August half time

August 23rd, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

This month has been a rather quiet month, with the new job and some new hobbies, my enthusiasm for my sites kind of slowed, add to this the fact that my hosting has been temperamental with my sites virtually collapsing on a regular basis all month for up to half an hour at a time several times a day, i think i may have ‘missed a trick’ in terms of earning additional commission, which is a real shame, last month i took in £164 at the end of the month, with a target to get £250 this month, given the results, i don’t think i’ll be hitting the target, i might even get less than July, still, apparently august is a quiet month, but it can be disheartening. I’m really hoping to up the ante on my affiliate marketing, if i can earn £2000 a month from affiliate marketing i will be over the moon, that would prove to me that i’ve got what it takes to be and affiliate. anyways, here’s the results for august so far.
aw £7.02
google £95.81
skimlinks £0.42
amazon £2.17
£105.42
based on this my target of £250 a month still stands till i hit it.

Posted in Monthly Goals | 1 Comment »

July Results

August 1st, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

July was a funny month, but it actually ended well, i’ve started PPC to my strongest site and the launch of my first ‘atomic niche’ site has been interesting, I’ve also invested in articles from content now, when at first glance look pretty good, but i need to find the time to put them up on site soon. Easy Content Unit and WP-o-matic was really stressful so i’m going to have a long hard look into how i can get that resolved, its very frustrating.

so heres the round up:
Google: £135.91
Awin: £4.63
Amazon: £15.44
Linkshare: £8.18
Total: £164.16

all in all a good result, but not enough to retire on i don’t think! I reckon the target for August will be a hefty £250, if i reach £200 I’ll be very happy.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | No Comments »

Setbacks and a new plan

July 26th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

after sleeping on my massive setback yesterday, I’ve decided to take a step back and reassess my affiliate marketing.

currently I have over 80 domains. and around 17 sites up. of which 10 are now broken. my strongest site however hasn’t been affected likewise with the site that generates most commissions from amazon, which is a bit of a saving grace, my third large site (which is actually a partnership) is going well too, with content now generating the bulk of the content its good news.

so rather than redoing the 10 sites from scratch right now, i’m going to focus on the existing sites that are performing, then focus on some ‘atomic niche’ sites i’ve already got, this will mean i need to design a landing page template. After this, its all hands on deck for christmas. and after all this is done, i’ll start to go back to the 10 sites that have been affected, at least this way I’m playing to the strengths of my portfolio.

another thing Im going to be doing is, aside from ECU and content now, i will not be spending any more money on affiliate marketing moving forwards, its time to stockpile some of the income i’m taking in from affiliate marketing.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | No Comments »

Mid-july update

July 19th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

here’s a quick update for july.
google -£63.34 estimate – £109.08
amazon – £12.08
linkshare – £6.45
skimlinks – £0.19
total -£82.06 (actual), £127.80 (estimate)

not bad, but not as high as I hoped…

my test sites have been setup but as yet, i’ve not done any linkbuilding so I’m unsure how effective they will be, certainly traffic to these sites isn’t there yet and google seems to be taking age to pickup the sites, next month will be a hardcore month of linkbuilding.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | No Comments »

Update for July

July 12th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Month so far has been interesting commissions from google look ok likely to hit £116.56 assuming no significant changes to patterns. Amazon is doing well too with 10 sales recognized totalling £5.70, however Affiliate Window seems to have stalled with no commissions so far, same goes for Linkshare, Skimlinks is showing £0.19 so far so it seems like a promising month so far.

I has a couple of days off between jobs which has meant I’ve been able to give my sites a lot more attention, allowing me to focus on some decent content for most of the sites, I’ve also baught a few atomic-niche sites which I hope to spend to next month filling with content.

I’ve decided to focus on higher value products as well which should help to increase the amount of commission i get and I’ll need to focus on linkbuilding techiques as i need my sites to start ranking better, the headache is always, too little time to get stuff done, this being said, the new techique I’ve learnt using easy content unit and wp-o-matic has been golden, its saved countless hours, I’ll certainly be investing in this further.

I’ve signed off some work to content now as well, which i’ll hopefully start seeing the results soon. All in all its a slow and long journey, so long as I hit my target of £125 this month I’ll be over the moon, if i get over £100 i’ll be happy.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | 2 Comments »

Commission round up June

July 1st, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m by no mean feat a small time, part time affiliate, i only spend around an hour or two a day on my sites including a small retail site for custom lego parts that isn’t associated with affiliate marketing. As far as actually being an affiliate I’m certainly no major player, but to give myself some credibility I am a full time affiliate manager meaning that it’s my job to plan build and ensure the success of affiliate campaigns, i just need to translate that into sales for myself!

So here’s a totally honest round up, no matter how embarrassing, of my affiliate related earnings for June. (I’ll be doing this each month moving forwards to track progression)

Linkshare – £13.36

Skimlinks – £2.07

Amazon – £2.33

Google adsense – £99.49

total – £117.23

Whilst commission for google is consistent and actually exceeded what i was expecting this month, but failed to beat May’s results, its promising news. However, on the other hand affiliate network commissions are still a trickle, and something I was hoping would change, The amazing £115 commission sale i got from one site, failed to repeat itself this month, but fingers crossed a little age on the site and some link building will help with that. I guess my habit of going around in circles when it comes to my own stuff has meant my progression as an affiliate has been slow, i should be in the £x,xxx region by now one would have thought! Nevertheless, persever, after all as an affiliate manager i see the kind of numbers possible in this game.

so, a little more focus, July sees me starting a new job, but affiliate side, we’re going to try and hit £125 commission, and in order to acheive this, i’m going to move my affiliate ‘office’ from the sofa in front of the TV and my lego, to the desk, by the dvd player and all those big books we use to prop doors open with. Lastly i’m actually going to READ more, I haven’t finished a book in months, so its about time i actually do some more research.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | No Comments »

Payday Mayday

June 25th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Junes been a really unusual month for me, I’ve been particularly lazy on the affiliate front, I’m about to change to a new job, I’ve got more sites to work on than ever before and it was my girlfriend’s sisters wedding which left me out of action for 4/5 days.  What was nice was not touching the laptop for that time and finding out I’d made £16.20 in commissions.

Now here’s the thing, I’ve not counted affiliate commissions in my analysis as i don’t acutally make that much from actual affiliate links at the moment and it’s sporadic to say the least, my hope to get this more consistant over the next year or so.

as you can see things have been good on the google adsense front, with month on month growth over the last four month, only Junes numbers (1- 24th) seem to buck the trend, and even then by my estimates this should come in  at around £90+  by the end of the month.

One of the big problems is that my main site is now starting to stablaize, its not been getting more traffic and seems to have reached a critical mass of sorts. As such I need to figure out a way to boost the profile of the site a bit more and/or build a new site that can replicate the same success the main site has had.

In addition to this I’ve launched and am currently populating two other niche sites, using the theory of ‘atomic niche’ but varying this to accomodate the more generic profile of the site.

Lastly one of my niche sites, the one that gave me £115 commission off one sale has been completed, as such i’ve left this site as it is, and the next break i get, i’ll be focusing on the linkbuilding process for this particular site.

The big challenge for me at the moment seems to be 1. keeping on top of things, 2. staying motivated considering the really low amount of revenue I’m taking in. At least my hosting and most of my domains are covered by my commissions.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | 1 Comment »

content content content

June 24th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

The internet in many ways is similar to property. A domain name is like a promiment location, meaning that it inof itself is a commodity. But like property a location isn’t enough, its also about how the structure both of the site and the property is made; and its about design, the look and the feel of the site as well as the content. Like property its these variables that give a website value, in this context the value comes from unique visitors.

This leads me to the biggest headache any affiliate can have…content. Content on a website is very much the make or break, its critical to getting the site ranking in google and important in allowing users to have something to keep coming back for. In addition, you’re also confronted with the challenge of keeping the content both unique and fresh.

There simple isn’t the hours in the day to maintain content which is why, for one of my particular sites, Ive decided its time to try the warter with getting some content written for me. which leads me to the big question…who to choose, i certainly have no idea where to start.

So for July, part of my task will be to find someone to help with content writing.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals, Other Stuff, SEO | 1 Comment »

Starting from Scratch month 1

June 16th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

So, after my first post, here is where I am right now and my targets for the end of the month:

1. google adsense – at the moment, this is where the bulk of my affiliate income comes from, I’m making around £4.50 a day from it, so by the end of the month I’m trying to push this to £5.50 a day, at least then it justifies the hour a day i spend on part-time affiliate marketing

2. affiliate programs – I’ve not been getting much consistancy from affiliate programs, the most I’ve acheived is 3 consecutive days where I’ve made commission, some months I won’t even get a single sale, so I’m hoping that in June I can get a sale a month from affiliate programs

3.  I’ve not really been up to speed with some of the innovations in affiliate marketing, mainly due to time, there’s tools like skimlinks and ECU which I’ve yet to use fully so June is the month of tests.

4. I’ve got stacks of blogs to write content for and get sorted, so again June is the month of taking stock and sorting all this out.

5. lastly, finances, as I’m now getting a more consistant income from affiliate marketing, I had to apply for self-employed status as a result I have to worry about such fantastic things as tax, something I need to get sorted, sooner rather than later.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals | No Comments »

Why I got into affiliate marketing

June 16th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’ve always been entrepreneural even from a young age when i got caught selling baseball cards in school. Leaving Uni with not much of a degree in graphic design i was at a loss as to what to do with my life, it dawned on me i wasn’t much of a graphic designer and my design skills were best left to gather dust. It was at this point I fell into affiliate marketing, I was an avid fan of the internet anyways having been a moderator on  a fairly large internet forum, so I knew my way around and in my youth i had created a geocities site before. So I jumped at the chance of a Job when an opening at an affiliate network became available. (I’d got this job through a friend).

After over 9 months learning the ropes and understanding affiliate marketing I was also looking at how much some of the bigger affiliates were making and seeing their sites it seemed like such an acheivable opportunity. I found myself wishing that instead of worrying about dating, instead of worrying about skateboarding and music, I should have been doing this affiliate marketing thing-a-ma-jiggy.

It wasn’t until I moved to another agency and discovered Squidoo that I really began being a part-time affiliate. At this new job I was in control of an affiliate site, so my understanding of SEO and PPC grew from here, without this knowledge I would have been gropeing around in the dark. Using Squidoo, I ended up creating quite a few test sites, none did really great, but i did get some google adsense commission which proved the concept and allowed me to understand the basics of what it was like to be an affiliate.

In October 2008 I started my real adventure as a part-time affiliate, I’d discovered Wordpress by this point and acquired top-notch webhosting from Netmotivated (a company I heavily recommend by the way),  and I’d started to understand SEO and Niche marketing, an area that I’ve decided to focus on. It seems strange but every thing prior to October 2008 was testing and learning.

My first big break came when I discovered a niche as a result of an article in The Sun, what began as a small blog has now become the authority site on the subject and now earns me a consistant income every day of every month, totalling £xxx each month. This was the proof of concept, whilst this blog was fantastic it still needs constant updating and traffic has begun to reach its limit. Furtunately I’ve dedicated more resources to aquiring new domains and exploring SEO further, this has ment that I now have a portfolio of over 70 domains and over 8 active sites.

My second renaissance was when a niche site i created ranked in google in 6 hours, and made a sale worth £xxx within the week i set it up.

My hope, now that I have the knowledge and experience as a result of my professional life and my hobby, is that i can begin to grow this success to earning me a substatial passive income i can use to fund my retirement, or better yet allow me to transition from being a part-time affiliate to a full time affiliate…that would be nice.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals, Niche Marketing, Other Stuff, PPC, SEO, Wordpress | 2 Comments »