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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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.

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%

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, 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.

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?

Back in April, I wrote on this blog how, after just a couple months, I was making over $20/month using Text-Link-Ads.com. Even back then, I was happy with $20/month, as it required no work on my part at all. Text-Link-Ads.com customers would search the Text-Link-Ads.com directory, find my site, and then choose to advertise. To borrow a phrase my old math teacher used to say, “It’s like money for jam.”

Five months later, my monthly income has increased to $39.10/month, which is nearly 100% more than what I was making when I posted my initial review of the service. And at what cost? None! Have I invested hours of my time grooming my site for Text-Link-Ads? No. Essentially, the only time I even remember I am using their service is when I get emails from PayPal informing me that I’ve received a new $40 deposit into my account.

Anyway, I guess my point is, if you’re looking for an easy way of monetizing your site, take a look at Text-Link-Ads.com (Non-affiliate link here). For me, the income has proven to be steady and reliable, while still growing month-over-month.

Have you heard of Text-Link-Ads.com? They are another way of diversifying how your website is earning you income each month.

I started using Text-Link-Ads.com about two months ago, and so far, I’m up to earning just over $20/month and it’s still increasing month over month.

How does it work?
Essentially, you earn money each month for linking to other websites. So, you might have a technology blog and, using Text-Ad-Links.com, you’ll advertise other technology websites by linking to them from your blog. The websites that you link to benefit by (potentially) higher search engine results positions (SERPs), as each backlink that they get from other related websites can boost their page rank and keyword ranking for the niche that they are targetting.

In the end, everyone benefits.

My experiences:
In the first month of usage, not even one other website wanted to advertise on the two blogs that I submitted to TLA. But in the last few weeks, I’ve managed to sign up four links…. with each link earning me just over $6 per month. NOT BAD, EH!?

How do you sign up?
If you’re interested in signing up, please consider using my affiliate link. Not only will you be earning new income each month, but my earnings will increase too.

Sign up for Text-Ad-Links.com and earn yourself additional income from your website each month!

Otherwise, here is a non-affiliate link.

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