I bought AffiloBlueprint 1.0 when it was first released a couple months ago.

I really liked it, and since AffiloBlueprint will be released in a couple days, I thought I would do a quick review for it so my readers can take advantage of one of the better infoproducts out there on the market.

Just a little background information about Mark Ling; he’s one of my favorite gurus because he really does walk the talk.

Other than the fact that the things he teach makes sense, I also know for a fact that he’s a hugely successful Clickbank merchant. SitStayFetch, one of the most popular products on Clickbank, is actually owned by him; so are a few other less popular, but certainly successful ones.

In AffiloBlueprint 1.0, the site-building part was mainly taught the XSitePro way.

I don’t use XSitePro and I’m a wordpress fan, so I had Keshia create a custom theme that would look exactly like the case study Mark created.

In AffiloBlueprint 2.0, you’ll actually get a free wordpress theme that would probably be easier to customize, plus you save yourself the hassle of having to get one created yourself like I did, PLUS you get to use this theme on unlimited sites, so I think this by itself is worth the entire cost of entry.

I’m too easily distracted so I’ve only created one AffiloBlueprint site myself, since December of 2008, because I’ve been busy with other projects. It’s a very, very viable business model though, and is one I plan to replicate over and over in the very near future.

Essentially, the process is as follows.

1) Market Research
2) Outsource content
3) Create site, build a list 
4) Build links
5) Drive traffic through article marketing
6) PPC
7) Expand, and so on.

Might look like the content page of a $27 ebook but Mark explains it so well that if you’re able to get your hands dirty implementing it, you WILL see sales fast.

Heck, if you’re still stuck after going through the entire course, just email me and I’ll try to help you sort things out.

So what have my results been like from the one AffiloBlueprint site I built?

From December till today, I’ve made about USD$900 from sales, and have sold the site for USD$1300 so I can use the influx of cash to re-invest in other parts of my business.

Spent about USD$200 on having articles written and sending some PPC traffic, so net profit was about USD$2000.

Considering the fact that..

1) Much of the work was outsourced
2) I will be able to churn out these sites much faster now

I think AffiloBlueprint is a great learning experience, even without the wordpress theme. Heck, with the wordpress theme, I think it’s a no-brainer if you plan to make any income from affiliate marketing.

Even as a relative newbie, a successful AffiloBlueprint site will pay for the entire course in a week once it’s been setup properly.

I’m not trying hard to sell you on this, but if you buy it through my link, there are a couple things I can offer you as a gift:

1) Email support – I’ll give you some advice with building your first site; I don’t know how valuable you deem this to be, but in my opinion, there is something very wrong if you can’t even get an AffiloBlueprint site up with my help.

2) To be honest, I didn’t follow AffiloBlueprint completely; I skipped the tedious article marketing part almost completely, and still made a fair number of sales. (What, you didn’t know I’m lazy?)

I’ll tell you how I built links the lazy way to get my site ranking number 6 on google for my primary keyword.

Disclaimer: The method isn’t free, but I’ll work something out for you if you buy through my link.

So here’s the link:

http://www.affilorama.com/affiloblueprint?aff=kangwei

Yeah I’m not even trying to mask it or anything; you already know it’s my link.

Right, it’s 4 a.m. my time, and I have an exam in 2 days’ time, so I’m off to bed for now; just wanted to give you a heads-up about this great product

It’s now week 4 of the case study.

I have originally intended to make this little experiment last for about 6 weeks, but I did a quick evaluation of the statistics, reviewed my strategies, and realize that there isn’t much of a point carrying on with this experiment.

It might take abit more time and tweaks to make this site achieve its $1 per day goal, which I thought was a fairly easy goal to hit for.

I think there is a very important lesson from this case study; so important that we can stop right here and we will already have learnt alot.

What is the main reason that this case study didn’t fail to hit my goal?

Lack of RESEARCH.

Duh, right? If you think you’ve heard this all before, hear me out.

The most critical mistake I made was this: I took the gist of the content right out of Content Goldmine, and simply assumed that since the niche and articles were well-researched, it will work with any business model.

Wrong. Dead wrong.

Does this mean that Content Goldmine is an inferior membership site? Far from it; it’s excellent.

What could proper research have done for me?

In summary, in this past 4 weeks, the site has netted me a grand total of $1.35 from Adsense. The affiliate products weren’t a good fit for the site, because I couldn’t find any on Clickbank that is niched enough to obtain a good match.

Again, poor research. I’ll probably add some CPA ads to the site to aid in the monetization. I should probably remove Adsense ads because the payout from the clicks are way too low.

Okay!

I hope you learnt some stuff from this case study, even though it didn’t turn out to be as successful as I envisioned. There were many lessons to be learnt though!

My better half and I thoroughly enjoyed doing this case study though; it was good insight for her. She finally knows what I’ve been doing in front of the laptop all the time.

In the spirit of giving, and to thank you for supporting the case study..

If you’re interested in looking at the actual niche site to further aid you in your education, just drop me a personal email, and I will reply you with the URL. You can find my email address at the sidebar, in my bio.

Hope you enjoyed this first case study! More to come for sure.

Do drop me some feedback as to how I can improve the case studies I do in future!

It’s been 3 weeks since this case study started.

Here’s a brief recap.

Week 1: Posted 5 articles on the blog, and then submitted one article to EzineArticles. Once the article is approved, it is then submitted to Goarticles.com and then posted on the blog.

Week 2: About 5 articles have been submitted. Stopped all activity because at this point of time I wanted to add the site to 3 Way Links to demonstrate the power of it.

Week 3:

This was quite a passive week. We stopped almost all activity on article submissions and just wanted to get our site onto 3 Way Links as soon as possible. Unfortunately, an upgrade was being done to the server and I couldn’t get my account going. We submitted the site right after 3 Way Links came back online, and we got approval in a day; very efficient.

Here’s a summary of our traffic stats.

52.90% Direct Traffic
34.19% Referring Sites
12.90% Search Engines

Of course, direct traffic mainly came from me and the better half as we edited the sites, added posts and made changes to it in general.

34.19% came from our article submission efforts at Ezinearticles.

12.90% came to out site while searching for resources on our niche. However, because ours is quite an obscure niche, our traffic was on the low site.

Earnings-wise, we’re still far from our aim of a consistent $1 per day; we’re getting the hits, but not the clicks. The affiliate programs aren’t converting as well.

So far we’ve mainly had $0 days, and peaked at $0.46 cents, with a total of 3 clicks.

Up until now, things aren’t looking very positive, but maybe 3 Way Links still needs some time to take effect. Afterall, we’ve only been on the network for about a week.

CY provided some useful information about article marketing to me that I’d like to share with you as well.

1. Don’t write a summary of your article in the article body. Instead, include the summary in your bio box.
2. Write a Part 1 article, then link to part 2 article from your bio box.
3. Write a how-to article, then link to a presell page where you presell a tool that can automate the how-to process you mention in article.
4. Write a product review, then link to a page from your bio box, where you offer extra bonus and discount if they purchase via your affiliate links.

If you have any comments/ideas at all, do not hesitate to drop me a comment!