Let’s start out by introducing what this is. This is a quick run through of how to set up a complete internet marketing business for less than $150 (which you will make back almost immediately). You may think it is a little weird to refer to a WordPress site as a “full internet marketing business”, but that isn’t what I’m offering you here. I’m offering you a strategy that WILL make you money. Period.
This is going to be a “step by step” guide for you to get started. You’ll need a copy of MyReviewPlugin (a plugin for WordPress that does basically everything you need to run a marketing business – or review sites), you’ll need to be familiar with WordPress (be able to set it up, etc.) and you should probably know what a domain name is and that kind of thing. Given that you’re on gigathemes.com, I suspect you’re qualified.
The Really Important Question: What are you going to sell? Where is your niche? Who will pay you to sell it?
Pick a niche you’re most comfortable with. It actually doesn’t matter all that much what it is, but make sure its a real niche. Really nichey: its important! You’re probably not experienced enough (nor have the funding) to pick up a niche like “kitchen supplies” and run with it – so pick a niche like “carving knives”, “electric blenders” or “foldable picnic tables”.
Ideally your niche will be something that people order online – niches like “refridgerators with internet access” (which you’d be a little early to target right now) could be successful, but since its unlikely people are ordering fridges online, you might have a bit more trouble.
Most importantly, however. You need to find an affiliate for this niche that you can work with. Someone who provides a commission-type structure for your marketing efforts to pay off from. A great place to find these affiliates is ShareASale.com and CommissionJunction.com, but if you look carefully, hundreds of businesses have established affiliate programs. You’ll need to apply to these affiliate programs and convince them you’re not a scammer, but other than that, once you’re in: you’re good to go.
The advantage to picking a merchant from ShareASale or CommissionJunction is that they often offer data feeds. MyReviewPlugin’s Import Man is fully equipped for immediately turning a data feed in to a full website.
This isn’t the only way to profit from your MyReviewPlugin-powered review site: but it is one of the best. AdSense and other methods can provide you a small income, and given the power of MyReviewPlugin you can find hundreds of ways to find great search engine rankings, build niche and even non-niche websites, and generally turn a profit from.
Once you’ve got your merchant picked out and approved, a domain name of some sort registered (look for ones that contain your target keywords – these are better for SEO, etc.), a web host (probably at HostGator – but if you would like to use datafeeds with 50,000+ products, you may wish to stick to a VPS or dedicated server: if you own MyReviewPlugin already, you can contact mark@myreviewplugin to discuss how to sort this out), and MyReviewPlugin/WordPress set up on your new domain name, you’re ready to go!
Here’s what we do. Sign in to your WordPress site and use the “Quick Setup” to activate some review categories you would like to use on your site (these can be things like “price”, “quality”, whatever), and then go to the Settings page and activate the automatic embeds you would like to use (you’ll understand this when you get in to the script if you’re not there yet) – you probably want comment-ratings, a comment-rating form and editor’s ratings, if not comparison tables and all that other stuff.
Now go back to your merchant and get the datafeed file. Open it up in Excel or another application and clean it up a bit. Make sure the first row has all the column names, its saved as a UTF-8 comma separated file and all your data is cleaned up how you like it. You’ll be using this data to fill your website with content, so make sure its perfect!
In MyReviewPlugin, go to Import Man, and select “CSV” from the type. Click the file radio box and then select the file you would like to import (the datafeed you just generated). On the template page go ahead and fill out the title (select a column from the right side – you will want to use information like product name, model number, etc. here for the best SEO results), body (make sure your affiliate link is in here somewhere!), etc. Use the rest of the page to select information like categories, dates, affiliate link data, etc.
Run the import and you’ll find the first 500 records (or less if your datafeed had fewer) have been imported. The rest will be imported over the next couple minutes automatically. You can keep working while this happens. You now have content on your website!
Your website is set up – you should go ahead and go to the Autoinstall Extras page and install All In One SEO (and probably a few other plugins, use your imagination). Remember the goal here is to get your website ranking for terms like “product name model number” and “site keywords product name” – these keywords will bring in supertargeted traffic that converts. Anything that can improve your optimization, you should use.
Choose a theme now too. I recommend themes like “Blix Fixed” and the default themes that come with MyReviewPlugin. Blix Fixed is one of my favorite themes: it converts very well, is easy on the eyes and integrates with MyReviewPlugin absolutely perfectly with nothing more than checking the boxes.
If you’ve chosen a theme with a color scheme that clashes or where you need some spacing between the embeds, want to change the font, or need to otherwise configure the appearance of your autoembeds, go ahead and use the “Appearance Settings” (in the autoembeds area) now. Otherwise, continue onwards with the money making.
If you’re using “average ratings” (user comments) and even if you’re not, you’ll want to use the automation tools a bit now. In the main menu you’ll see “Bulk Modifications” – this page allows you to not only activate rating categories on all your posts (which you want to do, so that users can see the ratings), but also generate random editor’s ratings for all the categories. It also allows you to specify some other data you probably won’t need to for this project. Select “All Categories” (or the category you put your posts in) in the criteria, and check off the rating categories you want to use, provide them something like low end: 3 high end: 5 and let it do its work. It’ll only take a minute to work on 20,000+ posts, so just hold tight.
Now you’ve probably also activated Comment Man at this point. Comment Man allows you to generate unique comments with unique names and with user ratings. This allows you to pre-fill the site with great content easily.
Getting People In: Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is a big field. I mean really big. Far too big to cover here. Luckily for you, MyReviewPlugin and WordPress handle huge parts of that job for you: basically everything on site is handled. Here are some things to keep in mind though: keywords in your title tag matter, keywords in your post titles matter. This means you should be picking keywords that: a. you think you can rank in Google for, and b. you think people are searching for. There’s plenty of tools to help you out with that (Googling the keyword is the easiest!), but the simple rule is that if no one else is targeting it (you don’t see it in anyone else’s title tag) and its a couple words long, you can probably rank for it.
Ranking for something like “Sony TV” is nearly impossible until you’re much bigger. Ranking for something like “Sony TV KDL-32L5000 32” LCD” is STILL almost impossible. Ranking for something like “Sony TV KDL-32L5000 Remote (RM-YD028)” is probably a lot easier (note this is NOT a recommended niche, TVs are very competitive – even that specific keyword is dominated by SonyStyle.com, Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, etc.). The idea of a very specific niche is clear and simple.
The most important thing you can do once your site is online and you’re happy with it is gather links. There’s a dozen ways you can do this, my favorite is to hire someone else! ODesk.com and WickedFire.com are both great sources of finding people to do link development: social bookmarking, linkwheel development, article writing (and submission to ezinearticles.com and other sites), etc. all provide great one way links. These links are easy to get and account for the majority of the efforts I do on these sites. Other ways to get links include exchanging links with other similar websites, blog commenting, and forum posting: at the end of this I outline a little “bonus” SEO strategy to get tons of links really fast.
Growing Up.
One last step. Once the traffic is flowing (and that will probably be a few days to a few weeks after you begin doing SEO – don’t give up) you can start making more money from it. Tweak things to try to increase the number of visitors that click through and buy: try adding more reviews, fewer reviews, adding big flashy arrows towards your link, etc. Any of these things could change the conversion rate and they’re all worth a try. Make sure to keep track of what you’re testing and what has worked for you.
Once you’ve done that, your main goal is to get more traffic. If you’re making a lot of money from your sales you may be profitable to purchase traffic towards the site via Google Adwords instead of just relying on SEO. Usually, though your main way of making more money will be to create more sites with more content in new niches! Get going building your empire!
Just to re-cap, here’s what you need:
- WordPress 2.9
- MyReviewPlugin 2.0+
- A Niche
- A Domain Name
- An Affiliate (ShareASale, CommissionJunction, LinkShare)
- Inbound Links
Bonus SEO Strategy: I mentioned that I’d tell you a little secret of mine. Here it is: use MyReviewPlugin and Import Man/Comment Man to set up massive sites in your niche. I’m talking 100,000+ pages. Then promote these pages. These large sites will get “a life of their own” to some extent and start collecting their own links from bots stealing the content, users linking to the reviews, etc. You can then use these massive sites to push links towards your specific niche site. You may also want to try out tools like WP-O-Matic.
As we know that most of search engine search result is belong forum. 
