I’ve had a mixed month this month. Some good points and some bad points. The main good points are that I feel like I have invested a lot more time than usual into my affiliate activities. I’ve also managed to convince my wife that this is the way to go and this will be the key to giving her a better lifestyle.
I have great inspirations in the AM field to thank for this, whose stories of hardship, work, ups and downs and (sometimes), luck have helped put my case forward. This spurred me on to really knuckle down, put my foot to the floor and plough on with my long overdue third affiliate site. It’s another site similar to my bar stools UK site, using the same template powered by WordPress and is doing the same sort of thing with the products. I had wanted to start a travel site as my third site but wanted to ‘re-use’ as much of my existing assets as possible and simply changing the logo and colours on the existing WP theme to create a new site seemed like a good way to go. It won’t take much to earn more than the Bar Stools site, that’s for sure!
With that in mind, here’s how July faired for me – I did have one surprising source of revenue in July:
Income
- Affiliate Window: £4.45
- Amazon Associates: £0.00
- Commission Junction: £409.87
- Ebay Partner Network: £49.00
- Google AdSense: £2.82
- Independant Sources of Commission: £214.00
- USFreeAds: £25.00
- Total Income: £705.14
Expenses
- Server: £100
- AdWords: £256.00
- Total Expenses: £356.00
Gross Profit: £349.14
As you can see there was a surprise revenue stream in there from ‘Independant Commission Sources’ – these are sources of commission from retailers directly and not through a network. In this particular case, I had a couple of sales of a very highly paying product. Needless to say, this was not from my bar stools site. In fact, the bar stools site’s only contribution to this month’s revenue figure was a £4.45 commission that is still pending. On the plus side, it was actually a bar stool 
All in all I’m dissapointed with this month’s earnings. I now have 3 sites and although I was not expecting any income from the new third site (and won’t for a couple of months yet), if it wasn’t for my PPC-powered site which I really do not want to mention in public, I’m not sure that my attempts at affiliate marketing are going particularly well.
Having said that, I am making a profit but, of course, this is not taking into consideration my own time – which, if I charged for it, the whole thing would be running at a loss or just barely breaking even.
I am encouraged by my increase in motivation, spurred on primarily by surprise commissions and some encouragement from fellow marketeers musketeers, and I really want to transfer this increased motivation level into cold, hard cash (well, cash on the screen anyway). My full time job is OK but it’s not really the life I want and so I will continue on this course and just keep digging in, getting my head down and taking the advice of other, more successful affiliates to make this work.
I hope you’ve all had good months too and one fellow affiliate, for sure, has had a positive month.
Let me know how it’s going for you and especially so if you’re finding it as hard as I am to break through the few hundred quid plateau.
.
August 1st, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Thanks for the reference! My month did not feel very positive. I did say it took me a LONG time and lots of mistakes before making any kind of money. I am especially happy to read that you have managed to convince your wife its the way forward, that is one feat I just CAN NOT manage, not yet anyway!
If my first three sites did as well as yours I would have been laughing. Dont worry you will definitely get there
August 1st, 2010 at 11:43 pm
My misses tries her best to listen/understand me constantly going on about AM, but I think a lot of it goes straight over her head…but she does understand that it can work, and that it would be a better lifestyle for the both of us WHEN it does.
August 2nd, 2010 at 4:36 am
I spotted something in the new Affiliate Doctors site review ( http://www.affiliatedoctors.com/child-trust-funds/ ) from Lammo that you might be interested in:
“I feel your pain though.. I launched a site two years ago now.. and religously added content every single day for nearly 6 months.. at which point Google was sending me the grand sum of 20 visitors a day.. I was convinced that I’d done something wrong, and even had some SEO guys check out the source code for me.. all was fine. So I kept on adding content and (most importantly IMO) building links. After around 8/9 months, almost as though someone at Google had flicked a switch, I started to see rankings and traffic. After two years, I’m still adding content and building links on a regular basis and have some very tasty positions in the search results, all of which I would put down to not giving up when it seemed Google was ignoring my site!”
August 2nd, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Mansoor – Convincing my wife is much easier than making money out of AM! I just threw in the customary ‘but you won’t ever have to work again, Babe…’ and that kinda did it
Shane – Amen to that, Shane…I’d be happy with a beach hut next to yours (that is of course, a few miles down the beach with nothing between us!)
Hobbsy – Great link. I read the post with interest and do feel confident Google will love me one day. Keeping the mojo going between now and then is the biggest problem. I guess if you just keep adding content and new links, Google can’t really ignore you forever, right?
August 3rd, 2010 at 1:39 am
Keep it up WhiteKnight, not bad going considering you only have 3 niche sites.
I too keep saying to my wife, it will work one day lol. Sometimes it does feel like you might be putting in a lot of hours, but it does take time and effort. I would say its how you manage that time. Try and add value to your sites for every hour of work you put in, whether it be building up loads more links, writing a couple of articles or building your next site.
If you are staying small with niches then try and stay on topic which you already seem to be doing.
I need to take my own advice sometimes too lol.
Oh our July was as good as June, but we lost our biggest earning merchant (closed program) and we had a preferential 10% from them. This earnings has now been replaced with another merchant only paying 5% but our number of sales per month has increased.
Also don’t forget to take into account the dreaded TAX
Cheers
Gary
August 6th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Gary – Great advice about adding value. This is one of the keys to success I reckon. Don’t ever spend time ‘working’ but not actually doing anything. I’ve found myself in this boat many times and I’m determined to cut out the slack now and really move things forward with my affiliate marketing plan. I need to be earning enough to quit the full time job by the end of the year!
I think there’s also a great moral in the story about losing your merchant, only to find a different one that pays less but converts more. This is a very important calculation for affiliates to get their heads around. More conversions or higher commission…tot up your numbers and work it out before committing. But how do you know? Networks normally show avge conversion rate, pay attention.
TAX – ouch. Now that’s a word I reeeaallly hate. I have a ltd company for my affiliate ventures, and all earnings get put through that for tax purposes but again, this is very important info. I’d say hand in hand with this one is a good (cheap) accountant. For anyone interested, I’ve also started using a great online Accounting Program that calculates all my taxes, vat and can even print off my profit and loss at the press of a button. Excellent for seeing a snapshot of exactly where you are in your business. It’s all online too, so no need to worry about your laptop exploding and losing all your accounts!
August 11th, 2010 at 3:39 am
Mate,
Throw out the adwords campaign, that’ll free up some money.
Go and use free traffic sources. Might require more work, but it helps 10 times more than you actually think.
People are actually not clicking as much on adwords advertising now. So, you will see a decline. I would start using free methods before its too late. Plus, free methods help better with SEO and rankings.
Only the other day, i used a competative keyword, and it took my site to #1, within three days.
I use this to find keywords, works everytime:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends