Monthly report for September 2009
My eighth month of being an Affiliate Marketer is over and so is my first full month of trying Internet marketing full-time.
Unfortunately I have seen my income go down for the second month running.
In September I earned just £293 (£233 from Amazon & £60 from Awin. There was also £76 of transactions from Awin that were made in September but are still pending).
Last month earnings where £387 and the month before £435 so things are definitely on the slide!
In the last few weeks I have bucked my ideas up a bit and knuckled down with a stricter timetable seeing me do 35 hours a week. Hopefully the seeds being planted will start to bear fruit in the coming months.
Feedback from other Affiliate Marketers is leading me to think focusing on just a couple of sites rather than lots of smaller ones is the way forward. So this is definately something I will think about this month with the aim of getting one bigger, more general site up and running.
I am now also looking for a full-time job so my days of doing AM full-time may soon be over. I think I realistically need to be earning £750 out here to be able to survive and ideally £1000 a month to have some money to put away each month for travelling or otther purchases.
At the moment I am miles away from that amount so it looks like it will be back to being a wage slave, doing the 9-5 again.
How did you get rich: a couple of big sites or lots of little ones?
I am by no means rich… but i have one main site that i started with back in 2006 and now i have built up a around 5-10 other smaller sites so all my eggs are not in one basket!
Damn…just started following you and sorry to hear that it has not gone to plan !! Do you think it may be due to you taking it a little easier a few months ago ?
How many affiliate sites have you got out there at the moment?
Bad Luck.
If I was you I would stop all new projects and go back through your existing portfolio and sort out which ones might be in demand for Xmas then add some new posts and pages with links to your optimised landing pages (with easycontentunits or whatever on).
Hope you will see the results come through in the next month or so. Definitely focus on your existing sites that you think have potential and start maximising your returns from them. Its tempting to start new sites but focus on 2 or 3 and you should see results. Also analyse why your earning have taken a fall. It could be due to demand, rankings, out of stock products etc so it’s good to find out why. Also, are you using any PPC activity? If not, it might be a quicker way to see some results for sites/products you know are converting for you already via natural search.
Rosh
Sorry to hear it’s not going that well Joe. I earned less in my second month and it’s quite disheartening although I have been learning a lot.
I went down the same route as you and tried the scatter gun approach but it doesn’t work and am now concentrating all my efforts on just a couple of sites. The site that made me most of my income in my first month has disappeared from Google and shows no sign of coming back (been gone a month now) and a couple of other sites have vanished or been hit by a Google penalty (my fault as I did a bulk wordpress post).
You have some sites which are bringing in small amounts which is a good thing so in your position I would go through and find which ones you could grow. Write some good unique content every couple of days and try and pick up some long tail traffic.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Thanks for the advice. Seems everyone is saying the same thing: less is more.
I’ve got one more smaller site to finish then I will start working on a ‘big’ site.
Is there any reason why you can’t -
Start working on ideas for a couple of big sites and still do a few smaller sites.
Take your most successful smaller sites and develop them into bigger & better sites.
Instead of leaping from 2-3 page sites to 50+ page sites, create something in-between.
Can you afford to spend the next few months – the most lucrative time of year for affiliates, building a site that might not start making any money till early next year?
About a week ago I put a site live that I started back in July, it has around 60 pages which will probably grow to 80 by November. I’ve also managed to build a number of smaller sites in that time. Plus I’m still employed 3 days a week so it’s meant working in my free-time and lots of late nights.
The best thing I did was to reinvest the money I made – just about all of my content is outsourced now, which lets me spend more time on building and researching.
@mac-geek: no, there is no reason why I can’t work on a big and a small site at the same time. Just not got an idea for a big site. I could expand my main site but that is a seasonal one and I’d rather something that run all year round.
When you say 50+ pages is each page for one product or are there many products on a page? Just trying to envision a 50+ page site.
@admin: with the site I mentioned there’s around 50 single product pages(some still in progress), each has maybe 250 words, a large product pic and a price comparison. I’ll probably start creating other pages that might feature 6-10 of the products (that are related in some way)and just have a short paragraph for each product on those pages. It’s quite a general niche and theres no shortage of products to promote.
It sounds like you need a bit of direction so it might be worth trying some kind of course, and I don’t necessarily mean IPK
there are plenty more out there…
@seamaster (admin), if you’d like your comments to show up as your name, change the display settings under your admin username to something you’d like
I’m admire that you can make money with Amazon.
I don’t know how to make money with it.
I’d warn against one big site only. I lost a number of good SERPS positions for my one site in August and I’m only recovering now. Also, I’m realising that seasonality is a very big thing … and most sites have some seasonal factor going on.