How I Got Rich

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.

Weekend Break

I went away for the weekend as it was the King’s birthday and therefore a long weekend.  We heading off to Koh Chang which is one of the Thai islands.  Koh Chang means Elephant Island and we saw quite a few elephants wandering around and also went for a ride on them which involved swiming with them at the end.

I decided to leave my PPC campaigns running over the weekend as I had been doing quite well leading up to the weekend and on the Sunday I found an Internet cafe and had a quick check of my stats.  Unfortunately most of the items I was promoting with PPC has sold out so although I was getting the traffic and clicks through to the merchants hardly any sales were made.

I am now trying to find some more items to promote that are popular but still in stock as I reckon there is about another week left of people buying Christmas presents online.

I’m away next week until the new year so will be trying to make the most of the Christmas shopping before I go.

Anyone know how to find which Christmas items are proving popular so far this year?

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!

Check for out of Stock Merchants

It is obvious you should regularly check the merchants you are linking to have the items in stock you are promoting.

However it is something that I overlooked and after going over the stats for yesterday I saw quite a lot of the items I was advertising on my sites were out of stock.  Some of them were still displaying as in stock on my Easy Content Units (ECU) but when I clicked through to the merchant the items were no longer in stock.

Chances are the user will go back to your site and try another merchant but there is also the chance they will just load Google in the current window and find another site with the item by-passing your site.

Another issue I had was that a few merchants had gone out of stock and Play.com became the lowest priced merchant with the item in stock.  This was bad news as Play.com seems to only pay about 1% commission so suddenly my sales were at a similar level but commission was slashed dramatically.

All the above would apply to SEO driven sites but with PPC it becomes much more urgent as you are paying for all your traffic and a bad day could wipe out all profits.

Again I guess this highlights the problem of having lots of small sites that applies to the approach I have taken so far.  The more small sites you have promoting individual items the more site and products you have to check to see if everything is working.

I think once the Christmas traffic has died down I will try and setup up a hand-full of high value PPC campaigns that get me £20 or so commission per sale.  Hopefully this should be easier to manage on a day to day basis.

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.

It gets worse…

After the previous days drop in earnings it was inevitable the figures for Wednesday would take another dip.

PPC spend was 20 pounds (although it is hard to say for sure due to the different time zones) and clicks were coming in as fast as they were on the Monday when I cleared 50 pounds profit.  But hardly any of these clicks converted and only 6 pounds worth of commission was earnt.  Sales were made through my other sites that aren’t being promoted by PPC so the day wasn’t a total write off and I did make some profit overall.

I don’t know what has changed since Monday.  I am getting more traffic than I was before and have more campaigns running but even the existing campaigns are not converting like they were.

Maybe because it was a Monday people were more ready to buy as they’d been out at the weekend and seen the things in the shops and were now checking to see if they were cheaper online?

Monday was the 24th and in my old job we got paid on the 24th so perhaps people had been waiting until then?

Either way it doesn’t explain why clicks are still high but conversions are down.

I will see what happens tomorrow and then re-assess the situation.

I’m pretty gutted as I thought I was onto a winner.  I knew 50 quid a day was too much and wouldn’t carry on but I didn’t realise it would drop so much.

Back to SEO I guess…

One Step Forward Two Steps Back

After my great day yesterday, today I’ve come back down to reality.  Checking my figures today wasnt the happy experience I was anticipating.  It looked something like this:

• Sales: £28.50
• PPC Spend: £15.08
• Net Profit: £13.42

That doesn’t look too bad until you take into account a lot of those sales were not directly from PPC traffic and were sales from my regular SEO sites. It is getting quite hard to calculate exactly how many of my sales come from PPC and how much commission they are bringing in.  Especially when you get sales from Amazon who don’t tell you what you’ve sold until the following day and how much commission yet get until the item has been dispatched (although you can make a rough guess).  Also my Adwords account is set to a time zone that is -7 hours, I am targeting a market in a time zone that is -+0 hours and I am physically in a time zone that is 8+ hours.  This makes it a bit tricky to tell exactly when the clicks occurred and which day they are recorded in in Amazon and Affiliate Window.  Its a shame you can’tchange the time zone in Adwords after the first time you set it.

I had about 12 more clicks than yesterday but made less sales.   I guess the click through rates are evening themselves out after an unsually high rate for the first day.

Has anyone seen any Adwords vouchers floating around?  I might sign up with my girlfriends details and have a go at promoting some more expensive items for free.

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.