Rory Hansen

Earnings
AdSense: $166.53
Clickbank: $437.58
Text-Link-Ads: $89.56
Sedo, Amazon Associates: ~$2
Paid Reviews: $22.54
Total earnings: $718.21

Costs
No AdWords costs this month.
Signed up for Findology, but have yet to start any campaigns.
Total costs: $0.00

October Earnings: $718.21

September Earnings: $335.79
This represents a 214% improvement month-over-month.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $718.21 profit, which is 48% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 8 more months to make up the remaining 52%.

Concerns going forward
As I had mentioned in a previous post, my main contributing site has seen it’s traffic dive in recent days. By dive, I mean traffic has reduced by about 75% (natural, search engine traffic). This concerns me because unless things pick up again, November earnings could potentially be 75% lower than October earnings.

I first mentioned CodeIgniter back in February 2007 as something that really excited me, but it took over a year and a half for me to actually use it!

Well, after a 2-day programming blitz, I launched my first CodeIgniter website yesterday. It’s hosted on the keyword domain www.PremierLeagueShirts.com and is an affiliate site targetting those looking for English Premier League jerseys. While still under heavy construction, the primary features are now available for use. The remaining changes will mostly be cosmetic and UI-related.

Here are some of the features that I programmed into www.PremierLeagueShirts.com:

• SEO-Friendly URLS - Each and every URL is search engine friendly. Take for example some of these URLS:
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Shop_By_Player/Beckham_David
  • http://www.premierleagueshirts.com/store/subcategory/Teamwear/Womens
• Product Search – While still quite simplistic, will return a list of products which matches the user’s query.
• Completely Database-Driven: All content is stored in the Premier League Shirts database. No real-time webservice calls to the main affiliate site which may slow down page loads.

And what’s left to come?

• Improved GUI – Yes, the UI is plain. But my goal was to get the site out there and crawled by the major search engines. Now that that’s done, I’ll see what can be done about the look-and-feel of the site.
• Improved Search – The site search currently only looks at the Product Name, and not the Brand, Category, or Description. This will be looked into.
• Stats – Record what products are being looked at, what’s being searched for, and store that all in the database. Spit that out onto new pages on the site for further crawling by Google.
• Additional Content – What is on the site right now is strictly affiliate products and their descriptions. Obviously Google may not like that so much, so will have to look at additional sources of related content.

So, what do you think so far? Since this is my first forray into the world of CodeIgniter, I’m please with what I’ve accomplished over the last 2 days.

One of my niche sites, which helped me break the $100/day barrier, just got Google slapped pretty bad. At least I think it was!

Visits are wa-ay down over the last 3 days, from about 600 uniques to about 125 uniques a day. The reason is because traffic from Google has shrunk to basically zilch.

Google Analytics shows that traffic from my top 10 search queries is down to just a few hits a day, from HUNDREDS!

Just my luck. I brag about one of my sites, and then a few days later, it stops performing.

I’m really hoping things bounce back.

On Friday, I earned more than $125 through my small network of sites and couldn’t help but tell everyone around me! I was ecstatic! It was the first time that I’d earned more than $100 in one day.

It’s amazing how small, incremental earnings improvements can do wonders for personal motivation. I’m not making a 6-figure income from affiliate marketing or blogging, but I feel like I’m headed in the right direction. In September, I was averaging about $10 per day, which added up to $330 that month. And, with one week to go in October, I know I’ll be surpassing that by QUITE A BIT, but I’m trying to avoid calculating anything til after the 31st. I’m looking to be surprised!

I’ve had some good days in the past, but none as good as this. Some readers might recall my Firefox experiment for Google Referrals. During my most successful days, I had Google Referrals earnings of over $175/day. But this is a bit deceiving, because I was also PAYING for Google AdWords. In all, I saw profits of about $1000/month during the experiment, which would average to about $30/day.

Perhaps this was just a lucky day for me. And I doubt I’ll even hit the $1000 mark for the month of October. Regardless, I’m so pleased with where I am this month and am even more motivated to hit my Mortgage Goal.

A few posts I’ve bookmarked as references for creating effective landing pages.

Jonathan Volk:
The Landing Page MUST
- Customized landing pages create the feeling of “exclusivity.”

Zac Johnson:
Create Killer Landing Pages
- Landing page template

Free Comparison Shopping Landing Page Template
- Multi-product landing page template

Examples of Good and Bad Landing Pages

Cash Tactics:
Landing Pages and Tracking

I first started playing with AdSense and affiliate marketing after reading about the financial success that probloggers like Darren Rowse and Jason Calcanis were achieving. Like many other followers at the time, I figured that, if they could do it, so could I. So, I started up a few (spam) blogs, posted (crappy) stories, and pasted AdSense code everywhere I could. Yes, I did a little SEO as well as a bit of little link-building, but I probably spent more time logging into the Google AdSense website to check out my puny earnings than I spent creating quality content. And, as you can probably guess, I faired pretty poorly financially.

In hindsight, I admit that I was attempting to spend pennies to make millions. I was hoping to get lucky, score a high Google SERP, get tonnes of instant traffic, and convert that into paying clicks. How naive.

Years later, and with a much clearer head, I know that it’ll be impossible to achieve my goal of covering my monthly mortgage without putting in a lot of hard work. Such a simple realization, but it’s only now that I’m finally accepting the idea.

And you know what? It’s already paying off. In a previous post, I calculated that I had earned $335.79 last month. At a glance, it looks like my October earnings will be a significant percentage higher, and I attribute that to this matured mindset.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my affiliate marketing goal of making enough money online per month to cover my mortgage. Effectively, this is around $1500/month.

I figured that I was bringing in around $300 per month already, as it’s been pretty steady for the last year. Up until September 2008, I’d been coasting, doing less than an hour per month of work to support that $300/month income stream, as I had no motivation to invest anything more.

As a baseline measurement to understand where I am with respect to meeting my goal, I need to know my September 2008 results. Well, I just took a couple minutes to tabulate them, and here they are:

Mortgage Goal: $1500 / month

September Results:
AdSense For Content: $254.25
Text-Link-Ads: $81.54
Total: $335.79

(No earnings from Amazon Affiliates, and neglible earnings from Chitika and other programs during September.)

Mortgage Goal Remaining: $1164.21 / month
Percent of Mortgage Goal Met: 22%

Just got back from Green Lemon Grass restaurant, where John Chow (yes, that John Chow) was hosting this week’s Dot Com Pho meetup. It was my first time attending Dot Com Pho, and driving to the restaurant, I had no idea what to expect.

In total, there were about 11 people there, including the focus of one of John’s recent posts, Tim Sykes. In a nutshell, Tim’s story is that, as a teenager, he managed to turn his $12,000 of Bar Mitzvah gift money into $1.65 million dollars by shorting stocks. He’s in town for a seminar, and I guess John convinced him to come out to Dot Com Pho as well.

I really enjoyed the 2 hours we spent at the restaurant, casually chatting about politics (both Canadian and American), blogging, and any other topic that sprang to mind. But most of all, I appreciated meeting so many new contacts in the Vancouver-area that are interested in blogging, blogging for money, and making money online through a variety of mediums. Of course, meeting John Chow, Internet Blogging Celebrity, was definitely a bonus.

Actually, no, the real bonus was walking away with some Dot Com Pho schwag. Courtesy of Market Leverage, I received an “I’m blogging this” t-shirt, and from Tim (or John, maybe) I got a signed copy of Tim Sykes’ new book An American Hedge Fund, which details “How [He] Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund.”

We all know the 1st-tier PPC networks are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. You might also classify Amazon in there, too. Of these top-tier pay-per-click advertising networks, I’ve used Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter for various search marketing campaigns in the past. (I’ve never tried Amazon’s service, so cannot comment to how slick it is, or how well the traffic converts.)

There are many reasons why these networks are considered 1st-tier, the number one reason being that their respective search engines have the largest market share. But it’s more than that. Each of the 1st-tier services also have great keyword research tools, have slick interfaces for creating ads, and have really nice reporting systems.

The only real drawback? They can be a little pricey.

But what about the 2nd-tier? Have you used any of them?

Here’s a list I’ve gathered so far:

• SuperPages.com
• GoClick.com
• Search123.com
• ABCSearch
• Findology
• SearchFeed.com
• MIVA
• Enhance Interactive
• 7Search
• FindIt-Quick.com
• BrainFox.com
• Kanoodle

(Oh, and I’m sure I missed a tonne more. :-)

Personally, I’ve used 7Search before and, although the PPC cost was rather cheap (I was bidding on keywords with click-thru costs of between $0.01 and $0.03 each), the number of clicks I also got were few and far between as well. It probably took 8 months to use up the $25 initial deposit I made.

I’m trying with another 2nd-tier PPC network now, Findology. Mostly, I’m doing this because I found a promo code for an extra $50 credit on an initial deposit of $25.

(Actually, it appears that these promo codes are all over the place, because people can create them on the fly and use them as advertising bait. Hmm…. Smart actually. Someone just made a few bucks off me when I signed up using their promo code!)

Questions:

• Has anyone out there in the blogosphere used Findology before?
• What’s your opinion of the service?
• Any tips?

Feel free to leave some comments detailing your experiences. I’d really like to know how the other 2nd-tier networks compare.

In my last post, I stated that my goal is to reach the $1500/month mark by June 2009. I think it’s a pretty decent, SMART goal, because to reach it I’ll have to leave my comfort zone and try some new marketing techniques. (It also means that I’ll probably have to shell out more cash per month towards PPC traffic, which on it’s own is already a daunting decision for myself, as it’ll add an element of risk to the equation and I’m generally a risk-averse person.)

Anyway, in that last post, I also highlighted a few other goal setters out there, like John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker, who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Well, I came across another affiliate marketer today who also sets goals– Very Big Goals .  Jonathan Volk’s goal of $400,000/month probably seems impossible at first… until you understand that he’s now 66% of the way there, as last month he broke the $270,000 plateau! Now, if that isn’t a disgusting amount of money, I don’t know what is.

In comparison my goal seems puny, but in fact, while Jonathan is 66% of the way to his goal, I’m still only about 20% to mine. Nevertheless, his monthly income is a huge motivator for me and I can only hope to reach that number some day.