The Nicher

I set up my Build A Niche Store account on January 11th.  I immediately set up my first shop, staying up quite late tryint to make everything “just right”.  The next day I set up two more.

For a few days, I actively checked my stats on Commission Junction several times a day to see if any of my stores had generated a sale.  I only noticed one click and a number of impressions, but no sales.  Not too worried since, of course, all the sites I had set up were brand new and probably not indexed yet.  Naturally, most, if not all, the traffic had come from my blog readers following my links.  I never expect, or encourage, conversions from friends.

A few days ago I stopped checking sales stats figuring the old “watched pot” theory may be applying.  Instead, I put myself into fixing up my started affiliate sites, and starting a few new ones.  But today, I decided to take a closer look at my stats.

 At first I was very pleasantly surprised to see that I’d had 4 click throughs.  That may not sound like much, but I believe only 2 or 3 of the shops are currently indexed, and the cookie Ebay places on the clicker’s computer lasts 30 days (meaning anything they buy through Ebay for the next 30 days will give me a kickback).  And that’s not taking into account that one of my niches has an extremely high price point.

And then I remembered.  While BANS is intended to earn affiliate money on Ebay sales, the company itself offers its affiliates a nice cut of their purchase price.  I logged into that account and had a wonderful surprise- just over $44 was sitting in my account. 

That cuts my total investment by about 1/3.

What a great start only 2 days after signing up!

For years I’ve wanted to be a writer.  Sometimes it was fiction, sometimes non-fiction.  Last year I began to focus more on the freelance side of writing.  Particularly web content. 

Then a few months ago it hit me.  What does a web content writer do?  They write content for (usually) affiliate marketers to put up on a site, slap a few ads on it, and make a load of money either off of the ads, or by selling the site.  So why couldn’t I do that?

 Well, problem number one is that I can’t code to save my life.  Ask me to to build you a site from scratch and I’ll happily call the men in white coats to take you away.  Still… I kept plugging away at my blogs and paid posts and trying to figure out little things like how to put YouTube videos into my posts and stick ads in the sidebars.

And little by little, I began to learn.  Of course, I still can’t code.  But with some terrific software available (WordPress for one!) I started to realize that I don’t need to know how to do that.  And more programs crossed my radar.  I’ve purchased one, downloaded others…. and I became addicted. 

Rather than bore the freelance writers and novelists that follow my other blogs, I thought I’d start up another to track my successes and failures.  As well as to have a spot just to talk about affiliate stuff.  I love it!  And if you’re new to affiliate marketing, or even site building, I’d love to have you join me.  Drop me a comment and we’ll work on this together.