How I Got Rich

Monthly Round-up: February 2012

The second month of the new year is now over and after a disappointing January last month I was hoping for a bit of a turn around and to start heading back to where I was in 2011.

Unfortunately this was not to be and February 2012 started off in the same fashion as the previous month in terms of sales.

Beginning of the End or a New Beginning?

Now that the month is over and the results are in it looks like January wasn’t a blip and this is how it is now for me in regards to earnings from my current crop of sites as they stand. My earnings for 2012 are just under 50% down on my average earnings for 2011 and take me back to well over a year in terms of level of income. This sucks big time but I guess its the price I have to pay for taking my eyes off the ball for a good 5-6 months while life got busy for a while.

I’ve learned the hard way that this isn’t passive income!

So where do I go from here? Is it the end of my time in affiliate marketing, should I try and shore up my sites and attempt to get them ranking again or do I take a new approach? I don’t have the time or money to try and fix all my sites and I don’t feel entirely like giving up just yet so I guess its time to change things up a bit. I will try and salvage my top five sites and leave the rest for now. Even if they drop even further in the SERPS they might just benefit from some ageing of the domains.

Battle Plan

I’m going to add new content to my top five sites and do some link building for the new and old content on them. Then I’m going to look at starting some new sites that have been better keyword researched and have the potential to earn money all year round and at a higher level than my existing sites which even when they were at number one never brought in big bucks. Starting new sites might seem like a bit of a bad idea when I’ve already got loads that need attention but I feel like a new direction or beginning is needed.

10 Sites Making £200 Per Month Each

In a previous post I asked what does a £400 / $630 a month site look like. I never found the answer to that question but I have set my sights a bit lower and my mission for 2012 is to build 10 sites that make £200 per month each. Five of those are likely to be existing sites and five might be new ones or perhaps existing sites once I’ve had a look at what I’ve got and taken stock. I’m going to be strict with myself and only focus on these 10 sites. It is going to be hard but I’m really determined to get my earnings up to £2000 per month as soon as possible. I’m not sure if these sites will be product sites, adsense sites or what but I will decide before the end of March and then start in April. Whatever I decide they will have a fair amount of content rather than trying to get by on the minimum.

Starting in April should give me at least six months to get them up and running and earning £200 each. Too ambitious? What do you think?

Link Building in February

I’ve been using Unique Article Wizard for a few months now and had hired someone from Odesk to write articles to submit into the service for me. This was costing me about $4 per submission which was on top of the $67 per month I was paying for UAW. Each submission tends to get accepted to about 100-120 sites and each submission can have two backlinks in. I normally link to two different sites from each article. This was working out fairly expensive and was taking quite a long time to get the articles done and into UAW. The VA was doing about five a week which isn’t really enough in my opinion. So after looking around for a better way I stumbled onto a service called Article Builder.

Article Builder

This service, from the people who made The Best Spinner, basically builds articles for you from a range of niches and topics that you can then submit into services like Article Ranks and Unique Article Wizard. Someone was kind enough to let me have a go on their account and I quickly discovered I could generate and then submit an article into UAW in a matter of minutes. Although this service is $300 / £180 per year I think it will save me loads of time and cost in terms of hiring someone to write the content for me.

I’ve not yet signed up as am very skint this month but am probably going to do so this week.

If anyone knows of any discounts for this service floating around let me know please!

Unique Article Wizard on Steroids!

As I said I was previously paying someone to write and submit articles into UAW at a rate of five per week. If this was for one site it might be ok but with the amount of sites I have and the fact I was linking to Web 2.0s that link to my main sites as well as linking directly to the money sites with UAW it wasn’t really time or cost effective.

But after trying Article Builder I was able to really hammer UAW and could do 10 submissions in minutes. With each submission pointing to two Web 2.0 sites I could really start to power-up some one of my tier 1 and 2 satellite sites as well as doing lots of deep linking to inner pages on my money sites.

I’m going to keep this up for a month and see if it helps but people are still reporting good results from UAW so I’m going to keep the faith for a bit longer.

Going back to Article Ranks

Now that I have content on tap I decided to give Article Ranks another try. I signed up a while a go and used it for a bit but not consistently as I didn’t have the content to submit into it. Now that I have access to Article Builder I can simply generate a spun article and then paste it into Article Ranks. I still have to add my URL into the body of the article but that isn’t too much of a hassle. Article Ranks seems to only submit your articles to a few sites but they seem to be better quality than the UAW ones. I will give this a try for a while alongside UAW and see how that goes.

New Service: Link Authority

I wrote about my experiences and testing using this new-ish backlinking tool earlier in February. I tested it on one site and saw good results quickly so rolled it out to a few of my other sites. Link Authority works like Build My Rank in that you write a 150 word article and then submit it to one site (of their choosing) and get one backlink to your site from a website which has a Google page rank of two or higher. This is quite time consuming as you have to write the 150 articles or pay someone else to do it. The results seem worth the hassle and with prices starting from as low as $12 per month it is definitely worth a try. I’m currently trying out a few writers on Odesk who can write the 150 word articles for $0.50 per article so that will save me some time. Unfortunately the content from Article Builder isn’t unique enough for this system.

Backlink Banzai

I’ve read quite a few good reviews of service that is new to me called Backlink Banzai. It seems totally hands off and is $67 a month which is quite a lot but if it can get just one of my sites ranking well then it will easily pay for itself. I am really tempted to give it a try but just don’t have £45 spare to try it when I’m not sure it works or not. Has anyone tried it or heard anything about it? People say their website looks hideous but I rather like it!

On the Hunt For PR Domains

Both Link Authority and Article Ranks allow you to submit your own websites into their network and by doing so you earn credits so that you can use their services without paying money. So this month I will be looking to buy a few cheap domains with page rank that I can do just that with. I can use the content from Article Builder to beef up the domains. Article Builder has a function that allows it to post directly to a website so I can set them up on auto pilot which should be interesting. I’ve read quite a few people are doing this with their Made for Adsense sites. If anyone knows where I can find some PR2+ domains from let me know please.

My Adsense Sites

Speaking of Adsnese I now have about 15 of those micro niche Adsense sites that people like Spencer from Niche Pursuits make. They are finally starting to rank now and are getting a few clicks but none are on page one yet so it is early days. I hope this model works out for me as these sites are easy to totally outsource and could be very hands off. If so they could be a great way to get some extra money coming despite my lack of time.

Affiliate Earnings for February

I think that about covers it (in 1500 words)! As I said this was another poor month much like January 2012.

My earnings for February 2012 were £718 / $1136

Sad but true! This blog made £20 which was the most its made for a long time but the rest came from my niche product sites. Like last month this doesn’t cover my daily living expenses for the month let alone give me anything to re-invest. Luckily I get paid a few months in arrears from Amazon and Awin so I’ve got a bit of breathing space. Also I have been informed by the powers that be that if I don’t get things back on track and bringing in £2000 by around August time I will have to get a full time job again. It seems whenever I give up my day job things go wrong and I end up dropping my income and then being forced back into work.

I’m really hoping that it doesn’t come to that again as I don’t think I could bare it!

How was your February?

Tools I used this month:

• Article Builder
• Article Ranks
• Link Authority
• Unique Article Wizard

Monthly Round-up: January 2012

I think this must be the start of my forth year doing affiliate marketing. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month and my goal which I want to hit before the end of 2012 is £2000 per month. As of August 2011 I no longer have a day job and spend my time as a stay at home dad while trying and do a bit of affiliate marketing when I can although I’m trying to do at least two hours a day this year after letting things slide big time since about April 2011.

Link Building

This month has been very quiet. Some days I didn’t make any sales which has been quite rare for me for a long time. My main sites have mainly been travelling downward in the SERPS although a few of my older, more neglected sites have been moving in the opposite direction thanks to my building some links to them using Unique Article Wizard.

I’m still using this tool and am seeing some positive results on less competitive terms but I’m not convinced it is cut out for more competitive niches or at least not on its own. Although I’ve not been using it much as it is time consuming to write the articles and submit them. I find one article submitted tends to get published about 100-200 times and as each article can have two links this means up to 200-400 backlinks. With the two links I tend to use one of them to link to one of my sites and the other link either points at a Web 2.0 site which links back to my site or directly to one of my other related sites. I think this is better than having both links from an article pointing to the same site. I’m trying to mix up my anchor text a lot more now so my links look something like this:

< a href="http://mydogtrainingsite.com" >{dog training|dog training ideas|dog training guide|click here|more info}< /a >

I’m also building more links to my inner pages. As I said writing and submitting articles is time consuming so I’ve not got much data to see how UAW is working. But this month I’ve hired two people form Odesk to write and submit articles in UAW. They are both going to do five articles and submit them each week and are charging about $5 a go. I will see how they get on any if they are good possibly increase this amount.

I also want to try Build My Rank as I hear good things about that. The cheapest package only lets you build links for five domains so I will pick my five best sites and focus on them. Focussing only on five sites is a good idea and something I want to try in 2012. I’m really bad to doing a little bit hear and there on my many sites instead of focusing my efforts so they actually make a difference.

Content Writing

The other day I mentioned I wanted to give article writing a try and see if I can bring in a few extra pounds a month to tide me over while my earnings are low. I’ve not found anything yet but am still looking. I know it makes sense to work on my own sites but when times are hard needs must!

Monthly Affiliate Earnings

As I said it was a slow month. Perhaps after Christmas people are skint and I hear there might be a recession looming in the UK? Either way it was bad and bearing in mind I earned £1200 last January it looks even worse!

My earnings for January 2012 were £745 / $1180

This doesn’t even cover my monthly (non-affiliate marketing related) outgoings so it is pretty bad.

Goals for February 2012

Well February is a short month so that’s already off to a bad start! I’m aiming for £1000 but obviously more would be good! I’m going to focus on my top five sites and try and get them back ranking before I start thinking about my ‘strategy’ for the new year. I’m quite interested in this Video Tycoon course which sounds good but I’ve just not got the time or money to invest in something new. Although after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad earlier this month I should be saying not “I can’t afford it” but “how can I afford it?” Good book by the way and definitely worth a read!

How was your January 2012? As bad as mine or did you start the year with a bang!

Also I think I want a new WP theme for this site. Any recommendation for a free, clean theme with two columns? Thanks.

Monthly Round-up: December 2011

Better late than never I guess! Not much to report for December. None of my Christmas sites from previous years were ranking so I wasn’t expecting anything from them and I was right.

Didn’t really do much work overall as had people visiting and it was Christmas. The work I did was based around trying to claw back some of my rankings taken from me in the Google update of October. Some sites have come back but not the main ones, at least not for all their keywords they were ranking for.

Some days were really quiet in December and I actually made no sales at all which was quite rare and then other days I was making over £50.

Still using Unique Article Wizard with mixed success, it does work sometimes but depends on where you’re articles are submitted and how competitive the sites you are trying to rank are.

My Earnings for December 2011 were £1300 / $1990 gross

2011 in a Few Words

Overall 2011 has been a great year. I had some great holidays visiting some new countries (Australia, Malaysia, plus lots of places in Thailand) we had a baby, I quit my job to be a stay at home dad and full-time (more like part-time internet marketeer) and I managed to make £1840 in one month from affiliate marketing. But in purely affiliate marketing terms the year has ended on a low note. I feel three years in affiliate marketing and I still don’t really know what I am doing. If someone gave me some money and said “build a site for me that would make money” I wouldn’t be confident of being able to do so as so far my portfolio is very hit and miss. The 80/20 rule is definitely in effect! I’m still no expert on picking a niche and keywords and not much better when it comes to link building. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month which is pretty good considering the hours I put in but not yet up to my goal of £2000 per month. Now I am no longer working in a day job and I am using my internet earning for living expenses so I’ve got much less to reinvest which has slowed me down quite a bit. I really want to get earning a few extra £100 a month so I can start reinvesting again and try and boost my income.

Goals for 2012

I just want to make more money really! £2000 per month would be great, £3000 per month would be amazing. My plans are to try and improve the rankings of my top 5 earners from 2011, continue building up one of my ‘big sites’ I started last year and get some more Adsense sites up and running. A new service is being launched at the Online Income Lab where you can hire a VA through them to build a site right through from researching the keyword to installing WordPress and doing the backlinking. I’m keen to give this a go as it sounds very hands off which is good as I have little time. Also these sites should be easy to sell on flippa or just keep and get some more money coming in.

How was your 2011 and what are your plans for 2012? Is internet marketing dead?

Monthly Round-up: November 2011

November picked up pretty much where October left off. I didn’t get up to much in November and continued trying to get my main sites that got downranked by Google back to where they were. I was also working on getting my first 10 Adsense sites completed and with backlinks for each site. I also signed up with Unique Article Wizard to make the process of getting links for my site a bit cheaper and easier.

Unique Article Wizard

I wrote about my first impressions of this tool here and they haven’t changed much since then. I’ve used it a lot more and have found that if I select the categories for the articles correctly, for some niches, I can get about 400 submissions per article. I’ve been setting the Wizard to only do 20 submissions per day so I don’t overload my sites with links. Due to this slow submission rate most of my jobs are yet to complete. For some sites I have seen an upwards move in the SERPS but for some others I have not. I guess it depends on how competitive the niche is, how good your site is, what other links you’ve got and what the competition is like. I’m going to keep using the tool for now but I’m not 100% sold.

Adsense Sites

After following the guys over at Niche Pursuits and Online Income Lab I couldn’t help myself from giving this type of internet marketing a try, especially with my other product niche sites floundering! In November I managed to finally get my first 10 Adsense sites finished. Some have multiple pages of content and some just have one page and nearly all have got some backlinks to them now. I’ve been buying quality content from The Content Authority but its not cheap so haven’t got much money left to invest this month which is a shame. I have bought another 10 domains for keywords which I found with SECockpit which is one of the best tools I’ve used. As I’ve no money to invest this month I’m going to try and write one 1000 word article for each of these sites myself. As the topics are pretty varied this might take a while but its better than not doing anything even if its not particularly time efficient. I’ve also been adding videos to these sites that I’ve had made on Fiverr.com and added to Youtube for an extra backlink. Seems like a relatively easy and cheap way to get backlinks and add different content to the sites. None of the first 10 sites are ranking in Google yet but I got a couple of clicks this month. I’m going to keep going with this approach and see if I can do 10 sites a month for the next six months or so.

Overview

November was pretty poor when it came to my sites rankings and earnings. I had little time to do much but tried to squeeze as many hours in as I could. Since my sites got hit by Google I’ve started to think I’ve gone about this game the wrong way. My lots of little sites approach didn’t really work in the end and I’ve now got too many sites to try and repair. Once I get a bit more money to invest I’m going to build up my best five sites and then try and build another five sites but build them with better, longer content and go for some slightly more competitive niches. I can’t be arsed to go after the tiny niches anymore that get you one or two sales a month and don’t bring in hardly any money.
It was ok before when they ranked without much effort but now Google is penalising those sites they would take too much work to rank in this day and age.

Other Affiliates

I read a great post from the Affiliate Musketeer who has been doing affiliate marketing as long as me (I think) but got off to a bit of a slow start but has now found his formula and is doing well. I was pleased to read his latest blog post but was also a bit jealous as it wasn’t so long ago I made £1800 in a month. I’m hoping for a Kindle for Christmas so if anyone has a copy of those books lying around feel free to lend them to me via email.

Earnings for November 2011

Like I said at the top this month carried on from October although this month I did slightly worse, continuing the downwards slide. I made £1.50 from my Adsense sites which was nice I suppose but not enough to pick up the slack from my product sites!

Last month I earned £1440 from affiliate marketing which was down from September but this month:

My gross earnings for November 2011 were: £1200 / $1870

So a drop of over £200 in one month. Some of this is down to losing top spots in Google while some of it due to my seasonal sites going out of season. I’ve not done anything to my old Christmas sites from previous years so I’m not expecting much of an increase in December.

Next Month

My goal for the end of 2011 was to be making £2000 per month but unless something major happens I’m going to be far short of that target. It’s been a good year in many ways but my earnings have been a bit disappointing but with the amount of time I’ve put into my sites in the last six months I can’t complain too much. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when I can work out my monthly average for 2011, have a little cry/cheer and then start the new year with a better game plan!

How was your November 2011?

Monthly Round-up: September 2011

September is over. One month closer towards the end of the year where I have been aiming to be making £2000 ($3100) per month by (not including Christmas stuff). This month was a bit of a step further away from that goal in terms of earnings as has been the trend the last couple of months. From looking at my stats it seems my sites have been getting more hits than ever before but making less money. Maybe as the keywords my sites are ranked for increases the less targeted the traffic is? Who knows but I haven’t got time to sit around analysing my stats and learning from my mistakes, I must keep ploughing on into the unknown!

Life as a Full-Time Affiliate

This was my first full month as a full-time affilaite and full-time stay at home dad. The two don’t really go together very well but I have managed to do quite a bit of work this month compared to the last few with at least something getting done most days. Maybe in the new year when the baby is a bit older I will get a nanny in the day for a couple of hours so I can pop out and get some work done. Babysitters and nannies only charge about £2 per hour here so I could afford it, its just whether I want to leave the little one on their own each day. We shall see…

Adsense Sites

I’m continuing to go down the Adsense route after following the progress of Trent and Spencer. I found lots of good niches/keywords with the keyword research tool SECockpit and have setup eight sites so far. My target was 10 by the end of September but eight is ok. The keywords look good to my inexperienced eye so we shall see if I can get them ranking and if they make any money. Once they are up and running I will start getting some more setup. I am very tempted to sign up for Trent’s Niche Site Mastery course but I’ve never paid for a course or how to guide yet and something doesn’t feel right about handing over cash for something like that.

New Niche Product Sites

This month I set up four more standard niche sites after months of not doing any. I made myself stop registering new domains and starting yet another site a while ago but now I think why not? Its how I’ve got this far so why stop. None of them are particularly good niches but if they each earn £10 a month I’m making money.

I’ve only put up about four pages on each one but I’ve changed the way I am going to do these sites from how I used to. Before I’d do one general page of about 500 words on the niche, then do product descriptions of products from the nice. Now what I am doing is a general 500 word peice on the niche then instead of doing product descriptions I will use the Google Keyword tool to find four or five related keywords that get searched for the most and then do a 500 word post/page targeting that keyword. For example my niche might be ‘Snowboards’, then I’d find the next highest searched keywords which might ‘Cheap Snowboards’, ‘Stunt Snowboards’, ‘Nike Snowboards’ and so on. Then if I need more content for the site I will do brand pages and then product descriptions. The problem with product descriptions are that they tend to be too long tail. For most of my sites, hardly any of them get traffic from specific product searches even though they rank well for specific product names. I find this the case more with lower priced items.

When it comes to TVs I expect people do find the one they want in the shops and then search for the product name online but with items under £50 or even £100 I don’t think people do the same level of research. Most people won’t search for ‘model name and number sandwich toaster’ but they do search for ‘cheap sandwich toaster’ or maybe even ‘Morphy Richards sandwich toaster’.

Content Writers

I’ve been using the instructions over on Sitey.net to find cheap content writers who write 10 articles for $10. The people who apply are mostly pretty crap but you do get the odd diamond amongst the rough. However the good ones tend to move on once they realise how much they could be making. I’m tempted to try out The Content Authority website but I’m pretty skint at the moment so can’t really afford it just now.

Link Building

I’ve managed to get a few sites to number one for keywords I’ve been targeting for ages. One site that is about two years old finally got to number one for the two main keywords. It is still bouincing around the top four which is a bit of a pain but while it is number one it gets about 150 hits a day which results in a few sales most days, this only brings me a couple of quid but its worth it for now. The 24/7 Backlinks service has been revived and you can get 1000 free backlinks per day just for signing up: http://247backlinks.info/ I’m also still using Social Adr for general easy social bookmarking backlinks.

You can see what other tools I use here.

The Future

Things have to change. I can’t really carry on building more small niche product sites. Adsense might be the way forward but it is very early days for me so can’t say for sure. My relative successes in link building has shown me that some of my sites that I thought would be quite profitable aren’t. My earnings aren’t to be scoffed at but they aren’t enough to live comfortably on and to give me enough to reinvest. I’m not really sure where to go from here. I need to find a new slant on affiliate marketing to push me on to the next level. My goal for the end of the year is £2000 per month but beyond that I’d love to be making £3000 or even £5000 per month one day. Is it possible?

Earnings for September 2011

My earnings for September 2011 were: £1490 ($2320)

Last month I earnt £1500 which is only a tenner more so not worth crying about but it is down about £350 from May 2011 when I earnt £1840 (seems a long time ago now). I made my first couple of sales through More Niche which was good as the comission levels were quite high compared to regular sales. I made more from Amazon this month than usual but less through Affiliate Window. I found a really good (free) plugin to help manage all your WordPress installations called managewp, it is definately worth a look if you have lots of sites.

How was your September?

Monthly Round-Up: August 2011

My third month as a full-time affiliate has ended and my new role as full-time-stay-at-home-dad has also started as my girlfriend has gone back to work after her maternity leave.

While we were both off work I had plans to try and do five hours of work a day but that never really happened. I’ve now scraped that plan and no longer have a timetable, I just do a bit of work when I can. Some days I do nothing and others I do maybe up to an hour. This probably isn’t enough to help me reach my (current) goal of £2000 per month but its the best I can do at the moment and I prefer this approach as it means I don’t beat myself up when I don’t reach my target hours of work per day. When the baby is a bit older I might hire a baby sitter/nanny for a couple of hours a day so I can pop over the road to Starbucks and do a quick bit of work each day. They only charge 2 quid an hour so its not going to break the bank!

Less is More

So what have I been doing with my limited time? I haven’t got time to write my own content or find good links so now I have to pay for these. I’ve got a couple of content writers which I am using for content to use for links (Web 2.0s & Articles) and to put on my sites. I’d rather write my own stuff for my sites, at least for the important pages but I haven’t got time and this is better than nothing. I’ve heard the term LSI Content be mentioned a few times but am not really sure what it is, anyone know about it?

Backlinks

I’ve bought lots of types of banklink over the past few months and I think I have found out what works for me from the things I’ve tried. Right now blog posts from blogs with PR seems to work. I’ve tried Web 2.0s, social bookmarks and other stuff like that but what seems to work most of them time is a blog post on a blog with PR (3 or 4) with a link to my site. If you can find such blogs who are willing to let you post then good for you but if you can’t you will have to pay for it. Sometimes the boost in the SERPs stick and something it doesn’t and your site drops down again but while the site is number one I make sales so it is worth the money IMO. It gets hard to find new providers though so once I’ve used the couple I know about and need to rank a site for other keywords I don’t have anyone to turn to. If you know anyone selling blog posts or a service that will let you post to blogs/sites with PR please leave a comment.

Social Bookmarking

As I just said blog posts are working for me at the moment. But they don’t always work, as a competitive niche can be hard to crack. It is also worth mentioning that I rarely just use the blog posts on their own. The blog post seems to be the icing on the cake that moves the site but before I use the blog posts I will social bookmark my pages, do a few Web 2.0s and maybe a directory submission. I was buying social bookmarking services but at abou $10 for 100 bookmarks it was getting quite expensive consdierng how many sites I have (40+?). I’d heard good things about Social Demon/Bookmark Demon but it sounded like a fair bit of work to setup it up and as I’m tight on time I thought I’d leave it for now. I then signed up for the trial of Social Adr which is touted as a lazy persons social bookmarker. The trial expired and I didn’t cancel the service so am still using it but can’t say I’ve tested how effective it is but it is very easy to use and does get you bookmarks. Whether they get indexed or not is another matter.

Xrummer and Scrapebox

I’ve not had much luck with buying Xrummer (forum profiles) and Scrapebox (blog comments) blasts that link to the above bookmarks and blog posts. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to my sites ranking when I do it.

Adsense

So far I’ve made all my money promoting physical prodcuts from places like Amazon. But now after reading Trent’s blog, the Online Income Lab I have been persuaded to start making some Adsene sites. Trent has made good progress in a few months so I am following his approach to try and diversify my income a bit. I used a tool called SECockpit to find my niches which made it very easy. Even if you are not making Adsense sites and are just looking for niches in general I highly recommend this tool. I’ve setup one site so far and have registered three more domains which I am setting up now. These sites are quicker to setup than the Amazon type ones I have been doing so far so they could be a better use of my time. My goal is to get 10 setup before the end of September and then see if any of them make any money.

Earnings for August 2011

Last month I earnt £1186 which was quite a drop from a few months ago hwere I made £1840 but this month was a bit better.

My earnings for August 2011 were: £1500

I was pretty pleased with this as its £50 on average per day and movement in the right direction. My goal for September is £1600 and my goal for the end of 2011 is £2000 per month.

How was your August 2011?

Monthly Round-up: July 2011

This month I became a full-time affiliate. Well, a part-time dad and a part-time affiliate. But either way I gave up the day job to earn my crust soley from affiliate marketing.

Going Full-Time

I didn’t take to going full-time very well and found it very hard to get the hours in. I set myself the target of doing five hours a day but this soon went out of the window and I was finding it difficult to get anything done most days. I decided that if I had such limited time I would spend it outsourcing link building rather than writing and adding content to my sites as this would take the least time and get me the biggest return on my time. I figured spending 10 minutes filling in a form to order some links would be better than spending 10 minutes writing half an article for one of sites. At least I was getting something done. Some of the link building paid off and some of it didn’t. I’m still trying to find out the best type of links to get a small niche site ranking.

Holiday!

After all that hard work it was clear I needed a holiday so off we went for a week in Phuket. There was no internet at our hotel, well there was but I refused to pay £4 per hour so I stayed offline for a week which was nice but also meant I spent about 1/4 of July not doing any work at all.

Staying Motivated

When you are doing affiliate marketing on the side trying to steal an hour here and there, working is quite fun but once you go full-time it just becomes like any other job and after last month’s drop in earnings I am finding it very hard to stay motivated and do some work. This usually happens when my earnings dip. I think “what’s the point in putting in the work if it doesn’t correlate with my earnings”.

July 2011 Earnings

Last month I brought in £1200. This was down quite a bit from the £1840 I made a few months ago.

My gross earnings for July 2011 were £1186 ($1930).

That was a bit of a kick in the nuts and not a good way to start my full-time career as an internet marketeer. But I have been busy the last three months or so a drop is to be expected I guess.

The Future

I’m not really sure how to progress. A grand a month is nice for a few hours work here and there but its not enough. I want to be making a solid £2000 per month by the end of the year and then much more after that. But at the moment that seems like a step too far. I’d love to lock myself away for a month and work 24/7 but that just isn’t possible.

Adsense

I’ve been reading Trent Dyrsmid’s blog: http://onlineincomelab.com/ and have been impressed by the quick progress he has made with Adsense sites and I am keen to give it a go. Anyone else done this kind of thing?

How was your month?

Monthly Round-up: June 2011

This has been a bittersweet month for me (first time I’ve ever used that word). After the heights of last month where I brought in £1840 I knew I’d be hard pressed to beat that personal best this month. I wrote last month that my goal for June would be £1900 but that I’d be happy to clear £1500.

But before I get to the bitter part lets start with the sweet.

That Friday Feeling x 100

The end of June brought to a close my day job and as of Friday 1 June I no longer have gainful employment! So for the second time in my life I am going to try my hand at affiliate marketing full-time.

Giving up the Day Job and Going Fulltime Part II

Last time I tried this was about two years ago when I first moved to Thailand. After a few months in the game I had managed to get my earnings to about £500 per month. I figured if I went fulltime I could start to build on that and could soon get to £1000. Things didn’t go quite according to plan and due to me being lazy and preferring to enjoy my new surroundings rather than sitting at the laptop for eights plus hours a day my earnings didn’t increase and even started to go backwards. It wasn’t long before I had to get a fulltime job again and try and find time for affiliate marketing on the side.

Giving it another Shot

Due to a change in circumstances and my earnings reaching a respectable level I am now going to try and be a fulltime affiliate again. I hope I have learnt my lesson and will be more disciplined this time around as I don’t really want to have to get a proper job ever again! With a bit of luck I have learnt a few things in the past couple of years that will allow me to increase my earnings.

The New Regime

As my girlfriend has got seven weeks of maternity leave left I am going to try and go all out for this period and get as much done as I can. I want to try and outsource some tasks so that when she goes back to work and I am left holding the baby I will have as much free time as possible.

Over the next seven weeks I plan to do five hours of work each day. This doesn’t sound like much but if I am focused I think I can get a fair amount done. I’m not going to be reading forums or checking my stats but working hard on adding content to my sites. Content and links will be bought and I will just work on adding the content to my sites and using the affiliate marketing tools I already have.

A Healthy Body for a Healthy Mind

I’ve been going to the gym for years but have been a bit slack over the past few months. After reading this post on another affiliate marketing blog I have decided to set myself another little challenge for the next seven weeks. That challenge is to do 30 minutes of exercise each day. I hope this will help keep my motivated when it comes to work and stop be getting bored being indoors. I’m going to aim to head to the gym each morning before I start work. I might even do 30 minutes of swimming each evening too. It seems a shame not to use the gym or the two pools in my complex when they are right here. I will also continue to aim to do three weights sessions a week. If I can stick to this I will throw in a few Muay Thai sessions as well. I plan to get a lot done in these next seven weeks as they will be my last months of (relative) freedom for a while!

What I did in June

I did a fair amount of work in June on my sites. Mostly this was focussed on link building and research rather than actual hands on stuff on my sites. I bought some new tools, with the main one being Linkamotion, which I have not gotten around to using yet.

What I will do in July

I’ve got a lot of content that I’ve bought so I will be adding that to my sites. I’m going to try and do one Linkamotion article a day which should give me 50 links to a site each day. I’m going to try and not spend much money testing out different link building tools and deals this month as I want to use what I have already. I want to try some new themes out on a few of my sites to try and increase conversions as I have a few sites that get 50 hits a day but don’t really make many sales.

Earnings for June 2011

Last month I earned £1840. My goal for June was £1900 and I said I’d be happy with £1500.

My (gross) earnings for June 2011 were £1200

Pretty bad eh? I put this mainly down to one of my main sites getting knocked off the first page for loads of its keywords mid May and never recovering. Some keywords came back a bit but nothing like before. Other sites didn’t manage to pick up the slack and keep my earnings stable so I dropped £640 this month. Ouch!
I was looking at my average earnings and for the first six months of 2011 they have been £1400 a month which is pretty good I reckon. Now I am fulltime though things need to get better quickly.

Goal for July

I’m going to go for £1500 for July. My long term goal has been to get to £2000 per month by the end of September 2011 but after June’s poor show this is looking increasingly unlikely to happen. I’m still going to give it a try though.

How did you do in June?

Monthly Round-up: May 2011

Last month was my best month in affiliate marketing so far and it gave me high hopes for April. As the month started it looked like I would not be disappointed. My daily earnings improved on last month and by the end of the first week I was on target to make over £2000. But then disaster stuck. On about May 8th one of my main sites got struck down by Google and was knocked off the first page for most of its keywords.

Possible Sighting of Google Panda

As I just mentioned up until May 8th I was doing pretty well and then one of my main earners got dumped out of the SERPs. It was an exact match domain which was ranking at number one in Google for the domain and also the plural of the domain. A few of the other pages I had built for this site were on page one and getting some good longer tail traffic. So overnight between May 7th and 8th I went from getting about 150 hits a day to around 30. The main keyword which was in the domain dropped to the bottom of page one and all the rest dropped right out of sight.

I had been working on the site right up to when it went down in the SERPs. I was adding new content and building links so it is possible I did something to upset Google or maybe it was to do with the Panda update. I’ve read there was an update to the Panda rollout around this time so perhaps it was.

I carried on adding content after the drop and managed to eventually get back to the number one spot for the keyword in the domain. The plural of the main keyword brought me the most traffic and after a while it did bounce back to page one for a few days before disappearing again.

The top line is the keyword in the domain and the other main line is the plural. Notice how lots of sites disappear on 6-May and never return. Brutal!

As this was one of my main sites it hit my earnings quite hard but I managed to limp on until the end of the month without going broke. I’m still working on the site and hopefully it will rise from the ashes back to where it once was.

New Tools

I had been using the free version of IM Automator which is a web based bookmarking tool for a while so when a slot came up on their paid-for Pro version I snapped it up. At $50 per month it was more than I’ve spent so far on a monthly subscription but I like the ease of use of the free version and I figured I’d use the extra features of the Pro version. The Pro version includes more bookmarking sites to submit your pages to, an RSS and directory submission service as well as an article submission service. I signed up mainly for the article service. You write one 500 word article with two links in the resource box and it submits it to 60 article sites which should all accept it. It doesn’t need any spinning so you can just write and submit. I wasn’t sure how good this was as how valuable can having links from 60 copies of the same article be? Surely they will all be duplicate content. You can submit about 20 articles a day so could in theory get about 2400 links a day. Writing 20 500 word articles a day isn’t that easy and I never managed more than a few each day. Plus if they are all from the same 60 sites how useful this is I’m not sure.

The sites I tested it on didn’t make any jumps in the SERPs and although I might be judging it too quickly I’m not going to sign up for another month. I guess if you had someone writing content for you each day or you had a backlog of content to get rid of and could take advantage of the maximum number of submissions per day it might worth it but for me at the moment its not. So I’m going to look for something else to spend my hard earned pocket money on. I’ve heard good things about Linkamotion of which you can read a review of here.

Outsourcing Mission

My plan is to outsource as much as possible so I can do other things with my time so I have been thinking of ways to do this. I am a bit nervous of handing over the reigns of my sites just yet so I’m currently looking to hire people to build links for me and write content. Using this template on sitey.net I managed to hire a couple of guys to write 10 articles of 500 words for $10 from Odesk. It’s not the best writing in the world but it is grammatically correct and makes sense. I wouldn’t put it on my main sites as I have another guy who does that but it will be good for building Web 2.0 properties and submitting to services like IM Automator Pro should I go back to it.

Linkbuilding with Web 2.0s

I am always looking for ways to get links but have only recently started doing this so am a bit behind the pack when it comes to link building. People have been using Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo for ages to get links and although the boat might have sailed a bit I’m giving it a go. I’m going to build out 10 or so Web 2.0 sites with multiple pages, images and videos for each of my sites and link to that site. Then I will build smaller Web 2.0s and do lots of other link building things and point those at my 10 big Web 2.0s. At least that’s the plan for now until I get any better ideas.

Things to Do

I really need to get a new laptop. This netbook has done me well for two years but it’s too slow now and I need something with more power. I’d like a mid range 13” one with 4GB of ram and a 500GB hard drive.

Nothing fancy just something that can get things done.

I need a new layout for my site as a lot of them aren’t really converting very well and not even earnings £1 a day even though they get 1000+ hits a month.

Things I Didn’t Do

I didn’t get a VPS due to lack of funds and time. I didn’t try out SEnuke X due to lack of time and a slow netbook. I didn’t use Sick Submitter once, apart from the pinger so think I will cancel this for now.

Earnings:

Well I think that pretty much sums up May 2011. I better post the bit you’ve all been waiting for: how much I earned.

My (gross) earnings for May 2011 were £1840

I am very pleased with this and was only aiming for £1700 this month (which is £100 more than last month) but was very happy to exceed this.

Goals for June 2011:

Last month I said I’m aiming to increase my earnings by £100 a month and I’d love to go for £1900 for June but in the last week or so of May I was lucky to get £50 a day on a good day so I’m not holding my breath. To get £1900 I will need to bring in £63 per day which is pretty hard when one of your main sites has been tanked by Google. To be honest I will be happy for anything over £1500 for June.

Last month I was mainly watching The Shadow Line, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

What did you get up to in May?

Monthly Round-up: April 2011

This one is a bit late but I thought I’d do a quick one as a) I tend to get more hits when I do a monthly round up so there must be some interest and b) there was a fair bit to report. I had my birthday in April but also, more excitingly; it saw the arrival of our first child! This was very exciting and understandably I hardly spent any time on affiliate marketing after she was born. You get a lot more time indoors with a new baby but trying to type or even click a mouse with a baby in one arm is not easy so in this case more time at home doesn’t mean more time to work! Besides who wants to work when they have a new baby to entertain them? Not me!

But even with the new arrival I still managed to do a bit in April before the big day.

New Tools:

In April I signed up for a tool called Sick Submitter. It allows you to create your own forum profiles, social bookmarks and even submit articles. Once you have the tool you need to find scripts or packets that let you do different things like creating profiles etc. A number are given away free each month by the people who make the software and on their forums people make them and give them away for free. They also have the ones you have to pay for which people have made. Each one tends to do a different like great 1000 forum profiles or submit your site to a 100 social bookmarks. When I first got it I had high hopes and plugged away with it but to be honest it took me a lot of time to get to grips with it and the free packets aren’t that great so it’s not had much use of late. For the price it is good ($12 p/m) and I do think it has potential but you probably need to spend a good bit of time to get to grips with it and find some decent packets that let it live up to its potential. I think there is a free trial so give it a shot if it sounds like something you might want to use.

You can see what other affiliate marketing tools I use on this page.

Link Building:

I’ve still been experimenting with link building and trying different things out. Nothing that I’ve tried so far has really jumped out at me as having a decent effect on rankings consistently which is a bit disappointing. I suppose it is hard to compare different methods on different sites as some niches are less competitive so creating some Web 2.0s linking to your site will see it move up in the SERPs whereas on other site 100 Web 2.0s and another 100 blog posts linking to it won’t even see a move of one place. But saying that, some sites have responded well to my efforts but I couldn’t really say what worked and what didn’t!

Outgoings:

So now that I am using a few tools my outgoings are starting to go up a bit. At the moment I have:

• Easy Content Units (£25 per month)
• Hostgator hosting ($10 per month)
• Sick Submitter ($12 per month)

On top of that I am reinvesting a bit of my earnings on link building and content but this is not a fixed outgoing as it’s on a pay as you go basis.

Earnings:

I’m going to continue posting my earnings in gross amounts rather than deducting what I spend as its not that much and it looks better when I don’t!

My earnings for April were £1595

I am happy with this although it would be nice to have gotten that extra fiver to round it off. For next month I am aiming for an increase of £100. A few months ago I was hoping for a 10% increase each month but I think that might get quite tricky. So for May I am aiming for £1700.

Goals:

I think my goal for September 2011 was £2000 per month. It looks like I am heading in the right direction but as most of my sites are seasonal it remains to be seen what happens when the current earners go into hibernation and whether any sites will step up and take their place.

What did you get up to in April?