Monthly report for August 2009
Another month is over and this has been my seventh month in affiliate marketing.
Last month I made £435 (£407 of which came from Amazon and £28 from Affiliate Window).
My target for August was £500 but unfortunately I did not meet it.
For August I earnt £387 (£313 from Amazon and £74 from Awin and there is also another £76.45 from Awin which is pending and I guess will go through in September).
My main site only earned £175 this month where as last month it earned £251 despite still being number one in Google. It is seasonal so I expect it will go down again next month.
This has been the first month where I have not made a significant increase on the previous month. Have I reach the sticking point that beginners can quickly reach but to
surpass needs extra skills and knowledge, the point that seperates the men/woman from the boys/girls?
I didn’t do any work on am during the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August so perhaps that explains why there was a bit of a dip. Also I found that some of the links on my sites where pointing to products that were no longer available or were out of stock so that could’ve caused some sales to be lost. If you have any old site I recommend going back and checking the links are still active and valid.
I had some good results from my Affi style micro niche site which I was promoting via PPC which brought me £50 profit (after PPC spend) from 3 sales. After this I made 3 more of this type of site which I am also promoting with PPC. Hopefully they will see the same level of success.
I am now out of work so am going to be trying to do AM full-time but it is hard to stay motivated now I have lots of free time. Before I was putting in the odd few hours here and there when I could and found it quite easy to motivate myself. Now I have the whole day ahead of me free it is not so easy – seems more like a job now!
My medium term goal when I started with AM was to be making £500 a month by the end of September and as this is now September I will be trying my hardest to achieve this.
I’m still playing with small smingle type sites but have not come up with many good ones lately.
PPC for financial leads is where I want to get to in the next few months as well as working on a bigger long term site. Also there is Christmas to start working on…
Also a few other affiliate have moved into some of the niches I am working in taking the .org and .org.uk versions of domains I was using. Is this ok to do as I’ve seen a few niches I like but someone else is already ranked well in that niche?
How are things going with you? Learnt anything you’d like to share?
Unlucky about the target but I’m sure you will be able to make your next target seeing as you are now settled in Thailand.
August was my first full month in AM and I made £140 give or take a couple of quid. I have learnt so much on my journey so far and am hoping to beat that amount this month (although not going that well so far lol).
The sites which I thought would make decent money have flopped and the ones which I knocked together without much thought have done quite well. At this stage for me it’s purely luck.
I am now using wordpress on most of my sites and have found some really good tools which help with the boring jobs (imports etc). At the moment I have 2 big sites I am working on and they are the ones I am hoping will make the money!
Keep up the good work!
I’m putting August down to a seasonal dip. My productivity has dipped also. Working with a glass of wine in hand perhaps isn’t helping…
PPC seems to be the way forward… though I find cheap clicks hard to come by, i’m reluctant to bid anything over miserly sums and as a consequence i’m getting no ppc traffic! Still, only day 2, I guess the key is finding those high traffic cheap keywords.
Motivation wise, how about taking in your current surroundings, then closing your eyes, remembering the work environment you’ve just left and all the cr*p that goes with it and realising working on aff sites is what will keep you on the beach and out of the office… Should scare you enough!
What was looking like disappointing earnings for August actually turned out to be one of my best months ever, and that’s mainly down to more amazon sales. I’ve also got off to a flying start for September with a £37 commission from a single amazon product.
Also had some potential good news from ebay, they are switching to a new payment structure in October and based on early reports I stand to make 3 times what I would normally under the current system.
Most of my August was spent building sites aimed at the Christmas period including a 40 odd page site with a Christmas domain/theme.
IPK will help you prepare for Christmas
Love the blog. I’m very much following your footsteps, except a few months behind and not as successful. May 0, June 12, July 53, Aug 50, Sep 50+. Strategy is different; just 1 big site, with 70+ pages and keywords for most pages. But hampered badly by beginner’s lack of knowledge that Google would love me for 1st few weeks and then on a whim, disregard my listings for many pages. Only recovering in last 3 days; I’ve seen big uplift in traffic since Sep 13 in clothing and fashion niche focused on UK traffic.Need to create new sites and explore new niches and not be so fixated that I think I know how things work. I need to risk my time more.
Hi Pepe, sounds like you are getting off to a good start. Good luck diversifying.