I interview Jaron who is making $100+ per month for only a 4-MONTH-old niche website. He told me it actually hit $350 in March 2018 after we recorded this. WOW!!
Which is super impressive because Jaron is just a beginner, who has recently discovered how to build niche websites, and make money online with affiliate marketing.
Jaron originally started with researching dropshipping on Shopify, and eventually gravitated towards affiliate marketing by watching Niche Site Project and Income School on YouTube.
Get my personal KGR Calculator Spreadsheet right here…
And ever since then his site has been growing each month and he’s on track to growing his site exponentially.
The latest update as of the summer of 2018, Jaron, is pulling in about $100 per day.
Here is the transcript of the interview.
Newbie Using the Keyword Golden Ratio
Doug: What’s up? This is another success story interview. In this video, I talk to Jaron, who has a niche site that is about four months old. He’s already hit the $100.00 per month threshold. This is super impressive because Jaron is actually a beginner. He just discovered Amazon affiliate income sites in the last five to six months, or so. Let’s get to the interview now, and hear the tips that Jaron had for you. And just part of his story.
I almost forgot, if you’re not on the email list, you should check it out. Go to nichesiteproject.com and hit the green button. Enter your email address, I’ll send you all my templates, a bunch of other guides and 15000 keywords. If you’re interested in Amazon affiliate marketing, you should definitely check it out. Jaron, how are you today?
Jaron: I’m doing well. Thanks, Doug.
Doug: You emailed me a few, probably weeks, ago, and you were like, “Hey. I got an interesting story.” And I wanted to hear more, that’s why we’re sitting here today. I want to get to the punchline quickly. Can you tell me the results on your site, hit the traffic, and then the revenue? And then we’ll back into the interesting part of the story.
Jaron: Sure, yeah. I started my website at the end of November after I found your channel and Income Schools channel. I had no experience with blogging or with writing. Picked a weird niche, I think, which I think has worked out well for me. We can talk about that more later. I’m just not even quite four months in, in total, and I took the latter half of December and the first half of January off completely. I didn’t write a single post, and I’d only written about maybe 15 or 20 posts prior to that. But, maybe 30 days or so ago, the website, even only being a few months old, really started to take off. A few of my articles started ranking really well for terms with pretty low monthly search volume, but I was getting really good daily traffic. 30, 40, 50 page views a day for really small keywords, but I was the feature snippet for a lot of those so I was getting a lot of traffic.
Doug: Wow.
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Niche Site with 100 to 200 Page Views per Day
Jaron: I think, maybe 30 days ago, started to take off and I was getting 100, 200 page views a day, and then it’s just been quickly climbing. Last week, just from organic traffic, I’ve been getting 500 page views a day. Today I think will be my best day, I think when I checked it right before we got on this call, it’s about 4:20 right now and I’m at 460 page views, so today’s a big day because I just had a keyword that skyrocketed to number one, for fairly large term.
Doug: Cool.
Jaron: For 720 monthly. Today, I’ll probably do 600. It’s monetized with Amazon primarily, so far I’ve made just under $300.00 total. Most of that in the last couple weeks’ish. I’ve made about $60.00 from Clickbank. I’ve made about $20.00 from share a sale, affiliate program. I made 10 bucks from this companies own affiliate program because they don’t have Amazon stock. I’m not even quite four months in.
Doug: Sweet. That’s amazing. Everything sounds great- you’re on a good trajectory, and just about as fast as I’ve seen any person start up. Especially without any experience. That’s amazing. Congratulations.
Jaron: Thank you. I’m pretty excited.
What’s Jaron’s Background
Doug: Right. We’re going to get into some of the more interesting details and some of the strategic stuff, in a second, because I want to hear some of your background. Where are you from? What was your day job? What’d you study in school? Did you go to school? All that stuff, you can just lay it out.
Jaron: Sure. Let’s see, I went to school in Southern Idaho. I went there for business and politics, actually. Got a consulting job right out of college that didn’t work well for me. I was isolated and on the road a lot and it wasn’t a good situation. I quit that and when my wife and I got married, almost six years ago, moved up here to North Idaho where her family is from, and I took over a local IT company. That just did IT consulting for small businesses and homes. Really basic stuff like networking stuff and setting up peoples iPhones, really simple stuff. I did, no schooling, but I was pretty adept with IT stuff.
One of the clients I have for that business, a biotech company, but pretty small one, needed more full time IT help, so I work full time for that company now, in IT. And some web stuff. They have an eCommerce store and website, but nothing like this, not this type of blogging or this type of monetization. I was fairly familiar with setting up a word press site an doing some of that stuff, so I got to skip past that. Not a talented writer at all, I wouldn’t say. Yeah, that’s where I’m now. I work full-time for an IT company, and my wife and I just had our first kid.
Doug: Congrats.
Jaron: Thank you. Eight months ago. And I also have a little part-time job, so pretty busy overall.
Doug: Okay. Sounds very busy.
Jaron: Yeah. I’m trying to shift a little bit more time to this because it’s done exciting for me.
Doug: I find that it’s pretty cool to learn something new, and this has the added benefit of a hobby that can generate money versus a lot of my other hobbies just make the money evaporate. Like beer brewing. You don’t save money with brewing beer.
Jaron: I don’t have that many hobbies and didn’t have that much time for them, so when I found this, it resonated with me and it’s going pretty well so far.
The Gateway to Internet Marketing and Amazon Associates
Doug: Very cool. You just randomly found niche sites and making money online. Did you have some gateway? For me, I found smart passive income, the podcast, and then meandered around and found all sorts of … This whole other world of making money online. How’d you find it?
Jaron: Yeah. Totally a similar situation. I didn’t find smart passive income, I’ve since read some of their blogs. No, I actually found making money online, I was at home, I like my job actually, and don’t want to quit it. But, money is just tighter than I’d like it to be so I wanted to find a way to improve that situation. I found, the first thing I stumbled on with making money online was the trendy Shopify drop shipping method that’s really common. I found a little course on that and did that and had some minor success, but trouble there as it’s capital intensive because you’re dumping a lot of money into Facebook and hoping for results. It’s really time consuming and just didn’t resonate with me. Through that guys course that I did with that, I found affiliate marketing and through searching around for affiliate marketing I found Income School, and through Income School, I found your channel.
And after watching, I don’t know, I stayed up a few nights late just watching tons of YouTube video, until it clicked. And then I actually got those guys, the Income School guys old course. They call it Income School, or I don’t know what they called it at the time. Anyway, I took their course, pretty basic, just setting up a site. I did their course, picked a niche that was, we can talk about it more later, but I think a really bad topic now, thinking back. After watching more videos and picking a niche, it’s not product focused at all. In fact, there’s not that many products to recommend. But, I picked a niche and I just ran with it, and mostly found keywords that answered questions that I could-
Doug: Got it.
Jaron: I don’t even know that the original question, but there’s somewhere.
Doug: Cool.
Jaron: That was my gateway into affiliate marketing.
Doug: Got it. Got it. You found Shopify a little bit, then found affiliate marketing. I’ll give Income School guys a shout out. I’ve interviewed-
Jaron: I don’t know-
Doug: Go ahead.
Jaron: We can edit this part out, but I don’t know how much you want me to talk about Income School on your channel here. If you … I did pay for their course and they got me started.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, it’s totally cool because … I don’t care. It’s fine.
Jaron: Okay. I don’t want to over plug them.
Doug: No, no. In fact, if there’s anyone that I would plug, it would be them because they seem like good guys, smart guys.
Jaron: They’re good guys.
Doug: Yeah.
Jaron: I think I’ve since moved to a lot more of your content, because a lot of stuff they cover, I feel like I’m past.
Doug: Yeah, Sure. Cool. I’ll give a shout out to the Income School guys here, and put a link. They’re good guys, I interviewed them on the channel and then they interviewed me. Those are good guys and it sounds like Jaron, they got you a good foundation to start from. The site we’re talking about today, you launched it out of their course. Is that right?
Jaron: Yep. Yep. I did.
How the first few months feel…as a beginner
Doug: Cool. Walk us through maybe the first month or two, how did you … Not tactical, but how did you feel going through it, because I know in that first period, really not much is happening. You’re doing probably a lot of work and you’re trying to convince your wife, or your spouse, or your partner, whoever, right? Your wife of course, but as budding Internet marketers, we’re trying to tell people about what we’re trying to do and everyone thinks we’re insane and we’re wasting our time. Just tell us, Jaron, what was it like?
Jaron: Sure. Yeah. It was like that. Most of my writing time, and most of my course time, because I work full-time and then … Most of my time was at night when it was my wife’s turn to put our newborn down. I had an hour, an hour and a half while she was putting him down. That was my time to write. Then sometimes after she was done I would finish the article I was on. I did lack some motivation because you finish an article, but there’s no one there to read it. You’re just writing to a ghost town, which is demoralizing at time. And a lot of the content I was writing was really boring. It’s not that fun to research or write, but I was like, “I’m gonna give this a chance.”
And then I made it through two weeks of that, writing one article every night. And then I actually got really burnt out and that was when I took that month long break, it was also getting close to Christmas, so I took a month off after writing 14 or 15 articles and then came back in January, partly because the traffic was already starting to pick up, which was a little more exciting. I’m like, “Oh, there’s gonna be someone that might read this article so I guess I’ll write it.”
Doug: Right.
Jaron: At first it was tough, and my only experience with making money online was with that Shopify thing. I was selling these ridiculous Harry Potter onesies that was importing from China and selling on Facebook. It just seemed like this ridiculous thing. I made no money with-
Doug: So now you have 200 of these onesies you’re trying to … No, I’m just kidding.
Jaron: No. I was just drop shipping them. Yeah, I lost money overall with that whole experience. It was probably good for me in the end, but I definitely didn’t have a cheering squad behind me. Not that my wife wasn’t supportive, but no one was expecting this to work, including me.
Doug: Sure. Very good. All right. I think everyone that is in that first, and we … I made that a shorter period, so we said 30, 45 days, but really the first six months are a little sketchy, right? You don’t know what you’re doing, you probably are making a lot of mistakes and you don’t really know it until afterwards. And there’s a lot of just —uncertainty. There’s a lot of uncertainty throughout that first period and a lot of times, if you can make it past that first six months or so, you’ll be in great shape ‘cause you’ve learned a lot and then, as long as you didn’t make any irreversible mistakes, you’re in good shape. So, everyone that is in that early period, just fight past it and you should be alright. Anything to add, Jeron?
Jaron: I’m in an online chat group of people in similar situations to me. Most of them are a little bit further behind than I am. But, a lot of cool people in there. A lot of people like me that are just full time, just trying to make money online. It’s actually really interesting and kinda fun to be in there and hear everyone’s stories and stuff. But, I think it’s been a little bit different for me ‘cause my period was much shorter because my website’s really already starting to take off, I think really early in comparison to most, which is pretty motivating. ‘Cause every day, I’m getting 50 to 100 clicks on Amazon and I’m selling stuff every day, even if it’s small, adding people to my email list. So it feels really motivating now ’cause every day I’m getting traffic, so it feels like people are going to read what I write. So now I’m kind of already past that point, where I’m like okay, this isn’t working, I just gotta put more time into it. I just started my second website, taking a short break from the first one. I’m gonna kinda grow up a little bit and then come back to this one.
Picking your first Niche
Doug: Got it. So you picked your first niche. Can you tell us how you did your brainstorming and just some background on it? You mentioned maybe it’s not the best niche, but it seems to be working okay for you. So tell us what you can. Of course, you’re not going to reveal it here or anything like that.
Jaron: Yeah, man. My brainstorming was kinda weird with that. I kept coming up with ideas and then researching it and feeling really defeated by what I saw online. I think my first idea was ultimate home desk things, because at the time I wanted to have this really nice home office desk with lots of cool features and stuff, and felt like that was really competitive, and then I was going to do soundproofing, because that was something that the Income School guys had done, like a case study from, and I was like I can beat this site, so I was going to do that.
Then I noticed, and I’ve told the guys since then, because they were so public with that case study there’s been some exact replica copies of their content, like 10 of them. So I felt like okay, well I’m competing with a bunch of me’s out there trying to do the same thing and that feels kinda silly.
So then I found something related to the company I work for. It’s a really interesting niche that I think there’s no one like us that’s really doing much for it, at least I haven’t stumbled across any of it. Most of the websites that have content for it are really old, really poorly made websites with bad SEO, and even though some of the articles are really well done I just feel like a lot of the other factors aren’t there for them, so I just felt like I could beat them out. I found a lot of keywords that I felt like no one was even trying to answer. Even though there wasn’t monthly search volume they just seemed like reasonable queries and so I was like eh, I can write an article on this.
Doug: Cool.
Jaron: So I just went with it, even though it’s not a very easily monetizable niche, and it’s not product oriented at all. It’s not like best waffle makers, or that kind of website, like a really technical area where most of the articles are actually educational kind of.
Doug: Interesting. Well, and I think one, it’s really cool to hear that there are niches out there where it doesn’t look like there are marketers involved in them. So that’s cool.
Jaron: Yeah. Yeah. I think I might have gotten a little bit lucky, ’cause I haven’t found any websites that I felt like … I haven’t found any websites that are in this area that are just monetizing with Amazon most of their articles. Yeah, I think I found the lucky one.
Keyword Golden Ratio gets Early Success
Doug: Okay. And now, because of our conversations before I know that the keyword golden ratio has been helpful, so if people aren’t familiar I’ll put a link so you can learn about the details of keyword golden ratio, but can you tell me how the keyword golden ratio, the KGR, plays a role in the site and the traffic at this point and sort of just how it’s been helpful?
Jaron: Yeah. It plays a huge role. In fact, I use it for picking most of my keywords. One thing I worry about with my website is, I’m seeing a lot of early success but that’s because I’ve done a really good job with keyword research, attacking really small keywords. I haven’t really gone for any of the large keywords in this niche, so I worry a little bit about the longevity. I’m not starting any, planting the seed of a really big article for a big keyword and hoping, you know, I’m just attacking all the small keywords. And I think in my niche there’s just a lot of them. ‘Cause I’ve seen it in the chat of some of your YouTube videos that people are like oh, it’s just I can never find … I know the formula but I can never find the keywords. And for me it just seemed silly to use the formula sometimes because I could just see almost immediately just by searching the keyword, that no one is actually putting the title, the all in search title.
Doug: Yep.
Jaron: Yeah, so I just found a ton of those keywords. And I use the KGR whenever I’m doing keyword research. A lot of the keywords I went after actually had zero monthly search volume. Like any versions of the long tail search had just … you know, I used keywords everywhere for that, and a lot of them just said they had zero monthly search volume but it just seemed like a reasonable question so I would answer it. In fact one of those that I did pretty early on has been one of my biggest, I don’t know, it’s gotten like 10,000 page views or something now, and it said it had zero monthly search volume and I get probably 50 views a day on it, partly because that keyword and a few variants of it are the featured snippet, and the number one search, which is cool. That’s pretty motivating. ‘Cause then when you ask Google Home the question, it says, “According to” my website,” and then it gives my answer, I’m like wow, I was influenced over something, which feels pretty cool.
Yeah, so I just go after really small keywords that I feel like no one is doing a good job answering. That’s how I write all of my articles.
Doug: Wow. I’m just gonna highlight what you just said so people really get it. So you’re site’s like three, four months old right? Three and a half months old.
Jaron: Yeah, it’ll be four months old on the 22nd from when I published my first article.
Doug: Cool, so it’s about three, four months old, about four months old, and you had faith in the KGR, even though you don’t know me but you watched a lot of videos, and then you found some zero search volume terms and you thought hey, this seems like a reasonable article anyway, even though it says no one’s gonna search for it, and now that post brings in 40, 50 visitors a day on a good day.
Jaron: Yeah.
Doug: And so when we multiply that out that’s like, is that 1500 visitors a month? And technically one would expect to get zero. And it’s through all the long tail variations that you’re not searching for the search volume no one knows about. So the point is, we don’t have to be greedy, there’s a lot of keywords out there. You could go after zero search volumes. Not all of them are gonna work out like that, but some will.
Jaron: Yeah. And I’ve gone after a lot of those zero. I’d say most of them at least get some traffic. I don’t think any of them have gotten no traffic. Although, I’ve written a lot of articles in the last 30 days that have had almost no chance to [inaudible 00:18:12]. Interestingly enough, one of those keywords that I wrote just, almost exactly 30 days ago, just shot up to like the number one or two depending on the variant, for a 720 monthly search volume. I went after a much smaller version of the keyword, not doing good enough research and realizing that I could have been writing for a little bit better one, but I’ve shopped the number two spot for a 720 monthly search volume version of it, and today I’ve gotten like 80. That’s part of the reason that today’s going so well is, it just shot up and I’m getting a ton of page views to it.
KGR for Ranking for Higher Search Volumes
Doug: That’s cool. Nice. And I’ll tell you something else, right? You mentioned that you weren’t targeting that 720 search volume term, but you started ranking for it. That will happen again and again, and what will happen is you won’t intend to rank for the 2500 or the 3200 search volume, but you’ll rank for it anyway because your other article is starting to move up and getting good user interaction. So you can go back and add, sort of recalibrate the post so that you’re serving both audiences and then that’s how you can … Most people don’t stick with me long enough to get to that part, they’re just like “oh, the KGR won’t work,” but you’ll start ranking and you already have, you’ll start ranking for stuff that you didn’t mean to with higher search volumes, and that’s where the really cool stuff happens.
Jaron: ‘Cause that was a term that qualified for the KGR with me, ’cause I was just searching a lower variant of it. ‘Cause I think it’s 240 a month, right?
Doug: 250.
Jaron: 250 you’re under, so it was in that range. So I was like okay, this is a go. I’m just now I realized, just today I realized that it’s ranking now for a much higher search volume terms.
Doug: Cool. Now let’s switch gears over to content. Sounds like you are writing the content on your own, you started lean and general.
Jaron: Yep.
Content and Writing
Doug: So how do you approach content? Actually like you have a topic, you have a term that you’re gonna target, what do you do?
Jaron: I kinda do the … I haven’t really researched it that much, but I was watching an old interview you did with Dave Fox and you guys were talking about the skyscraper method, which I haven’t actually researched that much, and I do know outreach portion of it, but I do something similar to that where I just look at all the people that actually answered the question and just kind of read through.
Actually, I was watching your new content video today as well, and you were talking about this. And then I just kinda write a conglomerate that’s just a better version of all of them, kind of all in my own words, and I’ll cite the ones that I really felt like I took quite a bit from, but I just write kind of a … Mostly what I do is just try to write a much longer version than what’s best out there. Most of my content is really long. I was looking today, I’ve written 51 articles on the website, and I’m averaging about 1800 words over that, so I write pretty long articles, which I think I’ve seen suggestions for. ‘Cause a lot of these really low volume search keywords people are writing just quick answers, and I would write like 1500 words. It seemed ridiculous at the time. It seemed like I was blabbering on, but it just kinda worked. So my content strategies, I just search the best results out there and read them all and kind of bring them all … Sometimes I’ll even copy all of them into a document and then I’ll just read through the whole thing, and then I just in a separate document kind of rewrite it all in my own words with being able to reference it all on the right hand side and just kinda come up with a better version of what’s out there.
Get my guide to improve your keyword search results
Doug: Got it. Got it. And for people that want to do something similar I have what I call the research paper method, which is essential that where you do research and then you curate the information, put it in your own words. I mean it’s literally how people write books.
Jaron: Yeah. I was just gonna say, that’s my method, but your other method is the FAQ method. That’s how I add length to articles I feel like are too short. So I’ll do the RPM and write an article, I’m like oh, that’s only 1200 words, let’s get it to 2000. And I’ll just see other keywords that are close or other questions that people are answering, I’ll check Quora.
Jaron: That are close or other questions that people are answering, I’ll check Quora or like other places and then I’ll just answer a few more questions. In the end, I don’t put FAQ but I’ll just like answer a few more questions, then I’ll just add a bunch of links at the end that’s still relevant.
Doug: Sure.
Jaron: Sometimes I’ve ranked for some of those sub-headings of specific questions on a small topic.
Doug: Yeah, it’s amazing how that … I mean, it works because people ask these questions and you can answer them in your post. It’s super helpful.
Jaron: Yeah and it’s always really niched down by then so sometimes when people combine all the keywords into one really specific question, then you’ll grab those people.
Doug: Now, your major in university was history and politics, is that what you said?
Jaron: Business and politics.
Doug: Business and politics.
Jaron: Yeah, I have two bachelor degrees. One in business administration with an emphasis in finance and one in political economy.
Doug: Gotcha. And the reason why I ask that is did you write a lot in those two majors, did you end up writing a lot of papers?
Jaron: Yeah, I mean I did write a lot of papers. I’m not a very good writer.
Doug: Okay.
Jaron: I don’t personally think I’m a very good writer, I’m not that creative. But I have done a lot of writing in university so I do have some experience putting together a paper like that. And a lot of the stuff with my niche is pretty technical, it takes a lot of research in writing so I think that probably has helped with that.
Doug: Cool, and I was gonna say it doesn’t sound like you show up with writers block ’cause some people are just like “I just don’t know what to do.” You don’t have much time and you’re working multiple jobs and you have a young child. So I take it you sit down and you get to it, right?
Jaron: Yeah, yeah. Early on I did have some writer’s block. I think you were talking, maybe in this recent content video or like the very first time I had a blog post to write, I’m sitting looking at the blank window and I just put in the title of keyword I wanted and I’m like “Oh, damn. Where do I go from here?” So I just started Googling it but now that I’ve written a bunch of articles, I think if you just brute force your way through those early articles, even though they’re garbage. I went back and read some of my early articles and they’re really bad.
Doug: Totally.
Jaron: A lot of them haven’t done that well ranking wise because I think I’ve just gotten better at understanding what people actually want to read and formatting it better. I used to have huge blocks of text and it was just pretty poor but if you just brute force your way through those early articles. Now I feel like I kind of have a strategy for it where I just sit down, I know how to research, pull it all together and then write a really long conglomerate of the best research out there for it.
I suffer more with motivation than writer’s block. Sometimes I’ll sit down like “I don’t want to write another really boring blog post.” ‘Cause my niche is really boring, most of the topics so yeah.
Doug: Gotcha. So it sounds like it’s fairly technical because you’ve literally said that a few times. Is it something that you can outsource or is it too technical to do that?
Jaron: I think that I could outsource. What I haven’t done is I’ve written almost no product reviews. I’ve written almost no “best-of” posts. There are some products in this niche, those are the products that I am selling on Amazon. Although I’d love to talk you a little bit later about Amazon because most of the things I’ve sold on Amazon are not the products I link to. I’d be curious what other peoples experience is.
Doug: Sure, sure.
Jaron: But there are some products and I’ve written maybe two review posts and no “best-of” type posts. Most of my content is just answering questions that people are asking about the niche and then within it I’ll be like “And my favorite this is,” or whenever it’s reasonable to do and I’ll just text link to something, that’s it.
Doug: Got it.
Jaron: So I think what I could do is outsource some review posts of the products that I’ve been recommending and that’s something I am considering now that the site’s picking up and making some money because I’ve written ever article on my own. And this second site that I just started, I kind of picked because I want to try to outsource some of the writing and it’s a niche that would be pretty easy to do that with.
Doug: Very cool. Okay. Now, anything else you can think of, sort of like on the content side or how you’re approaching it that you think would be helpful?
Jaron: I mean one thing that I’ve done with like writer’s block stuff, and I think you’ve probably talked about this in some of your videos but I think I mostly got it from the Income School guys. They call it their “Hit List of Articles.” ‘Cause when you’re in the keyword research area, it’s really, I think, pretty easy to find a group of keywords. You just kind of go down that rabbit hole of finding keywords and finding KGR and just getting in that zone.
I think what a lot of people do is they find a keyword and be like “Oh, I found it!” And then they’ll go write it and they’ll stop that process and it’s really inefficient. One thing I do is I’ll sit down for whole hour and a half I have in the evening and it’ll just be picking articles. And then I just go into WordPress and I just start a draft for each one so they’re already all there. And then when I do have writer’s block and I don’t know what to write, I just go and I have all those articles there and I just pick one and I’ll move forward with it. That’s helped me a lot, I think because it’s just much more efficient. So that saves me all the time.
Link Building For KGR?
Doug: Very good. Okay, moving again to new topic. Link building and outreach and stuff like that. So it sounds like you haven’t done too much. Can you tell us what you’ve done so far?
Jaron: Yeah, I’ve done no link building at all, actually.
Doug: Okay.
Jaron: So yeah, I’ve just done no link building. I haven’t even attempted to do anything. All I’ve done is just write the content and make sure that search console finds.
Doug: Cool.
Jaron: It is something I would like to do more of but again, I purchased Income School’s course. They’re pretty … They’re more like we understand that keywords or back linking is helpful but we feel like it’s more efficient just to write more articles if you have a limited among time.
Doug: Sure.
Jaron: And I was like “Oh, that makes sense.” Now that my website’s growing up a little bit, I’d like to do some white hat back linking because I have almost no back links. When I checked in December I think I had two from like websites that automatically do that or something, really bad back links. So yeah, I think I’ve been kinda surprised by my results considering I’ve done no link building and had no one linked to my site.
Doug: Interesting and I think, I don’t know what this site is but from what you just mentioned it sounds like since you’ve approached it, I think probably from the Income School course influence, you wrote articles that were really just helpful. They weren’t product reviews and then when you coupled that with a Keyword Golden Ratio method, you were able to escalate the traffic that you were getting without having any links. And then because you wisely added some, I mean you know the type of the visitor that is on the site because they’re asking questions, so you know what kind of product can solve the problem that they’re asking about.
Jaron: Yeah and I would still say 80% or 90% of my articles, which is higher than they recommend but still have links in them. And I do have some other, I have a click bank product that I have a little side thing for and I recommend sometimes. It’s an e-book on my niche but I’ve sold maybe $60, $70 with that. So every article has some kind of link. I usually try to put some kind of link like above the fold, like really early on and with that I’ve just captured a lot of just random Amazon purchases. ‘Cause people will just be like “What’s this? Oh, I don’t care about that,” and they’ll go back to my article. But then I’ll just grab their evening purchases of dishware and whatever.
One of my articles, when I was saying that I have a featured snippet for, it’s a really weird article to have any Amazon links in. It’s a really specific technical question that it feels weird to put in an Amazon link but I just threw one early in. I was like “Oh, and you can get this on Amazon.” It was probably a poor strategy overall but I did that after the article started to pick up and man, it’s surprising how many people just click it, you know?
Doug: Yeah.
Jaron: Early on, it’s probably just about user experiences honestly but I’ve gotten a lot of Amazon sales just from … I mean, it’s relatively associated, it’s not that outlandish but a lot of people just click it and I’ll capture a lot of Amazon sales from that.
Doug: Very cool. It sounds like you have a great start to your site, Jaron. Traffic’s going up, even just this week it sounds like things are popping for you. So what are your sort of mid-term goals? Say 6, 12 months from now, where do you want be?
Jaron: Yeah, so I think this month in March, I think Amazon alone will probably do around 200-250, based off of what’s happened and what’s happening. So I think March, four months in, 350, 300, 350 will probably be pretty reasonable. So I would have said a month ago that $500 would have been great but I think I’ll hit that pretty soon. So I think by the end of the year I’d pretty happy if I was at $1,000 or $1,500 from this site.
But my ultimate goal would be to have two or three of these sites that I put a good amount of time into and like match my current income like two years from now or two years from when I started. Which I think is reasonable to do.
I’ve seen a lot of early success with this site but what I don’t know is did I just stumble upon a really good niche that was really underserved, and so I’ve just had a lot of success because I got lucky and found the perfect niche? Or is it because I’m decent at keyword research and writing these articles?
That I’ll find out with this new website that I just started, I’ve only written like five articles on it ’cause I’ve had no time to write. But a few months from now, we’ll find out if I got lucky or if I’m good at this. So that’ll be … I’m excited to find out. We’ll see. Stay tuned.
Doug: Very cool. Well, let us know in the comments if you want to get an update from Jaron. Jaron, would you come back sometime in the future for an update?
Jaron: Yeah, I’d love to.
Doug: Excellent. So thanks a lot Jaron, it’s a pleasure to talk to you and I’ll see on some live streams coming up.
Jaron: All right, thanks Doug.
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Hi, I have this website [edited out the url] but it gets nearly no traffic, any suggestions? $100+ per month would be sweet!
It’s a locally targeted service site, which is not my area. So I’d say if you want to do that, learn local SEO and lead generation. The Amazon Affiliate model is very different. Both can be great, but you can’t really mix and match.
This is awesome. I’ve only written 3 articles on my affiliate site using the KGR method but they’re already pulling in great traffic. Would love to see more case studies/interviews with people who AR successfully implementing this stuff.
Jim, thanks! You’re in luck…check out these new success stories. Then, I have about 5 more on YouTube. 🙂