Day 11 (24 October 2007)

Third Commission: $2.68

Fourth Commission: $0.68

Woo! Two Sales in one day!

They are from the same merchant as per the first and second sale.

I decided to install some scripts which includes tracking IP Bots, human visitors, etc. Having no prior experience, I do not want to take chance and engage the help of one experienced member to help me with the installation. He charges me $20 to install all the scripts. I have also requested him to do a second installation which will allow me to add subdomains to the software.
Total cost for his service is $50. And it should take 1-2 days for him to complete installation.

Another five websites are registered today.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Hi guys, I’m very apologetic for the lack of update. Have been really very busy these past few days.

Day 10 (23 October 2007)

Second Commission: $1.70

I woke up on Day 10 with a US$1.70 commission pending in my cj account. This is my second sale! It came from the same merchant as the first sale. I guess I’m lucky to have a merchant that can convert when I build my first batch of domains.

What I did next was to purchase another five domains and clone them. The whole process from registering the website from registrar to cloning the websites with the software took less than 15 minutes. There is no need to scrap content since there is a clone function in the system.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Day 8 (21 October 2007)

I took a break on Saturday and resume on Sunday. There was no sale at all on the previous day and neither is there today. Feeling extremely puzzled, I went and check the web stats and realised there was no visitors hitting all domains. How could this be?

I tried to log into my Webhost Manager (WHM) and discovered my server was the culprit. Promptly did an Apache restart and my domains resume to load with the speed of Ferrari.

As I’m new to handling a server, every now and then I made mistakes like this. I have wasted day 8 and 9 due to server congestion. Now I shall make it a point to restart my server at least twice a day to prevent the same thing from happening again.

Nevertheless, this did not hinder me from building more websites. A total of five domains were bought. I also renew my subscription for CJ Scraper for another three months. It really save me the time to scrap all the products from the merchants. The scraper is capable of doing the job in less than a minute. If I were to do it manually, it will take me weeks to complete one merchant.

Day 9 (22 October 2007)

I’m gaining some momentum after the previous two days were let down by my mistakes of not restarting my server. Built another ten websites. Traffic is trickling back and I’m receiving 1000 hits to all my domains. Even though there is no sale, I’m very confident that my second sale will be secured soon.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Day 6 (19 October 2007)

First Commission: $0.33

I finally received my first sale after 6 days! 5 days to get my first batch of domains to be indexed and it took another one day for conversion to take place. The purchase is a small ticket item which cost about $6 and the commission given to me is $0.33. Having reach my first target of achieving my first ever sale in affiliate marketing, I hope more sales will start streaming in now.

In total I receive a total of 169 impressions for day 6 and there is 65 clicks. All these traffic are redirected from Google based on the number of websites I have created so far. I can finally see the potential of this software.

I think I should start lookng for niche market that is not highly uncompetitive which hopefully will allow more clicks that will convert.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Day 5 (18 October 2007)

More websites got indexed by Google today. From my software dashboard, I can see that visitors are starting to stream into my websites using various search terms. I went on to analyse the keywords that these visitors had used to search in Google. All thanks to the keyword scraper which allow me to build up an extensive list of over 10,000 keywords for each merchant within one minute.

I build another 6 websites to promote this giant merchant in the computer hardware industry. Though the commission is only a meagre 1%, I’m hopeful that the branding of this company will ensure a constant stream of customers.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Day 4 (17 October 2007)

Websites that I previously registered are still not indexed yet. The only consolation for me is bots from various search engines are starting to crawl my websites. But heck, it takes time for websites to be indexed by Google. My first batch of domains which I registered few days ago are only 4 days old.

The merchant I’m advertising for today has a wide range of products and have a good online reputation. I decided to allocate ten websites to advertise their products. Judging from the EPC and EPM, the rates are pretty high. Though critics might argue that competition might be too intense.

I have also started to promote two products from clickbank using this software. Each products have been allocated five websites each. The gravity is pretty heavy for these two products, I hope I’m able to pull it off.

Lastly, I created one MFA (made for adsense) website. Strictly speaking, I didn’t put any google adsense ads, but rather ads from other advertising network. Such MFA websites are used to sustain my monthly subscription.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Day 3 (15 October 2007)

After learning how to use the software, I log into Commission Junction (CJ) to apply for all the merchants programs that allow publisher from my country. Some of the approvals are automated whereas some merchants will approve my application manually. Due to my location in the far east, many merchants from USA rejected my application.

I have also subscribe to a CJ keyword scraper program whereby it will scrape all the keyword and content from the merchant of interest. It saves me a lot of time thinking of which keywords to use. The good thing about this scraper is it could generate as many as 10,000 keywords in less than a minute and all the keywords will point to my affiliate website.

I registered another 10 domains today. I can see that goggle bots are beginning to crawl the websites I have registered yesterday. No signs of any indexing yet. It could take about 5 days before the websites start appearing on google search engine.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Day 2

I have settled on the affiliate tool I’m going to use for my campaigns. This decision is made after spending one day reading about the features of this tool. It helps when my queries were answered promptly by the forum members. Eventually all my doubts were cleared and I decided to subscribe the tool for one month.

This tool will allow me to generate many websites instantly and it definitely saves me a lot of time. What’s so good about this software is it allows me to redirect traffic to either a cloak or uncloak website. I can use these websites to promote my merchants’ products, affiliate programs etc. It is compatible with all kinds of affiliate programs you can ever think of. For instantce, commission junction and clickbank. No boundaries at all.

After signing up, I am granted access to the members forum where they share many useful tips on how to find the right keywords and index websites. It does help a lot and I gain many insights to white and black hat websites.

I register my first 5 domains to promote a merchant selling books. I’m told that it will take at least 5 days for websites to be indexed by google without any promotion. Here I am waiting for a few more days before I should expect something coming.

Meanwhile the key to maximising this tool is to build more websites while google index them.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I started working on achieving my target on 13 October 2007. It will take a few days before I can expect some sales. More about it soon.

Day 1

I got myself a Virtual Private Server (VPS). To be honest I have no prior experience of handling a server. I have to really learn from scratch. The primary reason why I need to get a VPS is the need to host at least a few hundreds to thousands of domains. Sounds crazy yeah? There’s the way to get many websites index and at least I will have some backup websites if some of my domains are banned by Google.

Since I’m still trying out for a month or two, I decided to subscribe to Level 1 - VPS. This tier costs about $44.95/month. I think they have some sort of promotion now which you can receive 50% lifetime even if you decide to upgrade to higher tier like Level 2 or Level 3 in future.

Features

- Setup fee FREE

- Disk Space 10GB

- Bandwidth 150GB

- Guaranteed Ram 256 MB

- 3 IPs

I spent a few hours understanding how VPS works. The admins at slhost are also very helpful. They response to the support tickets usually within 5 minutes.

Meanwhile I will not reveal which tool I’m using to get my first affiliate sale. Only if it works for me, will I recommend it to you. Continue to check back as I blog about my journey.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I’m really sorry for not updating during the past few days and I will explain why shortly. On 13 October 2007, I have finally signed up as a publisher with commission junction after much procrastination. Before I go on, I have never achieved any affiliate sales in my whole life. I’m not sure if DealDotCom should count as one though. But I’m talking in the same breadth as clickbank, commission junction and zanox etc.

So it is a big fat $0 with all these affiliate giants.

My targets in 30 days time are

1) To achieve my first ever affiliate sale
2) Meet the minimum requirement for withdrawal

In my subsequent posts, I will write about my “affiliate” journey to achieve this goal. Meanwhile just sit back and watch how I fall into the pit holes.

Popularity: 35% [?]