www.affiliateconfession.com

Hopefully this month’s affiliate earnings report will give a little inspiration to those that may have been watching their earnings go down instead of up. That’s what had been happening to me for the last 3 months and culminated in last month coming in at only $1,500 in earnings which as been the lowest amount I’ve earned as an affiliate since starting this blog. However, that all turned around in March as it was my first five figure month in affiliate income with total earnings coming in slightly over $10,500.

The big difference this month came from promoting Clickbank and CPA offers through ppc marketing. I have to give the credit to PPC Coach for the pay per click skills and attending the first Dot Com Steak Out and talking with my buddy Kiley Lenstrom for an attitude adjustment. I don’t know what it was for sure about hanging out at the Dot Com Steak Out, but a switch just went off in my head after being around some serious money makers in this business. Really, your attitude makes a huge difference in how much you can make in affiliate marketing.

Total revenue produced in March came to $12,298.65 with expenses of $1,726.88 which made for a total net income of $10,571.77. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,479.20
Commission Junction - $418.35
EPN - eBay - $205.32
Meal Planner Ebook - $187.00
TripAdvisor - $113.26
Clickbank - $567.73
Neverblue
Market Leverage
& Azoogle
CPA Offers - $9,070.73
Amazon.com - $158.17
Other Affiliate Programs - $98.89

Total Revenue - $12,298.65

Total expenses - $1,726.88

Total Income - $10,571.77

I had no idea this month’s income would increase by over 7 times from February’s income and double my previous record for earnings, but that’s the beauty of affiliate marketing. One month you may think it’s over and the next you end up making enough to carry you for several months. It can happen anytime so don’t ever give up on your affiliate career. Keep working, keep trying new things and keep learning, because you never know when things will turn around.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

Traffic and sales patterns on the net never cease to amaze me. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try you just can’t get something to work, even if you keep tweaking it and keep turning the dials. On the other hand when you have enough going on in your affiliate business, there are times you can make money without even trying. I love it when that happens.

As an example, I’ve been working on a system that gives a better focus to my ppc marketing where I can just find a good traffic source, then find an offer, plug in a few keywords and there’s another campaign working. About one out of every six or seven of these campaigns really make any money. But the other day I had one that I just knew would work. If you’ve been in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you know those ideas I’m talking about, the ones you are sure will generate lots of income.

Well, I worked on this ppc campaign for several day and sent over 2,000 clicks to the merchant at 5 cents per click or less and didn’t get a single sale. I was shocked to say the least because in my mind, it was a near certainty this campaign would work. But it didn’t generate even one cent of revenue. However, the same day I decided to let this one go, in came a sale from an old site on air compressors I hadn’t touched in more than a year. My commission for doing nothing was $40.

This is bizarre because stuff like this happens more often than you would think. Having enough niches out there generating a trickle of traffic to each site brings in additional commissions from furniture sales, chandelier sales, home decor, fitness equipment, travel and more. Probably 3 or 4 times a year I get a check in the mail from ReserveBranson.com for between $30 and $50. It’s not a lot, but it’s really nice when you’ve forgotten about it and you’re not expecting it at all. We usually take that money and go out for a nice dinner or something and celebrate that we just got paid for doing nothing.

Of course, you do realize you’re not really getting paid for doing nothing, it just seems like that. Over the last 4 to 5 years I’ve built up enough sites in enough niches that these unexpected, make money for doing nothing sales and checks are showing up more frequently. If you keep persevering in your affiliate career, this will eventually happen to you as well and you’ll get a check in the mail someday you weren’t expecting at all.

No matter how much money I go on to make in affiliate marketing, it will always be a beautiful thing when an unexpected $35 check shows up in the mail.

A few weeks ago I wrote about outsourcing your content writing to help you build your affiliate business. So far this year I’ve received 210 articles from SEO Article Writing Pros covering a variety of niches. So, what are you supposed to do with all those articles?

You can do several things with your outsourced content such as article marketing, trading articles with other sites in your niche, submitting your articles to authority sites in your niche and of course, simply adding the content to your own sites. Having massive amounts of content however doesn’t mean that you just put up everything all at once. You’ll want to selectively release your work so as to give the search engines the impression that your sites and incoming linking process are an ongoing work.

Several years ago I outsourced about 80 articles to get incoming links through article marketing and it ended up backfiring because of the process I used. One of my vacation sites and our healthy diet site was deindexed by Google and Yahoo shortly after these efforts and in the case of the vacation site there was probably another reason for the deindexing, which I’ll cover later, that the article marketing efforts identified.

In getting incoming links, you want to to get a natural trickle of links pointing to your site over time, not all at once. You also want to vary the anchor text pointing to pages on your site as well. The mistake I made was posting the same article, sometimes 2 or 3 at a time, that had the same anchor text to 10 or 15 different article directories every day for a month. We never know exactly what Google wants, but apparently they don’t like seeing links coming into your site at the rate of 600 a month if it doesn’t look natural. Had these links come from different sites or blogs at this rate they would have at least had different anchoring text and different content in each post or article.

Now while you may be thinking this is a duplicate content penalty, that’s not what it is. Duplicate content only means posting the same article to your own site that is found somewhere else on the net. My belief is that this is an unnatural linking process that looked to Google as though I was trying to do nothing but get tons of links into my sites. I believe the other reason my vacation site bit the dust (it has since recovered)  was that all the incoming links helped Google see that there were way to many affiliate links on the site. I’ve also since removed over 300 of these links from that site.

So what’s the proper way to do article marketing?

When submitting to article directories, I never submit more than 1 article per day with links pointing to the same site and never use the same article twice. In other words you want to simply use each article one time and let the natural process of other people picking up your articles bring you additional links.

It’s probably not as critical when using your outsourced articles for adding additional pages to your site, but I would recommend a slow process in this area as well. It is believed that Google likes to see fairly consistent changes being done to a site so it stands to reason if you put up 75 to 100 pages on a site in a couple of afternoons Google will notice your site less. For this reason I will add no more than 5 pages a day to any one of my sites, but most of the time its 2 to 3 pages every couple of days. This way if you have 100 articles, your site will be constantly changing over a 3 month or so period.

I just want to offer a little disclaimer here because much of what I’m saying about Google is pure speculation and only what I’ve been experiencing in my own business. We all know Google is a fickle beast to figure out, so you have to keep poking it with a stick until you see life in your niche. However, I can tell you that slow, steady consistent work never hurt anyone.

Use this as an example and find the content outsourcing and article marketing process that works best for you and your business.

In every affiliate’s career there are good income months and bad months. February was a bad income month for me for a couple of reasons. I spent another $800 on 100 articles for content and article marketing and did some advertising that just didn’t pay off. Also, the eBay Partner Network was way off for me this month.

One of the ppc campaigns I ran this past month, that was one of those, “This will definitely work” campaigns, has drained me of over $200 without a single conversion. Almost the same thing happened with Facebook as well when I spent about $120 to earn a mere $36. Luckily the merchant getting traffic through the ppc campaign has a 45 day cookie so it might just pay off. The reason I spent so much on that campaign is that a single conversion could erase all the losses because were talking about $2,500 products with a 10% payout. Hopefully it will be worth it because with pay per click marketing, things can turn around in a single day.

So in effect, I spent about $1,100 this month that brought zero return so far. The articles however are producing some decent seo results for one of my BANS stores and if nothing else, this site should produce some decent Adsense revenue once I add it to all the content.

Total revenue produced last month was $2,825.57 with expenses of $1,317.14 that gave me a net income of $1,508.16. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,319.10
Commission Junction - $225.56
EPN - eBay - $186.99
Meal Planner Ebook - $187.00
TripAdvisor - $110.59
Private Advertising - $105.00
AzoogleAds - $288.00
Amazon.com - $187.58
Neverblue - $27.00
Other Affiliate Programs - $188.75

Total Revenue - $2,825.57

Total expenses - $1,317.14

Total Income - $1,508.16

You never know what’s going to happen month to month. All you can do is keep plugging away and focus on the things that work and trash the things that don’t. Forward is the only direction to go in the affiliate marketing game. Remember, things can turn around in a single day, or even just a few hours.

Time for another affiliate earnings report and unfortunately income is down for January by a fairly significant amount. One of the reasons for this was an $800 expense for content outsourcing that doesn’t have any direct earnings payback for the current month it was spent in. Unlike spending that much for advertising that has an immediate direct payoff, it’s likely to be 3 months or so until that $800 starts to earn back some revenue.

With PPC when you stop spending, you stop earning. But I’ve decided to outsource much of my content writing and build up some of the most profitable or highest earning potential sites that will take some time to see a return. The content being created now however, should pay off for many months or years to come. I’m looking at having a much higher and more solid Adsense income of some $3,000 to $4,000 per month and resurrecting my best BANS site that has in the past earned up to $1,000 per month. This BANS site has huge potential and is especially relevant to what’s going on in the economy right now. It’s too valuable an internet property to not give it the best effort to get it back to bringing in more revenue.

Total revenue was $3,630.12 and expenses were $1,543.26 giving a net earnings of $2,086.86. You may notice earnings for Amazon listed below. This has normally been classified under “Other Affiliate Income” because earnings were minimal, however this past month was over $250 for Amazon which is pretty significant since between my wife and I it took over 1 year to earn our first $100 through the big A, but I’ve found a way to earn some decent extra cash through PPC and I’ll probably blog about it in a future post.

January 2009 breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,376.02
Commission Junction - $52.70
EPN - eBay - $401.92
Meal Planner Ebook - $68.00
TripAdvisor - $137.74
Clickbank - $161.87
Private Advertising - $140.00
AzoogleAds - $412.75
Amazon.com - $259.60
Neverblue - $433.10
Other Affiliate Programs - $186.42
 
Total Revenue- $3,630.12
 
Total expenses - $1,543.26
 
Total Income - $2,086.86

Yes, income is down a bit from the highs of last September and October’s average of $5,000 per month, but sometimes you have to take a step backwards to ultimately move forward. More outsourcing is in the works for this month as well and eventually it all should pay off in a big time way.