Forum Moderators: skibum
Disclaimer: I am not a expert affiliate marketer - some folks here can earn what took me months to learn in a few days only. But I found out what works for me and until my knowledge increases and develops, I'll stick to it - it just takes a bit longer, and the money's still good ;)
A quick recap of my background so far just to reintroduce the thread:
Recently off school, and working full time as a web designer for a year - when an early mid life crisis struck me - is this what life is about? a 9-7 job, go home, go work, repeat ad nauseum? I've found out that most people coming out from school faces those questions about life - I was no different than them.
Except - I had an idea for a website - a textbook swap and price comparison - this was an idea from way back while I was in school - but one that I didn't have the time or the full technical knowhow to implement. Now that I was done with school and facing the prospect of running in the rat race for eternity, it became more of a drive to get something going - I started building it and that's when I ran into Amazon affiliate program and datafeeds.
Within weeks I had a semi functional site running - and started doing some link exchanging. While searching for some help on the topic, I ran into webmasterworld! At first I was interested only in the link development forum, then somehow I migrated here to affiliate sales - while here, I started realizing that there were many people making money selling all sorts of things. I was only interested in how I could do Amazon better, primarily because I knew how to do their datafeeds, but also because textbooks was all I knew about. Mortgage? Credit cards? Hotel reservations? Gambling? I knew nothing about those industries!
Anyway to keep this (relatively) short - a year ago I discovered this forum. 6 months later I had a decent textbook site which was making me about $20/day. At that point I was already up to my ears from the corporate drone lifestyle and just about ready to quit my job - it was a gamble, but one would only need to look at the potential of affiliate marketing to know that if you play your cards right and you have some sort of idea what to do, the skies were the limit. It fit perfectly with the feelings I was going through, avoiding the rat race, doing something for myself, where I wasn't trading time for money, but instead building a sort of 'equity'. I pondered - if I am doing this part time and I can earn $20/day - then what happens if I go all out and do it full time? A fairly easy decision - I quit my job at the end of September.
Should I fail in affiliate marketing - I only have the next 45 years to work for someone else. Heh! In the meantime, the two problems I face is that I'm really bored with staying in the house for so long :) and to save money I moved in the the parents - to change a bit from this routine, I've decided to move out to europe and live somewhere over there while still doing more sites.
This new thread now will try to convey my ongoing quest to move from the $100/day I reached last month (6 months after I went full time) to $300/day - which is just short of $10k/month, a VERY nice round sum to reach, in my opinion :)... The $100/day pretty much lets me live anywhere in the world fairly comfortably (if it's not the french riviera, or beverly hills - you get my drift), but $300/day would let me actually start saving and possibly investing in real estate, and thus diversify one's revenue streams. That's the plan anyway.
...so after this extensive (re) introduction:
Last month my revenue was about $100+/day. Most of it was adsense - and so this month I was hit bad when adsense decided to go wacko and lost 40% of the revenue stream. Luckily, a site redesign increased the click throughs to make up for the shortfall, with the net effect that I'm a little bit over $100/day with adsense and affiliate sales combined. The current revenue for February has been around $135/day. Should it keep steady till the end of the month, that'll be $3750 in my pockets.
One site I put up last month - consumer products for women - I linked it to my PR5/Pr4 sites and got immediately indexed, and a few days later it was being found by surfers. This month adsense has started showing and paying(some pages still show public service ads) - from a paltry 50 cents at the beginning of this month, to $11 bucks today :) not a lot by any stretch of the imagination, but this is how all sites start anyway!... it has also generated some affiliate sales, so all together the new site has pulled in about $100 bucks.... We'll see how it grows(or not) in the following months.
I also have one site redesign to go through - this site is based on an amazon feed and has about 50,000 pages indexed - it gets some traffic, but due to the bad design it doesn't convert nearly as well as I'd like. Another site I have lined up was going to sell products from HSN.com - again, still in the works. I'm sure once I get those two sites up I can boost my daily revenue to closer to mid $100's...
Anyway - let's see how long it take me to get to $300/day. Place your bets, gentlemen! :)
except this one pays money
oy! One day....
You could write a PHP/Javascript page that says "If you were earning X large per month you bank balance would be increasing this fast" then have the numbers ticking over underneath.
Or in your case "What I've earned so far this month".
LOL, I might write that, just for the hell of it.
Cheers,
Brad
I go to the office so I can focus more on the work that I've agreed to complete, and all I do is come here and post, or check my stats, or chat online with some fellow WebmasterWorld'ers :) (btw, AIM: zooks76, feel free to say hi).
I've signed up with the Supporter's forum - and I've started scanning the past messages - there's some gold there that's worth every penny of the subscription (and that's not available here in the public forums) , but it may not be something you can fully digest if you're not at the point where it 'makes sense'.
I think I'll pass the $5000 mark this month.
The spike I've been getting for the past week made me think I could break $8k....
Now THAT...would...have...been...freaking...jaw...dropping...amazing....
I'd buy a round for everyone ;)
but it seems the party's over. Back to reality. I'm right on y'er tail though! :)
What I found was that this strategy was anything other than risk free. One lyrics site I bought for $6000 experienced a collapse in traffic after the Feb Google update. I have only managed to recoup $2800. Another site I bought was a complete scam and was a total write off. I can make the following observations after my buying spree.
1. The threat of a sudden collapse in traffic due to a change in Google's algo is very real. Be it due to duplicate content filters or link penalties. In many cases, the traffic just collapsed for no apparent reason.
2. To counter this, you should not rely on any single site.
3. Selling physical or downloadable products are actually more stable than making money through affiliate or Adsense. The reason is that if traffic from Google collapses. There is always traffic from advertising. Whereas if you were an affiliate, you may not have the suitable margin to pay for advertising.
4. Sites that can generate recurrent traffic on its own without search engines are more stable e.g. forums.
Having said that, if I have a site like movingonup that made $3000 a day for several months, I wouldn't mind if earnings completely collapased afterwards
Derek
Having said that, if I have a site like movingonup that made $3000 a day for several months, I wouldn't mind if earnings completely collapased afterwards
That is insane, of course any logical person would be upset. Why be happy with 3 months of $3k/day when you could have 12 month, 24 months, etc...
It is not that I would be happy if the traffic collapsed (Of course I wouldn't). It is just that I would have made so much money already that it wouldn't matter that much.
I'll take a steady income stream any day over some short term spikes.
I think most lottery winners opt to take a reduced lump sum rather than a monthly payment over 10-15 years.
yeah I use lottery players for my financial advice too
If the winner thinks he can manage the $ better than the discount rate, then it's logical that he should accept the lump sum.
If not, then he ought to take the yearly payments.
I'm still struggling to break $1 a day, so posting in this thread is pure fantasy for me.
I'm still struggling to break $1 a day, so posting in this thread is pure fantasy for me.
Do you have enough traffic but you're just not converting, or not enough traffic yet?
I would like to know more about the "datafeed" thingy - I haven't a clue what it is.
I'm a noob who knows a little html and php. I'm laying out a decent informational site that is based on high dollar keywords. So, there's probably a lot of competition. I'm very knowledgable in the subject matter and was able to write about 20,000 words on the topic, which I figure will convert nicely to a 100-page site.
I've been reading the posts by Tabke and others about putting up high-quality content. I hope to monetize the site based on Adsense at first, then learn about affiliate programs from there.
...and that's really about it. I've never put a site up before and have no idea what you guys are talking about half the time. But I really appreciate all the information you folks are putting up on these boards.
Thanks and I'll keep you posted on my progress. In the meantime, if anyone wants to suggest how I might gen some traffic to my new site, feel free!
just quick question for everyone regarding this... if you did do a research what is a typical high-paying keyword? $1, $2 or is like in the $10 range or higher?
The main keyword that I decided to write about has a high bid on Overture of about $15. Related keywords range from there down to $7. When I started looking at keywords related to other topics, I was surprised to learn that they were all <$1. Yes, I really am that much of a newbie.
Anyway, based on that little bit of research, I consider my keywords to be high dollar. I have no idea how to assess the competition other than running searches on Google and seeing how many millions of SERPs I get, along with Adwords ads.
Based on the boards I've read on this site, I'm hoping in the back of my head to have 10,000 to 15,000 visitors/month after a year or so, with a click-through of 1%. I suppose my cost-per-click will average in the <$1 range, and that I'll occasionally get a few of those high-dollar clicks. I'm doing this in my spare time when I'm not with my family or slaving away at my day job.
Do these expectations sound reasonable, folks, or do I need a reality check?
my ctr is also fairly high, in the low double digits.
Since it's a numbers game, with this method, I'm betting that a certain % of visitors clicks on adsense and a certain % of visitors clicks on my affiliate links, adsense will hopefully pay for a certain percentage of the cost and then the affiliate sales will compensate for the rest, it seems like the possibility of me succeeding is slightly better than failing as long as I keep close watch on the numbers. :) Has anyone used this method and have good success with it? how scalable if you mind telling your us conversions etc, no need for specific industry, products nor numbers, just want to know about the concept.
the truth is that some channels perform at 15%, while some other channels on the same site perform at 2% :)
This is for my main site - my other sites are around 8% or so, with the same distribution as the above.
Similar thing to a new site i put up wednesday last week.
all I had to do was to link them from some higher PR sites.
Now my sites still have 0/blank pr, so if that's what you mean by sandbox, then yeah Im still in it. If it's about getting traffic from G, then no.
now which one is a better proposition? get low key keywords right now, or wait to slug it out over competitive keywords?
