Albert Einstein famously asked himself, “What would it be like to ride on a beam of light?”.  By answering his own question he was able to completely change our understanding of time and space.  Time became relative and space was curved.  He changed the world.

A couple days ago I asked myself, “What would it be like to be the only affiliate for all of Amazon’s products?”  What if everybody who buys a product from Amazon did so through my website?  For Albert it took years to answer his question, I had my answer in a matter of seconds:  My website would crash.  And I would be have a #$@! load of money.

The Standard Amazon Affiliate Model

The standard method of being a affiliate for Amazon is as follows.  Review a product and place a link to the product at Amazon.com.  If the visitor is persuaded by your review they will click on the link and purchase the product from Amazon.  You get paid a  commission for sending the visitor to Amazon. 

This website is about making money online.  The only products I could review are make money online books.  But for me to review them I would have to read them – and like them.  Find a few books I enjoy, write a review and try to peddle them off on my visitors.  If I do manage to convince someone to purchase a book Amazon would reward me 5% commission.   I could never become rich this way.

I do not want to review products.  I want people to simply use my site to buy products from Amazon.  And not just some products – all products.

How To Get People To Buy Products From My Website

The most obvious way is to ask them to.  I could post a picture of me on bended knees with hands clasped together under my chin, begging them to use my website.  With caption, “Please use my site to buy your Amazon products.  If you do I will become rich.”.  Although this is the easiest way, it is also the most infective.  Nobody cares whether I make lots of money.  There needs to be incentive, other then my financial gain, to convince people to buy products from my site.

The World Needs Help

Before Adam’s grumpy stomach overtook him and he bit into a fresh apple, the world was a happy place. The skies were an unpolluted blue, the trees tall and full of singing birds.  Everybody got along, had what they needed, and were happy. But times have changed.  The world needs help.  People are fighting, hungry and abused.   The environment is changing, skies are graying and choking;  the seas are murky and sick;  animals are fighting for their existence. The world is far from being a paradise. 

It is not all that bad.  There are places in the world doing well.  There are people doing well. People with plenty of food and living in peace. Parks and sanctuaries where animals and plants thrive. The universe  hands out fortune randomly.  Some have lots of fortune, while others are completely without.  Lady Fortuna deals her cards blindfolded.  Only the fortunate have the luxury to help those dealt a poor hand.

So far I am one of the fortunate ones.  I am better off then the world average.  But if everybody used this website to make their Amazon purchases then that would change.  I would become abundantly fortunate.  Too much fortune to handle by myself.  It would have to give it away.  Push my fortune down and pull other’s fortune up.

People Do Not Care About Me, They Care About The World

This website donates most of the revenue earned from Amazon to charity.  The possibilities are amazing.

According to Amazon’s 2008 income statement they receive almost 20 billion dollars in revenue annually.  Amazon pays approximately 5% of purchase price to affiliates.  This means that if in 2008 all products where sold through this website, Amazon would have had to pay this website (5% of 20 billion) 1 billion dollars.  Compared to how much this website makes now, that would have been a really good year.

1 billion dollars – that is a lot of fortune that can be passed on to the less fortunate.  And that is what this website intends to do.  Take most of the money and pass it onto the those that need it.

People might not care about me, but they care about the world.  By using this website to make their Amazon purchases the state of the world can be improved.  They will do it to help the less fortunate – people, environment, animals.  This website will make money by tipping the scale of fortune towards a more even tilt.

To answer the question: What would it be like to be the only affiliate for all of Amazon’s products?  It would be having hundreds of millions of dollars to give the less fortunate.  Change the world.

Update September 2009 – This idea was a total bomb.  The charity page was up for a couple months and only two people purchased a book from Amazon.  So the charity page has been removed.  The Lesson: Do not depend on people’s chairty to make you money online.

Making More Money Online, Optimistic and Motivational

Your website has been up for a few months.  The initial excitement has worn off.  But still, every morning you wake up and head straight for the computer.  Open browser, favorites, traffic stats.  Seeing basically the same number that has greeted you every morning for the last couple weeks, you head for the shower.  There your tears wash down the drain.  At least that is how my mornings go.

This website has been hovering around 50 visitors a day for the last couple weeks.  A gray cloud is beginning to form above my head.

As of February 22, 2009 the traffic for the last 30 days:

As you can see there have been good days and bad days.  But no discernable upward trend. It hovers around 50.  The two spikes are from the two times that the website was listed on reddit.com.  But the spikes are lightning bolts.  Exciting while it is happening but gone in a flash.

Looking at the graph it appears that the website is not progressing.  There is no upward trend.  I want an upward trend.  I need a ray of sunshine to peek through the gray clouds.

So I created a graph that has an upward trend.  I call it the Extrapolated Traffic Graph.  It takes traffic from recent time periods and extrapolates what the total traffic would of been had the traffic always been what it is now.  (Feel free to re-read that last sentence. Sorry, but I can not improve it).  The time periods start from the most recent and narrowest time frame and move to the past with increasing time frames.

It is best explained with the actual graph.  Here is the Extrapolated Traffic Graph for February 22, 2009.

See – an upward trend.  To help understand how the graph works it is best to view it as an answer to the question: What would the total traffic be if all the past daily traffic was the same as the daily traffic for the last # days?

For the last 4 days traffic was 319 visitors.  Take the number of visitors (319) and divide by the number of days (4).  You get 80 visitors per day.  The website has been up for 53 days.  Multiply the visitors per day (80) by total days live (53) and you have extrapolated total traffic of 4240 visitors.  Now compare that against your actual total visitors.  Extrapolated 4240 compared to actual 2206.  Vwola – the website is progressing nicely.

Keep doing this for all the different time periods and you get a nice uptrend graph.

The reason it works is because the website is progressing.  The problem with the normal traffic graph is that the progress is hard to see.  The progress gets lost in the noise.  One day traffic is high, then 3 days in a row it is low.  These 3 days make it look like you are loosing ground.  But you are not.  You are still better off then you were a month ago.  And that is the point.  The magic in the Extrapolated Traffic Graph is that is gives more weight to traffic closer to the present.  For new websites the present is always better then the past.

The Extrapolated Traffic Graph is not misleading.  This website’s traffic is progressing.  It has to be.  Everyday I add more content.  I visit forums and leave thought provoking posts.  I submit the website to directories.  I make jaw dropping comments on other blogs.  It all adds up.  The website is better then it use to be. But the standard traffic graph just does not show it.  Extrapolate present traffic, compare it against actual traffic, and the progress becomes clearly visible.

If you are at the beginning stages of your website then I recommend you plot your own Extrapolated Traffic Graph.  Print it out and hang it on the wall.  Then every time dark clouds begin to form – have a look at your up trending graph.  Save the tears till your really need them.  Like when even the extrapolated graph trends down.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Optimistic and Motivational, There is a HOW TO in the Post

Can Jesus help me make money?  I am a little rusty with my recollection of Jesus stories, but I think I remember the gist of a few of them.  There is the one about how He came across a man who had been sleeping in a cave for days.  The man refused to talk to anybody, eat, or even breath.  Jesus miraculously convinced him that he better get up and return to work otherwise he will not be invited to the office Christmas party.  And there is the inspiring story of Jesus informing a couple of down on their luck fisherman, that the real money is in the ‘personal self help’ industry.  These two fisherman went on to become leaders in the field.

My problem is traffic.  It has stayed steady around 50 visitors a day for a couple of weeks.  I post to forums and make comments on other blogs.  This gets traffic, but always around 50 visitors.  I cannot seems to get anymore. I read on other websites that they receive thousands of visitors a day.  How do they do this?  Jesus help me.

Actually I have an inkling of what the problem is.  This site gets no traffic from search engines.  Last month only 11 visitors found the site via Google.  All the rest were through forums, and bloggers checking who left a comment on their blog.  I need more search traffic. How to increase traffic from search engines?

Writing Posts For Google Or For People

This Sunday morning while everybody was at church I was doing research about increasing search traffic. I found plenty of articles which argue that to get lots of traffic you need to write for Google, not for people.

There are two ways to write a post.  First one is to write for people.  Make it interesting.  Offer some advise.  Make the reader feel special.  Reading your post the visitor will feel good about themselves and they will think you are a great person.  They will keep coming back for more and they will tell their friends.  That’s great.

Writing Posts for Google

The second type is to write the post for Google.  Google is a machine.  It does not know what words mean.  You can not make Google smile or feel good.  Google takes the words on your post and creates statistics.  What words are used, how often are they used, what words are used the title, what words are bold.

By using certain words in your website and by using them in a specific way, you can get Google to place your website at the beginning of search results.  If your website is at the top of Google searches then you will get more traffic.  More traffic is more money.

Your website does not need to be interesting.  It does not need to make readers happy.  It simply needs traffic.  Google brings you traffic.  Once the traffic arrives visitors will have a look around; and find the material repetitive and useless.  Then quickly becoming bored, they click an ad just to get away from your site.  Jesus hallelujah.

How To Get Search Traffic

The trick is to create a website in a very competitive niche.  Which means a niche that lots of people search for.  A good example is “money”.  Every month 30,000,000 searches are done for the term money.   If you can got to the top of search results for money you can consider yourself a millionaire.  But most likely you will not get to the top of search results with that word alone.  No matter how well your content is geared towards making Google happy.  There is too much competition.

So what you need to do is combine the very competitive keyword with another keyword.  A word with less searches and therefore not as competitive.  For example , “Jesus”.  The term “Money Jesus” is searched 6,600 times.  Now you have a chance of getting to the top of search results for “Money Jesus”.  How?  Make Google think your post is perfect for people looking up the term “Money Jesus”.

Google with rank you higher in searches if you:

• Have the keywords in your title.
• The first sentence has your keywords
• You do not use the keyword too much. Google will think that you are making the post simply to please Google. There is lots of debate about what is ‘too much’. So to be safe do not use keywords ‘too much’.
• The last sentence contains your keywords.

These are the tips that I have been able to gather on the Internet.  Are they true?  Do they work?  Who knows.  This is simply what a lot people think that Google likes.  Of course, Google does not reveal what it likes.  If it did, then there would be a lot of crappy posts  on page 1 of search results.  The only way to find out if its true is to try.

Traffic vs. Morality

Something about creating a website specifically for Google just does not feel biblical.  It feels wrong.  True, I need traffic and will do almost anything for it.  But writing posts simply to trick Google into sending me traffic -  that is not right. I have to ask myself, is that something Jesus would do to make money?

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Optimistic and Motivational, There is a HOW TO in the Post, What YOU Should Do

After 22 days online a milestone has been reached.  100 people have stumbled onto the website.  That is a lot of people.

If I had to make dinner for 100 people then I would have to start cooking at dawn – it is a lot of people to feed.  If I was at the supermarket buying supplies for the dinner and the line up at the cashier was 100 people – that is a big lineup.  If I had to wash the dishes after everybody has gone home – that would be a lot of dirty dishes.

But in terms of website visitors 100 is pitiful.  Like 100 people going to a Rolling Stones concert.  I need thousands, not hundreds.  According to my Google AdSense account these 100 visitors have earned me $4.34 by clicking on ads 8 times.  I serve dinner to 100 people and all I get is $4.34.

So far 157 hours have been spent creating this website.  This past month has been completely devoted to the website’s creation and maintenance.  Had I spent the time as a employee for a website design company paying $25/hour then I would now have $25 x 157hrs = $3925. 

This means that I have sacrificed $3925 dollars to please my visitors.  In return they have given me $4.35.  100 visitors came to my house, have a delicious dinner, and then pay me $0.04 cents each.

I should not complain.  I knew this would happen before I started.  The beginning is hard.  Lots of work with no reward.  100 visitors come, they look at 2.53 pages, and then leave.  Almost all of them not paying a single penny. 

But that is how the website business works. It is very ‘front heavy’. You must do lots of work at the beginning with little return. After many hours (I do not know how many hours yet) of being a slave it begins to turn around. Once there is a big visitor base and the visitors keep coming back and inviting their friends. Then you will be receiving lots of money for little work. You will be making money while you are sleeping, walking the dog, growing your chia pet. Your website will become the slave. Working for you 24/7.

Unfortunately I am not there yet. Maybe far from it.

So for now, still at the beginning, it is nothing but blood, sweat and tears.  Only the hope, that one day 100,000 visitors will come and leave a big tip on the table, drives me to continue.  Because then I can take the money and buy a dishwasher.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, Optimistic and Motivational