Writing for Your Wealth

At the beginning of November, I spent about 20 minutes writing a post for my home improvement blog and in the eight weeks that followed it made $220.64 in sales through the Amazon affiliate program.

I’m sure the super affiliates making $500,000 and up a year would scoff at such a pittance, but I doubt those guys are reading my little blog anyway. I thought it might be useful to share what I did to make that amount, considering I put relatively little effort into the post. Also, you can see that writing about something as prosaic as space heaters can be profitable!

(And, for those who are calculating the amounts in the screenshot, no it doesn’t add up to $200. The DeLonghi brand just happened to be the most frequently ordered, so I had a nice group of them together in my Amazon reports page. The other brands were mixed throughout the rest of my “kitchen & housewares” orders.)

Anyway, let’s get to the nitty gritty…

Where I got the idea for the post

Since I blog on home and garden topics, I subscribe to a handful of home-and-gardeny magazines, and one of the fall issues had a chart showing which types of space heaters work well for which types of settings.

I decided to translate this into a written blog post on space heaters, and I included Amazon affiliate links to examples from each category. I don’t usually stick multiple affiliate links in a post (*cough* spammy *cough*), but it seemed appropriate in this case.

Keyword research

As long as I was going to try and make money, it made sense to do a little keyword research so the post had a shot of ranking somewhere in the search engine results.

I figured the main term (space heaters) was going to be competitive, so I didn’t want to target it specifically. Since I was only writing a blog post, and not a whole site, it didn’t make sense to go broad and pit my post against whole stores that sell space heaters. So I hunted down longer terms that searchers looking for more specific results might use.

It’s much easier to get a blog post to rank for a “long tail” or less frequently searched phrase.

I used the free Keyword Discovery Tool to check these keyword derivatives out. (This site is one of many alternatives to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool I’ve mentioned before, and it goes narrower instead of broader when delivering suggestions.)

As you can see, the number of searches drops off significantly after “space heater,” so it’s less likely people are putting a lot of effort into targeting those lesser terms. That makes them perfect for a blog post. Any one of those would be fine to target, but “best space heater” made most sense for my post.

Using the chosen keyword in the post

Once I picked “best space heater,” it was simply a matter of using it in the title and a couple times in the text of the post. Some of the SEO folks say it’s best to use your keyword closer to the beginning of the title if possible, so I could have simply made mine something like “Best Space Heater?”

I decided How to Choose the Best Space Heater would be more informative and might get more clicks from people. In the end, it’s usually a better bet to put humans before search engines when there’s a question.

One place I did screw up is that I failed to use my keyword phrase in the file name:

www.luxuryhousingtrends.com/archive/2008/11/how-to-choose-t/

Until last month, this blog was running on an old version of Movable Type that automatically picked short file names, based on the first couple words of the title. It was possible to override the suggested titles, but the spot to do it was way down at the bottom, and I never remembered to. (I’ll be sure to use that if they ever make an SEO Excuses t-shirt.)

Alas “how-to-choose-t” as a file name doesn’t help me at all in the SEO department, but it turned out okay in this instance anyway.

For search engine optimization considerations, one other place you might want to use your keyword is in the name of whatever pictures you may be uploading (if it’s appropriate).

Adding affiliate links

This was pretty simple. I’m already a member of the Amazon affiliate program, so I just surfed through their space heater offerings to see if I could find examples of each kind I was mentioning in the post.

I usually try to pick products that have lots of positive reviews for two reasons. First, I don’t want to recommend something that sucks. Second, you’re more likely to make a sale when there’s “social proof” that it’s good. If lots of people are buying it, it must be the thing to buy! (There’s a reason the QVC people tell you multiple times during the 15 minute spiel how many units have already been ordered.)

I remember that I had trouble finding heaters from all of the example categories, though, so I believe some of the ones I mentioned didn’t have reviews. But I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the models I sold most of had lots of customer reviews.

The Results

I made a couple sales right away, probably from folks who saw the post on the front page and needed a heater anyway, but soon after, my blog post began appearing in Google for “best space heater.” I’m sure it’ll drop over time, but as I write this, it’s still #5 in the results list.

The following weeks brought many more sales, and I’m sure the post has actually earned more than $220. Though the Amazon reports don’t show you who ordered what, I know people often get more than one thing at a time (there are probably tracking programs out there that can tell you this, but it’s not something I’ve cared enough about to look into). Also, Adsense is on the post, and it’s a foregone conclusion that some folks clicked on those ads instead of surfing through to Amazon.

Future earnings?

It’s likely that earnings will gradually drop off (though probably not disappear completely), unless I put some work into building links to this specific post from outside sites, because over time blog posts become less fresh and get buried deeper in your archives.

Also, in this particular case, I wrote about a seasonal topic, and we’re probably to the point where people who needed to order space heaters for the winter already have. The nice thing about seasonal topics though is that they become relevant again a year later. Last winter, I wrote about a snow removal tool in a blog post, and I have had 8 or 10 sell through that link again this year.

In the whole affiliate marketing scheme, $200 isn’t anything to brag about, but when you consider that this simple post paid for the entire operating costs of the site for two years, it isn’t too shabby.

Can you duplicate (or better!) these results?

I admit that I had an advantage coming into this: I wrote this post on a blog that is more than three years old and has enough links pointing to it that Google sees it as something of an authority site. It’s certainly not on par with a Gizmodo or (in my genre) This Old House, but it gets indexed frequently by Google and it is possible for posts to rank for less competitive keywords without a lot of extra effort.

That said, if your blog is somewhat established, you should be able to do this sort of thing with affiliate marketing too.

Figure out what products you can promote in your niche that people need to buy anyway. If you write about gardening, and you’re not promoting your favorite gardening tools, you’re missing out!

But don’t just think about selling to your existing readers. Figure out what keyword phrases people in general are using so you’ll attract search engine users, folks who may never even have visited your site before. They’re actually more likely to make a purchase than your existing readers, because they got online specifically to look up information on a product.

If you think about it, you’ll see why sales came so easily through my post. Anyone looking up “best space heater” is probably about to order one and is just trying to figure out what kind they need.

In order to give yourself more of a chance to rank for those keywords, try to get links to that specific blog post after you publish it. A lot of folks make the mistake of only trying to get links to their home page, but you can–and should–use all the same link building techniques to get links pointing to your category pages and individual posts.

Finding a program and choosing products to promote

If you’re new to affiliate marketing, Amazon is a nice place to start.

True, Amazon isn’t the most lucrative affiliate program out there (their commissions aren’t that high, and they only have a 24 hour window where you’ll be credited for sales made to folks who clicked in through your links), but since just about everyone who shops online has an account there, it’s pretty easy to make sales with them. People don’t have to worry about filling out credit cards and personal information since it’s already on file–it’s always easier to make sales when folks don’t have to jump through any hoops.

Amazon also has so many products, either that they sell directly or that are sold through their marketplace partners, that you’re bound to find something niche-related that you can promote.

As far as price goes, I like the $50-$200 range a lot myself. This gives you products that pay a few dollars in commission, and yet they aren’t so expensive that people are going to hem and haw and put things in their “wishlist” instead of their cart.

Once you’ve figured out the system, you can always go on to other more lucrative affiliate programs. Good luck!