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! :)
Share your growth with other newbies also here [webmasterworld.com...]
my traffic after the spike of last time reads like a really bad stock pick - from 25k impressions to 13k the next day, to 10,9,8,7,6,5k, and back to around 4, so I'm still around $200/day or so - no big surprises for me so far.
Just got back from a weekend at the beach, in Cadiz. A word to the wise though, sleeping on the beach overnight sounds a lot more fun than it really is.
I have a forum with more than 30,000 members with no SEO that saw its traffic halved in this update. The only thing I can think of is that Google is determined to go after scraper sites and sites built by automatic content generators. In doing so, a lot of large websites are being hit indiscriminately.
thanks for the heads up on the Google update, I'm a bit out of it :)
So, with that in mind I took the time to run a few reports from my logs to figure out where my current traffic is coming from, and I suppose it's a good thing, Google no longer drives most of my traffic these days, at the proportion of 40 for Yahoo, 30 for G, and the remainder coming from everyone else.
I should be able to weather the new google update reasonably well.
rfung,
same here with an even bigger difference: Y to G is like 4:1 now for one of my main sites. Regarding Bourbon the overall effect on traffic is negligable. I do hope this trend continues and further reduces my (and everyone else's) dependence on the big G.
Greetings from London.
This ride has been a fun one, mostly going up, but with all ups it has its downs too. It's my sad duty to inform (and no one is sadder than myself) in the interest of full disclosure that with the recent google update, which I thought I could weather, my site(s) took a deep plunge where my traffic got cut (appropriately as I laid out Google traffic to be 30-ish% of my referrals) by 30-ish%, and together with strange combination of also lower CTR(from my average of 10% to 6%) and CPM(from average of $35 to $20), my adsense revenue got slashed between 40% to as high as 70% in some days. Affiliate sales seem to have suffered a bit as a result of lower traffic.
Consequently I'm barely making $100/day, with one day going as low as $50 (and what a painful day that is), from what was looking like a $200/day average this month. My dad has been kind enough to forfeit 'his' website's revenue to me for the time being.
I can still live in Spain and it won´t stop me from drinking all the beer i can(probably even more so now :)) and staying up late into the night. Historically, back in December my site took a nosedive as well, which prompted me to redesign it, leading to high growth afterwards, so I'm not worried in the least.
As I pointed out way back in the beginning, I have no debt or responsabilities to speak of, and I have been socking away money for the tax man and into the savings account, so this is just a slight 'setback'. The only thing bummy about this whole thing is that it takes away my freedom to 'work when I want' (and I haven't really worked for a good few months now) and forces me to get my arse back on track. Which, is the one good thing as well.
Now, more than ever, I want to get cracking way past that $300/day mark this thread started off at. Show those guys at Google they can't mess with a man and his money.
it won´t stop me from drinking all the beer i can(probably even more so now :))
Nothing like a good reason for having a beer... I had a beer-related site once and it had reached #1 on google for its topic. It stayed at #1 for months, and then one day it disappeared from google for that important keyword. I understand your loss, rfung. Good luck and cheers!
I understand its a lifestyle choice but the business we are in is very volatile and no one knew what will happen after 4-5 years ,so its better to make all the money one can now which allow to live whereever and do whatever we want for the rest of the life! .And please dont ever assume you are too young to make that kinda money .From what i know most succesfull people (>3k/day) in this game are only in their late 20's ,FYI i also just crossed 28!...
I know this is none of my business but its a very very friendly suggestion and please dont take it arrogant or judgemental :)
Wish you Good Luck!
I'm about 100 hours of work into my first website, and after a few hundred dollars and another 100 hours or so of work, I should finally be getting my site up sometime in June. I've gone from wanting to make a website to help pay the bills to setting a goal of equaling or beating my salary income in 2-4 years.
gopi, I'm young myself (23) and I have to say I totally agree with your post. I'm putting in tons of work now (55 hrs a week, plus 10-20 on the site), but I know its definately going to pay off in 5 years or so. I think your advice is great for anyone just starting their careers, or their own business.
rfung, are you getting it now? How Google isn't any sort of base to build your business on.
Consequently I'm barely making $100/day, with one day going as low as $50 (and what a painful day that is), from what was looking like a $200/day average this month.
You too, eh? Well, misery loves company and all that. I've stopped checking my Adsense stats, because it's too painful to look, lol.
Now, more than ever, I want to get cracking way past that $300/day mark this thread started off at. Show those guys at Google they can't mess with a man and his money.
Here, here. Let the plotting and planning for more traffic begin ;)
The main one is that i wouldn't consider Adsense alone as a long-term solution. I think this is too volatile a product to rely on long term. A number of factors could result in you having $0 a day at some.
I think this applies to most types of affiliate marketing, but its probably better to spread your egss over several baskets. More than one site, more than one category of product and more than one target market. The slightest of changes in legislation or at a company who you affiliate with could mean a major impact on your business.
But hey, while working from home does get a bit boring, take it while you can, thats my philosophy so the best of luck to you :)
Simmo!
anyway, as gopi suggested, this may be a good time to re-evaluate if I should settle down here (or somewhere) for a longer period of time to focus more on building sites. Spain is as good as any place in the US to lock yourself in a room and hammer away at the keyboard!
For the time being, I'll take on the flak and be the posterboy for 'see what happens when...' but let me reiterate, it's not like I'm making zilch revenue - I'm down to a bit less than $100/day, that's not so good, but definitely not out, and I'm not the least worried about my comeback :)
No story would be a good read without some drama...
Anyways, in this industry if you depend on free traffic and/or paid traffic there is always a chance of being wiped out for whatever reason...algo change or editiorial rule change etc... but if you have an authority site that people have in their minds or you have your own email lists that's where your business will last longer...
Rfung, go PPC. It's a much more sustainable business model.
Also was wondering if you agree with this...I've had a hypothesis that Yahoo searchers are more likely buyers than Google searchers. Think that's true?
Good luck on recovering from this past update!
As for Yahoo searchers vs. Google searchers, I have detected very little difference. On one of my sites, I've monitored performance very closely for over two years, and there has been almost no difference in conversion ratios between the two. AdWords was almost the same, as well. Overture only converted about half as well. MSN converted about 10% better. Traffic from well-focused web sites, forums, and blogs converted about twice as well.
The only way to weather any Google storm is to create a site that is not dependent on Google. Seems basic, but unfortunately true.
I use a combination of online SEO, PPC, and links (probably the definition of SEM now). In relation to my last post I create as many sites as possible that have unique content, great design and features to get people to return. I submit press releases to online sources as well as offline local and specialised press. I enlist help where necessary now - for example students can write great content at a great price!
I use PPC to help me find niche converting keywords, it can be a loss leader at times but gives you an idea of the best converting phrases by provider by price. I can now find thousands of niche keywords to further help SEO across Google, Yahoo and MSN (sometimes Ask Jeeves if it is retail). I find MSN and Ask converts far better for shopping queries - as long as the content is written with the buying process in mind.
It is a case of diversifying the business plan (sites, content - i.e. product, and then sales and marketing).
In the case of the recent Google update I have done quite well, some down, more up - 2 steps back, 3 forward.
Its all a case of risk, and once you have gone through what rfung has done you are forced to change and learn - or see your income disappear.
There is a time to play in this industry - $200 a day is not it (just one day a week maybe!)
A lot can happen in a few days when you haven't sufficiently covered the risk...
I remember my first post here on WebmasterWorld exactly two months ago when I finally made my first sale. I am now doing ~$100 / week in AM commission and $50 or so in adsense. As little as it is, it's amazing to see things come together. For all you newbies, this can and WILL HAPPEN with patience, perseverance and hard work. I only have one site thats really been indexed and is active, However the sky seems to be the limit.
Anyways, I haven't been on the board for awhile so I thought Id check in.....
For what is worth, yes I understand $200/day is hardly enough to rest your laurels on, but it's a silly proposition _for me_ to quit a job where I was working 50+ hours a week to dedicate myself to a similar lifestyle without taking the time to enjoy the rewards it brings.
I know there are individuals here bustin their asses working (and enjoying) 80hr weeks in order to secure their online earnings, but that just ain't me. I will work maybe 20-30 hours a week.
Anyway, as the month rears its ugly head, it's been around $6500 this month. Next month should be around $2k and $3k... sighs.
Good point rfung, working continuously online for even more money is for some people, and not for some people.
Personally I don't see the point of spending all of your time in front of a screen when you can use the internet/lifestyle to your advantage.
C.K.
I get up at 11 AM and actually work maybe 3-5 hrs in the day and maybe another hour or so after dinner ...To be honest i dont do any actual grunt work , most of my time is spent in research (that includes webmasterworld) which i enjoy a lot.
Rfung ,as i said before this is a very volatile business (i have seen my earnings fluctuate from 5 digits/day to 3 digits/day ), So IMHO your biggest concern should be to protect the lifestyle you enjoy now ,so that you can continue it for the rest of your life .You dont want to go again to a 9-5 job making like 60-70k , are you? ...
Anyway as i as said this is a very friendly suggestion and please dont take it wrong ...Ok , i rest my case and back to my cave :)
I don't consider any one source of traffic as my base. I'll use my dog as an example. The other day after coming back inside there was something wrong with one of his legs. It was curled up and he was now basically a 3 legged dog. But he still got around just fine. Kind of like my business model. If i lose a leg, things will go on. 1 leg might be free SE traffic, another PPC, another offline advertising, another bookmark/return traffic etc. As time goes on you should be getting more legs which contribute to an overall stronger base. Right now all the legs are fine and the dog is fine too :)
Another great point is diversify! My google earnings dropped recently like many others affected by the last update, but my other programs (affiliate) have been growing every month, and they are least dependent on Google. So it all balanced out. Next month, who knows, my Google earnings may shoot back up and the affiliate stuff will go down, or both up. The point is, the more you diversify, the more stable your income becomes. And the closer you are to achieving real financial stability.
One final note, many say you should have a few months cash saved up before taking the plunge. An important point to remember, many (most) affiliate/ad programs pay out on a net 30 to net 45 (some even longer) basis. This fact alone provides you with an nice cushion to weather tough times. If everything were to vanish today (worst case scenario), you still get checks from most these programs for usually close to 4-6 weeks. Enough time to re-insert yourself back into society (again, worst case scenario... =)
Good luck everyone!
