That’s right 15 days after buying a brand new domain and building a 4 page site – and we’re ranking in the top 10 for a keyword that gets 30k searches a month and has 150k sites that are listed for the term.

The sale netted me about $5 – one more sale and the domain is paid for for the year – and since the hosting is all on the same plan for this site, and many others of mine – So in about 2 more sales the site will have paid its share of the yearly hosting.

I’m going to stick with this site and keep trying to get it ranked higher on page 1. That will surely bring in more traffic/sales – Right now I’m pretty low on the page in spot 10. Sure it’s the last spot on page 1 – but it’s still page 1 – and organic traffic to my site has doubled already today than it was yesterday when I was still ranking on page 2. And the day is only half over

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Only about 15 people have found me through search – but that’s only going to go up, and quickly. 3 of the keywords that people found me with I added more content to the site to optimize further for those words. I did this because it’s a product -  a $400 product (it’s the collectors/top of the line addition+better steel knife of the same brand/type) – I had to make a new affiliate and sign up on ShareASale so I could have this product featured. Nice.

Before I added the extra content for this product I was ranking 30-40th position for the words  because I didn’t even think to try and optimize for them – Today I have 2 page one listings for similar searches (9th and 5th) so I should start to see some more traffic for these.

I have never really been an affiliate so I’m playing it all by ear, but it just seemed like the right thing to do – Go for the low hanging fruit first.

No sales yet as of the time of this writing – but my traffic has leveled out at 50 visits a day (heh, “leveled out” for the last 3 days) but that’s just the run-off from StumbleUpon mostly well, 1/3 of it anyway.

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This morning I still had not been indexed – bummer, right – So I the first thing I did was hit up the social media sites – Submitted to digg, mixx, reddit, del.icio.us ect, ect, ect, etc – Stumbled it and sent it to all my friends. Sure enough about an hour later – I’ve been crawled for the first time – HUZZAH!

The next thing I did was reach out to my network of friends and contacts to see if anyone ran related sites and would be interested in linking to me – After all, the site provides some great information. I got a few links that way – then I went to some related dofollow blogs and made comments – the regular stuff.

After that I did what I don’t often to anymore – submitted to a bunch of free directories that I like and have helped me in the past. Sure this doesn’t do as much good – I even submitted to dmoz! (I KNOW RIGHT?!) It will be 6 years before they let me in - but it’s easy – and it can’t hurt.

I think tomorrow – and the coming weeks – will be more of the same and I may hold off on writing about it any further until I rank for my keywords and start seeing some REAL traffic.

Traffic since I put the site up and analytics running (by days)- 1 (that’s me!), 12 (that’s a couple of my friends and the Affiliate Managers), 34(Forum members), 89(mostly reddit/stumble people) – heh, lets hope this number keeps skyrocketing! I’m really excited to see when the first people are finding me through organic search/keywords.

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I got the site built and set up on my hosting plan. I have the affiliate links running as well as tracking with Google analytics.

I decided to build the site in plain HTML instead of wordpress. In some ways it was nice to go back to the old ways… but I had fully forgotten how pain in the ass it is if you want to make changes to all of the pages. The site I built is small – Since we are following what Viperchill has laid out for us – but it has a lot of useful original content so we’ll see what happens.

Today I spent some time adding links to this new affiliate site from my other domains. The next step is to start hitting up some “survivalist” forums and getting it in there. To start getting this sucker ranked.

Might as well share with you all the site I’m building and give myself some link love. The product I picked was, as I said, the pocket knife I carry all the time the – Benchmade Griptilian – And that’s the link to the site I have built. When I get accepted to some other affiliate programs I’ll add them in that where to buy section as well.

I thought I would feel dirty being an affiliate… but when you are trying to sell something you actually really love – it’s pretty great!

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The first step in his process is to write down what you are interested in. This was an easy enough step and I came up with the following list: Camping, Dancing, Dogs, Music, Guitars, BBQ, Beards and several others. But these were the ones that I wrote down first.

Step 2 is to see if there is a market for any of these things and, all but beards, has a lot of search. Great, now all we need to do is find a product.

As it turned out the first product that came to mind was a product that I was actually playing with while coming up with this list AND it related to camping – My pocket knife.

Next it was time to see if my particular brand of pocket knife was something people searched for – I bought it back in ‘06 and it has been in my pocket every day since then, it’s not a multitool, but it has come in handy just about every day (even if I just use it to open letters and boxes).

Sure enough for the exact name/brand there are 22,000 searches a month – Checking to see the competition for my primary keyword I found that only about 150,000 pages even rank… Really not to many. Great. The clincher was that one of the secondary keywords (only the make of the knife) has 40,000 searches a month but only about 35,000 listings – Woah, this should be pretty easy to rank for (from my experience with SEO anything under 50,000 is doable with not too much work).

The next step was to find if there was a good affiliate program – turns out there are many (picking the right one is going to be the hard part)

So now I have a product that I really love and an exact match URL. Now it’s just time to make the site and try and rank for my words. Hopefully I can make and get the site up today.

Now, I’m probably not starting as small as laid out in Glen’s plan – but I do have a lot more experience with SEO and getting pages ranked than someone totally new to the game. So wish me luck!

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I read an article yesterday I just happened to find through following @Viperchill that was truly inspiring. Glen wrote about his successful process of creating affiliate sites. As many of you know I got my start in the internet marketing world with a few funny sites that got enough visitors to bring in a fun Google ads revenue.

I have never tried my hand at affiliate marketing. I have often thought about it but always found reasons not to.  After reading Glens post it’s time to give it a go. I am going to follow his process to nearly the letter and I will write about it here to keep everyone up to date.

Go and check out what he wrote but to sum up the process: Find one of your passions, see if there is a market, find a product that fits, make the site, get ranked, profit

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I started thinking to myself that if I’m going to have this title I should put some reason behind it – or at the very least rank #1 in google for a search of Lord of Awesome. This is my mission now. I will spend time over the coming weeks to rank myself in the serps as Lord of Awesome.

This is where the SEO comes in – I will rank this page and others for Lord of Awesome as I have for my personal name Dave Winget. A search for Dave Winget comes up as the first 10 results pointing to things I have done and, given a little time, Lord of Awesome will come up as well.

If you want to help me out with this noble mission of branding myself as Dave Winget – Lord of Awesome feel free to link to this post and write about the best title – Lord of Awesome.

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Lets see with this yelp page for Omni Financial. And that ends our test to push a page up in the serps and potentially harmful ones down. Go get them Omni Financial… Go get them.

Expect a follow up post as soon as I know what’s going on with it. Could be pushed up in a day, week, month..

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That said I started a Twitter account for my new company @10kthings (I’m @Wingnut by the way).

Before I started the company Twitter account it I asked my follwers to see if everyone thought it was a good/bad/lame idea or not – the resounding answer was DO IT.  So far it’s been a great idea.  I really can’t be more happy with it (well, I wish my partners would use it more… but they started to today) With me and 4 other people tweeting (using it the real way and not just shameless self promotion) it’s been fun.  We have a few followers and it’s just nice to know that we have the support out there.  For all the time it takes chatting with people – it’s all well worth it.  It keeps us motivated knowing that there are people watching what we are up to and willing to help support us.

All and all starting a Twitter account for your company is a GOOD THING.  It opens your company up to a whole new range of being social and lets you know that there are people out there that actually do care and wish you the best…. It also it’s awesome free advertising and public relations!

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So I did what any Freelancer turned Agency Worker doing side freelance work would do – Took it up a notch with my freelance work. I have always worked with designers and PPC consultants to help with my freelance clients – but now it’s official a company. The launch of the new internet marketing company site, 10kThings.com, should happen later this evening.

It’s pretty cool. We have been working together for a while now and interestingly enough we can do the exact same things any large agency can but for a much lower cost – As we have ZERO overhead.

We will see how things go – we have a few proposals out and a couple clients already signed. Who knows this thing could get huge… here’s to hoping.

To those wondering I will be keeping my full time job – and they were cool that I was working side work when they hired me as they encourage the entrepreneurial spirit. I am really happy where I am with this company and 10k Things will not be a direct competitor with where I am now. The current company I am with is much more large scale than anything 10k Things will be for quite some time.

Right now it’s just a fun project to bring in a little extra money with taking on a few clients and try something new.

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