Rory Hansen

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.

The Vancouver International Film Festival has come and gone, and although I had a small list of films I intended to watch, I never ended up making it out to the theatre. I suppose there’s always next year. On a related note, another film festival flick that I want to catch is Battle in Seattle, which played at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and opened in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto this past week.

Having been in Vancouver at the time, I can vividly remember the news coverage of the street violence that erupted during the WTO protests in 1999. It’s these protests that the film Battle in Seattle centers upon, and by the looks of the trailer, the movie truly takes us back 9 years to those emotional days.

Back in 1999, the city of Seattle was host to the World Trade Organization, which was big news then, as it was the first time the ministerial conference was being held in America. Although intended to highlight the launch of new trade talks with developing countries, the 40,000 plus protesters that collapsed into the heart of Seattle saw the conference as a rallying cry for protesting the globalization and exploitation that multinational corporations engage in. On news footage at the time, I can remember the stand-offs between the protesters and the Seattle Police Department, as well as the destruction to storefronts which resulted. Definitely a conflict I’d never want to be in the middle of.

The movie has a star-studded cast that includes the likes of Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta, which only helps to bolster my interest in the movie. (Who doesn’t love Charlize!?) If you’re interested in learning more about the movie, you can do so here.

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.”

My history with AWStats 

For years now, I’ve used AWStats to help understand my site traffic; how many people are visiting, what pages are getting visited, and what search terms they’re using to find my site. If you’ve never used AWStats before, it’s a pretty typical web log analysis tool that parses your server logs every night, and produces a series of reports that detail the various things I mentioned above.

But therein lies it’s two downfalls:

1. AWStats generates its statistics by looking at your server logs. Because it parses server logs, it cannot provide metrics on anything that isn’t stored in the logs. This includes tracking links that your visitors clicked on, tracking user browser resolutions and bandwidth, and an assortment of other client-side facts.
2. AWStats refreshes it’s stats every night. When tweaking ad campaigns and landing pages, writing blog posts, and adding new links to my sites, I want to be able to know exactly what’s going on in real-time. And, waiting til the next day just isn’t good enough; it simply causes me to make too many guesses and assumptions.

(Okay, I know you can change how often AWStats runs, but my web host has it scheduled to run once a day, at night.)

3-day trial with MyBlogLog

I recently signed up for MyBlogLog a few days ago and one of the services that I started to make use of immediately was it’s Statistics service. Pop in a little bit of javascript on your website and it’ll start tracking in real-time site visitors, what pages they viewed, how often pages were viewed, and what links your visitors clicked on (including Google AdSense links!). Although they only provide a 3-day trial on the service, I found myself practically refreshing the stats page every few hours to see what was new. I found that I really enjoyed having all this knowledge at my finger tips.

Now, on to Google Analytics

Well, that 3-day trial is ending today, and I can’t imagine just going back to AWStats, so I’m giving Google Analytics a shot. I’d known of it’s existance for a long time, even when it was still called Urchin, but had never bothered looking into it. So far, I’m pleased with what I see, especially with a feature called Site Overlay. It’s truly amazing. When you click on the Site Overlay link in Google Analytics, it opens up a new browser window and points the browser to your website. Then, on a translucent overlay of your website, it shows you exactly what links are being clicked and how often. It might even provide more info, but I’m still investigating all of the options and functions that this tool has.

Open questions:

• What analysis tool are you using on your website?
• What does it do well, and what does it do poorly?

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.

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.