How I Got Rich

That Sunday Night Feeling

Now that I am back working full-time some of the things I’d left behind are returning.

The main one is that Sunday night feeling where you know you have work the next day which is even worse after having some time off.  Last week I was off from work and was on holiday and today (Monday) is a public holiday so I am getting that Sunday night feeling a day late but it is just as strong if not stronger.  I am really fired up to do some affiliate marketing work but have lots of planning and preparation to do for the day job so can’t even do that!

I’ve set myself another goal which is to be earning £900 a month by the end of June which is about four months time.  This should be enough for me to quit the day job and go full-time again.

I plan to do this via my existing sites and the addition of one big site which I am yet to start.

Can it be done? Watch this space.

Getting all my sites to number 1 in Google

This might sound like an obvious goal but for now I am going to focus on getting my existing sites to number one in Google.  Most of them are at number one in Google for their main keyword but not all of them.

Normally I start a new site, put up some content and wait for it to get to number one.  If after a while it is not on page one or close then I leave it and move on.  But as I have vowed to not make any new sites for a while I am thinking I might as well get the sites I have to number one so I can see if any of them will get any traffic.

I have sites for keywords that get, according to the Google keyword tool, anything from 3,000 to 50,000 exact searches a month.  As I’ve now realised the Google keyword tool is not to be believed and does not even give a rough idea of searches.  This has made me think that I might be sitting on a site that gets 100’s of 1000’s of exact searches each month and I won’t know until I get the site to number one.

So with that in mind I am going back to my older sites that don’t rank well and seeing what I can do to get them to number one.

I’ve never really done any work on back links so I might have to finally get around to giving it a serious go.  I will also be adding content which I will probably end up outsourcing as I don’t have much spare time any more.  It is quite expensive at £10 for 500 words but probably cost effective in the long run?

Anyone got any tips for getting a site to number one in Google?

Back to Work, Full Time!

Well being a full-time affiliate again didn’t last long.  Less than a week later I have a new job but will be working full-time not part-time like before.  This means my time for affiliate marketing will be greatly reduced.  I wasn’t looking for work but something landed in my lap and was offered ito me and I am not in a position to turn work down so I will be starting next week.

Maybe this will spur me on and give me an incentive to put more effort into my affiliate marketing sites.  I must admit I had been getting lazy.  Around my previous job in England I still managed to put in quite a bit of effort into affiliate stuff and got to a level of earnings I have yet to go above (apart from Christmas) after trying affiliate marketing full-time for the past few months.

I’m setting myself the goal of writing four new product review pages/posts a day to one of my existing sites (rotating through the sites) and also adding one new product review page to each of my two big sites.

With the extra money coming in I will be reinvesting some of my profits from Internet marketing into my sites by buying content and looking into link building and how much that costs.  Anyone know any thing about that?

My long term goal is still to get from my current earnings of about 400 pound a month to 2,000 a month by the end of 2010.  Will I be able to do it?

Busy Beaver

I’ve had quite a productive day today.  This morning I wrote a few new pages of content for one of my old sites that was languishing  around page three in Google for ages and since I moved it to Wordpress has crawled up to the bottom of page one.  I’ve slowly been adding more posts to it to help improve it’s ranking.  There has been no change as of yet but I hope soon it will move up to the top.  Its more of a seasonal site for the autumn but it can’t do any harm getting it to the top now.  According to the Google KeyWord Tool it got 18,100 exact local searches last month so hopefully a few of them will click through if I get it higher up the page.  At the moment it gets about 100-200 uniques a month and makes a few sales.  Its never going to make me rich but as I’ve already bought the domain I might as well use it and see if I can make a few quid from it.

Ranking for Two Keywords

Regarding the above site I would ideally like to get it ranking for two keywords.  One is, lets say, red monkeys and the other is big footballs.  The product I am promoting does both things but has two different names that is referred to.  The domain I have used is redmonkeys.org.uk and the site is on the first page for that term but for the keyword big footballs the site is nowhere to be seen.  I’m not sure the best way to go about getting the site ranked for the other keyword.  I’m starting to build backlinks using that keyword as anchor text and I’ve started using the keyword more throughout the website so hopefully things should pick up.

If I focus on getting the site ranked for big footballs is there any way it will affect the ranking already achieved for red monkeys?

Another thing I did today was add a new product (well the first product) to my ‘big site’ and setup a PPC campaign for it.  Hopefully I get lucky with this product and start to see some sales come though.  My aim is to add one new product to this site per day and set up a PPC campaign for it.

Back to being a Full-Time Affiliate Marketer again

I have now finished my part-time contract I was on and am now back to being a full-time Internet marketer again.  I will be looking for a new job (hopefully part-time) as I am still earning bugger all from this lark but hopefully before I find one my fortunes will pick up.

Last month was amazing but this month has been back to normal and I think I will be lucky to clear £400 which is nowhere near enough.

I am starting to wonder at what point do you call it quits and admit that something isn’t going to work out for you and move onto something else?  I guess if I have another month without any rise in profits then I will have to have a long hard look at where I am.

8 Pages in 2 Hours

I read something just now in Kirty’s blog which has inspired me to set myself a new challenge.  Kirsty mentioned that she sets herself the target of writing eight pages a day and aims to do so  in two hours.  Later on she says each page is about 250 words.

After reading that I have decided to set myself the same target.  Each day I will write 8 new pages for my existing sites (of which I have many).  I will aim to do it in two hours but will give myself longer if need be.  Each page will most likely be a Wordpress post with an image of the product a link to the merchant and an ECU where appropriate.  Each post should be about 150-250 words.

Two hours isn’t long and I will spend the rest of my time working on other aspects of my sties including link building, finding new products or anything else I can think of.

Right, I better get off and start writing!

2009 & 2010

2009 has been a pretty good year for me.  I gave up my boring IT job, moved to Thailand and tried my hand at Internet Marketing full-time.  Going full-time didn’t boost my earnings as much as I thought they would so I got a couple of part-time jobs to tide me over.  The year finished on a high note with me earning £883 in the last month setting a new personal record.

I’ve learnt a lot in my first year in affiliate marketing and will be putting that into practice in 2010.  Some of the things I will be focusing on in the new year will be:

• Stop buying domains for small-time keyword niche sites. I have enough of these sites in various states of completion to last me a long time and the list is getting too many to mention.  It always seems easier to stop working on long term projects to start a new project that most of the times doesn’t come to much.
• Get my big sites up and running. I have three big sites I plan to get going this month and work on throughout the year.  It was going to be two but I am having quite good success with one niche using PPC that I an going to build a big site around it and promote it via PPC.  The other two will be content sites that I will aim to get traffic organically for.  I need to stop procrastinating around getting started and Just Do It.
• Make more use of PPC. I stayed away from PPC for a long time as I was scared of losing money but most times I have tried it it has paid off.  The amount of traffic I can get from it massively out numbers any traffic my sites get from organic search results alone.   I am going to delve deeper into the world of PPC and AdWords and see how much more traffic I can bring in.  SEO will not be neglected as I think it is essential for long-term success but PPC is just as valuable.
• Reinvest profits. I haven’t done much of this so far but I am going to look into ways of reinvesting my profits in my sites.  Content writing is an obvious solution and perhaps link building is also something I should look into outsourcing.  Anything else I can spend my money on?

My goals and resolutions for 2010 are as follows:

• Do something every day that can bring in money.  I read this somewhere else and liked the idea.  It can be a small thing or a big thing but basically each day you are adding something to your ‘portfolio’ that could lead to a sale whether it be launch a new site, add a new product, start a new campaign or just add a new link to a merchant.
• Be earning £2000 profit per month by end of 2010. I want to be earning £2000 per month by the end of 2010.  This is more than I earned in my day job and will put me in a nice position for when I return to England plus I will also be able to live very comfortably out here on that much too.

Non-Affiliate Marketing:

• Learn Thai
• Take up a sport and stick with it throughout the year – possibly Tennis, Golf or Muay Thai
• Start a diary blog for my travels
• Learn to draw
• Get back in touch with 3 friends from my childhood/school days

My First £50 Day!

After only a few day after posting about how I wanted a £50 a day site I managed to bring in over £50 in sales in one day.  This wasn’t from one site but spread across many but it  is still a new personal best for me and a nice change in my fortunes.

I put this down to finally giving PPC a proper go as most of the traffic came via Adwords ad I had setup in the past few days.  Yesterday I spent £13.01 on Adwords clicks and made £66.76 in commission which gives me a profit of £53.75. Some of the sales came through non-Adwords traffic so I will have to work out exactly how much I earnt from the Adwords traffic but I am certain it is more than the amount I spent.

£50 a day equals £1500 a month which would be amazing.  If I could make £25 a day in the not too distant future I would be very happy.

Hopefully this is the start of something good rather than a glitch in the Matrix.

First Day In My New Job

Since giving up the day job and moving to Thailand I have been trying to make a go of it with affiliate marketing but as my regular readers will know things didn’t really pan out in the way I had hoped and I’ve not been earning enough to live off out here even with the low cost of living.

Due to this I have started a new job teaching web design in English at a Thai school.  Since Thailand has strict laws on immigration it is only possible to get a work permit for a job a Thai person cannot do and that really only leaves teaching hence the teaching job.  Most people teach English but when I saw this job I thought it would be ideal as it combines something I have done in the past and know a fair bit about (web design) with the requirement to teach.

However the first day nearly broke me and it was touch and go whether I’d make it to the end of the day.  The main reason for this was the kids were so badly behaved and I didn’t have the teaching skills to handle a class of 35 unruly Thai teenagers who had little respect for their farang teacher!

The job is only part-time and I get paid a bit more than the going rate for teaching English and it works out to about £35 a day.  Not a lot for the effort and grief but better than nothing.

The one good thing to come out of this is that it has really spurred me on to make something of my affiliate marketing efforts.

Surely from the 35-40 sites I have it shouldn’t be too hard to make £35-40 a day from them?

At the moment that is too much to ask but I am going to be working like a dog from now on to make it happen.  This weekend I’m staying in and not venturing out or down to the pool even though the sun is out and its nice and hot.

From now on I am going all out to make the dream of giving up the day job a reality!

I’m Back!

It’s been a while since my last post (about 25 days) and a few people had gotten in touch to check if I was still alive and doing affiliate marketing.  Well I am still going, I went away for a week but apart from that have been plugging away quietly.

How Are Things Going?
Sales are doing ok for this month and I should do better than last month but not up to the level I was a few months ago.  I got a bit disheartened at the start of the month but have been putting in a lot more work of late, updating older sites, making new sites etc.  My older sites are starting to rank well with a lot in the number one position in Google for their main keyword.  However this doesnt guarantee traffic or sales and some of my sites that are number one still get very little traffic and few if any sales even though they get 5-10k exact seraches according to GKWT.  This is why I have so far been making lots of sites.  Waiting for one of them to take off as until I have got a site up and running I don’t know if it will bring in any money or not.  Still not got an eye for spotting a good niche.

Big Site
All the advice I have had so far has been to make a bigger, more general site that I can focus on rather than having lots of little sites to distract me.  So far I’ve been wary of putting all my eggs in one basket (especially since my choices so far have been so hit and miss) but as my other approach isn’t really paying off I am going to give it a go.

I’ve picked my niche, almost got a name for the site and should be ready to go at the start of November.  I will be building it around Wordpress for now but have some planning to do of how to structure it.

Getting a New Day Job
As some of my regular readers may know I gave up my day job a few months ago to come to Thailand.  My earnings were going up month on month before I came out so I thought they would continue to increase and soon be enough to live on out here without getting another full time job.  Alas they did not and since my earnings started to go down I’ve been looking (a bit half-heartedly) for a new job.  Part-time would be ideal but there is not much on offer out here and due to the strict immigration laws teaching is really the only option for a farang and there are not many part-time teaching jobs on offer.  Hopefully my earnings will rocket and I will avoid going back into working for the man.  I think £650 per month would do me nicely out here and allow me to focus on really putting my all into Internet marketing.

Anything exciting been happening in the world of affiliate marketing in the last month or so?

Are you all ready for Christmas (I’ve not done anything which I am sure I will regret)?