How I Got Rich

Monthly Round-Up: February 2010

February was a poor month for me and I only made about 300 pounds and I had to spend about 80 quid on AdWords to get there.  This was my worst month for probably about six months and the first real big drop in profit.  But onwards and upwards as they say.

I have started proper work on a ‘big site’ but am only focusing on one type of product for now and will then start adding in more products once I am ranking ok for the first product type.

I’ve started paying for content and reinvesting some of my earnings from affiliate marketing now I am working full-time again.  I’ve been buying content in lots of 500 words and having the content focused around my niche keywords.  I had a site that had been at the bottom of page one in Google for ages and after adding the content it moved to number three in Google so hopefully I should see a return on that investment shortly.  Before that the site was languishing on page two and sometimes further out but after moving it to Wordpress and separating each product review/description into a separate Wordpress post it moved to the bottom of page one in Google.  So moving to Wordpress plus adding good written content can equal a decent jump in the serps for a site.

As for my big site I am having trouble finding a decent Wordpress theme that is suited to an affiliate site.  I’m using a magazine theme at the moment and I do like it but it doesn’t quite meet my needs and I am having trouble deciding how to structure a site that is bigger than my usual one type of product site.

Can anyone recommend a good Wordpress theme, free or otherwise, for a decent sized affiliate site?

How was February for you?

December 2009 Round-Up

Well 2009 is over and it has been an interesting year to say the least.  First I got into affiliate marketing and then I moved to Thailand.  But first things first:  How was my December?

I left it quite late starting my Christmas sites but in the end I pulled my finger out and got a few up and running.  They were started too late to rank well organically so I decided to promote them via AdWords paying for each visit I received.

This started off well and on some days I was making £50 a day profit and I even made about £80 one day.  The month didnt carry on like this and as the items I was promoting ran out of stock my sales dried up.   I was also on holiday for the last two weeks of the month so couldn’t really set-up any new sites or AdWords campaigns.   I decided to leave my existing PPC campaigns running while I was away and kept my fingers crossed they wouldnt cost me too much.

When I got back to Bangkok yesterday I was pleasantly supprise to see I had earned £883 in December.  I spent about £223 on AdWords.  This is about double of what I’ve made in my last few months and has made me very happy.  If I could make this every month I’d be over the moon, especially out here in Thailand where the cost of living is quite low compared to England.

I know a lot of this has come from the Christmas market but I am determined to keep the momentum going and try and get in the same region this month.  PPC really helped alot as it allows your new ventures to get traffic straight away and get the sales trickling in.

How was your December?

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.

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…

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.

Working Offline

As the maid was coming I went to the Starbucks over the road with my Netbook to do a few hours of affiliate marketing work.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get on the Internet over there so had to work offline.  This gave me a good opportunity to develop a new Wordpress theme for my single product, micro nice sites.  Previously I had been making these sites by hand using HTML & CSS but I thought using Wordpress will make it easier to add more content as I can just do a new post rather than a new page and also I can benefit from the supposedly favourable way Google ranks Wordpress sites and blogs.

I modified an existing Wordpress theme I had developed and changed it to one column with three side bars that sit below the last post.  I built the theme then started adding content.  This was a bit of a mistake as to copy a Wordpress installation and its content from a local machine to the online installation looks quite hard and something I decided not to attempt which meant I had to copy it manually.

I finished the site yesterday which took two days including the design of the theme.  This was longer than I hoped to spend on one of these single product sites as they are very hit and miss as you are definitely putting all your eggs in one product.  I also had problems with the ECU price comparison widget as some of the merchants were not showing in the search results which could potentially lose me sales if the visitor goes off to check if that merchant has the product in stock.

I’ve  setup an AdWords PPC campaign for it which should get me some traffic and some sales – fingers crossed.  I will let it run to £13.75 of clicks (which is the amount of commission I will get from a sale) and if it has not made a sale pull it.

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.