This is a post that we actually send out to one of our email lists but we thought it was worth while posting to our blog here as well as it is a question we get asked regularly. Our answer to that question is always the same: NO. Actually we say it a lot nicer than that but that in essence is our response.
Why?…well for a couple of reasons actually. The first is the age old problem of people copying the site. We’ve had the experience of people not only copying individual pages but also in some instances copying the whole site. And although the old adage says ‘being copied is the greatest form of flattery’ when it comes to the internet, this doesn’t hold true. Copying our site doesn’t help anyone and no one benefits, not the person copying our site and certainly not us.
The other reason is that we have made so many mistakes in the past that giving someone one of our websites to look at will only result in them making the same mistakes we did. I have already read reviews from people who have obviously copied the format of some of our reviews. Unfortunately the particular format they copied didn’t work for us and I know it won’t work for them either.
Then there are others that attempt to follow our site structure because they found one of our websites and think they should structure it the same way. They are wasting their time because the site structure has very little to do with our success. We have sites structured in all sorts of different ways and the reviews still work regardless of how the site is structured.
And one more reason that we don’t give out our websites is that we are forever testing different things. We might try an Amazon plugin out for example. And because we are trying it out, it doesn’t mean that it is actually working for us, but people who visit the site may assume that because we are using that plugin then they should do the same.
What made this all work for us in the end wasn’t how our sites were structured or the plugins we used, the niche we chose, or whether we used a blog or a html site – what worked was creating quality reviews and working our butts off getting traffic to those reviews.
We want you to be thinking in the same way. Just create a fantastic content for your site and spend the rest of your time getting traffic/backlinks to that content. That should be your primary goal. You don’t need to see our websites for this to work. You don’t need to see anyone’s website for this to work. You simply need to focus on your website, provide value and work on getting traffic.
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Wanda/Paula……I’m glad you cleared this up. I can only imagine how many people are asking you for you URL’s. It pretty sad that people will copy and entire site. It’s just laziness.
Even if they did copy your site, most would not take the time to send the traffic to the site to see the results anyway. Once you get a plan in place for traffic generation, it get’s a little easier.
I’ve had a few people via a internet marketing forum ask me via direct message to view one of my sites. Like you said, site structure is not as important as great content.
Talk later.
Ron
Exactly Ron. If you go to any of the big internet marketing forums you will find it very rare for any of the big players to give out their niche sites. Those people aren’t silly – they know all the reasons why not to.
thanks very much for your advise.I have read some of your articles and i`m a freshman to this business . I searched among Amazons and finally find a product , but I still don`t know how to write the reviews .how to write the beginning of the reviews and which parts should write ? about the product , i have find some details and others comments . but i find it difficult to organized them together . and at last , it`s my first time to use English to write essays ,forgive my poor English .
Have a read of these posts. They may help get you started:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2010/07/10/how-to-weave-a-story-into-your-product-reviews/
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2009/12/17/how-to-write-product-reviews-that-convert/
Very wise, ladies! Although many of your followers would just like to “see how you did it”, there are others out there who would copy everything shamelessly.
And that is an interesting point you make about, not all of your sites use the techniques that you currently use. Some are part of your “evolutionary history”! You’ve moved on since you made them, learnt better techniques etc.
I did hear of one of your sites (used as an example on someone else’s course) and do intend to go and take a look. But what I really enjoyed was the feeling of “hey, Paula and Wanda, have read this guy’s stuff”. That made me feel that I wasn’t wasting my time taking a look at his process too.
So yes, I’d love a guided tour of every site you ever made but I totally understand why it will never happen. :)
The thing is that a guided tour probably wouldn’t help anyway. It really all comes down to writing a great page of content and getting traffic to that page. That’s really affiliate market in a nutshell. You could have a website with only one page of content and if what you have written is helpful to the reader and you can get plenty of traffic to that page then you could be making enough money to make a full time living. One page is all it takes.
How very true :-)
The “product” of the internet is words carried by websites. To make the most from the internet, one needs to provide both and the better quality they are, the more you/we can make.
Thanks for the honesty :-)
Well said Jan. When we moved from writing poor quality reviews to really good quality reviews, things started to change for us. Providing quality is soooo important.
I would never copy a site or a post. I am currently in a huff because someone has been passing my content and reviews off as their own and I was actually banned from a network because of this.
Yep, that sort of thing has been known to happen. You can try The Wayback Machine to see if your content is showing up there and then can tell the network that your content was up first.
http://www.waybackmachine.org/
I see myself linking to this post a LOT from here on out. I am so tired of those that won’t give up on the thought that site design/structure is 99% of ones success…oddly enough, it’s not always designer that say it either. LOL
Personally, I say not even 50%, but whatever. It’s important, but not so much.
I’ve witnessed some pretty, umm…..interesting designs receive more monthly traffic and sales then 50 of the prettiest combined.
Interesting = ugly, really off, or almost downright non-existent.
Yes ‘ugly’ seems to make no difference. I’ve seen some really bad sites (at least in my eyes) that get tons of traffic.
Yep. “Pretty” is for advertisers, if you’re into that sorta thing. It does not, or definitely should not matter to those there for the content itself.
As a learner, I can see both sides of the coin. Ultimately for you though, people will probably copy your site structure and copy and niche and test it against you.
It’s completely fine, everyone has their reasons, the above being the main one.
For some reason people seem to think that the niche is going to make all the difference to them so they spend most of their time trying to find out the niche of someone who has made it and then copy it.
We have sites on all sorts of niches and each do as well as the other. The niche isn’t the issue. The issue is writing well written content about a product that will help someone decide whether the product is worth buying.
We had niches that weren’t doing well at all and only when we started writing quality content did they start to make us regular sales.
I actually have come across a few of your sites and they are different from each other. So I agree, the sites are not the reason for your success. It’s the reviews themselves which you have given us the blueprint of exactly how to do it in The Amazonian Profit Plan.
Exactly Cathy. It all comes down to creating pages with good quality product reviews and getting traffic to those pages. Anyone who does that can’t help but make money from it.
I have faith on you paula and the concept of preselling through a well written review is a major step towards a success.
I’ve believed u so much that I’m writing reviews around the products that hardly gets 500 searches per month. I would be happy enough to get 500 visitors to my review page if it makes 20% conversions. Fingers crossed!!!
I belong to a membership site where one of the members came across several of your sites and now think they KNOW what your strategy is.
It’s sad really that people think they actually know the science and thought process behind a site just by looking at it. This is so far from the truth and what folks don’t realize is that they could be hurting their business by simply copying what could actually be another marketer’s “test experiment”.
This same forum also believe that your ebook price was inflated and a rehash of other books.
On a more positive note, I purchased your ebook and saw the value immediately. I came across a single response of yours on the warriorforum ,ended up here, and bought your book immediately.
Your ebook totally put me at ease and removed a lot of the road blocks most new and even some more experienced affiliate marketers put themselves through in this business.
To Your Continued Success!
Sunray
Well there are always going to be those who take a negative approach to everything in their life. A lot of forums tend to perpetuate that sort of thinking so we tend to avoid them. The Warrior Forum is one of the best in my opinion. You will get negative people of course but most of them an looking for positives rather than negatives. They are the ones that will succeed.
So glad you like the book and that you saw the value in it.
I had a feeling that this would be coming up as a question to you. What you’re saying is true. There are definitely those who would copy you. I know I’ve had articles copied and my name left on them as the author, but links removed and a whole lot of garbage and links for fake handbags inserted into them. The articles aren’t even about handbags – totally different subject! Very annoying! They’re on free blogging type sites and which I’ve contacted and complained but nothing is done. I understand what you’re saying completely.
You’ve done a great job and given all that’s needed in your E-book so good on you!
It’s unfortunate really that people feel the need to copy. It just doesn’t work. They are looking for the easy way out. It will be a never ending search for them because taking the easy way out usually means providing little value…and providing little value usually means not making much money.
Great advice and too true: people get so stuck on a theme, a plugin, a keyword tool – that they forget what makes good business.
Content.
Connecting with people.
Answering a question, a need, fulfilling a desire (as in a luxury item).
Great advice! I’ve just completed the Amazonian Profit Plan, signed up as an affiliate, and will get the word out – your ebook is JUST WHAT I NEEDED.
Lovely, and worth the price of admission!
To your success.
Excellent, glad you like the ebook. Hope it helps with your Halloween sales.
I’ve been so motivated by your articles I went and started my first blog on blogspot. Will that work or am I shooting myself in the foot doing it this way vs WP?
Thanks
It can work and Blogspot is great for anyone who wants a totally free website because you don’t have to pay for domain name or hosting. However, we do not recommend this method because of the reasons that Cathy has mentioned below.
John, blogspot will work but I wouldn’t recommend them. They have a nasty habit of shutting down blogs with no explanation or warning.
Thank you Cathy we totally agree.
Hi Wanda and Paula,
I did not exactly know where to put this question, but I have been reading your blog for a little while now and I have also been looking into the Amazonian Profit Plan. My biggest problems are the reviews and finding products (which I know you go over in the guide), but I am curious how you guys come up with domain names-that is kind of where I am stuck right now because I do not want to do micro niche’s anymore. I have one site that is earning roughly $10 a month with no back linking and I have affiliated it with Amazon-which I think is the funnest way to monetize a site :)
I love how you 2 just have a handful and are making over 10k a month-and with the Holidays coming up you will probably bounce up to 15k. Do you guys have a stopping point or just the sky is the limit. Like a big picture goal?
Thank you for all of the helpful information on your site! I am gonna add you to my blogroll.
To be honest Kelly we don’t get too caught up with domain names. We like to get our keywords in there if we can but if we can’t we just get something generic. We tend to focus on individual pages rather than the site as a whole.
We have product reviews on sites with domain names that have nothing to do with the product and they still make sales.
So our advice is to try and get your main keywords in the domain name if you can but don’t sweat it if you can’t. You can still make this work.
And we definitely don’t have a stopping point with this business. The sky is definitely the limit with internet marketing. We are constantly reassessing our goals.
Thank you Paula for your answer-that was one of my biggest concerns!
Kelly,
If you can’t find a suitable .com for yoru domain name (thanks to teh spammers, auto bloggers and domain squatters), Matt Cutts from Google says that .net & .org are good. Just avoid .info as Google staff know they are cheap and mainly used by spammers. Also Matt says the keywords in yoru url’s are important.
So let’s say you do coffee machine reviews (hmmm Lattes). KellysCoffeeReviews.com maybe available. Yet your category & page url may read kellyscoffeereviews/breville/breville-bes860-review.php for example. That link has a lot of good ranking potential on Google :) Also use dashes (-) or dots (.) as separators. NOT underscores (_). Google bot sees underscores as nothing and will join the keywords together (eg. brevillebes860review) which may not rank well as it doesn’t match what people search for.
Cheers,
Dave
Thank you Dave,
That is where I get stuck! I am used the searching for micro niche sites, which I do not want to do anymore. I want to venture to bigger sites that have traffic of over 1000 visitors a month!
Absolutely – if you have no money what so ever, blogger is a great way to get started. But as soon as a little money starts coming in, you should start buying your own little piece of the internet.
It’s like renting and owning – when you rent (blogger), the landlord can kick you out if they think you aren’t following the rules. But when you own your own real estate, you get to make the rules.
Well said Kelly – that is a great way of explaining it.
I see this all the time. Not just with websites, but with email campaigns, sales funnels, and more.
“Guru Joe” sent me this email and he’s a gazillionaire, so it must work. Yeah, right.
You might be seeing one of GJ’s failed tests…
I guess that’s why you really need to do your homework with anything you buy online. Who knows what you are going to get.
Furthermore John, “Guru Joe” makes money from selling his crap not actually doing the work he teaches. Most money making secrets course online aren’t secrets at all. Just commonsense.
That can be a major problem with so called experts not being experts at all. There are a lot of people selling money making ebooks who aren’t actually make money online at all.
Hi Paula/Wanda I have asked from you to show me example of one of our website by comments in one of your post which I don’t remember, But after reading this post I don’t need to know about your website. Now I’ll start focusing on my website like both of you did!