Episode 113: How Dave McGimpsey builds little affiliate websites that make him over $100/day

Episode 113: How Dave McGimpsey Builds Little Affiliate Websites That Make Him Over $100/Day

Mike: Hi there everyone! Welcome to Episode 113 of The Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And today on the show, I’ve got Dave McGimpsey on and we’re gonna talk about something very – I don’t wanna say close to my heart, but something that I’m very interested in because as lot of you already know, I used to build adsense niche sites. And there was an update in September of 2012 where the exact match domains were given less value in search engines. So, that’s when I stopped doing that. But it seems like we’ve got – we have Dave on and he’s doing a very similar thing but he hasn’t been affected by any of these panda penguin exact match Google updates. And what he’s doing is he’s building mini affiliate sites and he’s making about a hundred dollars or more a day for doing it. And this is very interesting to me because it’s one of those things that if you can build one of them and I get into how many of them he has and how it works in the interview, but if you can build one of them and you can teach that to someone, then you could outsource it. And that’s what I was doing with my older sites, with my whole site that was set up what I was doing is I initially learned how to make all the sites on my own. And then, I created videos and outsourced all of it, all of it inexpensively to the Philippines so that all I have to do was make sure that everything was running smoothly and the machine would just push out niche sites for me. Now, of course in the end, that – I ended up having most of the sites lose their rankings but if I can get something going in the way that Dave has where he’s not losing his rankings and he feels pretty secure that he’s not going to, that can be really interesting. Anyways, enough with my little rant about that – that’s just my little sidebar here. But yeah, here’s Dave McGimpsey.

Mike: We are here today with Dave McGimpsey. Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave: Thank you very much, Mike. Good to be here.
Mike: Let’s start off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you make money online.

Dave: Okay. So, I guess to start from the beginning, I got interested in earning online back around 2007 and around that time, I found the Warrior Forum. And I went through probably what everyone goes through, the stage of just buying everything. You know, every sales page that’s good in the WSO Forum, then you know. So, I bought a lot of WSOs but I didn’t really do much with them. They’re all kind of, I still had them in some way doing nothing. And I got a little bit disheartened but I keep trying. I was in the position where I was working from home, and so it was a little bit easy to find the time to make a go of things.

Mike: You’re already working from home?
Dave: Not at that moment, no. But at that time, I was. Mike: Okay.

Dave: So, I had a little bit of extra time on my hands because of that. And so, basically I kept buying WSOs and eventually before Chris Rempel launched his Lazy Marketer Guide on ClickBank, I bought it as a WSO. And that one I kind of – I started to rate it and I got a little bit of a feel for how to get a site rank and stuff like that and it really helped me out. But you know, it kind of – I got some sites up and I really didn’t do anything with them. Because I bought a lot of domains, had some grand plans and didn’t do anything. And suddenly one of the sites started to get a lot of traffic and I was just only glancing through my sites and looking at all my stats that I realized that this was suddenly getting some traffic. And I wasn’t sure why it was getting the traffic, but then when I looked at the keywords, it was clear why it was. And so basically, I just kind of put an affiliate link on that and suddenly wow, I’m making money. I was making a hundred dollars everyday and the product was going through a little bit of – it was kind of spiking on ClickBank. It was suddenly popular. And then, it leveled down, maybe went down to $20 a day for a while. And it was really good and I focused everything on that site. I’m gonna get back things, gotta to this, gotta do that. And I was worried everyday when I wake up, will I still be making commissions and stuff. I focused a lot on that. And it went really well for a while but I started to think maybe I should try and follow what I’ve done with this with other sites and see what happens. And I did that. And I had a lot of failures. And I still have a lot of failures but you know, overall it’s just built and built and built and I’m making reasonable money. As a part, I guess as a part-time gig.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, you post some income shots on your sales page. What do you – how much are you making from this method right now?

Dave: Are we talking daily, monthly, yearly?

Mike: Whatever yeah, any way.

Dave: If I look at it – let’s just take a day, average that over a month or over a year and in a day, I’m probably making around a hundred dollars a day.

Mike: And how many – over how many websites is this?

Dave: I currently have – I would say 125 domains in my account. Some of those domains are doing nothing. There’s nothing on them. And you know, a lot of them are making nothing than ones that I bought and nothing happened with them. You know, but it’s hard to maybe – I would say if I went through my account, maybe I’ll find 20 that I really, really – that I’m making money with and maybe a total of 30 or 40 that I really wanna keep hold of.

Mike: Okay. So, you’ve got a portfolio of about 30 domains that you’re actively using and making a hundred dollars a day from. I mean, that’s pretty good —

Dave: This is as a whole. I’m not saying I’m making a hundred dollars a day from them, every particular domain. Sorry to interrupt. Mike: No, no problem.
Dave: Just wanna clear that up.

Mike: No, I got that. You’re making a hundred dollars a day overall from – overall of the websites. Now, this is actually really interesting for me because I have over 700 domains in my account and those were all adsense websites. Now, what happened to me was back in September of 2012, there was an exact match domain update and all my websites were exact match domains. So, what happened was – depending on who you talk to, the value of the exact match wasn’t the same as it used to be. And I went from having good rankings for a lot of sites and making about $2000 a month just from adsense income to having a lot of them lose a lot of rankings and now, I think I make like $200 a month from those same sites. So, I think you talk about this a little bit in your product, perhaps about how you’re able to avoid all these Google updates that everyone’s been running scared from. We’ve got Panda, we’ve got Penguin, we’ve got exact match domain update, we’ve got refreshes on all these different updates and who know what we have coming in the near future. So, how are you avoiding these lapse with your sites?

Dave: How am I avoiding – I haven’t done anything actively to avoid it, okay. I’m not – there’s nothing on the hand or I wouldn’t say with anything I’m doing is black cat or anything like that, you know. But my sites are extremely laser targeted, you know. Yeah. The sites that I’ve bought are very, very targeted sites. And I know that I guess you’d say the exact match domain thing, that was very targeted towards particular keyword or something. But yeah, I think with – I basically, I hit on something that I don’t know if it’s just luck or whatever it is but I hit on something where I’ve got a certain level of SEO I do, I don’t do anymore until I know that I’m really gonna make money with this site. And it’s just – it seems to work.

Mike: Oh, they still exact match domains for the keywords that you’re targeting? Dave: Yes.

Mike: And I don’t know if you reveal this before people pull the trigger and buy but do you reveal what these sites are about? Like, I know they are affiliate sites but are they targeting specifically ClickBank or The Warrior Forum or Amazon? How does that go?

Dave: So, basically there are affiliate sites. I actually don’t do anything with Amazon. But ClickBank, PayDotCom, Plimus, Markethold, that kind of thing.

Mike: Okay. Well, we kind touched on the fact that you have a product. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Dave: Okay. So, the product is basically I guess a brain dump. So, it’s just everything that I’ve been doing over the last five years to earn an income, okay. And you know, I’m not holding anything back in it. It’s just what I’ve been doing. And I just decided to put it out and see what kind of feedback I get from it and the feedback’s been quite positive so far. But basically there’s a core product that tells you what I’m doing. It’s some html templates in there. And then, there’s an upsell or an OTO which is basically some software that will create the html for you. It’s as simple as that. There’s no smoke and mirrors. It’s not a pushbutton thing. It’s just, I made it what it is.

Mike: So, it’s like an easy site template creator? Is that what the OTO is?

Dave: The software pack?

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Dave: Yeah, the software pack is basically something where you can put your content in there and it will do all the you know, the SEO part that I’m currently doing as far as the way I’ve optimized the pages. And it will just get the pages out, so all you have to do is load them up and get some backlinks and you’re done.

Mike: Cool, cool.
Dave: Yeah. I didn’t go to so much detail about the product but it’s basically just talking about what I’m doing.

Mike: You mentioned on your sales page that there’s three things you need to do right now to get your affiliate sites rank fast. Can you give us – can you let us know what one of those is?

Dave: One of them. Okay. One of them – okay, I actually have been having – this is probably quite relevant because I’ve been having this kind of conversation with a couple of people recently in the last day or so, and that’s stop thinking you can only make sales if you have a keyword that has a lot of volume of searches. There’s more to it than just volume. You know, I could you know write loads as a keyword phrase that has a lot of volume but it doesn’t mean if you can rank number one in Google for that, you’re gonna necessarily make a lot of money because there’s no buyer intent with that keyword. And so yeah, that’s one of the tips.

Mike: Okay, so — if of course, when you go after your keyword, even if you look in adwords keyword tool, you can find keywords that have a lot volume but the – if you look at the advertising competitiveness on it, you’ll see if it’s low, then that means there’s not many people bidding in for adwords and therefore, most likely it’s not gonna be very much of a commercial keyword. So, like you said weight loss, of course it might sound like a great keyword to rank for but the person that’s gonna be searching for weight loss isn’t necessarily searching for a specific way to lose weight. Of course, it’s gonna happen. There’s gotta be people that are searching in for and are gonna have buyer intent but you – if you have something like how to buy a gym membership or you know, that buying the key word or something like that, it’s gonna be much more lucrative. Even if it’s only 200 searches a month, like those 200 searches that come in are gonna be laser targeted like you said. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Dave: Correct. Yeah. So, and then you take it further, right? So, then you’ve got – you could drive it a little further and you can say buy gym membership from Venice Beach Gold or something like that. I mean, that’s taking a little bit far – but you know what I mean.

Mike: Sure.

Dave: – but you know what I mean. You may only get three searches but those three searches are very likely to have their credit card in their hand, you know.

Mike: Here’s the thing though, like there’s all these long-tail keywords and I understand the fact that okay – like in the past, what I would usually do is I will find a keyword and I’ll use a certain formula for okay, if it has like from my adsense site, if it has a monthly SEO value all the stuff of $10 a month, then I will buy it. Now, I mean, I have 500 searches and it was a $2 click in the CPC and then I kinda have a formula to figure out even with that lesser searches. But now, after I got slapped and I feel like it’s harder to rank these domains now for these keywords. Are you explaining exactly how to do that in your brain dump?

Dave: Yes. Mike: Yes.

Dave: I’m explaining exactly. But the thing is I really don’t wanna give too much away about this without basically giving everyone the product –

Mike: Sure.

Dave: But I don’t focus so much on keyword research. There’s another way, there’s another thing that I’m looking at, that I find has worked for me and is more important.

Mike: Are you worried about – if a lot of people buy this and start doing the same thing you are? Are you worried about saturation?

Dave: No, I’m not. I think that’s besides that I’ve got at the moment, I think you know, they’ll continue to earn money and you know, the sites that I pick here and there you know, I’m not – for me personally, yeah, I think this is wide-open. A feedback that I got from quite a few purchases so far is that I mean, they’re happy to share their results, they’re happy to you know, they’re happy with the results they’re getting already. So.

Mike: Cool. You mention here there’s the biggest mistake that you can make that could possibly get you sued and how to avoid it. What comes to my mind instantly is buying a trademark domain. That’s –

Dave: Yes.

Mike: That’s what I think of when I see that right there and I actually I have a lot of trademark domains and an interesting thing is out of the hundreds of domain that I bought that had trademarks on them, I’ve got contacted I would say about 2% of the time by someone from the company saying take the site down and I would just write them a nice email back and say okay, site is gone. Here, you can either have the domain or not have it. So, yeah. Is that what this is about or is this something different?

Dave: That’s basically what I’m talking about. Yeah.

Mike: Did you get in trouble?

Dave: No. I haven’t got in trouble as far as directly like that, like someone contact me and say – I actually just tell a lie, there was one but I just basically did the same as you, okay? And when I registered, I did that unknowingly. But I lost a couple of domains, not because it was – not because it was directly someone’s trademark but because there was some legal action involved in the use of some — there was legal action involved in the use of two parties with discussing the use of their particular name. And my name happens to be similar to someone else’s and so the name was just taken out of my account. No notification whatsoever.

Mike: And that’s the thing, like when I would buy these domains, I was just putting up a quick adsense website that cost me 30 bucks to put up in total. So, it was for me, the risk of losing it was – I was willing to take that risk. But if you’re gonna buy a website and you’re putting up a lot of time into it and you’re gonna put a lot of content and will be relying on that, then I would definitely stay away from it. I mean, if you wanna avoid all the trouble in the world, then stay away from trademark domains.

Dave: Yes.

Mike: That’d be my advice.

Dave: Yes.

Mike: Cool.

Dave: I would definitely agree.

Mike: And what else do I have here. I’m taking a look at your sales page right now, trying to pick it apart a little bit and trying to pull something, pull a little tidbits idea here.

Dave: Okay.
Mike: Let’s see. I wanted to ask you about link building. Dave: Yes.
Mike: What kind of link building do you do?

Dave: Various, but not a lot. Firstly, not a lot – not until I know that something is going to be profitable. I found that what I was doing was I was putting all my time, my efforts into creating content for sites, building links, that kind of thing. And then, worrying about when it’s gonna get into Google, when it’s gonna get to first page, when is that gonna happen, when is that gonna happen. And I was worrying myself a bit and nothing would happen. You know, and so it felt like all that time for nothing. So basically, my pointers is

get the site ready, get it up, get one or two backlinks and then leave it. If it makes money, great. If it doesn’t, then I don’t have to worry about it. If it’s not making any money, I’ll occasionally just check what traffic is coming through, otherwise forget it.

Mike: And if it does rank, how long does it usually take before it starts ranking?
Dave: It can be a couple of days to a couple of weeks usually with this method. And – sorry, go ahead.

Mike: I was gonna say, you’ve got 20-30 of these that are making money and are the – you said you have a bunch of other sites. Were the other sites once that you also tried this with and that didn’t stick or —

Dave: Some of it, yes.
Mike: Okay. And are you actively making more sites now? Dave: Yes. Yeah.

Mike: If I were you, I would say okay, this is working. Like, I found something that’s really working here. I’m making $50-$100 a day from it, a hundred dollars a day. I would say in my mind, I would say let’s ramp this up and just go for it and just start outsourcing everything and start really producing them. Are you doing that though or – ?

Dave: Actually, no. Yeah, I haven’t gotten into doing any outsourcing or anything like that at all. And to be honest, this may sound strange but I kinda like my day job, you know. Obviously, like any day job, there’s ups and downs.

Mike: What is your day job?

Dave: I’m not sure I wanna talk about my day job

Mike: Ah, okay.

Dave: Yeah, just in case they’re watching.

Mike: Gotcha.

Dave: But I like what I do and you know, this is just cream on the top of things, you know. And this allows me to kinda like what I said on the sales page, take my family to Disneyland, things like that.

Mike: You said you went to Tokyo, Disneyland, right? Dave: Yeah.
Mike: How was that?
Dave: It’s awesome, actually.

Mike: Yeah?

Dave: Actually, this is now two years in a row. Like, Christmas two years in a row. It’s just – I though, you know, Disneyland is gonna be awful. It’s gonna be like mice running around and waving at me and wanting to get me further, wanting to take me, stuff like that. But actually it’s really, really good.

Mike: Have you been to the one in – I think there’s a European one. I’ve been to the one in Florida. Have you been to the one in States or anything?

Dave: No. I’ve been to the one in Paris but that one when I was probably twenty or something, you know. That stage, it was just because you know, I was kinda going along with friends, you know. And I was 20 years old, I kinda got run into it. You know, it’s a small world and all that kind of thing.

Mike: It’s cool, though. I mean, you said this method that you have isn’t bringing that much money and of course, it’s not bringing in a lot of money but if someone is able to take this and to bring in an extra $20 a day, an extra $50 a day from it, then that would be completely worth it. And it’s these kinds of things that I’m most interested in, not the ones that are like it’s gotta be a full-time job. Like, there’s plenty of thing you can do online. People can go ahead and start an article-writing service, like I could right now go into the Warrior Forum, put up an advertisement saying I’ll write 500,000-word articles and I’ll do it for 5 dollars, 15 buck, whatever the going rate is right now. People will order from you and you can do that but you’re just buying yourself, you’re pretty much setting yourself up for another job, right?

Dave: Yeah. Yes.

Mike: And maybe, you can – I mean for some people that’s perfect. Like, I know there’s people out there – friend of mine, Tom. He does this kind of writing and he’s really happy with it coz he can dictate when he works and he can work from home and whatnot. But yeah, this is definitely something that I’m interested in coz it’s very reminiscent of the adsense sites that I was creating before.

Dave: Yeah.

Mike: So, I’m really interested in how you get these little suckers to rank.

Dave: There’s – I mean, there’s nothing better – fulltime job or not, there’s nothing better than kind of waking up in the morning and you know, checking your bank account and there’s this information there and you got a couple of paid up call me mail, you know, saying you’ve made a sale and stuff, you know. It’s not –

Mike: How do you think your sites haven’t been hit by the updates?

Dave: Because they’re so focused. They’re so laser targeted. Like, I’m talking about there’s some that are only three-page sites. You know, some – because I could see that they were gonna be – they were gonna earn money, I fill them out, you know. But there were some that were still doing well, really well in fact and they’re only three pages.

Mike: And the content, do you write it yourself? All of it? Or is auto-generated content or do you – I know you said you don’t outsource but do you outsource writing for your content?

Dave: I’ve only outsourced the writing of content a couple of times and that’s when I wanted out a course in German or something like that. I know that, basically. So, I wrote the articles and I just gave it to someone on Elance maybe, and asked them to just translate it into German.

Mike: You did it – it was an affiliate product in German?
Dave: Yes.
Mike: Did that end up ranking for you?
Dave: Not as so much as I have hoped but you know, it’s still occasionally added some money.

Mike: It’s interesting. The whole foreign language affiliate marketing interests me because I live in Istanbul, Turkey. I’ve been here for five years now. I speak the language so, I could essentially write content in Turkish and I have someone to look it over because I’m sure grammar would be horrible. But I could created content in Turkish and there’s a population of Turkey around 70 million, 80 million – I’m not quite sure what it is. I’m sure someone will correct me in the comments. But it’s a wide-open market. And there are – I’m not sure how many affiliate products but I mean, there’s – I’m positive, it would be much easier to rank for keywords in the Turkish Google than it would be on the English Google.

Dave: Yup. And this is the conversation I keep having with my wife. I’m telling her to write some, coz my wife is Japanese. I’m telling her to write some content in Japanese and get some sites in Google. But you know, things are busy and stuff but yeah, I definitely – I agree. I think it would be far easier to rank.

Mike: You know, what I always wonder though is with – like .us, .au, .ca. All these different country codes for the domain names and there’s that, that comes into play when ranking in the foreign language Google, also I think where the hosting is, or where the domain is registered. Is the domain registered in that country or whatnot. So, there’s all these kinds of little things that come into

play where – I’m not sure if there’s someone out there that’s really gone into this, if anyone listening now knows someone that does a lot of foreign language ranking, please let me know and – do you know anyone that does this?

Dave: No. The only experience I’ve had is that one that I did. And that one ranked pretty well, it’s a .com. Yeah, it ranked pretty well but I had high hopes for this site. I paid – I did pay for a pretty good link from a German site – for a backlink from a German site but yeah.

Mike: And link building would be interesting too, because all the link building that I know how to do is all from American or English or Australian sites. It’s not gonna be from German sites or Turkish sites and whatnot, so — I think that’s a whole different topic but it’s definitely interesting. So anything – before we wrap it up here, is there anything that you – that we didn’t touch on with your affiliate mini site secret brain dump that you think is important to mention before we wrap it up here?

Dave: Yeah, I just like to say I think it’s a different way of looking at how to get sites and to Google. You know, I think it’s kind of. And from what I’ve found from the customers I talked to, sometimes they’ve had a hard time kind of getting around the normal way of finding the keywords and volume and stuff like that. So yeah, it’s a different way of looking at things.

Mike: Cool, cool. Well, again thank you for coming on the show today. We’re gonna have links to your products on the show notes on mikefrommaine.com. If people wanna reach out and contact you, do you have a website or how can they reach you at?

Dave: So, they can reach me at davemacmarketing.com.
Mike: davemacmarketing.com.
Dave: Yeah. My last name is a little complicated to spell. So, I just shortened it to mac. M-A-C. Mike: Great. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Thanks again, Dave. I really appreciate it. Dave: Thank you. Cheers!

Mike: I hope you enjoyed the interview with Dave. If you wanna check out his WSO that sold over 400 so far, you can got to mikefrommaine.com/minisites. That’s mikefrommaine.com/minisites. And yeah, check that out. It’s definitely something that I will personally be looking into. Thank you for watching and as always, I will see you tomorrow.