I think this must be the start of my forth year doing affiliate marketing. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month and my goal which I want to hit before the end of 2012 is £2000 per month. As of August 2011 I no longer have a day job and spend my time as a stay at home dad while trying and do a bit of affiliate marketing when I can although I’m trying to do at least two hours a day this year after letting things slide big time since about April 2011.

Link Building

This month has been very quiet. Some days I didn’t make any sales which has been quite rare for me for a long time. My main sites have mainly been travelling downward in the SERPS although a few of my older, more neglected sites have been moving in the opposite direction thanks to my building some links to them using Unique Article Wizard.

I’m still using this tool and am seeing some positive results on less competitive terms but I’m not convinced it is cut out for more competitive niches or at least not on its own. Although I’ve not been using it much as it is time consuming to write the articles and submit them. I find one article submitted tends to get published about 100-200 times and as each article can have two links this means up to 200-400 backlinks. With the two links I tend to use one of them to link to one of my sites and the other link either points at a Web 2.0 site which links back to my site or directly to one of my other related sites. I think this is better than having both links from an article pointing to the same site. I’m trying to mix up my anchor text a lot more now so my links look something like this:

< a href="http://mydogtrainingsite.com" >{dog training|dog training ideas|dog training guide|click here|more info}< /a >

I’m also building more links to my inner pages. As I said writing and submitting articles is time consuming so I’ve not got much data to see how UAW is working. But this month I’ve hired two people form Odesk to write and submit articles in UAW. They are both going to do five articles and submit them each week and are charging about $5 a go. I will see how they get on any if they are good possibly increase this amount.

I also want to try Build My Rank as I hear good things about that. The cheapest package only lets you build links for five domains so I will pick my five best sites and focus on them. Focussing only on five sites is a good idea and something I want to try in 2012. I’m really bad to doing a little bit hear and there on my many sites instead of focusing my efforts so they actually make a difference.

Content Writing

The other day I mentioned I wanted to give article writing a try and see if I can bring in a few extra pounds a month to tide me over while my earnings are low. I’ve not found anything yet but am still looking. I know it makes sense to work on my own sites but when times are hard needs must!

Monthly Affiliate Earnings

As I said it was a slow month. Perhaps after Christmas people are skint and I hear there might be a recession looming in the UK? Either way it was bad and bearing in mind I earned £1200 last January it looks even worse!

My earnings for January 2012 were £745 / $1180

This doesn’t even cover my monthly (non-affiliate marketing related) outgoings so it is pretty bad.

Goals for February 2012

Well February is a short month so that’s already off to a bad start! I’m aiming for £1000 but obviously more would be good! I’m going to focus on my top five sites and try and get them back ranking before I start thinking about my ‘strategy’ for the new year. I’m quite interested in this Video Tycoon course which sounds good but I’ve just not got the time or money to invest in something new. Although after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad earlier this month I should be saying not “I can’t afford it” but “how can I afford it?” Good book by the way and definitely worth a read!

How was your January 2012? As bad as mine or did you start the year with a bang!

Also I think I want a new WP theme for this site. Any recommendation for a free, clean theme with two columns? Thanks.

Monthly Round-up: January 2012 is a post from: How I Got Rich

Better late than never I guess! Not much to report for December. None of my Christmas sites from previous years were ranking so I wasn’t expecting anything from them and I was right.

Didn’t really do much work overall as had people visiting and it was Christmas. The work I did was based around trying to claw back some of my rankings taken from me in the Google update of October. Some sites have come back but not the main ones, at least not for all their keywords they were ranking for.

Some days were really quiet in December and I actually made no sales at all which was quite rare and then other days I was making over £50.

Still using Unique Article Wizard with mixed success, it does work sometimes but depends on where you’re articles are submitted and how competitive the sites you are trying to rank are.

My Earnings for December 2011 were £1300 / $1990 gross

2011 in a Few Words

Overall 2011 has been a great year. I had some great holidays visiting some new countries (Australia, Malaysia, plus lots of places in Thailand) we had a baby, I quit my job to be a stay at home dad and full-time (more like part-time internet marketeer) and I managed to make £1840 in one month from affiliate marketing. But in purely affiliate marketing terms the year has ended on a low note. I feel three years in affiliate marketing and I still don’t really know what I am doing. If someone gave me some money and said “build a site for me that would make money” I wouldn’t be confident of being able to do so as so far my portfolio is very hit and miss. The 80/20 rule is definitely in effect! I’m still no expert on picking a niche and keywords and not much better when it comes to link building. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month which is pretty good considering the hours I put in but not yet up to my goal of £2000 per month. Now I am no longer working in a day job and I am using my internet earning for living expenses so I’ve got much less to reinvest which has slowed me down quite a bit. I really want to get earning a few extra £100 a month so I can start reinvesting again and try and boost my income.

Goals for 2012

I just want to make more money really! £2000 per month would be great, £3000 per month would be amazing. My plans are to try and improve the rankings of my top 5 earners from 2011, continue building up one of my ‘big sites’ I started last year and get some more Adsense sites up and running. A new service is being launched at the Online Income Lab where you can hire a VA through them to build a site right through from researching the keyword to installing WordPress and doing the backlinking. I’m keen to give this a go as it sounds very hands off which is good as I have little time. Also these sites should be easy to sell on flippa or just keep and get some more money coming in.

How was your 2011 and what are your plans for 2012? Is internet marketing dead?

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

November picked up pretty much where October left off. I didn’t get up to much in November and continued trying to get my main sites that got downranked by Google back to where they were. I was also working on getting my first 10 Adsense sites completed and with backlinks for each site. I also signed up with Unique Article Wizard to make the process of getting links for my site a bit cheaper and easier.

Unique Article Wizard

I wrote about my first impressions of this tool here and they haven’t changed much since then. I’ve used it a lot more and have found that if I select the categories for the articles correctly, for some niches, I can get about 400 submissions per article. I’ve been setting the Wizard to only do 20 submissions per day so I don’t overload my sites with links. Due to this slow submission rate most of my jobs are yet to complete. For some sites I have seen an upwards move in the SERPS but for some others I have not. I guess it depends on how competitive the niche is, how good your site is, what other links you’ve got and what the competition is like. I’m going to keep using the tool for now but I’m not 100% sold.

Adsense Sites

After following the guys over at Niche Pursuits and Online Income Lab I couldn’t help myself from giving this type of internet marketing a try, especially with my other product niche sites floundering! In November I managed to finally get my first 10 Adsense sites finished. Some have multiple pages of content and some just have one page and nearly all have got some backlinks to them now. I’ve been buying quality content from The Content Authority but its not cheap so haven’t got much money left to invest this month which is a shame. I have bought another 10 domains for keywords which I found with SECockpit which is one of the best tools I’ve used. As I’ve no money to invest this month I’m going to try and write one 1000 word article for each of these sites myself. As the topics are pretty varied this might take a while but its better than not doing anything even if its not particularly time efficient. I’ve also been adding videos to these sites that I’ve had made on Fiverr.com and added to Youtube for an extra backlink. Seems like a relatively easy and cheap way to get backlinks and add different content to the sites. None of the first 10 sites are ranking in Google yet but I got a couple of clicks this month. I’m going to keep going with this approach and see if I can do 10 sites a month for the next six months or so.

Overview

November was pretty poor when it came to my sites rankings and earnings. I had little time to do much but tried to squeeze as many hours in as I could. Since my sites got hit by Google I’ve started to think I’ve gone about this game the wrong way. My lots of little sites approach didn’t really work in the end and I’ve now got too many sites to try and repair. Once I get a bit more money to invest I’m going to build up my best five sites and then try and build another five sites but build them with better, longer content and go for some slightly more competitive niches. I can’t be arsed to go after the tiny niches anymore that get you one or two sales a month and don’t bring in hardly any money.
It was ok before when they ranked without much effort but now Google is penalising those sites they would take too much work to rank in this day and age.

Other Affiliates

I read a great post from the Affiliate Musketeer who has been doing affiliate marketing as long as me (I think) but got off to a bit of a slow start but has now found his formula and is doing well. I was pleased to read his latest blog post but was also a bit jealous as it wasn’t so long ago I made £1800 in a month. I’m hoping for a Kindle for Christmas so if anyone has a copy of those books lying around feel free to lend them to me via email.

Earnings for November 2011

Like I said at the top this month carried on from October although this month I did slightly worse, continuing the downwards slide. I made £1.50 from my Adsense sites which was nice I suppose but not enough to pick up the slack from my product sites!

Last month I earned £1440 from affiliate marketing which was down from September but this month:

My gross earnings for November 2011 were: £1200 / $1870

So a drop of over £200 in one month. Some of this is down to losing top spots in Google while some of it due to my seasonal sites going out of season. I’ve not done anything to my old Christmas sites from previous years so I’m not expecting much of an increase in December.

Next Month

My goal for the end of 2011 was to be making £2000 per month but unless something major happens I’m going to be far short of that target. It’s been a good year in many ways but my earnings have been a bit disappointing but with the amount of time I’ve put into my sites in the last six months I can’t complain too much. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when I can work out my monthly average for 2011, have a little cry/cheer and then start the new year with a better game plan!

How was your November 2011?

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

October started off really well for me and I was earning on average £60 a day which meant I was on target to equal my best month of about £1850. But then around October 14 something went wrong!

Panda will get you in the End!

There was a Google update which I think was part of the infamous Panda and my sites took a hit. I had escaped the previous updates that made up Panda but was not so lucky this time. Nearly all my sites took a hit. Sites that were exact match domains still ranked for their main keywords but any long tail keywords they ranked for got knocked right down the SERPs. Sites like amazon, ebay and wikipedia seemed to benefit most from the update, at least in the niches I am targeting and I lost out to them for most of my long tail. I went from earning £60 a day to £30 a day overnight!

Before and After October 14 2011

Another site Before and After October 14 2011

Private Blog Network Deindexed

As part of my link building I have been buying posts on private blog networks. These services are advertised on sites like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum to mention just two. They might not be to everyone’s tastes but they were working well for me and I was getting a good return on my investment. However, as part of this Google update (or at least at the same time) one blog network I was using got de-indexed which removed all my backlinks from those sites. It wasn’t the only blog network I was using but it still affected some of my sites quite badly. I know people will say it serves me right for using such services but they do work and I still made money while my sites were well ranked. It might not have been as long term as I’d liked but I did get a positive effect. I’m still going to use them in the future but if anyone has any suggestions of better places to get links I’d love to hear them.

Unique Article Wizard

I finally bit the bullet and signed up with Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you submit your spun articles to other peoples’ blogs and directories. I posted about signing up before and didn’t get very good feedback but two people I’ve been following lately (Spencer @ Niche Pursuits and Trent @ Online Income Lab) swear by it so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s too early to tell if it has any effect but to read about how it can be used go here: http://onlineincomelab.com/backlinking-strategy/

• If you want to know more about the Unique Article Wizard click here on my affiliate link.

Other Stuff I Did In October

Apart from crying when my sites got hit I didn’t do much work in October. We went on holiday to Penang in Malaysia for a week at half term which was really good. The food was amazing, much better than Thailand I am afraid to say, and so cheap to eat out at the best curry places. There wasn’t free Wifi in the hotels but it wasn’t too expensive – about £10 a day – so I did a few hours of work but not much. As the floods started to get closer to Bangkok my partner’s school was shut so we got an unexpected two weeks off work. We decided to go away again and went to Koh Chang, one of the Thai islands. This time the hotel had free wifi so I managed to do a few hours a day of work which felt good as I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed with what to do next and how I could try and fix my sites or whether to give it all up and get a proper job.

Lifestyle Affiliates

While I was away it got me thinking about what I would do if I could start over again. As the cost of living is so cheap out here in South East Asia I would recommend to anyone who is just starting out and who is making a couple of £100 a month to save up and move out here. Get a little place by the sea, lock yourself away and work your socks off without all the stresses of high overheads back home. You will get a good holiday and can hopefully lay down some good foundations on your internet business while you have little distractions. Of course if you have a mortgage and family this isn’t an option but for those that are young, free and and single: go for it!

Earnings for October 2011

Last month I earned £1490 which was pretty good and although this month started off well by the middle of the month it was clear I wasn going to be lucky to beat that.

My gross earnings for October 2011 were: £1439.29 / $2309

Not bad considering what happened mid-month but a bit disappointing when you look at how well things started off. The downward slump is continuing which is a shame. Pretty sure I won’t hit my long-term goal of £2000 a month by the end of the year.

Goals for November 2011

You can read what I am thinking about doing in my What Would You Do with $1000 post.

My main focus for November will be to get 5 Adsense niche sites up and running with 8-10 pages on and some backlinks for each.

Alongside that I will be trying my hardest to get my existing sites back to where they were. I will pick the five top earners from the last couple of months and focus on them for now. I will be adding content to them and getting them a few links where I can.

How was your October and what are you goals for the last few months of the year?

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

September is over. One month closer towards the end of the year where I have been aiming to be making £2000 ($3100) per month by (not including Christmas stuff). This month was a bit of a step further away from that goal in terms of earnings as has been the trend the last couple of months. From looking at my stats it seems my sites have been getting more hits than ever before but making less money. Maybe as the keywords my sites are ranked for increases the less targeted the traffic is? Who knows but I haven’t got time to sit around analysing my stats and learning from my mistakes, I must keep ploughing on into the unknown!

Life as a Full-Time Affiliate

This was my first full month as a full-time affilaite and full-time stay at home dad. The two don’t really go together very well but I have managed to do quite a bit of work this month compared to the last few with at least something getting done most days. Maybe in the new year when the baby is a bit older I will get a nanny in the day for a couple of hours so I can pop out and get some work done. Babysitters and nannies only charge about £2 per hour here so I could afford it, its just whether I want to leave the little one on their own each day. We shall see…

Adsense Sites

I’m continuing to go down the Adsense route after following the progress of Trent and Spencer. I found lots of good niches/keywords with the keyword research tool SECockpit and have setup eight sites so far. My target was 10 by the end of September but eight is ok. The keywords look good to my inexperienced eye so we shall see if I can get them ranking and if they make any money. Once they are up and running I will start getting some more setup. I am very tempted to sign up for Trent’s Niche Site Mastery course but I’ve never paid for a course or how to guide yet and something doesn’t feel right about handing over cash for something like that.

New Niche Product Sites

This month I set up four more standard niche sites after months of not doing any. I made myself stop registering new domains and starting yet another site a while ago but now I think why not? Its how I’ve got this far so why stop. None of them are particularly good niches but if they each earn £10 a month I’m making money.

I’ve only put up about four pages on each one but I’ve changed the way I am going to do these sites from how I used to. Before I’d do one general page of about 500 words on the niche, then do product descriptions of products from the nice. Now what I am doing is a general 500 word peice on the niche then instead of doing product descriptions I will use the Google Keyword tool to find four or five related keywords that get searched for the most and then do a 500 word post/page targeting that keyword. For example my niche might be ‘Snowboards’, then I’d find the next highest searched keywords which might ‘Cheap Snowboards’, ‘Stunt Snowboards’, ‘Nike Snowboards’ and so on. Then if I need more content for the site I will do brand pages and then product descriptions. The problem with product descriptions are that they tend to be too long tail. For most of my sites, hardly any of them get traffic from specific product searches even though they rank well for specific product names. I find this the case more with lower priced items.

When it comes to TVs I expect people do find the one they want in the shops and then search for the product name online but with items under £50 or even £100 I don’t think people do the same level of research. Most people won’t search for ‘model name and number sandwich toaster’ but they do search for ‘cheap sandwich toaster’ or maybe even ‘Morphy Richards sandwich toaster’.

Content Writers

I’ve been using the instructions over on Sitey.net to find cheap content writers who write 10 articles for $10. The people who apply are mostly pretty crap but you do get the odd diamond amongst the rough. However the good ones tend to move on once they realise how much they could be making. I’m tempted to try out The Content Authority website but I’m pretty skint at the moment so can’t really afford it just now.

Link Building

I’ve managed to get a few sites to number one for keywords I’ve been targeting for ages. One site that is about two years old finally got to number one for the two main keywords. It is still bouincing around the top four which is a bit of a pain but while it is number one it gets about 150 hits a day which results in a few sales most days, this only brings me a couple of quid but its worth it for now. The 24/7 Backlinks service has been revived and you can get 1000 free backlinks per day just for signing up: http://247backlinks.info/ I’m also still using Social Adr for general easy social bookmarking backlinks.

You can see what other tools I use here.

The Future

Things have to change. I can’t really carry on building more small niche product sites. Adsense might be the way forward but it is very early days for me so can’t say for sure. My relative successes in link building has shown me that some of my sites that I thought would be quite profitable aren’t. My earnings aren’t to be scoffed at but they aren’t enough to live comfortably on and to give me enough to reinvest. I’m not really sure where to go from here. I need to find a new slant on affiliate marketing to push me on to the next level. My goal for the end of the year is £2000 per month but beyond that I’d love to be making £3000 or even £5000 per month one day. Is it possible?

Earnings for September 2011

My earnings for September 2011 were: £1490 ($2320)

Last month I earnt £1500 which is only a tenner more so not worth crying about but it is down about £350 from May 2011 when I earnt £1840 (seems a long time ago now). I made my first couple of sales through More Niche which was good as the comission levels were quite high compared to regular sales. I made more from Amazon this month than usual but less through Affiliate Window. I found a really good (free) plugin to help manage all your WordPress installations called managewp, it is definately worth a look if you have lots of sites.

How was your September?

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

This month I became a full-time affiliate. Well, a part-time dad and a part-time affiliate. But either way I gave up the day job to earn my crust soley from affiliate marketing.

Going Full-Time

I didn’t take to going full-time very well and found it very hard to get the hours in. I set myself the target of doing five hours a day but this soon went out of the window and I was finding it difficult to get anything done most days. I decided that if I had such limited time I would spend it outsourcing link building rather than writing and adding content to my sites as this would take the least time and get me the biggest return on my time. I figured spending 10 minutes filling in a form to order some links would be better than spending 10 minutes writing half an article for one of sites. At least I was getting something done. Some of the link building paid off and some of it didn’t. I’m still trying to find out the best type of links to get a small niche site ranking.

Holiday!

After all that hard work it was clear I needed a holiday so off we went for a week in Phuket. There was no internet at our hotel, well there was but I refused to pay £4 per hour so I stayed offline for a week which was nice but also meant I spent about 1/4 of July not doing any work at all.

Staying Motivated

When you are doing affiliate marketing on the side trying to steal an hour here and there, working is quite fun but once you go full-time it just becomes like any other job and after last month’s drop in earnings I am finding it very hard to stay motivated and do some work. This usually happens when my earnings dip. I think “what’s the point in putting in the work if it doesn’t correlate with my earnings”.

July 2011 Earnings

Last month I brought in £1200. This was down quite a bit from the £1840 I made a few months ago.

My gross earnings for July 2011 were £1186 ($1930).

That was a bit of a kick in the nuts and not a good way to start my full-time career as an internet marketeer. But I have been busy the last three months or so a drop is to be expected I guess.

The Future

I’m not really sure how to progress. A grand a month is nice for a few hours work here and there but its not enough. I want to be making a solid £2000 per month by the end of the year and then much more after that. But at the moment that seems like a step too far. I’d love to lock myself away for a month and work 24/7 but that just isn’t possible.

Adsense

I’ve been reading Trent Dyrsmid’s blog: http://onlineincomelab.com/ and have been impressed by the quick progress he has made with Adsense sites and I am keen to give it a go. Anyone else done this kind of thing?

How was your month?

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

This has been a bittersweet month for me (first time I’ve ever used that word). After the heights of last month where I brought in £1840 I knew I’d be hard pressed to beat that personal best this month. I wrote last month that my goal for June would be £1900 but that I’d be happy to clear £1500.

But before I get to the bitter part lets start with the sweet.

That Friday Feeling x 100

The end of June brought to a close my day job and as of Friday 1 June I no longer have gainful employment! So for the second time in my life I am going to try my hand at affiliate marketing full-time.

Giving up the Day Job and Going Fulltime Part II

Last time I tried this was about two years ago when I first moved to Thailand. After a few months in the game I had managed to get my earnings to about £500 per month. I figured if I went fulltime I could start to build on that and could soon get to £1000. Things didn’t go quite according to plan and due to me being lazy and preferring to enjoy my new surroundings rather than sitting at the laptop for eights plus hours a day my earnings didn’t increase and even started to go backwards. It wasn’t long before I had to get a fulltime job again and try and find time for affiliate marketing on the side.

Giving it another Shot

Due to a change in circumstances and my earnings reaching a respectable level I am now going to try and be a fulltime affiliate again. I hope I have learnt my lesson and will be more disciplined this time around as I don’t really want to have to get a proper job ever again! With a bit of luck I have learnt a few things in the past couple of years that will allow me to increase my earnings.

The New Regime

As my girlfriend has got seven weeks of maternity leave left I am going to try and go all out for this period and get as much done as I can. I want to try and outsource some tasks so that when she goes back to work and I am left holding the baby I will have as much free time as possible.

Over the next seven weeks I plan to do five hours of work each day. This doesn’t sound like much but if I am focused I think I can get a fair amount done. I’m not going to be reading forums or checking my stats but working hard on adding content to my sites. Content and links will be bought and I will just work on adding the content to my sites and using the affiliate marketing tools I already have.

A Healthy Body for a Healthy Mind

I’ve been going to the gym for years but have been a bit slack over the past few months. After reading this post on another affiliate marketing blog I have decided to set myself another little challenge for the next seven weeks. That challenge is to do 30 minutes of exercise each day. I hope this will help keep my motivated when it comes to work and stop be getting bored being indoors. I’m going to aim to head to the gym each morning before I start work. I might even do 30 minutes of swimming each evening too. It seems a shame not to use the gym or the two pools in my complex when they are right here. I will also continue to aim to do three weights sessions a week. If I can stick to this I will throw in a few Muay Thai sessions as well. I plan to get a lot done in these next seven weeks as they will be my last months of (relative) freedom for a while!

What I did in June

I did a fair amount of work in June on my sites. Mostly this was focussed on link building and research rather than actual hands on stuff on my sites. I bought some new tools, with the main one being Linkamotion, which I have not gotten around to using yet.

What I will do in July

I’ve got a lot of content that I’ve bought so I will be adding that to my sites. I’m going to try and do one Linkamotion article a day which should give me 50 links to a site each day. I’m going to try and not spend much money testing out different link building tools and deals this month as I want to use what I have already. I want to try some new themes out on a few of my sites to try and increase conversions as I have a few sites that get 50 hits a day but don’t really make many sales.

Earnings for June 2011

Last month I earned £1840. My goal for June was £1900 and I said I’d be happy with £1500.

My (gross) earnings for June 2011 were £1200

Pretty bad eh? I put this mainly down to one of my main sites getting knocked off the first page for loads of its keywords mid May and never recovering. Some keywords came back a bit but nothing like before. Other sites didn’t manage to pick up the slack and keep my earnings stable so I dropped £640 this month. Ouch!
I was looking at my average earnings and for the first six months of 2011 they have been £1400 a month which is pretty good I reckon. Now I am fulltime though things need to get better quickly.

Goal for July

I’m going to go for £1500 for July. My long term goal has been to get to £2000 per month by the end of September 2011 but after June’s poor show this is looking increasingly unlikely to happen. I’m still going to give it a try though.

How did you do in June?

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

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

I don’t think I’ve a monthly round-up for a while but this month it is a welcome distraction from content writing.

My earnings peaked in November and December 2010 with one of my Autumnal sites taking off big time thanks to an increase in the number of people searching for it. But that niche’s popularity was short lived only lasting two months before it went back to getting 30 or less hits a day.

As most of my sites are seasonal when one site is doing well the others take a break and don’t bring in much money. As my Autumnal sites are not making any sales now, this month saw some of my Spring sites come out of hibernation and start getting a few more hits.

Earnings are still down from the end of last year and in March 2011 I made £280 less than I was doing in November and December. Its a drop of 20% which is not what I was hoping for when I set my goal of increasing my earnings by 10% each month.

I guess its a lesson in factoring in seasonality of a product when picking a niche or area to work in. Some of my sites I wouldn’t have considered seasonal when I picked them but after looking at a years worth of data there are definite patterns and its worth also noting that most seasonal niches tend to have short periods of popularity and long periods of inactivity.

If you have a good spread of sites each peaking in different months you could weather the storms but its frustrating to see your sites bounce around in terms of how much money they bring in.

Selling Sites

I made an effort to try and sell one of my sites this month. It was at number one in Google so I emailed the people who are bidding on the keyword it is number one for and asked them if they wanted to buy it. It’s not a great opportunity for an affiliate site but if you are bidding on that keyword it might be nice to also have the number one site to get some extra traffic. I’m not desperate to start selling sites but wouldn’t say no to lump sum of cash that I could reinvest in some link building for my other sites as that is my main priority at the moment.

Earnings for March 2011: £1120

Update: a few people have asked my how much each site makes and things like that. I’ve done this quick pie chart to show how the income is spread over my 50 sites or so. As you can see there are a few that bring home the most money and loads that don’t bring in much at all. The main sites that make the most tend to change each month as the seasons change and things go in and out of favour.

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

I’m not sure what month this is of my time in affiliate marketing but I think it might be getting close to two years now!

October didn’t start that well as by the end of the first week I got my AdWords account stopped so I had to rely on SEO traffic for the rest of the month.  I had been spending about 400 to 500 pounds a month on AdWords for the past few months which worked out to quite a lot of clicks.  So when all the that traffic stopped I was expecting a big drop in earnings.  In a way I was a bit glad I had been forced to stop paying for clicks as one of the main reasons I liked affilaite marketing is that it could be done with hardly any outgoings and was very easy to do without any regular monthly outgoings like a big direct debit to Google each month.  It was low risk in the beginning and that was how I liked it.

Thankfully the loss in PPC traffic didn’t affect me overall and I made more than the previous month!  Only a few quidmore but enough for me to relax now I was without my AdWords traffic.

How Did This Happen?

As I promoting a lot of sites in Adowrds that were also number one in Google the sites were getting traffic from both SEO and PPC.  I was paying for clicks for the same keywords my sites were number one at and as I wasn’t tracking which users, SEO or PPC, were making the sales I hadn’t realise the PPC traffic wasn’t really adding any value to my sites.

Without the PPC traffic my sites got less hits and less sales but overall they still managed to make a profit as I didn’t have to pay Google.

This isn’t the full story.  Some sites that I was paying a lot to Google for to get traffic were not making any profit and were being subsidised my sites that only got traffic from SEO.

Now the sites that aren’t ranked aren’t getting any hits and its down to my SEO sites to bring home the bacon.

The only real downside so far is that my Christmas site won’t get any traffic this year as it wasn’t ranking at all for any of its items.  Last year for was my first foray into PPC and it paid off very well with December 2009 being my best month at that point.  I was looking to repeat it again this year but without AdWords I can’t see how I can get any traffic.

As the seasons in the UK changed from Summer to Winter my sites which were making money changed too.  My big earners dropped right off but luckily I had some more Autumnal sites which picked up the slack.  If my sites were at their peak all year round I think I’d be doing pretty well but as things stand it is a constant ebb and flow of sites doing well for a few months a year.

I’m still paying for content to be written and still paying for links to be built although after this hiccup I might pause the link building for a while.

My big site still isn’t ranking but I haven’t given up on it and have a few more ideas for some big sites although I need to plan them properly first and get a decent design sorted.  I recently discovered the skills I learnt making niche sites are not really transferable when it comes to making a big site and that a big site is whole other kettle of fish.

I recently purchased a seven day trial of an article spinner which looks pretty good, although it is broken at the moment and I am waiting to hear back from their support about how to fix it.  Hopefully this will happen before the seven day trial ends!

Once I get it up and running I am planning to do some article marketing although I don’t know much about it yet.  It does sound, in theory at least, like a good way to get back links but we shall see.  Anyone else doing this?

I was quite busy overall in October although did have a week in Bali and a few days at the beach in Thailand so not all work and no play!

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