then downloaded to a file. As well, I had been collecting articles in my searches and saving them as PDF’s.

The reason for PDF’s is the internal search function within Acrobat Reader, which could then find all mentions of this term within any PDFs on my HD. Also, they are neater to use, as most programs will export to PDF – and you don’t have to open yet another program to read the varied data you find.

This search gave me lots of well-written data that I could use to either quote or re-write to make my blog posts. Key here is that these are not sales pages. They are impartial reviews filled with useful data. They simply link to the sales pages. And  then you you  promote  those blog pages either by a network of bloggers, or through Synnd network that Charles Helfin created.

I also linked to the image in Flikr and once those blog posts came out, went to that page to leave a link in the comments section. That gives me traffic from Flikr as well.

I did about 10 articles in one day and then pre-dated these so that they came out one per day until all posted. So it didn’t look like I was spamming. Search engines know that most average people put out only a single post per day, if that. I like to strike while the iron is hot, so learned to throttle the publishing, not my writing.

A note about copywriting:

I don’t think I’ve covered this in other posts. I got a tip from Heflin’s Social Media Science forum, where a person actually got Google to give him the keywords he needed to use in his articles.

Refining this makes it pretty simple (though a bit geeky – you’ll have to work it through before you can see why it works.)

1. Go to your affiliate sales page or main site and scrape their copy about the product.
2. Paste this into Notepad or something that just gives you straight text back.
3. Go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool External and select “from website content” and then paste that text in to the little box.
4. It will then give you a long list of keywords. Making sure CPC is selected, export this to CSV.
5. Open it up in a spreadsheet application like Open Office Calc.
6. Create a formula which goes in a new column over to the far right of that existing data – Search Volume x Avg CPC x .001
7. Sort by this column – and you’ll see the most profitable (by advertiser demand, anyway) KW you have.
8. Then make sure that these KW show up in your affiliate article, as long as they make sense in the sentences you use.

You simply start with a couple-hundred word article, and then go through and spice it up with the various words Google recommends.

Reasoning for this is that Google is set to give priority to high-ranking CPC KW, as they can sell more ads that way.  And so your blog post or article tends to show up higher on Google in this way – if you use words that have high CPC and search volume.

Content ideas at use

While I had some content initially, I was under a time crunch to get this going and onto other projects. What I needed was about 10 posts up so that it would be a respectable site to the search engines.

Every page had to say something different and useful about grass fed beef, but not repeat. And they all had to point to my affiliate product, La Cense beef.

The difficulty was that after a few posts,  I found myself talking more about running a farm than how wonderful grass-fed beef was. And the point was to excite people about the product so they’d buy it.

Luckily, I had to go check the cows, so I had a nice walk and time for inspiration to sort out my muddle.

It hit me that another keyword that I had looked at before was in “recipes”. When I got back to work on this, I then pulled up some PLR (Private License Rights) ebooks I had – in this case, one on CrockPot Recipes – and then searched within those for beef. Voila! I had content. Borrowing some recipes from my sponsor (which tied more viewers in to their site for possible sales) I then had another 3 pages.

Plus, that template for more posts was a simple one to create. A short blurb and then some more crockpot beef recipes. Endless content, if I need it.

Marketing my posts:

Then I turned around and put these all up for syndication by Synnd, so I didn’t have to do some wacky self-promotional scene. (Actually put the first two up and as these got going, I then put up the rest.)

And there are additional cross-publishing efforts I can do, such as ping.fm and mini-blogs, etc. I’m considering compiling these up as an ebook for publishing on Scribd, as well as a simple presentation of the data, which will have links to every blog post. Were I to create a podcast for this, I could then create a video based on the presentation slides and then post this to several video sites. As well, taking each blog post, I can post these to the vital article directories by hand, about a day or so apart – again, so it doesn’t look like I’m spamming.

The trick with that last paragraph isn’t so much to saturate Google’s search results, but to get additional traffic sources.

Each blog post also links back to my main hub site (robertworstell..com) and you see that there is an RSS site feed from A Midwest Journal which appears on this affiliate site.  Drive traffic to that affiliate blog and then invite that traffic over to my main hub.  (I also link on that site back to my affilate blog site when I mention grass fed beef. )

My marketing efforts will be in looking what differences they are making in my analytics. Study what is more effective and increase those efforts. Future  posts, if any are needed, will be in checking what search terms they are looking for and then creating content to match.

But again, this is supposed to be supplementary income, not main work that takes over other passions. Just another education opportunity.

I’ll update this further with the results of that marketing.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
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