How I Got Rich

What I done did today

After work and between the gym and my Thai class I wrote a few more bits of content about an older site which is finally climbing the Google tree and is at number three.  These were two 250ish word product reviews that I have done as separate Wordpress posts.

I’ve also decided to split apart my big site I am working on into two smaller big sites as the two areas are not that closely related.  After deciding this I spend some time looking for a UK based host I could host the site with as I want to move away from having all my sites on one server based in a different country to the one I am targeting.

After I’ve picked the host I will look for a Wordpress theme that meets my needs and get cracking on the site.  I want it ranking well for at least one product before Easter so I’ve not got long to get something up.  Hopefully I will have a quiet weekend and get some work done.

One of my newish sites made its first sale netting £10 commission which was nice.  A few more of those this month will make me happy.

Knock me down with a feather – another £50 day

Another good day in the run up to Christmas.  Yesterday I tweaked my Adwords ads and updated some of my ECUs that were pointing to out of stock merchants and today I have a lower PPC spend and have made more commission.

Break down goes a little something like this:

• Awin: £42
• Amazon: £26
• Adwords: £14
• Profit: £54

Obviously these are all pending but I’ve not had many rejections so far (touch wood) and PPC spend isn’t in sync with sales as there are time zone issues afoot but overall it looks positive.

I’d love to spend today checking my sites and setting up some new campaigns but as regular reader may know I recently started a new part-time day job.  Although the job is only one day a week it also takes a full day to prepare so unfortunately today and tomorrow will be affiliate marketing free apart from the odd bit of stolen time.  I am quite gutted as I only get £35 for the day of work (which actually takes two days) and I could earn more than that from Internet marketing but its not all about the money right?

Down But Not Out

Not another £50 day yesterday but a £25 day which is still great.

• £22 was made through Awin
• £25 was made through Amazon
• £21.69 was spent through Adwords

A lot of the sales did not come via the PPC campaigns so I probably made a loss/broke even/made a slight profit on the Christmas PPC sites.  I put this down to a few of my best seller going out of stock and a fair amount of sales going through Play.com who only give about 0.5% commission.

This is all slightly out due to the fact my Adwords account is in a -8 time zone so it doesn’t match up with my Affiliate Window account which is 8 hours ahead of the Adwords account.  Has anyone managed to get Google to change the time zone of their Adwords account?

I am tempted to try and open a new account and put it in the right time zone this time as it is annoying me not being able to compare spend on ads with income from sales day by day.

That reminds me, I better put some money on my credit card as I will be getting a pretty big Adwords bill sometime soon!

Stone the Crows! Another £50 day!

The month has ended nicely for me with another £50 day.  Well there was £65.61 worth of sales recorded through Affiliate Window and I spent £19.81 on clicks via Adwords.  This leaves £45.80 profit but I am still waiting for Amazon to update which is taking ages, I guess there must be lots of sales to add up for the Christmas perio but I am confident I have recorded at least £5 worth of commission for yesterday.

Update: Amazon has now updated and about £662 worth of sales were made of which 6% is £39 making the total profit for November 30 £85.52!

The day before I had paused about three of my PPC campaigns which were the ones that lost me the most money but today I’ve still managed to rack up £20 worth of  clicks.

It is getting increasingly difficult to work out which campaigns are the most profitable and which are costing me the most money but I seem to be making money overall so its  not too much of a problem yet.

I am definitely converted to the ways of PPC now and, if all goes well over the next few weeks, will definitely be using it long-term alongside SEO.

I know most of this traffic is Christmas traffic but hopefully I can diversify into non-seasonal niches and see similar results throughout the year.  As I’ve said before £50 a day would be amazing and would really change my life for the better.

November looks to have been a good month with a new personal best relating to sales and commission.  I’ll do a post tomorrow once Amazon has updated but for now its fingers crossed for December!

Blistering Barnacles – Another £50 day!

Last week started off well with my first £50 day but as the week went on things started to dip and on some days I was making a loss on my PPC campaigns but overall, including traffic from SEO sites, I was making a profit.  I was tempted to stop the campaigns for fear of making a big loss but thanks to comments posted on this blog I decided to leave them running and see if they turned around over the coming days and weeks.

I was out and about on the weekend so left them running unattended but last night was pleasantly surprised to see I had accumulated £71.11 from sales in through Affiliate Window for Sunday.  I quickly checked Adwords to see what my daily spend was and was relieved to see it was only £18.25 leaving me with a grand total of £52.86.  I’m still yet to check Amazon as there is a few more hours to wait for the stats to update.

edit: I’ve just checked Amazon and yesterday 46 items were ordered with a rough total of £634 of which 6% is £38 so it looks like I had a £90 day!

There are a few caveats however:

• The timezones between AWin and Adwords don’t match up with Adwords being 8 hours behind Awin so the daily spend doesn’t quite correlate to the daily sales figures.  But generally my spend has been about £15 each day so far this week.
• Not all my sales come from PPC traffic so the Adwords spend might not be that profitable.  I will be looking at the stats more closely to work out my ROI shortly.

But nevertheless, profit is profit and after going over the stats and tweaking my Adwords campaigns I will leave them running for at least another week.

There are still a few weeks until Christmas so its not to late to get a slice of the Christmas pie if you are prepared to use PPC.

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.

Unexpected Sales

I logged into Awin yesterday and saw I had a new sale with £34 commission pending.  I had a look to see what site it was from and was pleasantly surprised to see it was from a site I made many months ago that has been in the top 3 of Google for its 8,000 exact match keywords since I made it.  It had never made a sale and I’d all but given up on it.  I hadn’t updated it since I made it as it continued to rank well with no help from me.

Being top 3 for a 8,000 exact match niche isn’t going to get you many hits and this site was getting about 3 hits per day. On paper this sounded like a good niche: 8000 searches, little competition, fairly high value products but alas it was not.  It was missing that X factor that is so hard to define when picking a niche. This is why I favour the lots of small sites approach.  If I’d spent months making this a big site would it have made anymore sales than it has done already?

But £30 is £30 so I’m not complaining!

Atomic Niche Site Update

I started a micro niche or atomic niche site a while ago for an item that retails for about £1000.

I built the site using the product model number as the domain and then put an Easy Content Unit price comparison widget on the home page.  I left the site to see how well it would rank organically and it got to number two in Google after a few weeks.  It was getting about five hits a day but no sales.  I left the site as I assumed the item was too expensive and that not many people were searching for the item.

Recently I have been looking into PPC and AdWords and thought I would give promoting this site using PPC a go using the new things I have learnt in that area.

Today I logged into Affiliate Window and saw that the site had made a sale! The item sold  for £1,158.00 which got me £19.58 in commission.  10% would’ve been nice, or even 5% but in this case I will have to settle for 1.5% thanks to those stingy b*~tards at Dixons!

I think I will setup another one of these sites soon…

I paid for 58 clicks which cost me £12 so I will only make about £8 on this one but it is a start.

Update: I have since made another sale from a different merchant which got me £31.91 commission.  This has come from 68 clicks which cost me £14.69 giving me a total profit of £36.80 so far.  I am happy with that and think I will build a couple more of these sites.  If I had 10 up and running performing like this that would be £300 per month.

Update II: Another sale through today for £852.17 which brought me £17.04 which is about a 2% commission rate.  PPC spend is now at £15.18 which gives me a gross profit of £68.53 and a net total profit of £53.35.  I will definitely be making a few more of this type of site this week.  Just need to find out which merchants offer decent commission rates as 1% is pretty poor.

Update III: Another sale for this site came through today which brought in  £29.88 commission from a sale of £995.99 (3% commission rate).   This brings the gross profit up to £98.41 which after deducting the PPC spend of £20.25 leaves a net profit of £78.16.  The other sites I made in this style after this one are yet to make a sale but it’s early days.

Update IV: Bah! The sale from update III has been decline.  This was £29.88 of commission I thought was comming my way but according the Affiliate Windows data it has been ‘web declined’.  Not sure what that means?

Update V: Another sale for the site, still no action on the other sites though.  This one gets £15.93 commission from a sale of £796.52 although this is still pending.  This brings the gross profit for this site up to £64.88 and with a PPC spend of £21.29 the net profit stands at £43.59.

Case Study | First Sale | End of Project

I made my first sale today through the site I have been writing about in this case study.  From the click ref in Affiliate Window it appears the user who made the sale arrived at the site via the PPC advert.  They bought the item via the ECU and picked the lowest priced merchant which was Dixons.

So far so good but what I failed to check was how much commission Dixons were paying on this type of item.  I wrongly assumed their maximum amount of 2.5% was paid on all items but after seeing this sale listed in Affiliate Window I saw I would only get 39p for selling a £39 item.  This works out at 1% and not the 2.5% I was expecting.  I had a quick check of the Dixons commission scale and found that only 1% commission is paid on slow cookers.

Due to this I have now stopped the AdWords campaign for this site and will leave the site alone, therefore ending the case study.

In total I have spent £6.88 on the domain and £1 in clicks from the Adwords campaign and have earned a grand total of 39p commission.  Making a grand loss of £7.49. Without the traffic from Adwords I doubt the site will get any more traffic or make any more sales so I will just chalk this up to experience and move on to the next project.

Lessons learnt: always check the exact comission paid by the merchant for the type of item you are promoting.  Pretty obvious really but something that caught me out this time!

29 Sales in One Day!

I woke up this morning and checked my Amazon Associates account as I do first thing each morning and was pleasantly surprise to see I had made 27 sales yesterday.  I had also made 2 sales via Affiliate Windows. 25 of those sales came from one site.

That was my best day so far.  It will be interesting to see how much commission this gets me.  I have estimated it to be £22 but that is not included and direct link bonuses from Amazon Assoicates.

Hopefully this will see me reach my target for this month of £200.