The Nicher

Unless something particularly interesting or exciting happens first, the next post you should see is a step by step tutorial on building your first basic Squidoo lens.

I realize that most of you either already know how to build a lens, or don’t want to- but lately I’ve had several friends ask me how to do things, from building a lens, to putting ads in their blogger sidebar.

Rather than simply write an email to each one and leave everyone else in the dark, I thought I’d post them up here.

So if you’re brand new to marketing, and want detailed information on how to get started without any of that techie-speak, this is the place to be. This is rather labor intensive, so please be patient.

But it could just be a train headed my way.

No, really, it’s all good. The medusa site is nearly finished- just a few more pages to populate, and a bit more content on the main pages.

The other huge project? I decided that I want to be a Giant Squid. No, I’m not smoking any of that wacky stuff (heck, after staring at a computer screen for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, you don’t need wacky stuff to act like this). A Giant Squid is a lensmaster on Squidoo who has 50 or more quality lenses- meaning you can’t just toss out a paragraph or two and call it a lens.

I’ve just finished my 51st lens, and now need to go back and update several of my older lenses, and totally rehaul 3 or 4. After that, I should qualify.

I don’t know what triggered the sudden desire to become a Giant Squid- I had no interest in it whatsoever until I heard that there was a deadline. Then, boom! I had to be a Giant Squid, and I had to be one now.

So between the medusa site, and building all those lenses (had 19 to start since I foolishly sold several before making this decision), I’ve barely had time for anything but internet work.  So, I built a lens on how to take breaks for internet workaholics. Oh, the irony.

But I’m nearly done. It’s nearly ready. And then? Oh, probably the other big website project I had in mind. And then in November it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month- yes, I’m insane). Plus all of those domains that I have just sitting there gathering dust… And I should probably reaquaint myself with my husband’s face. If there’s time.

Riddle me this: What happens when an affiliate marketer decides to build a relatively small niche site, and then has the brilliant idea to sort said niche into teeny-tiny bite sized pieces for ease of navigation?

You get a very worn out nicher.  I’ve been working for days on one teeny-tiny site that has ballooned into a rediculously large project.  There isn’t even any content yet; I’m still sorting into sub groups, sub-sub-groups and sub-sub-sub groups. 

On the upside, I seem to have discovered how to load html files to my host in such a way that it actually publishes the page.  *gasp*

I’m pathetically pleased with this accomplishment, since until now I’ve only managed to build sites with WordPress and BANS.  There may be more on this at a later date as I make my fledgeling attempts at building landing and squeeze pages.

Yesterday, I came home to find a check sitting on the floor beneath my mail slot. Despite the fact that it said “ClickBank” on the envelope, my work worn mind thought it said Commission Junction.

Now, I haven’t checked either account in quite a while as neither has been performing for me. Opening the envelope to find a check that was worth more than my CJ payout level, but less than my CB level continued to mess with my mind.

Once I realized that it was CB, I was livid. I had nearly twice the amount in my CB account than the check was made out for.

I checked my CB account, and sure enough, they’d deducted over $10 in fees. I knew that they’d been deducting $1 a month since I hadn’t met the requirements for pay out, and they justified a little over $3 in excess charges which is mentioned in their payment terms. But there’s an additional $7.50 which has no explaination.

Granted, I’m glad that they released what was left in my account, since I haven’t had purchases from 5 different cards yet (seriously, their terms are whacked, and I wouldn’t use them at all if it weren’t for a very lucrative program that affiliates through them), and I can even deal with them deducting nearly half of my money when they spell out why.

But that last $7.50? I really want to know why that was taken out. That one just burns my buns. I don’t do affiliate marketing for a living, but I still need my money. If I didn’t, would I really be marketing? Well, maybe, since I actually enjoy the creation process of these websites, but I certainly wouldn’t devote as much time to it as I do.

Clickbank: up yours.

I was talking to a friend at work about my websites.  He knows that I’m a bit addicted to BANS, despite the fact that I haven’t made back my investment yet.

He’s been interested in making a living online for a while as well, but he’s better at planning than I am.  Me, I get an idea and I fly with it. He actually takes classes.  We’ve always said that if we were one person, we’d probably be rich.  I think as partners we’d kill each other. 

He was only interested in the basic numbers, so that’s what I gave him.  I said, domains are about $10 a year.  I know where I can get codes to get either 10% off, or domains for $7 a year through GoDaddy, so that’s who I use.  I also told him that .info domains are about $2-3.  I wouldn’t recommend getting a .info domain if you want to build up repeat viewers, but for a site that relies on search engines for traffic, you could certainly do worse.

Hosting totally depends on what you want.  I told him that I pay about $8 a month with HostGator for unlimited domains.  I also told him that if he wanted just one website to build up, he can get hosting even cheaper than that for just one site.  I didn’t tell him about dedicated servers and such, because I don’t think either of us expects to become popular enough to need it- and if we do?  Then we celebrate!

He’s also interested in my affiliate accounts.  All of them.  So I told him about BANS since I think the program is well worth the one time $97 fee.  Even if you didn’t want to sell anything through the site, you could pay much more than that for a website template.  You’d probably get something more out of the box and ready to go, but BANS is highly customizable. 

I also told him about Commission Junction and ClickBank.  I think his mind began to boggle at that.  They’re both free to sign up for, and you get a cut of any sales you make for the other companies that you’re promoting.  I don’t think he understands much about affiliate marketing since he kept asking me “and you don’t have to actually have a product, right?”.  I’ll need to talk to him about that a little more.

All in all, I told him that if he started a blog and started pimping products on it, (rather than purchasing BANS or anything else other than domain and hosting) he’d be shelling out $6-17 a month.  And you know?  I never realized just how cheap that is.  Where else can you start a business for under $20 but on the internet?

I built 7 BANS stores over a period of about 2 weeks. Towards the end, I no longer had to follow instructions, I could simply make all the transfers and set it all up on my own.

 Then I went on vacation.  I haven’t even touched my BANS sites in approximately 3 weeks, except to add AdSense to one of them.  Tonight I decided to set one up quick and then work on it tomorrow.  And you know what?  I don’t remember a thing.

This is why it’s so important to keep up on your projects.  Setting up the program is taking me twice as long as usual now, because I have to follow the directions, step by step.  And my CuteFTP free trial ran out, so I had to pay for the full version.  And set that up as well. 

I haven’t been trying to earn affiliate money for long. Aside from sticking AdSense on a handful of personal blogs, and the occasional Amazon link on those blogs’ posts, I’ve really only been actively working on affiliate sites for about a month. And I was away for 1 1/2 weeks of that.Still, during that time I earned a little over $1 on AdSense bringing my total from AdSense to just under $8. I earned a little under $1 on Squidoo, bringing my Squidoo earnings to $5.50 plus $1.83 Amazon commission that hasn’t cleared yet, and a few cents that are being donated to the Grameen Foundation.

I’d love to say that I decided to follow in the footsteps of John Chow and Darren Rowse, but while I’d love to make that kind of money from this blog, that’s not really why I’m starting it.

For years my main career focus was to become a professional novelist.  Since I don’t seem to need as much money as many others seem to need, I wasn’t too concerned about becoming a best seller, just enough to cover the basics would be enough.

 I spent a lot of time online learning about the writing craft.  One day I stumbled upon a community blog that was comprised mostly of writers.  About half of these writers were freelancers, not novelists, and I inadvertantly began to learn about the freelance writing world.  Eventually I decided that being a freelance writer by day and a novelist by night would be even better than just a novelist since the income would be more predictable.

A few months later that community site folded, and many of us started up our on blogs on Blogger and WordPress.  Many of the same freelancers and novelists that I’d been in touch with at the community site continued to stay in touch through our personal blogs, and I began to learn even more.  Eventually I put a few things together.

Freelance web content writers write web content for internet marketers.  While many of these marketers have physical or informational products to sell, many of them were affiliate marketers.  And more, many of these affiliate sites were built with little more than a site template and some Adsense!  Granted, I don’t know much about marketing or HTML, but I do know how to use WordPress, and if I was going to be writing content…. maybe it should be for more than a one time $5-15 payment. 

 And so I began subscribing to professional bloggers and marketers RSS feeds and started learning more about affiliate marketing, programs, etc.  However, since all of my focus was on the affiliate sites I was building, I noticed that my writing blog had become more of a “look what I did today!” kind of blog.  Readership started to dwindle as most of my readers were there to hear about my writing or personal life.  I started feeling guilty when I blogged because I knew it wasn’t what my friends were interested in hearing.  And yet I wanted to talk about this.  Plus, I totally went on a domain registering binge.  I can’t seem to help myself.

So this is the beginner’s blog.  Hopefully to become a professional one day, but for now, it’s my platform to shout about what worked, what didn’t, what I’m trying, and what’s new.  Maybe some day I’ll be the new Darren or John (I don’t think my husband would like me getting a sex change, but I’m sure he’d enjoy the pay checks), but for now- I’ll just be The Nicher.

P.S. I haven’t begun optimizing this blog.  Partly because I tend to get involved in more projects than I can handle, but also because I don’t want to begin truly promoting this site until I have something useful to say.

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.