Income Stats – January 2010
This is me again with income report for January 2010.
January is the month when people finally stay home and sit down to their computers to buy a lot of stuf online 
And my December link building efforts were rewarded with healthy profits in January.
Most of the profits came from good old site of mine that I’ve built back in 2008 and never touched it since. All I did to promote this site was adding some reciprocal backlinks and submit 1 article onto many different directories using Brad Callen’s article submitter. In April 2009 there was a sudden burst in traffic and I’ve made over 1800$ in sales that month.
Since December 2009 (after the famous massive adwords ban) I’ve started doing SEO with a couple of my sites, including this one, so now I see some nice reward already.
I also made a Clickbank sale, the vendor removed his product from Clickbank so I had to find a similar one, but only found the product with some small correlation to the topic of my site – seems I need to change my title a bit and do some backlinking with updated anchor texts and see if the conversion increases.
OK, let’s turn to the actual numbers now:
Since there were no PPC costs involved in this month, here’s the income – 1053.86$
To be frank, this is so cool to see the income growth and realise this is not due to 2000-3000$ spent on PPC But just from free traffic! SEO rocks, whatever these PPC gurus will tell you. I know PPC is great and you can make a lot of money fast, but ONLY in case you’ll find this winning campaign -now go and find it )
The Money is in The Broken Links
I cannot stress this enough – always check your affiliate links and check them like you check your stats – 3 times a day )))
Why that? I’ve recently analysed my site’s (this site that made over 800$ in sales) traffic stats and found that I sent over 1000 (!) clickthroughs to one of the merchants in January. But when I’ve checked my affiliate stats, there was 0 sales made. All the traffic was from brand name searches so the conversion should be nice.
After contacing the merchant, I found that the links were updated since 2010 and old ones are no longer active. I’ve switched to the new ones immediately and already made 60$ in sales for 2 days. Just imagine how much money I left on the table due to this, ehh.. shit.
Plans for February 2010
I’d call this month Outsourcing. Yes I’ve decided to leverage my own efforts and really pump up the site promotion with outsourcing based on a hourly rates than fixed costs.
I’ve made all the calculations and found that hourly rate can significantly save my money than fixed rate projects. Especially with article writing that I cannot do a lot due to my extreme laziness and lack of self-organization. Grand is old disorganized lazy buddy, that’s true. He’d better spend some money to hire people who can do the work for him )
So, let’s see how that goes in Feb and if I can raise my business?
OK, time to work on a outsourcing project descritiption and place it to the freelancer sites. I’ll update more as soon as I have some fresh stuff to share with you guyes, ask me questions on SEO if you have some! See you
Related posts:
- Income Stats – December 2009
- Income Stats – September 2009
- Income Stats – July 2009
- Income Stats – June 2009
- Income Stats – August 2009
Filed Under: Monthly Incomes Report
NICE. $1800 in one month, huh? I thought my measly little $500 month from AdSense and Aff links to physical products was amazing for a first month’s payment (which took a spot longer than one month, but it’s the first check).
Are you selling the physical products you and I discussed elsewhere? If so, are said physical goods hosted on a site like Amazn, or more like Commission Junxn?
Also – what template do you use? A free WP one, or the AdSense/XFactor template?
Very curious as I’m still so new at this. Thanks.
[Reply]
Hi James!
No curently I’m not using free WP templates for the websites that are already making money.
I’ve created the site template with simple html/css coding in Dreamweaver, that I learned myself.
However, I do install WP templates on my new sites, as I see that wordpress is really easy to use. If you are interested in wordpress template that is 100% similar to XFActor’s adsense template (+ 2 other adsense optimized templates) I can give you a link (no aff) to the guy that sells these 3 templates for just 15$. I personally bought from him and I also know that people get over 10% CTR with his adsense WP templates.
I’ve launched a couple of sites with adsense + CJ links, but I don’t really have time now to promote these sites, since I’m contentrated more on offers with bigger payouts, like MarketHealth.com offers.
I think that for the first check 500$ from adsense and CJ is GREAT!!! Really, you’ve got a great potential and if you start promoting physical products with higher SEO competition but good payouts, you can easily reach 1000$->3000$ and so on… Just keep doing what you do with new affiliate offers.
Btw, when I started promoting my fist affiliate site in 2007, I’ve worked hard for 6 (!!!) months before I made my 200$ in month. Next month was kinda 400$ or so, and then…it just skyrocketed!
I shared this in my affiliateonlinemoneymaker.blogspot.com old blog that I had back in 2007.
[Reply]
Thanks, as usual, Anton. Yeah, the CJ products I aim for made me about $350 the first month, this month so far about $225, both times from 2 sales – but it’s a high-ticket item, I’ll gladly take the sale!
In any event, what are you using again for KW research – the EVOII? I’d LOVE to get it, just don’t have that in the budget just yet. If/When I get it, def giving you the commish, no problem with that.
I don’t think their price is unreasonable, just not able to do it yet.
In any event, I also wanted to ask you, you’ve mentioned higher compete words – what do you use to measure competition?
I strictly use Micro Niche Finder, as it has served me very nicely thus far. How do you define the strength of competition, and how do you know what it will take to make it work?
Thanks for taking the time.
[Reply]
Hi James!
In fact, I’m not using EVO II keyword tool, now just turned it on to play with it.
I try to use brainstorming method for keywords, and choose the keywords that might result in good conversion rates. Of course if I’m promoting a specific health brands, I might target brand terms, “what the product is” keywords with a buying indicators. Say, if I’m promoting Bowtrol, I’d target Bowtrol, bowtrol review, discount bowtrol, buy bowtrol, colon cleansing pills, best colon cleanser, natural colon cleanser, colon cleansing supplements comparison etc…
All these keywords will bring in sales. I’ve tested this in my old sites in 2007 and it still makes money. This is another reason why I like authority sites more than snipers. They tend to convert better. People see there’s content and the site is devoted to the theme, so they trust it more. I see more conversions from pages that compare 2-5 products, than from actual product review pages. This is what made me all these money in Feb. My comparison pages went up in SERPs and conversions came in!
As for competition, I also use MNF for this. But I also like to see the actual top 10 with Firexof plugins like SEO Quake or Aaron Wall’s SEO Book plugin (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) Both are free. This tell me a lot about the competition nature.
Like, the keywords is good if I see:
- deep internal pages from high pr trusted sites (amazon.com, etc. ), like amazon.com/../…/page.html – this is good.
- PR 0 – PR 3 sites with several hundreds of backlinks (under 1000 or even 500 links in Yahoo)
- web 2 properties or article sites rankings. (blogspot.com blogs, ezinearticles with 0 backlinks to article page, buzzle.com, articlesnatch or other top article directories, hubpages, squidoo lenses, linkedin profiles, bebo, ning or tumblr profiles without heavy backlinking)
- sniper sites on wordpress with exact kw in domain and org or net extensions)
- yahoo answers
- ehow articles
- 43things posts
- wikihow articles
- competition in quotes – really interesting but I find this sometimes doesn’t matter really. I got empty blogs ranked with over 200000 in quotes competition and couldn’t get to top 20 with under 50000 in quotes phrases sometimes.
- domain age, but google loves to rank fresh content as well
What I always do is analyse top 10 backlinking strategies. Plugins help with this really – just click at Y! Links and se how many backlinks the sites get. Where links come from, it’s PR.
backlinkwatch.com, Traffic Travis free edition is good for that.
Top 10 backlinking strategy interests me more than low competition indicators. I see if I can grab links where these top boys grabbed them, do they use articles, blog comments, profile links on high pr sites? Can I do the same?
Sometimes it just takes 2-3 months to build 1000-1500 backlinks but once I hit top 10 – wow! The sales will come every day. Btw for my main money making site – I’m not even close to top 10 for my main keywords, but I see sales every day, just keep adding backlinks and content.
EVO II – I wouldn’t recommend it now anymore, I see lot of EVO II satellites banned, and I cannot lift my low competition sites yet with this soft. ROI is just not positive. Full automation seems not a good thing. I’m considering a lot more flexible & powerful SENuke now. 127$ per month but I’ ve read a lot of positive stuff on their internal forum – people seem to get good rankings with that soft.
[Reply]
Here’s a foolish question I don’t want to ask anywhere else – what the heck is the diff between a “sniper” and an “authority” site?
I am using the XFactor style of AdSense sites, on WP, but seriously would like to do more.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for taking the time.
[Reply]
Hi James!
sniper is a site that targets specific keyword, has the keyword in domain name and typically it’s a thin site without many content. Authority site is more targeted towards a niche or a sub-niche, good example is Mark Ling’s site http://www.wowblackbook.com – main topic is WoW guides and world of warkraft strategies. There’s no specific keyword in domain name, and the site is reviewing different products within 1 niche – world of warkraft.
bowtrolwarning.org is a typical sniper – targets a keyword “bowtrol” and builds content around this term mostly . Snipers are typically build to achieve top rankings faster and more easy, however they are limited comparing to the authority sites.
Hope this helps
I know many people are having success with sniper sites, but for me personally authority tends to convert better
[Reply]
Makes sense that you do your traffic generation in that way, then – the funnel system, so to speak.
I can’t recall if I asked you – do you use SENuke at all? Doesn’t that do the same thing as your traffic generating process?
[Reply]