Rory Hansen

November Recap
Early on in November, I realized that this was going to be a challenging month for my Internet marketing efforts. Natural search engine traffic for my most profitable niche site was way down, which has affected both AdSense earnings as well as affiliate earnings from Clickbank.

I attempted to remedy that by driving targetted search engine traffic to the site via PPC advertising with Findology, only to discover that the Findology traffic was difficult/impossible to convert.

In the end, I fell well short of the earnings mark I set last month when I earned a profit of $718.21.
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After a maintenance haitus that lasted a few weeks longer than their posted notice stated, DealDotCom is back in action.

For those that are unfamiliar with DealDotCom, their concept is similar to that of Woot! in that they have a different product on sale each day. But, each product/tool/ebook is focused on blogging, affiliate marketing, generating traffic… topics that webmasters (especially those wanting to make money online) are interested in.

What sets them apart is that they have a 2-level affiliate marketing program, where you can earn 35% of the sales you send their way.

Anyway, in their first day back, they’re advertising the AutoMarker Social Bookmarking Software, which allows you access to a community of users that will propel your blog posts up the social media site ladders through votes. Sounds sorta scheme-ish, but, hey, traffic is traffic.

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.

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.

Many of the big names in internet marketing are proponents of setting goals for their affiliate and internet marketing campaigns. And, while I’m also a firm believer in goal-setting, I’ve never actually sat down and thought about my affiliate marketing goals– at least, not in any way which would result in a firm, realistic goal.

But, that’s all changing today. I’ve decided that, after many months of saying I’m going to actually start trying to make money online, that I’m finally going to put forth a somewhat serious effort to do so. And the first step in reaching my goal is to state it in black-and-white, here on this blog, so that I can be held accountable for reaching it.

My goal: By June 30, 2009, my monthly net earnings from all affiliate and search marketing efforts are to exceed the amount of my monthly mortgage payments. (For the sake of security and privacy, my target goal will be simplified to $1500/mo.)

So where am I today with respect to that goal? It’s been a while since I’ve actually tallied up the numbers from the myriad of affiliate and internet marketing programs that I participate in. But here’s a decent estimate:

Current status:

• Time effort per month: ~3 man hours
• Earnings per month: $250 US
• Costs per month: < $10 (web hosting)

So, as you can see, although I only spend about 3 hours per month working on the niche sites I run, I still earn about $250 US per month through a variety of programs. To reach my goal of $1500/month, I’ll obviously have to spend more time developing my sites, but hopefully, I’ll also be spending this time smarter than I have been to this point.

Anyway, I’ve got a number of ideas bouncing around my head that I’ll need to start executing on, so I’ll end this post here. I’ll be posting monthly summaries of my earnings results, so that my visitors can track my progress. I challenge you to set your own affiliate marketing goals, too, on your own blog, and through friendly competition, naybe we’ll meet our goals together.

Back in September, I signed up for DealDotCom, mostly on a whim to see if I could make any money selling their products.  Well, I’m now making ~$30/month from DealDotCom and I haven’t even sold one product!

How? Easy, their affiliate program which pays out at a whopping 35%! (Read more about their affiliate program in my initial blog post on DealDotCom.)

So, I signed up in September, and by January my affiliates were finally starting to sell products (and making money)! Of course, because they were making money, so was I. And there’s no sign of this income stream slowing down anytime soon.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making some money yourself from DealDotCom, give it a shot. Sign up for the service, try advertising a couple of their daily deals, then write a blog post of your experience. If you’re lucky, you’ll refer someone through your blog post to DealDotCom and make money in the same way I did! I seriously invested only a few minutes writing my initial review of the service and no time actually selling products, and here I am supplementing my AdSense income by more than $30 each month. (If you find this tip helpful, consider signing up through my referral link, or use this plain-old link to DealDotCom.)

While my monthly website income isn’t nearly as high as it used to be when I was making over $1000/month on Firefox referrals, the income has become pretty steady, and I’m no longer completely dependent on Google AdSense.  AdSense still makes up a large percentage of my month income (at about 71% for AdSense vs. 29% for other income streams), but that difference is decreasing every month.

Here are my results for September 2007:

AdSense for Content – $223.34
Firefox plus Google Toolbar Referrals – $25.10
Text-Link-Ads.com – $45.61 (Sign up for Text-Link-Ads.com through my affiliate link)
Amazon Associates – $19.75

Total: $313.80

Please note that this income comes from 3 other sites that I have running where I experiment with various search engine marketing and affiliate advertising programs. This blog itself makes pennies each day, and somedays even less! ;-)

Question for my readers: How was your September? Have you broken that $100/month plateau?

The other day, I mentioned BlogRush, which is a new service that hopes to drive more traffic to your page through a multi-level blog advertising widget.

Another new service that is gaining a lot of publicity as of late is DealDotCom. Unlike BlogRush, whose goal is to increase your website traffic, DealDotCom is a pretty typical affiliate program, that will hopefully let you use some of that new traffic to make an extra buck or two. What makes DealDotCom attractive are two things:

1. First of all, their affiliate program pays out at 35% for tier-1 referrals. Tier-2 referrals pay out at 15%, which is still decent.
2. Secondly, the products they sell are generally of interest to other bloggers, especially those hoping to make the leap from blogger to “pro-blogger”.

Just take a look at some of their recent deals:

• BayRSS 2.0 – Affiliate Plugin for Wordpress (Sold for $22.87) - A Wordpress plugin which allows you to “outsource” the creation of content to other authors, and share revenue with the content creators.
• Product Blueprint (Sold for $7.95) – An eBook and 30 minute video which explain how to find profitable markets fast and what to charge for products in these profitable market spaces.
• WPAffiliatePro – Marketed as the “Ultimate Wordpress Affiliate Solution”, this is a Wordpress plug-in which allows you to better manage affiliate links and understand how your links are doing.
• Long Tail Traffic Secrets (Sold for $39) - Another eBook, this one talking about blogs, podcasting, and social networking and how you can cash in on these forms of media. Provides expert’s secrets and tips to get top search engine rankings.

I just signed up for the DealDotCom affiliate program, to see if I can get a piece of this 35% pie. Heck, who knows, maybe I’ll actually even buy one of the advertised products at some point. I almost bit at WPAffiliatePro, based on some of the feedback that JohnChowDotCom had given the plug-in.

Like what I plan on doing with BlogRush, I will keep you posted with the results.

Adsense: $236.07
Firefox Referrals: $793.10

Yahoo! Marketing: $167.39
Google Adwords: $271.80
MSN AdCenter: $5.62
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $68.38

Profit: $515.98