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.

Unexpected Sales

I logged into Awin yesterday and saw I had a new sale with £34 commission pending.  I had a look to see what site it was from and was pleasantly surprised to see it was from a site I made many months ago that has been in the top 3 of Google for its 8,000 exact match keywords since I made it.  It had never made a sale and I’d all but given up on it.  I hadn’t updated it since I made it as it continued to rank well with no help from me.

Being top 3 for a 8,000 exact match niche isn’t going to get you many hits and this site was getting about 3 hits per day. On paper this sounded like a good niche: 8000 searches, little competition, fairly high value products but alas it was not.  It was missing that X factor that is so hard to define when picking a niche. This is why I favour the lots of small sites approach.  If I’d spent months making this a big site would it have made anymore sales than it has done already?

But £30 is £30 so I’m not complaining!

I’m Back!

It’s been a while since my last post (about 25 days) and a few people had gotten in touch to check if I was still alive and doing affiliate marketing.  Well I am still going, I went away for a week but apart from that have been plugging away quietly.

How Are Things Going?
Sales are doing ok for this month and I should do better than last month but not up to the level I was a few months ago.  I got a bit disheartened at the start of the month but have been putting in a lot more work of late, updating older sites, making new sites etc.  My older sites are starting to rank well with a lot in the number one position in Google for their main keyword.  However this doesnt guarantee traffic or sales and some of my sites that are number one still get very little traffic and few if any sales even though they get 5-10k exact seraches according to GKWT.  This is why I have so far been making lots of sites.  Waiting for one of them to take off as until I have got a site up and running I don’t know if it will bring in any money or not.  Still not got an eye for spotting a good niche.

Big Site
All the advice I have had so far has been to make a bigger, more general site that I can focus on rather than having lots of little sites to distract me.  So far I’ve been wary of putting all my eggs in one basket (especially since my choices so far have been so hit and miss) but as my other approach isn’t really paying off I am going to give it a go.

I’ve picked my niche, almost got a name for the site and should be ready to go at the start of November.  I will be building it around Wordpress for now but have some planning to do of how to structure it.

Getting a New Day Job
As some of my regular readers may know I gave up my day job a few months ago to come to Thailand.  My earnings were going up month on month before I came out so I thought they would continue to increase and soon be enough to live on out here without getting another full time job.  Alas they did not and since my earnings started to go down I’ve been looking (a bit half-heartedly) for a new job.  Part-time would be ideal but there is not much on offer out here and due to the strict immigration laws teaching is really the only option for a farang and there are not many part-time teaching jobs on offer.  Hopefully my earnings will rocket and I will avoid going back into working for the man.  I think £650 per month would do me nicely out here and allow me to focus on really putting my all into Internet marketing.

Anything exciting been happening in the world of affiliate marketing in the last month or so?

Are you all ready for Christmas (I’ve not done anything which I am sure I will regret)?

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?

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.