How I Got Rich

I Keep Having This Dream…

I keep having this dream before I wake up and it takes me a few minutes to discover it is just a dream and isn’t real.

In the dream I am back in London working my old 9-5 job. I am due to leave for Thailand in a few days but I haven’t told my work I am leaving and I’m trying to think of a way of getting out of my job in such short notice or else I won’t be able to move to Thailand.

When I wake up I am still frantically trying to think of a way to escape the day job and make it out of the country to a life of sun, sand and Singha.

What does it all mean? Maybe it means that due to the recent Google updates and how they affected my sites I might be heading home and back into a 9-5. Noooooo!

What Does a £400 a Month Site Look Like?

On my last post a comment from Jason from Lazy Bastard Life got me thinking about how many sites I’d like to have and what I’d like them to earn.

I think the ideal situation would be 10 sites that make around £400 / $630 per month each, bringing in a total of £4000 / $6300 per month.

But what would a site earning £400 / $630 per month look like?

So far none of my many sites make that much and although I’ve spread myself pretty thinly I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for a while. Some of my sites do occasionally make this amount per month when they are in season but never for more than a couple of months.

So is it possible to get site earning this sort of money?

If a site was making £5 commission per sale it would need 80 sales a month which is about 3 sales a day. You could probably get 3 sales from 100 visits (3% conversion rate) if your traffic was targeted and relevant to the product you were promoting.

Let’s say you get to number one in Google and get 100 hits a day. Let’s assume being number one in Google gets you 33% of the people searching for your keyword. That means you would need 300 searches a day which is 9000 searches a month.

So you would need a keyword that gets 9000 exact match searches a month and be promoting a product that gets you £5 in commission. Let’s assume a commission rate of 5% (amazon.co.uk) which would mean we need a product selling for £100.

If you were targeting the US market I think it would be easier to find a keywords getting that many searches due to the larger population.

So when you look at it like that it doesn’t sound too hard? So how come I’ve not come close so far?

What have I overlooked and what am I doing wrong?

Do you have a £400 / $630 a month site?

How Should One Invest Their Profits?

At the moment nearly all my earnings go towards paying off previous financial commitments and living costs but there will be time in the, hopefully, not too distant future when the slate will finally be wiped clean and everything I earn will be mine to spend as I choose. If we ignore last month which was an utter turkey when it comes to earnings and look back at 2011 you can see my average monthly income was £1500 or $2400. If I estimate my living costs at being £700 per month which includes putting money aside for holidays then it leaves me with £800 to play with.

How Would You Reinvest £800 Per Month?

So the question is: what should one do with £800 per month? Is it best to put it into a savings account or try and get a decent return by investing it in building websites? If I was to invest it in making money online I think it would go something like this each month:

• Hire a part-time virtual assistant to do link building
• Sign up for Build My Rank, Unique Article Wizard & SocialAdr
• Setup five new sites in low competition niches
• Add content to my best earning five sites
• Start an authority site and add regular content to it

Or am I just continuing to do what I’ve already been doing and not looking at the bigger picture?

What would you do if you had money to re-invest each month or if you already are, how do you reinvest?

£2 Project

I think I’ve written about this before but it only takes a few sites making a few pounds a day to start to add up. For the next few months I am going to focus on getting a number of my existing sites earning a few quid a day which when added up should bring me to my target total of earning £2000 per month from affiliate marketing.

I’ve identified 28 of my sites which I think have the potential to make regular sales. With a target of £2000 a month I will need these 28 sites to each make £2.4 per day.

About 10 of the sites I’ve picked are making over that a day, some by a bit and some by not much.

Some of the 28 sites are seasonal too which poses a bit of a problem too.

How Many Sales Per Day?
If the average commission is about 4% then to make £2.40 per day I will need to be making sales of £60 per day. This is quite a lot and means some of my sites will have to make 2-4 sales per day.

The Approach
I’m going to work through my sites in chronological order with the focus on getting them all to number one or at least on page one of Google for their main keyword. Then once there I can see if they get enough traffic to make £2.4 a day in commission.

First I will add content to the sites then start trying to get backlinks for them in a bid to get them to rise up the SERPs.

How many of your sites make more than £2.40 a day?

Back to Work

Well I’ve just had a week off work and am now back in the grind doing the 9-5. I had a great week off, probably didn’t do as much affiliate marketing as I should but it was nice to be a man of leisure and my own boss for a while. I did suffer from my old problem of not doing as much as I should and doing other things that are fun but won’t earn me money like going to the gym, lying by the pool, learning Thai and doing Thai boxing. These were my goals for the week:

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the last 7 days:
1. Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
2. Get all my sites up to date
3. Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
4. Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

So how did I get on? Not as well as I hoped but what’s the point in having goals if they are too easy to achieve?!

Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)

I was going to look at Aweber for my affiliate marketing mailing list but someone suggested mailchimp.com as it is free for the first 1,000 users so it would be an inexpensive way to test out a mailing list. I signed up with them and added a signup form to my busiest site which gets a good few hundred hits a day. My signup form is in the sidebar of the (WordPress) site and not in a popup but it is above the fold so everyone who lands on the site should see it. After having it on the site for about half a week and being seen by maybe 1000 users no one has signed up! The form does look a bit cruddy as I am yet to smarten it up but I am bit disappointed no one has signed up. I will try and jazz it up a bit and see if that helps and then maybe try putting it in a popup, although I don’t want to scare off any customers.

Get all my sites up to date

I didn’t even get close to this. I spent most of the time working on just one of my sites and adding content to it and smartening it up. The site is on page 4 for its main keyword but gets a fair amount of long tail traffic and makes a few sales so my goal is to get it up to page 1 in Google and see if it becomes more profitable. I’ve added some content but no backlinks so not sure if this will help.

Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites

I read a few blog posts on this but still no closer to outsourcing getting my pages formatted with links, ECU and content. Once I do this I think I will move a few steps up the ladder in terms of earnings as I can get lots of content added to my sites very quickly which is one of my main sticking points at the moment – not having enough time.

Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

No progress on this. Think I will scrap it as too much work to do and probably not much demand for it! Maybe after 5 years.

11 Goals for 2011

After reading My Egg Noodles’ 10 Goals for 2011 I thought I’d get mine down on ‘paper’ before I forget mine.

1. Pay off Credit Cards & Overdraft
   Big task but could be done by end of 2011
2. Be earning £2000 per month from affiliate marketing by July 2011
   Will require about a 10% increase month on month from here to July, pretty steep but could be done
3. Be earning £3000 per month from affiliate marketing by December 2012
   If I hit goal number 2 I will have lots more money to invest so it might happen
4. Go surfing (at least once)
   Will need to go on holiday to somewhere with some surf so not sure I can do this unless there are waves in Thailand?
5. Go snowboarding (at least once)
   Again will be dependent on where we go for holidays but could happen
6. Go SCUBA diving (and if I like it do the PADI)
   More likely than 4 & 5, had lots of opportunities to do this but never gotten around to it.  After snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef am inspired to try scubba’ing next.
7. Play Golf at least once
   Been practicing at the driving range, just need to find a course I can be let lose on
8. Carry on with Muay Thai for the whole year
   Would like to do it twice a week or even better, do a month long camp but not sure I can spare the time
9. Get a six pack
   If I just cut out the takeaways and went to the gym more often…
10. Bench 100kg for reps
    Only 10 kg away but its a big 10kg!
11. Make at least one new friend not related to work or mrs or existing friends i.e. expand social circle
    Could do with meeting some more people not from work or that we know already; will try to be more friendly!

I think that should do it for now.  Will report back in a year!

Last keyword domain niche site I promise!

Ever since starting out in affiliate marketing I have been building smingle style keyword domain niche sites. I’ve probably bought about 40-50 domains so far and have at least a very basic site setup on nearly all of them. Only a few make money but some do ok which is why I have carried on down this route.

My First Big Site
A while ago I vowed to stop buying anymore domains or starting any new sites and start work on a big site that did not have a keyword domain and targeted a bigger, more general niche. That site never really took off and I soon gave up on it. I didn’t buy many more domains and worked on expanding my existing sites out of their niches to try and make them more profitable. This worked on some sites but not on most of them. Moving a niche site out of its niche proved to be rather trickier than I thought.

No more Mini-sites
Lately I have been getting back into my old habit of buying keyword domains and setting up basic sites with a few pages and then leaving them to gather dust. Last week I bought another one that is hardly going to set the world alight.

But now I have made (another) decision to stop with the small sites and go full steam ahead on a big site.

A Big Site: My Second Attempt
I have picked an area to work in that, based on my niches sites, converts quite well online and has lots of merchants with a wide range in prices from 10 to 100s of pounds per item. Some items in this area are seasonal but overall the products should sell all year round.

I’ve bought the domain name. Obviously I would’ve loved an exact match keyword domain but on an area this big that was gone long ago so I opted for one with the main keyword in it and two other words in front of it. Whether this helps with ranking is debatable but it might show to users viewing the site the SERPs that the site is relevant.

Which UK Host?
So now I need to find some hosting. I am going to host this site separately from my other sites as I would like to keep it separate and also use a UK host for a bit of a boost in the SERPs. Any recommendations of a good value UK based host with Fantastico and CPanel for one domain and a WordPress site would be much appreciated.

My Big Site Strategy
My strategy for the big site is pretty basic and I could do with sitting down and coming up with some ideas to make it a bit more creative but for now I am going to be adding products from the area as 200 word product reviews and take it from there.

Big Site Link Building
As for link building I’ve not got much idea. So far I have been using forum profile links and blog commenting which I have paid for on my small sites and this has worked on some sites and not on others so I don’t really trust these methods. For this big site I don’t really want to take any risks so will be looking at ways to get good quality links manually.

My Eight Month Goal
My goal for this big site is to be making me ₤1000 per month by the end of July which is only 8 months away. Is this possible, can I do it?

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How to Pick a Big Niche for my Big Site

In prepartion for me giving up the day job and becoming a full-time affiliate marketeer in about seven months I am planning to work on a ‘big site’ from now to then with the goal of it bringing in ₤1000 a month by around July 2011.

Along with the income from my other sites this should cushion the blow of leaving my job and cover the bills until my full time earnings kick in.

The main thing stopping me from starting this big site is deciding on what area or niche to set the site in.

I’ve got three ideas I think are worth a punt but I am very wary of picking the wrong one. I am aware of ‘paralysis by analysis’ which is all too common in new affiliates starting out but seeing as I’ve never really made a successful site so far I don’t want to get it wrong.

My criteria for this project is the following:

• Products must not be seasonal – or at least not completely die out for parts of the year
• Products must cost over ₤50: so that they bring in at least ₤2.50 per sale of which I will need 400 per month at this price which is 14 a day to reach my target.  Increase the product price to ₤100 and I will need just seven sales a day.  This is very rough as commission rates vary between merchants.
• Lots of the merchants operating in this area must have affiliate programmes.  Don’t want to be competing with brands or merchants that I can’t promote on my site.
• Cannot promote with PPC.  Due to my run in with Google Adwords I can no longer get traffic via Adwords so it must be a product type/area/niche I can promote via SEO and get traffic via the organic search results.

Ideas on a postcard please!

Countdown to Going Full-Time (Again)

Things are getting real: countdown to giving up the day job!

Due to a change in personal circumstances I will be becoming a full-time affiliate again in about eight months (July 2011).

I gave this a crack before about a year ago but didn’t use my time wisely enough to increase my profits so didn’t earn enough to keep at it and therefore had to go back to work.

I was gutted to return to work and give up the dream life of working for myself with no boss or alarm clock but hopefully I learnt something from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and next time things will be different.

But for now at least my main focus is to increase earnings over the next eight or so months.

Ideally I want to be bringing home ₤2000 a month by July 2011 but that would mean an increase of about 66% and that sounds like an awful lot!

In theory it only needs 10 of my numerous sites to bring in ₤200 each a month but hardly any of my sites make over ₤50 a month so this too seems like a long shot.

Perhaps eight months is enough time to build a site that will bring in ₤1500 (with the other ₤500 coming from my existing sites) but so far I’ve not even come slightly close to that.

By the end of this month (November) I will have picked a strategy for how to proceed over the next eight months to realise my goal and be a successful (this time) full-time affiliate marketeer.

Travelling Affiliates

I recently stumbled across a few blogs by people who make money online and travel the world on their earnings.

Quite a few of them do affiliate marketing to earn their money online and work from their laptops wherever they might be in the world. Although I have moved abroad and partly support myself with affiliate marketing its not quite the same as what I do and to be honest I am pretty jealous of the freedom and the lifestyles they write about.

I guess it really does show you can do this stuff almost anywhere and make enough money to see the world.

Here are some of the blogs I have found, if you know of any others feel free to comment post them:

• http://www.suitcaselifestyle.com/
• justindupre.com
• http://www.myeggnoodles.com/