Web Earnings

If you aren’t familiar with the Affiliate Challenge, you can find out more here. Well I finally got round to launching the site and finishing off bits and bobs - as usual I got the bulk of it done quite quickly and then couldn’t find the time to do the ‘finishing off’! The site is http://www.campingnow.co.uk/ - My real aim in this competition is to show that you don’t need to be a whizz programmer or graphic designer to create a site that looks half decent, adds value to users and makes money. whether I’ll prove the theory or not is still to be seen!  
 
After much deliberating I decided on camping acessories as the area I would focus on as I thought this would be pretty uncompetitive. I setup a site with a bunch of products from the major camping retailers that had feeds, added some content, guides, campsite directory etc and then put the site live. I launched it ‘properly’ on the 12th Jan. It took 3 days to get indexed by Google but swiftly hit the ’sandbox’ (which it keeps jumping in and out of), took 5 days for most of the site to get indexed by Yahoo (which I thought was pretty good) and I’m still waiting on the good old MSN bot to come my way. I did a little bit of forum posting and submitted a few articles here and there to get the ball rolling and it seemed to work, I’ve also got a few link exchanges through forums etc so we’ll see how that goes. I have submitted Google and Yahoo sitemaps and made the site structure as flat and crawlable as possible (without getting too obsessed).  
 
After a while I realised that ‘camping equipment’ was a very general area an there was thousands upon thousands of products to be had so decided to be a little bit more specific. I saw the music festival crowd as quite a good niche to target so thought I would. I then built an area of the site dedicated to music festivals and did some more specific forum posting. The good thing about this area is that the whole social networking thing really comes into play so there are a huge number of marketing opportunities! I have also nearly finished an ebook about festivals which I plan to distribute for free from the site. I have high hopes that this will act as pretty good linkbait and allow me to collect some email addresses.  
 
Another thing I noticed was the huge number of online camping equipment reatailers who don’t have affiliate programs or really use cpc to any real effect. I think if I can get the site up to a decent standard they might be interested in some advertising on campingnow. Even though this was meant to be a short term project, I think there’s real potential as the camping industry hasn’t fully made the crosover to the online world.  
 
So the site’s been live for 16 days and here’s the main aspects of what I’ve learnt so far.  
 
• Tents can be bloody cheap! I’m talking under twenty quid!  
• Tents can be bloody expensive! I’m taking three zero’s!  
• Yahoo sitemaps are good for getting indexed, Google sitemaps are not.
• Forum posting is a good way to get some targetted visitors but takes time!  
• If you try to make an html site in dreamweaver without using templates you’ll be sorry when you notice you’ve made the same mistake on every page!  
• When you’re choosing a market for your site to target, sick to something you know and be as specific as you possible can.
• There’s alot of merchants who just don’t update their product feeds so if you don’t check, you may be sending your hard earned visitors to a site that doesn’t have the product they want. Boooo to those merchants.  
 
Here’s some site stats so far (after 16 days live and 28 days into the competition):  
• Total Visitors: 158
• Total unique Visitors: 138 (although 36 of those were yesterday so it’s increasing at a good rate.)
• Total Page Views: 837 (most of them probably me!)  
• Total marketing spend: £0.00  
• Time spent making Website: 7 million hours  
• Time spent promoting website: 8 million hours  
• I’ve also this week had my first real organic referrals, about 10 in the past couple of days which has me quite excited - my total revenue so far from the site is (drumroll..no? ok) about 37p, so…  
• Total profit so far: £0.37 (am I winning?)  
 
To do next:  
 
More link exchanges  
Finish ebook  
Have a marketing brainwave!  
 
I’ll try to post more regularly with updates as to what I have done - I’ll try and do another post detaling the free scripts and any software I’ve used because I’ve found some pretty good free stuff on my travels.  
 
As always, any feedback much appreciated - feedback[/at/]campingnow.co.uk