When I last posted on here, I was earning next to nothing and just couldn’t seem to cross the £600.00 a month mark in affiliate commission.

Now, just over 6 months later, I’m comfortably earning over £1800.00 a month in passive income.

Read below to find out exactly how I did it…

In February, I had a lifechanging experience. I told myself then that I was going to get my head down and do this affiliate marketing thing for real.

Like so many affiliates out there, I felt like I had been slogging away at this forever without much gain.  My affiliate sites were wide and varied from Bar Stools to Rings of Death. I felt like I’d tried it all to little avail.

Of course, I hadn’t.

As the weeks past and D-Day drew closer, I started to fret. I was going to be a dad in about 23 weeks and I wanted to be earning real money by that time. I lost a bit of faith in Affiliate Marketing around this time and started to think about other things.

That’s when I stumbled upon the start of a journey that changed everything forever.

1. Not Every Answer Needs to be Found in Google

I turned to that old forgotten source of all knowledge, the trusty old book, to find my way.

I wanted to be wealthy.

I’m not ashamed to admit that and if I was going to get real inspiration, I felt like I needed to take myself out of the internet marketing box altogether. During this ‘pilgrimage‘, I came across 3 books that fundamentally changed my perception of everything; especially wealth and how to get it.

If you want to make real wealth in any field, not just Affiliate Marketing, you need to read these books! I swear I’m not just flogging these to get commission – the amount I’d earn is pitiful compared to the amounts I’m now earning as a result of reading them.

1. The Richest Man in Babylon – George S. Clason
   This book explains how anyone with a source of income can turn their resources towards making more money. The concept is pretty simple, really, and when you read it you’ll find yourself nodding along with the author as he unravels the mystery of real wealth and how to go about getting it.
2. Rich Dad, Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki
   The first time I read this book, I found myself dumbstruck looking at the pages and thinking to myself; why on earth didn’t I think of that sooner? or how come I didn’t realise that before now?
3. Think and Grow Rich – Napolean Hil
   This book, for me, was the thread that hangs all the ideas in the other books together and forms the backbone of everything. When I read it, I found it a fascinating tale of men who really knew how to make wealth and the steps they took to achieve it. The underpinning idea is strong and potent, and if you can follow its rules, I truly believe there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

After I’d finished reading these books, I felt like I was truly starting to think about where my wealth was going to come from.

2. Appreciate that Real Wealth has Many Forms, Not Just Affiliate Websites

Following the principles in Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Richest Man in Babylon, I started to save up a portion of my earnings every month.

I didn’t really quite know what I was going to do with the savings yet, but knew I needed to invest it somewhere so that my money would start working for me.

I had lots of ideas at around this time including stocks and shares, bonds, gambling, renting houses out, renting vehicles out, doing freelance work, buying a business, lending money out and even buying and selling gold.

Then out of nowhere really, I had a major lightbulb moment which when I look back now, sounds completely obvious.

I had been doing online marketing for more than 10 years; SEO, PPC, Direct Mail and Affiliate Marketing. Armed with my new knowledge and outlook gained from the books above, I started to wonder if I could be a better Affiliate.

Turns out, I could.

3. Find A Good Affiliate Program

In the past, I’d spent most of my previous affiliate marketing years (since 2009 when I ‘officially’ started doing it) trying to promote consumer retail products.

I’d always managed to bring in a few hundred quid here, a few hundred there, but never really managed to break through the £600 a month mark.

I always seemed to hit the same barriers:

• I was bored by what I was selling
• I couldn’t figure out how to turn a consumer retail product into an ‘authority’ website
• Product changes moved so fast that my lack of programming skills prevented me from keeping up (affiliate marketing was supposed to be PASSIVE, right?!)
• I felt like I was working my arse off to get a sale, and when I did, the commission would just about buy me fish and chips on a Friday

What I needed was a merchant whose products didn’t change every day so that when I found the time to update my website with the latest information, it would be useful for YEARS to come, rather than weeks or months.

This meant that I could write a product review, and it would be just as relevant in 24 months time as it would be in 2 weeks’ time. In reality, this means that the time I spend writing these reviews and initially building these sites, will pay me back for years to come.

When I had this straight in my head, I started looking for the right network. Then I came across MoreNiche.

MoreNiche is an affiliate network that prides itself on promoting merchants who deliver excellent commissions and plenty of resources to support sales.

It was only after I started working with MoreNiche that I started to untap my own potential (wohoo! finally!).

I used my savings to get a site built using a product from the MoreNiche network.

I sold my first product within weeks of joining up and made a staggering £45.00 commission – off of one sale that I hardly put any work in to achieve. This really inspired me to start working on more.

Here’s a screenshot of one day last week (I am WhiteKnight):

That worked out at about £175.00 for the day from MoreNiche alone. Some of my older sites made £10-£15.00, taking my earnings for that day over £200.00!

This affiliate stuff really could work, afterall!

4. Find a Way to Trade Your Time for Money

Now that I’d found a good way to make decent commission, I wanted to try and reduce the amount of time that I was putting into creating these sites.

I started to think about reinvesting the money I was making into an outsource team who could basically take over all the work that I was putting into them.

I set myself a budget that commanded that 50% of my earnings each month would go directly back into building the sites out by paying an outsource team.

With 50% of my first months earnings, I was able to employ a content writer for the second month. The content writer proved an excellent investment because not only was I adding a new piece of content every 2 days to the site, I was also building up a library of articles that could be spun into more articles at a later date.

The addition of new content to my sites seemed to have a positive effect on my SERPs too and I saw my site increase its rank to top 5 position.

Two months later, I was able to invest my 50% in an SEO specialist.

Now I had a semi-automatic revenue generating asset.

5. Rinse and Repeat

It didn’t take me long to realise that the more money I put back into the business in terms of employing outsourcers, the more I was getting out of it in terms of commission.

After 5 months of continual growth, I was working with 4 outsourcers.

In the 6th month, I decided to repeat the whole process for a new site.

Now, 8 months on, I am finally earning more than £1800.00 a month in affiliate commissions and I can finally see a path forward that is scalable and manageable.

I intend to quit my job in the new year and come into the business full time, when my earnings, after paying my team, will surpass my current full time job.

Did I find the holy grail I was searching for?!

If not, I’m pretty damn close.

PS. Do you want to join me?

Sign up to MoreNiche today and send me an email when you’re done and I’ll help YOU make your first sale too!

I had a feeling something would happen as google had a little sniff of the new host. In fact, I was hoping it would. Today I checked SERPs and the site has indeed re-appeared on page 1 for lots of target terms. I’m guessing it’ll stay there for a day or so as google has a good look through the site and then decides to spit it out again.

Maybe this suggests that its something on my site that’s causing it to get dumped each time…it’s flicking some kind of algorythm check somewhere. The site is a wordpress site. I wonder if I just change the theme to the default theme if it’ll make any difference…

Can I really feel good about my work if all I’ve done is sell two products on one day? Yes, it makes over £100 but really, 2 sales is pretty weak, right?

These sales were for my summer-time site and this bodes well for this particular site looking forward. Now, this site is completely independant of my bar stools site and has been online for a few years. It has gone through continuous development over time and wasn’t something I put together in a week. In fact, it needs even more changes now. There is a lot of pretty useful, 100% unique content on the site and because it is quite an old site, it’s built up a lot of links over time as I’ve exchanged links, written articles, posted this, commented there, tried this, tried that etc etc.

The point is this wasn’t something I created in a day, a week or even a month. This has been a continuous process for years. In many ways, it was also completely accidental!

If only I could copy this formula for a more a planned site!

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Well, here’s a snapshot of analytics for the last year. You can see several spikes where Google decided to love me for a day then quickly spat me out.

Let’s see if moving a .co.uk website from a US host to a .co.uk host will improve my .co.uk SERPs. (I’m also hoping the server move will somehow make Google ‘re-assess’ my site from scratch and give it the rankings it deserves!

Fingers crossed because I really need some extra income in the next few months! (click here to find out why)

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Do you find the chaos more exciting or frightening?

I can think of a couple of other times in my life where events that happen around me force me to make decisions that have ultimately turned out for the better. Sometimes being forced into situations makes you man up a bit and do something about the things that haven’t been right for you in the past.

So for me, 2011 is going to be a huge year in terms of the direction my life is going to take with the culmination, or, rather dramatically, my event horizon, being the birth of my first child and the potential loss of my job at around the same time.

With the way things are going (destabilisation of world currencies and governments, trade relationships, soaring commodity prices that will affect every last one of us and the underlying threat of a major market crash) the last thing I’d recomend anyone do this year is have a baby – but the strange (possibly neurotic) thing about all of this is that I’m actually immensely excited by it all.

Energiser Bunny’s Got Nothing On Me

Already the threat of these events has made me reinvigorate my affiliate marketing efforts. I’ve already started to line up potential web design clients, I’ve put more time into promoting some existing clients and am really focussing on getting my head down and doing stuff again.

We all know we need to write good content and build links to get our sites ranking properly and this is exactly what I’ve been doing this week. Here’s how:

• I’ve written two top quality, well researched, highly informative 600 word articles and spun them both into infinite, equally as good possibilities.
• I’ve started my own little related link network which consists of about 20 free blogs. The plan is to cross link these over time.
• I’ve searched high and low for some good quality places to buy links, post links and come to some link exchange agreements with a few webmasters.
• I’ve tried to come up with a system that allows me to automate as much of this process as possible and so far I can auto search for related websites to partner with, I can auto post good quality links to websites using Sick Submitter and I can auto post top quality content to thousands of websites using Article Marketing Robot.

The plan is to do this for a potential client, show them the results, then negotiate a longer term contract with bonuses attached for #1, #2, #3 rankings etc.

At the same time, I am pushing forward with my plan to populate ALL of my existing domains and turn them all into sites that are set up for affiliate income. The next one on the list, as you all know, is the LEDTVOFFERS domain.

Finally Listened to Some Advice

I’ve also finally decided to really listen to the advice of so many of you here about my dedicated server. I currently have a dedicated server that costs me £150 a month. I have now opened a new hosting account with a UK-based hosting provider, TSOHost, for just £27 a month (for up to 100 sites). I am in the process now of migrating all the sites over and once complete, this will be a massive saving of £120 a month.

Why did it take me so long to start thinking about working smarter, not harder? I honestly don’t know other than that I always thought it’d be too much hassle, but, like they have in the past, events around me have forced me to take action.

Thank goodness for chaos and the need to survive…

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LED Tv Offers. I registered this domain a while back now and have had a free ECU sitting on it for over a year. It was getting about 3 visitors a day but not doing much else – especially not selling! This should be a quick fix, I’m updating the site to WordPress now and will use a theme that I’ve had sitting about for a while to wrap it all up nicely.

The plan is a simple one:

1. Add one new product per day as wordpress posts but customise the page template to look more ecommerce-like; eg. picture on the left, lightbox popup enlarge picture, product specs to the right with price and a ‘Shop Now’ or more details call to action button beneath. Below that, a couple of paragraphs of unique content followed by the wordpress comments system customised into a ‘review’ system.
2. Write one new article per week and auto submit to as many sites as poss for backlinks.
3. Setup a number of related social media pages with a mixed bag of links to all kinds of sites offering similar product but make sure mine is one of them.
4. Pay an oDesker pennies to do some auto creating of forum, social media and blog low quality links to the social media pages and articles.
5. Send RSS files out of all links to aggregators.
6. Make sure there’s no hidden content or dodgy stuff on the actual site and keep all content 100% unique.
7. Make sure there are useful reviews on the site that are independant to the merchants’ comments.

I’m going to copy this formula for any of my other domains that I have sitting about that are over 1 year old and once I’ve done all of those (about 5 I reckon), I’ll start refocusing my efforts in one particular sector.

My goal is to get these 5 domains up and running by end of February.

Software I’ll be using to achieve all of this:

• Article Marketing Robot
• Sick Submitter
• The Best Spinner

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That’s right folks, my wife is 14 weeks pregnant and I’m going to be a dad! That leaves me with a very short 26 week window to turn everything I’ve learned these past 14 months into an actual source of income that will allow me to get out of the rat race once and for all. To do that I need to turn £300 a month into £3000 a month – in just 7 months.

Ideas on a postcard please! Make sure you send first class though because I need to start TONIGHT!

Out of interest, has anyone actually managed to generate such profit in 26 weeks with similar resources?

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Then something strange happened….It was only really after sitting down and going through my figures for the year that I realised I’d made about £4,000 from AM last year.

I know this is small change to proper affiliates and certainly not enough for me to give up the day job and tell my wife she can quit work but when I sat and looked at it in January, I did wonder if I could do the same again this year…would that be £8,000 from AM by the end of 2011?

Would it be more? Now that I have a few ideas of where I went wrong…I asked myself all of these questions and then sales started coming in for January and I’m up over £400 for January in AM revenue…this peaked my interest enough to start thinking about it again.

I think, like most new affiliates, I’m suffering from that ‘not moving fast enough’ syndrome. I’m not putting enough work into my sites and I feel inadequate in comparison to all the other affiliates out there with fancy technical websites that auto pull feeds into sites and auto this and auto that…

The thing is, I’d be much more motivated to put more effort in if I could just see some return on the time investment – you all know the story of the Bar Stools site…a LOT of work went into that for not much result – although, I have to say it’s made £10.00 so far in February and it’s now started to appear in top 10 pages again (after being banned or whatever for the last few months – is it a good sign? I’ve been there and done that before so going to say ‘no’ on that one!

Anyway, no money = no motivation = give up, jack in

The FATAL NOOB AFFILIATE’S FLAW

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This is not a new thing but this reinforcement provides great opportunity for passionate affiliates. I’d urge all the one-page, one-product affiliates (and even those like myself who generally have lots of products but little content) to read through these posts.

Create useful stuff. Impart useful knowledge onto users – then send them to your merchant. Don’t just set up a pretty landing page and trick them through to merchants.

Thought for the day: What can you do for your user?

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I have totally failed to get my small Bar Stools website to rank although it does make the odd sale here and there (2 today in fact). There’s no great traffic from a constant source and it currently attracts 1 or 2 visitors each day from 3 or 4 different search engines (mostly).

It’s a total fail.

As a result of the bad earnings in November and December, I have not paid any attention to any of my affiliate sites but as I sit here thinking about how to best build a portfolio of income generating assets, I constantly come back to the idea of affiliate marketing and websites.

It is one of the easiest ways to employ capital 24 hours a day. I’ve always targeted sites based in the UK. I use hostgator for my (shit), overpriced hosting and if I really want to make the big bucks, maybe it’s time I drop the UK and start thinking about targeting vulnerable, lonely americans who will be swayed by swazzy looking landing pages and miracle pills that fix the world?

I had no idea that a single pill, once a day, could make me look this!

Anyway, sarcastic comments aside, I think overall, the bar stools site has made it’s money back and anything it brings in now is profit (actually I should have a look)…wow, since January 2010 to January 2011 the site has made a total of £152.68! from 46 sales (split between Amazon and Affiliate Window). I’m actually quite surprised by that. Oh well, no harm in leaving it online now is there?

OK, finally. To the point of this post. Affiliate Marketing is fu**ing hard. But it sounds easy. I have come to a new conclusion though. I think, moving into 2011, I’m just going to outsource the whole thing to the cheapest provider I can find.

Goal for 2011: Turn £100 into £10000.

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