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! :)
Great idea. I plan on getting my MBA as well, but web, you say that you can't use your MBA if you are an entrepreneur? NOT TRUE. Just think, once you start your own business you are definitely going to be using the management style you were taught at your respective school. hdpt00, where are you looking? I am definitely thinking IVY.
If you are successful, you are successful - period. If you are looking for investors in your business, or want to impress people with the MBA you really need to go to a top 15 or perhaps 20 school. Otherwise the MBA may be very helpful to you, but may not have much of a bearing on others (which is why a lot of people get them).
If your plan is to do AM for the long run and as your primary means of surviving, you don't need an MBA. If you plan on opening a 'real' business, then it may make more sense, if you dont have any business knowledge and you come from a totally different background.
Here is an interesting article on the economist regarding MBA's.
[economist.com...]
rfung:
So made any recent progress in your climb to $300 a day, are you on a temporary downturn at this time? You had indicated as much in your previous articles.
March I made about $7k, that's about $233/day
April so far is about $180/day.
And I was wondering if I could talk to you sometime about database-driven sites. One of my goals is to have a php/mysql site but I don't know where to begin. I'm willing to put in the effort to learn.. I thought maybe you could help put me on the right track.
cheers :-)
using a feed to create a site then becomes just an extension of your skill set. Once you know how to walk, running is just the same, but faster :)
Webmasterworld has forums related to php development. You may want to hang out there to get the basics (and the not so basics) to get you started. There are no shortcuts around that.(unless you hire someone to do it for you)
But, if you don't know how to create a page in html, then the road has a few more curves before you get somewhere...
Best of luck!
On a semi-related note, my 60 year old mom realized how much I was making, and she's started researching and writing articles for her own site now. I think she's got a good topic, and I'm hoping it can be a source of retirement income for her. Unlike one of my friends (who lost patience because she didn't see instant success), I think Mom has the tenacity to stick with it. ;)
Anyone else have friends or relatives who have jumped on board after they've seen your success?
I just went back to check my stats - my top day was $358.12, and I had another at $312.09 :) which was March 12 and 13 (sat and sun). Then from there it just came tumbling down...it'll be a while before i hit those numbers again, I predict.
does this mean that you're hovering around the mid $200's , since your high day is so recent?
I setup an additional adsense account (to manage for click fraud risk) under my dad's name, and I set up a site with that tracking code - it was supposed to be mine, but my dad kinda started calling it 'his site' so what da heck, its his - this was back in Feb. First week of march it got picked up by the SE's and started generating $2-$3 a day in adsense - total for March was $60 + $20 in affiliate sales. So far, April 1 - $12. April 2 - $20. Not bad. He's entitled to get a check now.
My dad didn't do anything of course - but now he's hooked on checking the adsense stats, 3-4 times a day, and bugging me to set up sites for him. I'm supposed to teach him a few things so he can create and manage his own pages, but..that's a really difficult task :)
Anyone else have friends or relatives who have jumped on board after they've seen your success?
I've found that after an initial burst of enthusiasm, most of my friends lose interest after a week or so. I've had a number of friends start on sites but no one has ever actually followed through long enough to even put up a web site let alone see any checks.
does this mean that you're hovering around the mid $200's , since your high day is so recent?
My average is around 230ish. I have quite a bit of fluctuation depending on day of the week (Mondays are usually the best, whereas Fridays and Saturdays tend to be weaker), but days where I don't break 200 are getting rare. I'm hoping the next few months get me to that $300 mark on a regular basis, as I have a handful of sites that should be coming out of Google's sandbox soon.
My dad didn't do anything of course - but now he's hooked on checking the adsense stats, 3-4 times a day, and bugging me to set up sites for him.
Yes but.
Now you know you have reliable help while travelling!
Otherwise, I wouldn't hear the end of it...
My wife gets so into checking the adsense stats too. She checks it several times a day, she'll even call me when I'm at work so we can "check it together".
We are making around 5 bucks a day, which is really exciting to us. You'd think we were making 100's the way we act sometimes. I'm always joking about quiting my job and everything so we can live off adsense.
Someday maybe, someday...
Matt
Read a lot of posts in WebmasterWorld about new Google patent which favors Amazon links. Google is Amazon business partner since 2993, so this favoritism by Googlebot should not astound us...
You would laugh at the small amount of money I make. Most days lately, ZERO. I did sort of OK for Christmas, but with only Yahoo and MSN traffic.
Here is my question and please forgive the newbieness: Will Adsense cause traffic to my site? Sorry if this is a stupid question. Trying to move forward, I feel like a train ran over my head...I plan to keep reading in this AM forum and TRY to learn some of your great pointers! You are all WAY WAY ahead of me! I congratulate you, and hope I can begin to make money now as I learn from all of you.
PS I have a bunch of links, but only one from a PR5 site. I use standard white hat SEO.
There are forums here on webmasterworld dedicated to both. Your questions may be better answered there :)
You'll read a lot of good advice (here) and you may get some bad - through your learning you'll have to do a lot of testing and eventually you'll be able to discern on sight what's "better" - and you can start sharing that new knowledge with others in return for what you learned.
Good luck!
I was averaging $1/day for months, then launched a complete redesign of my site and was averaging $4/day for the past month, until the traffic dropped because I did not feel the need to install my usual 301's from the old pages to the new. (NOTE: Always set redirects from retired pages to the newer versions of them. ALWAYS!)
I expect the traffic to come back slowly but I think it will be much stronger when it comes back.
Also, I am kicking off a new site. (a redesign of another domain I was playing with over the last year) If I can get the releases I need this should become the biggest money maker in my collection. Not to mention the only site like it in its niche!
I'll let you know how that one goes in the next few weeks.
Thanks for the inspiraion! Until last month I didn't think my sites had the potential to make over $2/day.
By the way the domain was cheap from godaddy and the hosting is like £35 a year, so if it makes nothing it doesn't really matter to me :)
Great..just great! My indexed pages dropped a lot, and now allinurl: shows only links without any description.
Still pulling in around $150, but this just SUCKS!...
Diversify, not only in industry, but also in the revenue streams. PPC is the way to go to be safe from page jacking....
Keep us posted.
I've found sites all over the net copying my content. Eventually, I hope to have the resources to be able to have a lawyer type on call who can follow up on these people, but it's not worth my time for now (fortunately, it hasn't affected my revenue much, yet). All I do is continue to add new content to sites and try to make sure my sites have a lot more incoming links and PR than those who are copying my stuff. I hope Google is working on a way to tell which site has the earliest version (aka the original) so they don't ding that one...
I have yet to see the full implication of my site not having any description on the links when I do an 'allinurl:' on google.
OTOH, "my dad's site" which has been a little bit over a month running seems to be nicely stabilizing at around $15-$20/day for the past few days. I'm sure he's happy... darn, why did I give it to him!...
I had been lurking for quite sometime and registered today.
I have been really impressed by your posts and it gives me lot of encouragement.
I have a question ..hope u will answer it.
Is your dad's site doing any PPC and then making money thru adsense or is the traffic just through SERP's?
I have started 2 sites in the recent few months and only get a few cents a day or nothing atall with adsense ...so wanted to know a bit.
ANy suggestions/tips are welcome.
Thanks for your great posts.Hope u enjoy your trip.
