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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! :)
If you use legitimate SEO methods, you shouldn't have to worry about completely being wiped out and all you'll have to do is recognize the SERP fluctuations and adjust acordingly.
You can "diversify" within organics too, which means using different tactics to promote sites, e.g.
Sticking within ethical, white-hat ways, you can vary your tactics for organic ranking:
The big 3 SEs are not going to disappear in a hurry, but algos will change. By not using the same "perfected" SEO formula on all your sites, you assure yourself that you have enough variation so that you are not wiped out completely with one "bad" algo change.
In practice, at the same time there's value in diversification, there's more value in specialization.
A quote from Killroy from a while ago that stayed with me:
Specialise to rise, then diversify...
If you're looking for fast growth, then duplicate what you already know works; if you've achieved a satisfactory level of income and are looking to stabilise, then it's time to diversify.
When people talk about diversification, they're often talking about a single aspect. You need diversification in your niches, diversification in your traffic sources, diversification in your merchants, diversification in your revenues, diversification in your markets, etc.MovingOnUp, could you explain what you mean by the last 2? (revenues and markets).
By revenues, I basically mean that you ultimately want revenue coming from a variety of sources.
Markets are different in that they're considerably more general. For instance, if you have a niche of PDAs, that's in the electronics market and to diversify you might want to choose your next niche as action figures in the toy market or Tom Clancy books in the book market. Don't get stuck in a mold and make all your sites the same.
On the other hand, I agree with the concept of combining diversification and specialization. I also agree with building on things that work.
Often, your work in one niche will lead you to tangent ideas in other niches.
Sometimes, diversification can be worse
Sometimes, specialization can kill you
No one has the right answer. Its all a judgement call :)
This is incorrect thinking. Build a good SEO template and you won't have to worry about algo changes. Yes, you should have different DESIGN templates, but not different SEO templates.
The truth is we would all love to quit our jobs and not have to work to make "the man" rich, whoever he may be. I am 28 years old, older than many of you i suspect, which is one of lifes funny tricks, learning from the youngsters, and the elders alike. Anway, my point is that i too wish to quit working a day job and do this full time, and in sticking with the theme, will do so once i reach $100 a day in profits. Next, is obviously the $300 a day plateau and so on. I JUST started within a week applying all of the things i have been reading, and have a lot to learn still, but would love some feedback. I have made a few sites, which you will find at the bottom of this post, that for better or worse, are just a beginning. See, i have no revenue, so i used ALL free things, in the hopes that if i had to teach someone else to do what i did(which i invariably will), i could teach them to do it FREE. Does anyone have any input? I would love some feedback, as i have much to learn, but there isn't much in my way, except every family member i have telling me to "get a real job" you won't make any money THAT way, yada yada"
Thanks in advance
Jeremy
[edited by: jcoronella at 9:11 pm (utc) on April 27, 2005]
...why do I imagine the "Enter the Dragon" soundtrack when I read that?
If somehow I helped 'you'(the generic you) achieve your goals, all I'd like is 10% cut of the profits :)
Seriously - if you become successful, just contribute back to this forum and help others. It's all about karma and there's plenty enough for everyone to be succesful with very little risk of overlapping fields, and even if there is, I doubt there's any one person that can monopolize it to begin with. Of course, you still need to protect your niche by not blatantly revealing it here. :)
(btw, not only Spanish girls are ultra hot, they're all over the place - only seeing to believe it... )
Also work on getting those blogs into rss feed sites. You will find your traffic going through the roof after several weeks.
btw, not only Spanish girls are ultra hot, they're all over the place - only seeing to believe it...
Damn you Rfung! Damn You I say!
(btw, not only Spanish girls are ultra hot, they're all over the place - only seeing to believe it... )
Remember rfung, "Shy people go hungry." ;o)
BTW, I hit my best day ever with adsense yesterday. Suprisingly, 50% was from the site that I just rebuilt (and forgot to redirect the traffic). Impressions on that site are still really low, but they are building. Looks like the redesign was a good idea.
my big site's only 800 pages in the index, without description (down from 30k+) but the money's still coming in. I don't have access from my laptop where I can download the log files to see where my traffic is coming from, so I cant analyze it.
Anyone know if when google drops you out of the index like it has done me (not completely) does it affect right away whether you're found as well? or there's some lag time between what you see when you type in 'allinurl' and what is found on the serps?
Averaging about $200/day from both AS/AM....
la vida still esta buena...
I am not talking about leaving comments I am talking about creating an actual blog either a free on or onsite as free blog script software is availible. Then if it will work for your product create the blog on that.
I think I have revealed enough. Mr rfung says protect your nitch.
Every scenario is different. Rather than worrying about how your current site will fare long-term, concentrate your efforts on new sites to protect yourself. And, enjoy Spain!
Jeremy
I can't say that I'm excited about Google's "CPM auction" announcement but something near. In any case I have a feeling that it's going to change much of what's been discussed through this thread.
(btw, not only Spanish girls are ultra hot, they're all over the place - only seeing to believe it... )
Yes, the whore houses in Spain are legendary.
I am purchasing 5-10 sites today and am spending the entire weekend getting them up and in working order. Hopefully by Sunday Night I will have it all completed. I hope I have chosen at least slightly decent subjects.
This is the wrong place to ask this question but since we are covering everything...Whats the deal with .Info's? Are they ANY good on SE's,or are they like non-exsistent? It seems 90% of the names I chose have the .info's available..even though they are fairly good names. Also, would you say that there is a maximum number of chartacters a domain name should have? If so what would it be? I am trying to not get past the 15-20 Range, some in the 30 Range are tempting me though.
Appreciate any words of wisdom.
Whats the deal with .Info's? Are they ANY good on SE's,or are they like non-exsistent?
One of the reasons why you might see a lot of new .info's these days is because registrars were giving them away for free since Sept 2004 till Dec 2004 to boost the popularity of the .info domains. Many people (including me) grabbed the chance to register a few .info names.
I do plan on hitting Eastern Europe after a month or two here in Seville. Italia wasn't quite on my plans, but I'll keep it in mind though :)...
However, having been in Seville and elsewhere thoughout the Iberian peninsula; I recommend moving on. There's nothing to see other than parched land and some vineyards and old churches. You need to hit the cities due east.
I offered Rome; but since that's not on your agenda, hit the clubs in Berlin and Vienna, Prague and Budhapest. And here's a trick - go to the cool bar in town(no prob getting in since your American) and offer to buy a drink for the hottest girl you see. Flash your American passport to the bartender and try paying with a hundred dollar(US) bill. If that doesn't work, use an AMEX. These girls notice everything and will be all over you like bees on pollen. But if you've been through Madrid you probably already know that.
[edited by: wsp9 at 11:34 am (utc) on April 29, 2005]
Just a short comment, as I see it come up so often. Aff marketing is different from buying domains, and the people I see going wrong usually end up with too many domains and no further action.
The domain name is slightly relevant to SEO, but marginally so. None of the top ranking sites I run have the keywords in the domain, yet they all meet one vital criteria - profitability!
Get ONE domain and get working on making some money from it TODAY. Keeping your feet on the edge of the pool can be achieved in many ways, and procrastinating about domain names is just one of them.
the whore houses in Spain are legendary.
There's nothing to see other than parched land and some vineyards and old churches
For someone with your cultural level probably the most interesting thing you can see here is the McDonald's
