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I am happy to say that this week with school starting, I broke the $20/day barrier...this month I will make the most ever so far at about $800 or so, all profit!
I sell BOOKS from Amazon, among other things. Not a big money maker, and tons of others do the same, so I am not too worried about being secretive about it :)
It also illustrates that one can pick up any product and break into the market and make some extra money. I don't know about you but $800 isn't pocket change for me :) 20" LCD monitor here it comes ;)
One thing I have to say to noobs about what they should do is , JUST DO IT!. Build a site, even if it has one page. It takes a few weeks to a couple months to get found by the search engines, so it's important that you at least get your domain going. Of course the more pages you have upfront, the easier it will be for you to be found.
Once you have the barebones of a site, I would really start getting some content. Write about a hobby of yours if you feel there's enough interest out there. Try and add an article every week or so. Break big articles into multiple pages, etc. Only YOU can decide what to build your site on. Read some of the more exhaustive threads on the topic on this forum.
I would say that the most important thing afterwards would be inbound links. I contacted over 300 sites in the span of a year. Find out what sites link to your competitors, then ask them to link to you. Obviously the better content you have, the better luck you will have with getting webmasters to link to you.So, content again.
Link exchanging boosted up my site to Pr5, and got me in the first page of serps for some major keywords, which in turn has netted me affiliate sales and adsense income. Whereas before I would have to seek out link partners, these days they find me!..it's quite an 'ego trip' when your site gets to be the one others are requesting link exchanges with! I've even had pr6 and pr7 sites sending me requests.
Anyway - I just wanted to share this , and hopefully it will serve as a motivation for those trying to break into the field.
It can be done!...
As far as traffic, right now I'm banking on some of the pages hitting keywords that aren't very targetted by others, but ultimately I want to be able to rely on PR (or whatever passes for 'high relevancy') to increase hits. For that,
I've also enlisted some external resources to help me with my link campaign
i.e hired some cheap help to go link hunting for me. It takes money to make money, I say, so I reckon it will be a good investment in the long run.
link exchanges work great when you're already established.. most people find you from serps so until you get into them not many people would be aproaching you for inbound links..
You are correct that because my sites are new, people are not too keen to link to them, but out of 100 requests you may get 5-10, and it's a start.
The bottom line is wether you can afford it, either through money paid, or through time spent(opportunity cost).
My pr5 site gets almost daily requests for link exchanges though, and oddly enough I ignore most of them because I don't have it automated. However on occasion I've exchanged links cross sites( i.e. one link on mine, in exchange for a link to one of my other sites).
for the month of November I've averaged $50/day.
A couple of interesting things happened:
- one of my sites that last month generated $500 suddenly dropped out out of the serps and so far it has generated $20!... that hurt!..otherwise I'd have broken the $60/day mark...
- my 2nd site has taken an upshoot and made close to $700 with most of it coming from adsense.
- my flagship site(amazon books) makes up the other $600. It's currently being redesigned, but I'm afraid of going through with that for fear of losing my top position in G.
- my new site has started generating some money, so far $100. I'm working heavily(i.e paying someone to do it) on doing some link exchanges with this site so it should go up in the next update.
- I have an adwords campaign, and that has netted me about $50(profit) with $200 spent... almost not worth it, but hey money is money.
So even if one of my major sources went dry, the increase in traffic on the other sites made up for it. The objective is of course to stop this trend so that it keeps going up and up!... with xmas coming up it will be interesting to see if I'll see a big increase in revenue..maybe reach $100/day? I'll be happy if I stay at the same level or if I can make $65-$70/day for december.
... I've been on 'vacation' travelling through the UK, so I haven't worked on any website related stuff.. which is great that I can do that :D and still reap in the rewards..ehhe.
Lovin' it!...(except how cold it is)
that's cool... congrats on your numbers.
btw, did you find that most people are willing to buy cheaper stuff online (ie. books) rather than electronics or computers?
Merry X'mas - ho,ho,ho!
I had calculated that if I were to keep at the current growth rate, I could be making $10k/month in a year's time.
My guess is that a sites income will surely level off, meaning if your experiencing 10% growth per month, there has to be a ending point.
whereease if you are creating new sites continously, that's another story.
am I right?
My guess is that a sites income will surely level off, meaning if your experiencing 10% growth per month, there has to be a ending point.
10% compounded monthly over a few years is still a scary scenario -- if you start with just $50 a day or$1,500pm ;)
Is that growing more sites or if your current sites keep increasing in revenue?
As with most things in life, its never black or white, so it's a little bit of both. I think somewhere in this thread I mentioned that I was creating a new site from an Amazon feed, so this month it started paying off. The other increase in revenue was from more traffic to an existing site.
Unfortunately my early attempts haven't reaped any rewards yet, but I am still within the small learning budget I have set myself.
So keep posting updates rfung, it's a great thread for us humble noobs :)
I'm just waiting for that first conversion....
as I was happily working my way to average $100/day this month, the unthinkable happened - my flagship site dropped in the serps to page 6 and 8 for keywords where I was 5 and 8 on the first page!...
Consequently, I'm pulling about half of what I was before...argh!... I should still be able to pull in more than last month, but this is one of those bumps on the road. Thank goodness that my other site(s) are more general in topic that I'm hoping they'll hold their ground.
So much for a merry Xmas :)
Currently I have two sites but they don't really have a keyword. They have a few thousands of pages which are all related to one subject. So I can't really focus on a few keywords because each page has other ones.
Within a few weeks I'm planning to build a few new sites to help me earn just that little bit more.
When you go the hot product route, you end up changing with the winds. But find something that people look for and buy all the time and you begin to build a steady stream of income with ROI's above 100%.
That's about what I average, 100%-175% ROI. That means that if I spend $100 advertising, I know that I'm going to pull in $200-$275 in a commissions. That treanslates into $100-$175 a day.
With that kind of income, you can do more than buy a 20" LCD, you can buy a Ferrari! :)
GLD
I've also decided to try my hand at doing more adwords at the same time I work on my sites.
After reading this amusing thread from the page 1... i found myself ..shamed.
I hit $20/day over a year ago and I am still there!
:)
I didn't want to quit my day job because I love it (yeah, what do you know?).
Another reason is actually the risk of Affiliate Marketing. The search engine world changes so fast that you may find yourself in the dust one day...without knowing it's coming.
So, yes. Your sites can disappear from SEs and Google can ban affiliates from bidding for direct-merchants traffic, etc, etc.
It is really risky.
Until you know you can live off of it, don't quit your day job.
If you make $1300/day (as someone mentioned on other threads), you may think about quitting. :)
Good luck to you all.
Until you know you can live off of it, don't quit your day job.
Most definitely. I'm living with my folks, and have no debt to speak of, so I can afford the slow growth, and the ups and downs. Anyone with responsabilities should consider taking it slower, which kinda puts it in a bind. The more time you put into it, the faster you can grow.
Until you know you can live off of it, don't quit your day job.
.. no offense but that's exactly the reason why most affiliates don't make good money ;)
Believe in yourself and just do it!
are you making any money now? now that you are working on it full time? I'm also planning to go full time myself sometime soon. Maybe when I reach a level wherein it can cover for all my daily needs/responsibilities.
I've only been doing this for 4 months, am hoping to reach $20/day average this month.
Keep approaching this as a hobby and you'll keep only earning "hobby" change. Make this into a full-time job and you'll start earning "job" wages, or even more.
Definitely agree. Once you have a rent or mortgage payment riding on your success, you'll be surprised at how motivated you are to work on your sites every day, and your earnings will go up as a result. As for being dropped from the SERPs, if you build a lot of good solid content sites and don't try to game the SEs, they'll do fine in the long run.
I never really get the don't-quit-your-day-job mentality. You got a job once, you can get one again if everything tanks. It's really not any more fickle than working for a company that might have to downsize at any given time.
PS Congrats on your success, rfung. Start establishing your credit now if you haven't already, and your first move out of the panrets' house could be into your own =)
and your first move out of the parents' house could be into your own =)
LoL. Thanks! That would be awesome. But I'm already planning on moving out to Europe and travel around, exploring and living here and there for 3 months at a time..or so the plan goes... gotta increase the revenue in the next 3 months.
I think you're my compatriot by the sound of your handle. (tama ba pare ko)
Iam earning money on the net now but not in the affiliate arena. I've been building websites for years but it was only 3 months ago when I got wise to the possibilities of e-marketing (dumb boy me). Since then, I abandoned making websites for other people and started building sites for my own [marketing]-use. Since I stopped taking in new projects, I have no regular income now. But with my 3 sites approaching completion, Iam very confident of the future.
Its a risky move, but I thought, if I approach this cautiously and build one site at a time on a part-time basis, it might take me years to get any decent income. I lost 3 maybe 4 or even 5 months worth of "salary", but at least when I finally get to start, I have plenty of marketing options.
Iam not considering myself an AM now. What I have been doing in the past 3 months is all preparation. Full-time preparation. Study, read, research, experiment, study some more, and build sites, the right kinds in the right niches. I refuse to start unprepared.
My plans are to first get me out of debt (which could take a while) then earn enough to pay for a mortgage, all the while keeping my day job. After that, who knows.
For those that have very few commitments, making the jump to full time AM is a slightly easier one, but for us that need a guarunteed income, a full time job has to stay.
I've only recently got going, and am only on the £20 (very recently got going) a month so far, but I have also been building sites with a view to launch in January (as well as having a full time job) so hopefully that £20 a day is only a couple of months away. This thread has been very useful though, even though it looks like lots of you can make that commitment to full time AM.
Anyway, good luck to us all in 2005 and may your ROI give you a nice warm feeling :)
