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: May 2011 is a post from: How I Got Rich

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?

Monthly Round-up: April 2011 is a post from: How I Got Rich

Well I’ve just had a week off work and am now back in the grind doing the 9-5. I had a great week off, probably didn’t do as much affiliate marketing as I should but it was nice to be a man of leisure and my own boss for a while. I did suffer from my old problem of not doing as much as I should and doing other things that are fun but won’t earn me money like going to the gym, lying by the pool, learning Thai and doing Thai boxing. These were my goals for the week:

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the last 7 days:
1. Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
2. Get all my sites up to date
3. Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
4. Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

So how did I get on? Not as well as I hoped but what’s the point in having goals if they are too easy to achieve?!

Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)

I was going to look at Aweber for my affiliate marketing mailing list but someone suggested mailchimp.com as it is free for the first 1,000 users so it would be an inexpensive way to test out a mailing list. I signed up with them and added a signup form to my busiest site which gets a good few hundred hits a day. My signup form is in the sidebar of the (WordPress) site and not in a popup but it is above the fold so everyone who lands on the site should see it. After having it on the site for about half a week and being seen by maybe 1000 users no one has signed up! The form does look a bit cruddy as I am yet to smarten it up but I am bit disappointed no one has signed up. I will try and jazz it up a bit and see if that helps and then maybe try putting it in a popup, although I don’t want to scare off any customers.

Get all my sites up to date

I didn’t even get close to this. I spent most of the time working on just one of my sites and adding content to it and smartening it up. The site is on page 4 for its main keyword but gets a fair amount of long tail traffic and makes a few sales so my goal is to get it up to page 1 in Google and see if it becomes more profitable. I’ve added some content but no backlinks so not sure if this will help.

Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites

I read a few blog posts on this but still no closer to outsourcing getting my pages formatted with links, ECU and content. Once I do this I think I will move a few steps up the ladder in terms of earnings as I can get lots of content added to my sites very quickly which is one of my main sticking points at the moment – not having enough time.

Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

No progress on this. Think I will scrap it as too much work to do and probably not much demand for it! Maybe after 5 years.

Back to Work is a post from: How I Got Rich

Starting tomorrow I have a week off from my day job. This will give me a good opportunity to get cracking on my affiliate marketing stuff for 2011. I’ve got lots of written content to get around to adding to my sites that I’ve been putting off for ages. Plus I want to try a few link building approaches I’ve read about. Apart from that I plan to do a fair amount of wakeboarding, muay Thai and golf practice as well as a few gym session. Should be a busy week!

Affiliate Marketing Goals for the next 7 days:

• Try out a mailing list software type service on one of my sites (any suggestions?)
• Get all my sites up to date
• Look into outsourcing adding content to my sites
• Write my ‘two years in affiliate marketing’ post

A Week off Work is a post from: How I Got Rich

After reading My Egg Noodles’ 10 Goals for 2011 I thought I’d get mine down on ‘paper’ before I forget mine.

1. Pay off Credit Cards & Overdraft
   Big task but could be done by end of 2011
2. Be earning £2000 per month from affiliate marketing by July 2011
   Will require about a 10% increase month on month from here to July, pretty steep but could be done
3. Be earning £3000 per month from affiliate marketing by December 2012
   If I hit goal number 2 I will have lots more money to invest so it might happen
4. Go surfing (at least once)
   Will need to go on holiday to somewhere with some surf so not sure I can do this unless there are waves in Thailand?
5. Go snowboarding (at least once)
   Again will be dependent on where we go for holidays but could happen
6. Go SCUBA diving (and if I like it do the PADI)
   More likely than 4 & 5, had lots of opportunities to do this but never gotten around to it.  After snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef am inspired to try scubba’ing next.
7. Play Golf at least once
   Been practicing at the driving range, just need to find a course I can be let lose on
8. Carry on with Muay Thai for the whole year
   Would like to do it twice a week or even better, do a month long camp but not sure I can spare the time
9. Get a six pack
   If I just cut out the takeaways and went to the gym more often…
10. Bench 100kg for reps
    Only 10 kg away but its a big 10kg!
11. Make at least one new friend not related to work or mrs or existing friends i.e. expand social circle
    Could do with meeting some more people not from work or that we know already; will try to be more friendly!

I think that should do it for now.  Will report back in a year!

11 Goals for 2011 is a post from: How I Got Rich

Ever since starting out in affiliate marketing I have been building smingle style keyword domain niche sites. I’ve probably bought about 40-50 domains so far and have at least a very basic site setup on nearly all of them. Only a few make money but some do ok which is why I have carried on down this route.

My First Big Site
A while ago I vowed to stop buying anymore domains or starting any new sites and start work on a big site that did not have a keyword domain and targeted a bigger, more general niche. That site never really took off and I soon gave up on it. I didn’t buy many more domains and worked on expanding my existing sites out of their niches to try and make them more profitable. This worked on some sites but not on most of them. Moving a niche site out of its niche proved to be rather trickier than I thought.

No more Mini-sites
Lately I have been getting back into my old habit of buying keyword domains and setting up basic sites with a few pages and then leaving them to gather dust. Last week I bought another one that is hardly going to set the world alight.

But now I have made (another) decision to stop with the small sites and go full steam ahead on a big site.

A Big Site: My Second Attempt
I have picked an area to work in that, based on my niches sites, converts quite well online and has lots of merchants with a wide range in prices from 10 to 100s of pounds per item. Some items in this area are seasonal but overall the products should sell all year round.

I’ve bought the domain name. Obviously I would’ve loved an exact match keyword domain but on an area this big that was gone long ago so I opted for one with the main keyword in it and two other words in front of it. Whether this helps with ranking is debatable but it might show to users viewing the site the SERPs that the site is relevant.

Which UK Host?
So now I need to find some hosting. I am going to host this site separately from my other sites as I would like to keep it separate and also use a UK host for a bit of a boost in the SERPs. Any recommendations of a good value UK based host with Fantastico and CPanel for one domain and a WordPress site would be much appreciated.

My Big Site Strategy
My strategy for the big site is pretty basic and I could do with sitting down and coming up with some ideas to make it a bit more creative but for now I am going to be adding products from the area as 200 word product reviews and take it from there.

Big Site Link Building
As for link building I’ve not got much idea. So far I have been using forum profile links and blog commenting which I have paid for on my small sites and this has worked on some sites and not on others so I don’t really trust these methods. For this big site I don’t really want to take any risks so will be looking at ways to get good quality links manually.

My Eight Month Goal
My goal for this big site is to be making me ₤1000 per month by the end of July which is only 8 months away. Is this possible, can I do it?

Last keyword domain niche site I promise! is a post from: How I Got Rich

Things are getting real: countdown to giving up the day job!

Due to a change in personal circumstances I will be becoming a full-time affiliate again in about eight months (July 2011).

I gave this a crack before about a year ago but didn’t use my time wisely enough to increase my profits so didn’t earn enough to keep at it and therefore had to go back to work.

I was gutted to return to work and give up the dream life of working for myself with no boss or alarm clock but hopefully I learnt something from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and next time things will be different.

But for now at least my main focus is to increase earnings over the next eight or so months.

Ideally I want to be bringing home ₤2000 a month by July 2011 but that would mean an increase of about 66% and that sounds like an awful lot!

In theory it only needs 10 of my numerous sites to bring in ₤200 each a month but hardly any of my sites make over ₤50 a month so this too seems like a long shot.

Perhaps eight months is enough time to build a site that will bring in ₤1500 (with the other ₤500 coming from my existing sites) but so far I’ve not even come slightly close to that.

By the end of this month (November) I will have picked a strategy for how to proceed over the next eight months to realise my goal and be a successful (this time) full-time affiliate marketeer.

Countdown to Going Full-Time (Again) is a post from: How I Got Rich

I’m almost back from my holidays.  Just spending a few days making use of a broadband connection and my laptop before returning to Thailand.  I did no work in July and still made the same amount of money I made in June which was really nice so had my two best months earnings-wise back to back.

Now that I’ve had a few days with my laptop and a decent Internet connection I’ve been checking my all my sites to see if they are still working and ranking ok.  One of my first fairly successful sites has just been overtaken in the SERPS and has been pushed to number two which was sad to see but I hadn’t updated it in over six months so can’t really complain.  I’ve since moved it over to WordPress and written more content for it in the hope of getting it back to number one but am not loosing too much sleep over it as its a seasonal domain and its season is about to end.

I registered two domains yesterday.  They are both clothing sites.  Clothing sites seem to be a bit hit and miss but I will stick something basic up for each of them and see what happens.

My big site is still floundering.  It gets some long tail traffic but nothing for the keywords I am targeting.

Which brings me on nicely to my main problem: backlinks!

I have no clue how to get them so am going to focus this month on finding out how to outsource them.  Once I have found out how to pay for them I will be apply them to all my sites.

My goal at the moment is to be earning £2000 per month by Christmas (so I can give up the day job) and then £3000 per month by June 2010.

Wish me luck!

Back from my Holidays is a post from: How I Got Rich

Here is a quick update of what I am doing at the moment in the world of affiliate marketing:

• Getting my existing sites to number one in Google. I’m doing this by moving them to WordPress and writing or buying new content for them.  Once they are all well ranked in Google I can see which ones are worth focusing on.
• Trying PPC for Financial Leads. I’m in the process of getting a site designed which I can use for collecting financial leads which I will get traffic via AdWords.  I’m going to be doing this via the Affiliate Marketing School.
• Working on my big site. This is still not ranking but will keep adding content to hopefully get it listed for some good keywords.
• Have a look at some more micro niche sites. My old ones are still bringing in the odd £15 sale once or twice a month so they are not to be dismissed.  Obviously some of them never made a sale.  Maybe I will sit down and do 10 or so on the weekend and see how they get on.

I think that is it for me.  I also want to have a closer look at feeds and automating things a bit more but will wait for a while.

Short term goal is still to be making £1000 by September 2010 and long term goal is to be making £2000 per month by September £2000.

What I’m Doing at the Moment is a post from: How I Got Rich

March was a good month, my second best after December 2009.  I spent about £65 on AdWords and managed to bring in just over £600 profit.  Most of that came from SEO and not the £65 I spent on PPC traffic obviously.

I made one very large sale which probably accounted for the rise in profits and I doubt I will repeat such a large sale again so for April I expect I will be back down to previous monthly earnings.

My ‘big site’ I started has still to get any organic traffic which is a shame.  I started in the same way I do my other sites but it has not ranked for the keyword I am going for.  The only difference is that it does not have a keyword domain – I guess this makes more difference than I thought.

I am going to buy a WordPress theme for this site but am not sure which one to get.  It is a shame you can’t try them out and have a look under the bonnet before  buying them.  I think I will get a Studio Press one unless anyone else knows of any other people selling good ones?

Still trying to get my older sites to number on in Google so I can hopefully start getting a few quid in from the sites I’d neglecting in the past.  Managed to get one website to number one for a keyword that got 27,100 exact searches last month according to the Google Keyword Tool (although I expect it is much less than that in reality).  That site is now getting about 25 unique hits per day so hopefully it should make 1 or 2 sales a week.

Goals of earning £800 by September 2010 and £2000 a month by September 2011 looking a long way off still!

March 2010 Round-up is a post from: How I Got Rich