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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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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But now I think I’ve just about had enough of working at the day job. Don’t get me wrong, they’re a good employer and the position pays relatively well and offers excellent flexible hours but…it’s hard work working for someone else when you’ve worked for yourself before. It eats something right out of you.

Today, at about 10.30, I decided I was going to resign. I don’t make enough money from my affiliate marketing efforts to pay the bills but I believe that by leaving the job and freeing up the extra 40 hours a week, I will be able to transfer that time into money.

This will be a huge risk for my wife and I (she’s pretty awesome for backing me in this – albeit with the condition that at the end of each day, I have to give her a work report – I’m not the best at managing my time, you see, so we figured if she kept asking me how I was doing, I’d have to do it ); we still have a mortgage and we want to start a family, but the way I look at it, I could work for the company for another two years and never really get anywhere with my own ideas, my own personal growth and I know that for each day I work for someone else, a little more of my energy gets sapped away.

So here’s the thing; I could be pretty unhappy but secure in the job, or I could be free and unsecure (for a time) by taking this step and when I weigh up all my options, I think I’d rather be happy and unsecure, because at least if I take that path, there is always the promise of freedom at the end and I feel like personally, it’s a journey I want to take, whereas working for someone else is just complying to a society that’s pretty fudged up anyway – shorting the dollar, anyone?

Alas!…here it is, I guess… The day I decided I was leaving work.

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Apparently though….all good things must come to an end and for me, this happened as I felt the landing gear touch the tarmac at Manchester Airport and disembarked. The refreshing drizzle that bathed me as I descended the steps to the ground served as a stark reminder that rat-race living is absolute and utter bollocks and I am completely ready to move on.

After feeling depressed the whole way home and reminiscing with my wife about how greedy and parasitic modern-day society is – I resolved to get stuck into my affiliate marketing business which will be my ticket out of here to a simpler, more fulfilling life away from it all.

As you can imagine, it didn’t take me long after I got home to turn on the laptop and skim through some stats. Talk about being shown the light….I totted up my earnings for May and was overjoyed to see it had been my best month to date. I’ll break down the earnings in a seperate post (because you’ll be amazed – or maybe you won’t – at the amount of traffic I get from people searching for ‘affiliate earnings *insert month here*’) but in a nutshell, whilst I’d been away kite-surfing, kayaking, sandboarding, sunbathing and scuba-diving…my affiliate sites (one in particular) had earned more in a single month than they ever had before…

Now when you get a lightbulb, hallelujah moment like that, it really opens your eyes and gives you a buzz about everything you’re doing and where you want to take this whole affiliate marketing thing and that’s exactly what happened to me. As a result, I’m now putting together a strategic business plan to support the growth of the business and may well use that to raise outside investment to support a couple of years of operation. With a small team of employees – maybe even outsource partners – working full time for 2 years on affiliate websites, I’m confident we could build a successful small business out of this and will be putting most of my spare time into that over the next few months.

I’m pretty sure I won’t need to remind any of you why I want to do this except that I really, really want to get out of this 9-5 bollocks and live a more fulfilling lifestyle with my new family…

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The current temperature is 28 degrees and the weather is fine, clear and sunny! Here’s to my new affiliate life…

If only. I’m actually getting married and this is the destination of our honeymoon. We’re getting married on Thursday and then jetting off to sunnier times on Monday morning. Today was my last day at the day job for 3 weeks.

But is this really just a pipe dream? The thought that it is not is about 80% of the reason why I keep grinding away at the affiliate duties. You might like the sound of my daily schedule for the holiday:

1. Get up bright and early each day and gym it for an hour and half
2. Go for a 30 min cool down in the pool (or sea, whichever I feel like at the time)
3. Have some breakfast
4. Go outside and sunbathe in the pool bar (with all inclusive drinks) until about 5pm
5. Get changed and have some dinner
6. Turn in for the evening on the old WiFi and do some AM for 4 hours

Now is it just me or does that sound like the perfect lifestyle? This next few weeks will be my first real chance to experience this kind of living for real and I just can’t see how this kind of experience will not motivate me more than anything else to make this affiliate marketing stuff work!

If you’ve been following the bar stools series, you’ll know I’ve currently hit a brick wall with rankings and much of the advice I’ve received is to continue to build links and add new content but the other major piece of advice that simply can’t be ignored is to start the next site.

I guess the philosophy here is that there’s no way around the age thing in google so just keep the site up to date and build more links whilst making the best use of the ‘idle’ time to launch the next site. In my case, this new site will be a drastic shift from the retail/bar stools site and will move into a highly competitive vertical – travel.

My thinking here is that if it’s tough and competitive, there’s money in it and I’m tired of fighting for the small commissions when it seems to me like a better use of the same time would be to put that energy into products/offerings that pay higher commissions…

I’m not looking for a golden goose but I’m looking for a £500 a month site and if it means I have to punch a little higher than my weight then so be it! When I’m leading my 4 hour day affiliate lifestyle on a desert island I’m sure I’ll feel like it was all worth it.

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Well, I say “I find” like I know what I’m talking about but the actual fact is that I’ve only had one bumper bank holiday (where sales cleared £100 for the day) since I started affiliate marketing (around about June last year), so really what I’m hoping for here could well be a hopeless pipe dream.

But that’s the buzz of aff marketing…you just never know and I believe if I’ve done it before, I’m pretty sure I could do it again.

Anyway, here’s to hoping the sun does come out this weekend and all my fellow affiliates out there enjoy some fun in the sun whilst our sites keep the money coming in!!

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Unfortunately…it was not from my bar stools site – again – so my struggle with this site continues. I did however, log into my analytics account to see that searches for bar stools on Yahoo are starting to increase. This is a great sign for the health of the SEO campaign, and I still firmly believe that in a couple of months this site will be out of Google’s sandbox and delivering some good quality long tail visitors to the site. It’s my strong belief in this fact that will make me continue to add content to this site for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, I’ve had a few fellow affiliates contact me and suggest I start working on a related niche site to fill in the ‘limbo’ period. I think this is a great suggestion and one which I would like to follow up on, however I do worry that by splitting my focus onto more sites will dilute my ability to keep things fresh and moving forward with the bar stools site…this is, afterall, still only a part-time thing for me.

I don’t want to outsource anything just yet because I want to get some level of consistency into my earnings (and therefore some confidence in the site itself) before I feel comfortable with the idea of ‘formulaic’ replication by freelancers – but this is definitely in my roadmap for develpoment – just not right at this moment.

Wow, now that I read over the last two paragraphs it sounds like a lot of excuses…it’s not, I promise! I won’t be sitting about idly in the meantime, that’s for sure. Until my bar stools site ranks for ‘bar stools uk’, I will not stop my focus on this site and that means more of the same old same old.

Writing content and adding links.

The site has been live now since February 1st. That’s 10 weeks and £51.70 in commission from two sales (one ‘accidental’). So far I have over 50 pages of content (powered by wordpress) and 17 incoming links from related sites giving me a PageRank of 1…

Clearly there are not enough links registering yet so my focus for the remainder of this month is to build more links.

On the other hand, by starting to build my next site I do add a greater depth of potential to my longer term strategy…it would be an interesting discussion topic to raise – whether to continue to remain focussed on 1 site until it starts to rank or to build another site in the meantime…
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OK, in February I started a new site over at this url. I have posted fairly regularly about how this site was set up and how it’s doing in my affiliate marketing series here. I also turned on an old PPC campaign that I hadn’t had enough money to run since September last year. I made a few minor tweaks on two other sites such as adding in AdSense and Amazon Associates. My target was to double January’s earnings and here’s how I fared:

Income:
ebay Partner Network: £139.67
Commission Junction: £100.00
AffiliateWindow: £49.07
Amazon Associates: £0.58
USFreeAds: £25.00
Google AdSense: £5.46

Total income: £319.78

Expenditure:
Google AdWords: £108.00
Hosting: £20

Total Expenditure: £128.00

Gross Profit: £191.78

As you can see there’s a huge increase in PPC spending on one of my sites which actually ran at an £8.00 loss for the month. However, the product is entering high season come the spring so I’m confident that getting cookies onto user’s computers will come to fruition next month. I also think it will be useful moving forward to be able to trend the entire campaign over a full year and thus identify troughs and peaks in earnings for this particular site.

My new site didn’t perform well at all. I have made a commitment to this site however and still have high hopes for it. It is still very early days yet so I’m not prepared to give up just yet. I am concentrating on two key sites, the Bar Stools UK site being one of them, and will continue to add content and build links and try and generate organic traffic. I have been through the figures and my simple calculations do not justify any PPC spend on this site so all the resource time should be put into SEO.

The organic traffic trend for the month is attached below:

As you can see the trend is upward, albeit very slow but I’d expect this. Traffic is all organic and is being driven purely by organic rankings. See below for a list of the top 50 keywords for the month:
bar stools uk
z bar stool
matilda bar stool
z bar stools
john lewis bar stools
tivoli bar stools
matilda bar chair brown
bombo bar stool
matilda bar chair
matilda stool
retro bar stools
assembly instructions for bombo bar stool
jack bar stool
mathilda bar stools
mathilda gas lift stool
ruby red bar stools
sam bar stools
(breakfast,bar) (stool,chair,seat) folding
4 square coloured plastic bar stool
71cm bar stool faux leather
85cm high bar stool
abs kitchen stools
abs modern silver barstool
aero flower stool
bar stool manufacturers
bar stool star feet
bar stool uk buy with back blue
bar stools bombo leather
bar stools bonded seat
bar stools in chrome and faux leather uk
bar stools over 85 cm
bar stools square base
bar sttol matilda
barstoolsuk
bistro bar stool
bistro bar stools
black bar stool sale
black bar stools with sqaure base
black folding bar stools
black wood retro style folding bar stool
blue with back stool uk buy
bombo bar stool copy
bombo bar stools uk
bombo bar stools white
bombo barstool in white
bombo barstool leather brown
bombo black “”bar table”"
bombo stools reviews
brushed steel bar stools
buying stools

I am confident that the site will improve in it’s performance as I tweak the offers. I am of the opinion currently that the prices charged by my merchants for some of the stools are a little high and do not provide real value to my users. It will be my goal for March to source better deals on the products to make them more competitive.

Conclusion

My goal was to increase my earnigns by 100% but I only managed a 62% increase. Whilst this is a little upsetting and maybe even disheartening, I’d be happy with a month on month growth rate of 62% so I mustn’t let this get me down. I shall continue to attempt to double my earnings for March and am therefore looking to increase affiliate revenue to £640 for March without increasing PPC costs. I have high hopes for my PPC campaign moving into March and hopefully the Bar Stools site can chip in with a higher revenue figure too.

Actions for February:

1. Build Links to my PPC Site
2. Build Links to my Bar Stools site
3. Source better merchants for bar stools whose prices are more competitive
4. Continue to add content to both sites
5. Increase revenue to £640

What do you think? Am I shooting too high? What do you feel about my conversion rate given my apparent highly targeted search referrers…am I under performing?

How To Build a Money-Making Affiliate Website from Scratch

1. Early Stage Research
   This chapter looks at all the things I did to research my idea. It includes keyword research, product research, whether or not it would interest me, potential commission (merchant) research and domain research.
2. Site Design
   This chapter will show you how I easily created my affiliate site so that it was simple to update and free to setup.
3. Building a useful Site
   In this chapter I begin to look at how to add value to a site so that it is of genuine benefit to your users.

eBay Partner Network: £132
USFreeAds: £25
AffiliateWindow: £40
Total Income: £197

PPC Spend: £27
Hosting: £20
Total Expenses: £47

Gross Profit: £150

Not so good, huh? nope. Well, there is a reason and I mentioned that in a post about being more cautious with your affiliate earnings over here. I haven’t really recovered since then but I’ve got my game face on now and am back in the swing. I’ve turned on my PPC campaigns again and launched one new site so far. I would say that February’s earnings should more than double.

So the challenge for February then:

Double January’s earnings.