David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

Here's the bad news. I think I have proved something so far!

I am not sure Compare Sat Nav can make billions on its own. I believe that through organic search listings, link exchanging and so forth, I can increase the visitor count but only so far.

At the end of the day, is currently the second highest performing site out of my portfolio and given the fact that the others have been running for around 1 to 2 years, this much progress in 5 weeks is great.

However, I do think I need to start work on a couple more niche websites as brothers and sisters for Compare Sat Nav.
 
At the moment, Compare Sat Nav is a niche consumer electronics website. There are a couple of sites that offer either generic consumer electronics price comparison or a poor standard of sat nav price comparison.

I do not deny that I have a small amount of direct competition but I am not terrifically worried by it too (yet!). I also have a larger source of competitors known as 'car manufacturers'. Sat nav is fast becoming a standard option on most cars and so people may not be interested in such a price comparison.

It is also an expensive product and people may not have £200 stuffed down the back of the sofa!

A lot of the affiliate marketing business revolves around testing, developing, trialling and reproducing the results again and again. This takes time and effort. It also takes time for the search engines to become more familiar with your site.

I therefore conclude that affiliate marketing is not an overnight 'make money fast' or 'get rich quick' scheme. Mind you, I never claimed that. I understand that this could take months or even years to perfect. I also conclude that I need to put more of my eggs in more baskets. Therefore, it is very difficult to make a liveable income from running just one affiliate site.

Using my current stats, I need 39 sites in my portfolio all achieving the same conversion stats as Compare Sat Nav to generate £20,000 per annum.

I have no intention of running 39 sites as I could not allocate enough of my time to each one.

Essentially, I would like to operate 5 niche sites under the David Fiske brand, spending one day a week on each. Monday is currently Compare Sat Nav day. Saturday and Sunday are my days off. I didn't become self employed to work day and night AND weekends! (OK, I work most weekends as well but this is stopping!).

Each day will be split into several tasks - keyword optimisation, statistical analysis, link building, content generation, etc.

If I can generate an extra 5 pages of content and one backlink for each site each week, in one year I would have a total of 1,300 pages of content and 260 backlinks. This will go along way to develop the David Fiske project.

As with Compare Sat Nav, I intend to be as open as possible with my earnings, traffic and life. At the end of the day, I am conducting this experiment so you don't have to.

Read the results, adapt my mistakes to make them work for you, and concentrate on developing your revenue streams. And if you like what you read here, tell people about this project.

Whilst making money on the Internet may seem scary and confusing, when you dissect it, it is a little bit of luck mixed with knowledge and skill.