Build Solid Automated Product Sites With Wordpress

8 November
51 Comments
by nickycakes

Ok, this post is just in time for the holidays coming up.  Everyone knows people buy more crap online for christmas, yadda yadda yadda.

Nickycakes got his start in the online marketing game just like many other people doing SEO.  SEO seemed like a perfect way to get started making money with absolutely zero investment money.  This is what most likely draws people to SEO at first.  Get a site, throw some links at it, and try your hardest to move up the rankings and get free traffic from the search engines.  Pretty simple, and sounds like a home run!

Unfortunately, there are a few big mistakes that newbies make when getting started with SEO that completely ruin the experience for them.  First, the site they make completely blows.  Nickycakes has seen some of the smartest people make the most retarded sites as their first ventures and later on if you ask them about them, they will be completely embarrassed to tell you about them.  Second, the sites they generally make are unlikely to make any money because they have awful topics.  Putting adsense on your naruto desktop background fansite has the potential to make you about $5 per year, at most.

The easy part in the equation is the actual SEO part.  Let’s face it, getting as many backlinks to your site with your desired search term as the anchor text takes absolutely NO skill, just time.  People who present themselves as “professional seo’s” and try to get people to pay them money are the biggest scam artists on the industry.  But enough on that tangent.  The point is, if you can build a decent site that will pretty much guarantee money if it gets traffic, then doing SEO for it will be a slam dunk.

One caveat before you get started, though.  This isn’t a project that will take you 1 hour to finish.  This project will take a decent time investment, but will result in a SOLID non-spam website that can generate cash for you for a long long time.  The good part is, just like any SEO type work, you could potentially do it in your spare time if you wanted and it would still be very effective.  It will likely require that you spend a little money to get started, but not very much compared to how much you will make in the long term if you do everything properly.

Let’s Get Started!

Hosting

You probably have hosting already.  If you are looking for something effective on the cheap, try hostgator.  Lots of people, including Nickycakes, love hostgator for basic shared hosting, but there are plenty of alternatives.  If you don’t already have hosting and want something more robust that can handle a deluge of traffic, you could look into dedicated servers, but for the purposes of this idea, you won’t need that immediately.  Really all you need is something that can run wordpress and lets you add domains yourself.  DO NOT EVER USE GODADDY FOR ANYTHING… EVER IN YOUR LIFE.

Networks

For this idea, you will need to sign up for some affiliate networks that have product feeds.  The to that Nicky tested out for this were Linkshare and Shareasale.  Normally Nicky hates “revshare” model affiliate networks since he mostly does PPC, and revshare (generally) blows for anything ppc related.  But since this project is SEO and due to the nature of having product feeds with tons of keywords, revshare actually works much better here.  Nicky was automatically approved for Linkshare when he signed up recently, but not too sure about Shareasale since he’s been signed up there for a long time already and can’t remember about their approval process.  PLEASE NOTE: Just cause Nicky has an account at Shareasale doesn’t mean he thinks their affiliate summit parties are anywhere close to fun, because they usually suck.  Sign up here:

Sign up for Shareasale.

Sign up for Linkshare.

Pick a Category

“Niche,” if you will.  Note: Always  pronounce it ‘neesh’ when you say it in public.  There are two correct pronunciations, but saying ‘neesh’ makes other people think they are saying it wrong since they usually only read it online, and that makes Nicky laugh.

You’ll want a product category, and you have PLENTY to choose from.   Just pretty much any category of product that people buy online will do.  Mp3 players, Sony Flatscreen TV’s, Radar Detectors, Hubcaps, Sunglasses, Movado Watches (only if you’re looking for female customers), whatever.  Things with model numbers work better sometimes just cause people search for those when comparison shopping, but really, there are hundreds of thousands of products to advertise that have product feeds on Linkshare and Shareasale.  Just pick one, and don’t waste too much time thinking about it.

Grab a Domain

Can have a main keyword in it if you want.  Can use dashes, whatever.  You’re not going for branding here since your traffic will be from search engines.  omg-radar-detectors-online-lol.com should work fine.   Namecheap is a good cheap domain registrar.  AUTUMNLEAVES is the latest coupon for them for like a dollar or something off, but if that’s expired just google “namecheap coupon” for the latest.

Wordpress + Theme

If you can’t figure out how to set up wordpress and find a simple looking theme for it on your own, you don’t belong here.

Plugin

Nickycakes’ friend Nick Mattern from wickedfire a while ago made this plugin that grabs product feeds and imports them into wordpress and makes them look like a review site, complete with fake reviews and affiliate links, pictures, everything.  This is something you could do by hand if you wanted to waste a month of your time, but Nicky would recommend you pick this up.  As you know, Nickycakes does not recommend anything unless he’s messed with it himself and knows the people who are running things enough to know they’re selling something solid.  The thing costs $139 for life, and offers free upgrades and an active support forum if you’re too retarded to figure this simple crap out.  If you wanted you could import 100,000 products into wordpress and it would work just fine.

The best part about the plugin is that it makes the posts look like it has actual user reviews, which is exactly what people are looking for when they’re searching for products online.  Think of sites like amazon and newegg.  Most people, including Nicky, when they’re shopping for a new keyboard, will type in keyboard into newegg and pick the first result with 5ish stars and a decent price and just buy it.  That is how a lot of people shop, and that’s how this plugin was designed.

There are VERY detailed instructions and videos on the site that will tell you what you need to do.  It should take you no more than an hour to have something up and running if you do it properly.

Check out the wordpress plugin.

Make Dat Money

SEO time.  First off, NEVER EVER buy ANY e-book or guide on SEO.  As mentioned at length earler, SEO is easy.  It relies on basically two main factors: how many inbound links you have with the keyword you’re going for, and how long your site has existed.  You should be able to get decent rankings for individual product keywords pretty quickly, especially model numbers.  Nickycakes has no desire to go in-depth on exactly how to get links to your site, but its pretty easy to spam social bookmarking sites and forums and whatnot with links to your site saying “radar detectors” or whatever you’re advertising.  If you put in the work, you will get results, and everyone that clicks through your site and buys a product makes you some money.

Christmas is coming up.  Get to work.

Keep it real.

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