RORY HANSEN

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.

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.

So, back in June, Firefox 3.0 came out, and I wanted to see if I could spin that into making some extra income via Google’s Firefox referral program, just as I had done with Firefox 2.0.

At around the same time, Yahoo! had come out with a new promotion which awarded a $100 credit for users which returned to Yahoo! Search Marketing. I figured that I should at the very minimum break even, and that an average campaign would net ~$100 US (the amount of the credit).

The Result: $184.60 in referrals. All profit.

The $100 credit from Yahoo! lasted about 6 days, so it was a really short-lived experiment. And while it is nothing close to the $2000+ I made during the Firefox 2.0 release, it’s still easy money. Easy free money. And there’s nothing better than that.

Unfortunately, a few months later, Google shut down their Referrals program, and so lost one source of passive income each month. But, I’m constantly experimenting with new affiliate programs and other sources of income, and, since then, have already overcome that loss.

A little bit of history on the Firefox / Yahoo! Search Marketing challenge

So, as many of you may remember, I ran an experiment way back a year or two ago, seeing how much money I could make through Google’s Firefox browser referral program. I started with essentially a $50 credit with Yahoo! Search Marketing, and then expanded to include other PPC programs, such as Google Adwords. Shortly afterwards, after a quick windfall of a few thousand dollars over the course of a couple months, I shut the program down due to the ever expanding cash flow requirements for shrinking profits.

Well, Yahoo! is back with another promotion, giving you a $100 credit towards clicks, so long as you deposit $30 (and not refunding it!). This coincides nicely with the release of Firefox 3.0, as there’ll be a large focus on downloading the new release of the very popular browser.

So, the challenge resumes…

Anyway, I started up the ads tonight, and spent just over $30 for 195 clicks, coming in at an average cost per click (CPC) of $0.17. Google doesn’t like us talking about exact figures, but I can tell you that I lost about $16 overall in the process tonight, as the cost of clicks fromYahoo! exceeded the conversion revenues I earned from Google.

Basically, how it works is that you do not get credit for a conversion if the visitor had downloaded and installed Firefox in the past on that same computer. So, although I had 195 click throughs to my site from Yahoo! Search, with a majority of those clicking on afterwards to download Firefox from Google, I only got credited with a few conversions.

(Of course, it doesn’t help that Google supplies an older version of the browser for download too, probably causing most users to click away once they realize this fact. But I knew that going into this and took that as a known risk.)

Explanation of results

Because existing Firefox users are essentially worthless in this scheme, I made the appropriate enhancements to my landing pages last year, using JavaScript to detect the user’s browser, and if they’re using Firefox, to redirect them to a custom page. This custom page had no link to download Firefox, but instead, a selection of the finest ads that Google Adsense could serve up. I figured that this might offset the cost of Firefox visitors clicking on my ads a little. But, looking at today’s summary, we’re talking puny returns. In the grand scheme of things, click throughs for “Firefox” related keywords are extremely low.

Next steps

Anyway, I’m waiting for Yahoo! to credit my account with the promised $100 credit. Once they do so, I’ll resume my campaign, but I doubt I’ll continue once the funds run out.

So, as of this moment, paid text links via Text-Link-Ads.com account for over $70 of the monthly revenue my websites bring in. Not bad, considering I have no involvement in the sale of those links, nor does it require any effort on my part to maintain those links each month.

Here’s a brief history of my involvement with Text-Link-Ads:

• April 12th, 2007: I had just recently signed up for Text-Link-Ads and was now making about $20/month from the service.
• September 3rd, 2007: A few months later, I was at $40/month from Text-Link-Ads.
• October 4th, 2007: One month later, another sale took me to $45/month.
• April 28th, 2008: Present day, and over the course of the last half year, monthly revenue from Text-Link-Ads.com has increased to over $70/month

Aside from the blog posts I’ve linked to above, I’ve spent no time promoting the service or attempting to sell links. Text-Link-Ads.com does that for me through their internal directory of websites that they provide Publishers access to. Essentially, I just sit back and wait for another email from Text-Link-Ads.com, notifying me that I’ve sold another link, adding to my monthly haul.

If you’re interested in trying out Text-Link-Ads, sign your website or blog up through this link. (Here’s the non-affiliate link if you’d prefer a clean entry into the site.)

Enjoy.

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?

Introduction to Amazon aStore
As you’ve seen with DealDotCom, when new affiliate services come out, I generally give each of them an honest shot, to see how they work, as well as to gauge the return one might expect with minimal time investment into the service.

That was exactly the case when I set up a niche Amazon aStore a couple months back. At the time, I was already no stranger to Amazon’s affiliate programs; I had used their AWS services to add content to other websites I had setup, as well as hotlinked individual products from time to time. But as you probably know, Amazon aStore is a little different. In the most basic sense, it’s a personal online store that you can setup, where you list Amazon products to sell. You can leave this as a stand-alone website or embed this store into your existing website in an <iframe>. Then, each time someone visits your aStore and makes a purchase, you are rewarded with a small referral fee in the 5% to 7% range of the purchase cost.

Well, anyway, after choosing my niche and setting up my Amazon sStore, I did the #1 most important thing to drive visitors to the website: I linked to it from a couple of my other websites. I really only did that so that Google and the other search engines would have an easier time finding my site to index. Other than that, I did no SEO activities at all. Nor did I do any online advertising or marketing. I basically let the site sit.

My Amazon aStore results
Anyway, the first month passed and I made a whopping $0.75 from my Amazon aStore. One person had purchased one item from my site and that $0.75 was my take from the purchase.

But things seem to be totally different this month. We’re only 3 weeks into September and my affiliate income has already accumulated to nearly $13, based on purchases of over $225 with Amazon aStore. Again, this is with No Advertising and No SEO!

Here’s a quick snapshot of the recent purchases that have come through my Amazon aStore:

You should be able to identify my niche market pretty easily from the product list above. ;-)

My impressions thus far
Anyway, I’m rather pleased with the performance so far of my Amazon aStore. I really didn’t expect anything, and considering I didn’t invest much time at all, I think the site is doing rather well. I did a quick guess of some of the keywords that my visitors may be using to find my site, and in Google, my aStore has SERPSs of #1, #2, and a couple other high positions.

My only gripe so far is that I don’t think Amazon has any built-in web analytics for their aStores, so I cannot be sure to the means at which visitors are come to my store. On top of that, there doesn’t seem to be any way to embed third-party web statistics either.

Stay tuned for a month-end summary.

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.

Have you heard of BlogRush? It’s a new service that’s designed to promote your blog posts on other blogs, and vice versa. They do this via a widget that some prominent probloggers like JohnChowdotCom are pimping on their websites. 

Essentially, this is how it works:

1. You earn credits each time the widget is viewed on your blog.
2. You also earn credits when the widget is viewed on blogs of those you refer to BlogRush.
3. You earn even more credits when the folks you’ve referred, refer others to the service.
4. The more credits you earn, the more times your blog headlines will be displayed on the BlogRush widget on other people’s blogs.

The idea is that the more people that see your blog headlines, the more people will visit your blog, and the more money you’ll generate from AdSense and other revenue-generating schemes you have going on.

While I’m not using the BlogRush widget on this blog, I’m experimenting it on a couple of my other, revenue-generating blogs, to see if it has any success in generating additional traffic. I’ll post my results at a later time.

If you’re interested in checking BlogRush out, please sign up through my referral link. I don’t make any money from you doing this, but you’ll help me gain more credits!