Free Money From Wordpress.com

By Steven · Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

This is fresh off the press and is a case study that has been active since January 2nd, 2008.

This time I’ve chosen to tackle Wordpress.com.

This particular case study actually came about by accident, and although Wordpress.com did NOT pay me directly I still got "free" money from Wordpress.com

Let me explain.

I am currently beta testing a new page generation script for a friend of mine, which uses RSS feeds to populate parts of the page (to give it fresh relevant content). And while I’m all for using RSS, I don’t particularly like to "give away" traffic to the links back to the originator of the feed… I really look at these more as a "leak" in my sites than anything else.

I decided that instead of giving away traffic to competitors’ RSS feeds, I’d rather create some blogs on Wordpress.com and post some articles on each that I could pull RSS feeds from. This way I could control my own traffic and minimize "leakage" and provide my page with 100% relevant content.

By the way, in case you’re not familiar with Wordpress.com, it is a "hosted" version of Wordpress, as opposed to a Wordpress blog that you host on your own server, and is similar to a Blogger blog in that it’s a free service where you can create as many blogs as you wish. I personally chose Wordpress.com because: 1. it’s free; and 2. it creates xml feeds, while Blogger creates an atom feed which was not compatible with the script I was using (unless I passed the atom feed through a service such as FeedBurner).

But I digress.

Once I created a handful of these Wordpress sites I noticed that some of them started receiving traffic immediately, which was quite curious.

So, I decided to test it. 

I built a Wordpress.com site on a very narrow topic, actually a product range (brand / model) in the "kitchenware" category. Sorry, I don’t want to reveal the product / niche as I’m still doing independent testing on a specific monetization model.

These are the actual results over the past week:

Wordpress.com Case Study

As you can see, this past week I’ve had 361 views (this does not include my own visits to the blog) spread over 4 blog posts. It might not be very impressive, but what’s really surprising and cool about these results is that I did no marketing of these pages, whatsoever…

Zip, Zilch, Zero, Nada…

All I did was post the content and went on my merry way.

I’m sure you’re thinking… "There’s got to be a trick to this."

Actually… no.

So what exactly did I do?

  1. I created a blog called xyzreviews.wordpress.com. (replace xyz with product name of choice)
  2. Then I named the blog: "All About XYZ", with a tagline like: "The Best XYZ Info Online".
  3. I changed the sidebar widgets (go to Presentation -> Widgets) to include only: Recent Posts and Links.
  4. All of my Post Titles had the product name in it.
  5. As you can see under "Totals", I only have 4 blog posts. I did not write a single "unique" article All the posts are repurposed content, i.e. PLR articles I’ve had on my hard drive for a LONG TIME! I uploaded each article "as is", no re-writing or editing of the articles. Again, I wasn’t really worried about duplicate content when creating these blogs since I was originally going to use these blogs solely for RSS feeds.
  6. Once I copied the article over, I proceeded to use a sub-headline (the first sentence of the article) using my product name. Each sub-headline was bolded and used as an anchor text link that linked to an affiliate product.
  7. I bolded and italicized several instances of the product name (as well as synonymous words). I also sprinkled some anchor text links throughout the article that pointed back to the affiliate product.
  8. I made sure to tag each post using the "Tags" area (this is located just below where you post content). For tags I used the product name, the brand name, the product name + review (e.g. xyz reviews). As you can see above, I only used 6 tags, which I used for every blog post.
  9. Click Publish!

That’s it! There were no other tweaks to the codes, templates… anything. Also, there was no other monetization to the site besides the links to my affiliate product page.

Note: When using this method, it is important that you create blogs around products in demand. Otherwise nobody will care to search the tags…

This simple exercise netted me $42.76 in commissions from CJ.com this week (that’s $6 a day for those that are counting). Not bad considering it took me less than 15 minutes to create and publish. By the way in case you’re wondering, this is not an anomaly. I’ve been able to recreate four other blogs that have experienced similar results.

So, where did the traffic come from?

Believe it or not, more than 90% of the traffic came from the tags I placed in Step 8. The rest came from search engines (long tail keyword searches).

Just imagine what Wordpress.com could do with some promotional activities…

So, if you have been slighting Wordpress.com in your marketing activities, perhaps it’s worth another look.

[tags]wordpress.com, web 2.0, blogging, blog marketing, case study, affiliate marketing, internet marketing[/tags]

Topics: Case Studies, Web 2.0 · Tags:
  • Steven,

    Have you checked to see if the pages do well after a month or two in engines and via the clicks on the tags or was it something that lasted first few weeks? Great post. I find that a lot of terms fade out after first month unless they really have very little competition (ie no one else will take time to optimize for it!).

    Deb
  • I started my guitar review site like you said, check it out and give me feedback if you have time, thanks buddy.

    Here's the site
  • Great, info-packed post man! It really inspired me to ramp up my own wordpress and blogger.com blogs, mostly on Fender Vintage Guitars. Through these I am setting up some different sites on guitar instruction and affiliate programs on CB.

    Any ideas on how to mix unique content,IE, the Top 10 Guitar Solos Of All Time w/links to videos and such on how to play the solos, with promoting CB products?

    If you want, you can take a look here at some of my work.
  • Thanks for the read! Very informative.
  • @ Steve,

    As long as you host the site on your domain and not the free Wordpress blog provided by Wordpress(ex. Steve.Wordpress.com rather Steve.com), you can make Affiliate sales, CPA sales, etc from your Wordpress blog.



    Hope this helps,

    Alex
  • Thanks for this post.

    I was under the impression that a Wordpress.com site cannot have any advertising/affiliate marketing included. How did you make commission from Commission Junction?
    Thanks
  • Aw shucks, Steven. You've let the cat out of the bag with this one. I've been using this technique for about 6 months now with great success. Gotta love that long tail revenue.

    You can find out more about the great income producing power of Wordpress blogs in detail at my blog post.

    Kindly,
    Alex
  • John
    That's interesting info!
    But I am wondering this: normally the PLR articles are in wider topics, but your promotional products are a narrow topic.
    How about your articles you are using? Because you put the product name in your post titles.

    Thanks
  • I'm a new.This's good.Thank you for your information.
  • vasu
    Good blog and Nice article
    Can you give us any examples of "PRODUCTS IN DEMAND"?
    This would let the article to get more intensity :)
  • Fred Williams
    Hi,
    I came about your website and was astonished with all the free usefull information.
    Damn too happy bcos i'm a NEWBIE and still learning.
    I would like to know what's rssfeed URL on a blog and how can someone create or pull RSS feeds from a website or blogs especially Blogger,Wordpress.com etc
    Thanks.
  • This is one of the best sites I have ever found. Thanks!!! Very nice and informal. I enjoy being here.
  • Steven
    Hi Kent,

    Thanks for visiting my blog. Much appreciated.

    As for linking to my "affiliate" products, I guess you could say I "cloaked" my links in that I would either use a URL redirect through one of my domains/sites, or have a pre-sell page on a sub-domain.

    Hope that answers your question.

    /Steven
  • Kent F
    Hi Steven - great post here. A quick question - after you review did you simply give your link and did it have some type of cloaker on it or did you buy a specific domain name for your link? I've heard a link with a straight clickbank (or whatever) link does not convert well. Thanks!

    Kent
  • Great post. Definitely a tool work using. 15 minutes of work that produced $42. For those of you who don't think that's significant, think of it like this, $42 x 52 weeks = $2184 per year.

    So 15 minutes of work will produce $2184 EVERY year from now forward.
  • Excellent post. I'm sure the popularity of the product you are promoting is very important. I have created a couple of wordpress blogs before but haven't checked on them is ages. Will need to revisit this.
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