BLOG INCOME

$62.00

PAID ADVERTISING INCOME

REVENUE: $1,664.78

COST: $1,489.65

P/L: +$175.13

TOTAL

$237.13





Six Month Recap

Wow, it’s already been six months I’ve been in this full-time. Time has really flown by but I definitely have learned a lot. At the start of my journey I had NO idea about paid affiliate marketing. I somewhat understood the concept but had a mountain-load to learn if I wanted to make this a full-time career. There were some significant turning points in my career which I’ve written about in the AffPlaybook Forum. I’ll highlight them below for those that don’t have member ship yet.

1) Making my first conversion, (Achieved in 19 days – Best.Feeling.EVER).

2) Almost doubling my income when I learned how to split test landing pages.

3) Almost doubling my income again by finding good quality traffic sources to duplicate too.

4) For PPV, Realizing that even if targets are not related to your offer but consist of an interested demographic, they can still convert very well

5) Affplaybook Masterclasses. (Learned 12 EXACT strategies to make money via online methods)

6) Realizing that the guys that make big money in this just work on building more and more campaigns.

I’m sure there’s more I could have added to that list but I’ll leave it at that. There definitely are some secrets to make things work in affiliate marketing but the REAL secret is that these can only be learned through experience and experience can only be gained by action! The more you do, the more you learn and in time you’ll realize what makes money and what doesn’t. Of course advice from guys from AffPlaybook also helped me in this but it really only clicked for me once I tried it and could see practically, what little tweak unlocked the mystery to gaming a specific traffic source.

Depressing first week

The first week of December I was three weeks into my holiday in India. Leading up to this week, I just had my eyes operated, (laser eye surgery), and was spending almost zero hours on the computer or mobile. At around this exact time my main traffic source, (50OnRed) started to ‘dry out’ BIG TIME and my winning campaign that used to give me a good $200+ in revenue a day was giving me $40 days. I didn’t update my stats for a while so couldn’t see clearly how much money I was losing but once I did, I paused everything right away. Two months ago I thought all you had to do in this industry was find a profitable campaign and the only reason this passive income will go away is if the offer gets pulled/merchant decides to discontinue their affiliate program or something along those lines. That week I learned a very important lesson. The importance of DIVERSIFICATION.

I didn’t lose the full campaign though. I’m yet to learn what exactly can be done when your offers stop becoming profitable on your traffic sources. I’ve reactivated as of last week but this time, I’ve reduced my bids on the URLs that are still some-what converting. There were some URL’s I was bidding $0.60 per impression! These used to convert real well so it was worth it. Now, not so much so I paused them. I’ve dropped from making $100+ a day to about $10-$30 a day which is a big drop but I’m grateful to be able to at least get something. I’ve heard you can reactivate your targets after a while of pausing them and sometimes your campaigns start performing again. I’ll see if this is true and report back sometime this month.

Affplaybook Master Classes

This was my first set of masterclasses with the Affplaybook group I’ve attended. I must say, it was DEFINITELY worth it. I’ve actually decided to scrap almost everything I was doing before and concentrate SOLELY on the strategies shown here as they were current, easy to do/test and had huge potential. Thanks to this I was able to get back into profits after almost scrapping my winning PPV campaign. There were two strategies I am going to focus on mainly.

Google PPC: Selling Physical Products from networks such as Shareasale, Commission Junction. I’ve figured out how to get huge CTR’s on my ads which consequently have given me clicks as low as 2-8 cents! That sounds crazy but it’s true. I’m spending about $15 a day at the moment for about 250 clicks which is spread across 3-5 merchants. I set all this up in India while just testing things and ended up hitting profit almost straight away. I definitely see some potential in this and hopefully get 1k/day profit just with this.

Pop Shops: Long term strategies have always been important to me. When on holidays I want to be able to enjoy myself and not worry about hitting negative days. For this to become a reality I need to spend time on building websites that give me income without me having to spend on advertising. I’m planning on learning how to make niche sites and pump out 50-100 pop shops this year. Again, aiming for 1k/day just fro these.

The Importance of Diversification

Pretty much 90% of my revenue was made up of the one offer for the last 4-5 months. Because of this, I became complacent and just set myself up for disappointment. After almost totally losing this campaign I started diversifying to other traffic sources and other types of offers, (physical products). Now I’m not as worried that my offer will be pulled or I’ll get kicked of a traffic source, (not that I’m doing anything shady). I just feel more relaxed and have set a side some time during the week to learn NEW traffic sources and generally try new things. It’s important to specialize in something but it’s also important to have a bit of all-round knowledge so you can spot more opportunities to expand your business.

Working Over Seas

An important realization for me this month was that working overseas is very much possible with this industry. The flexibility and lifestyle opportunity with affiliate marketing was one of the most appealing aspect for me. It was good to experience how it could be if I decided to continue working and travelling. I lived in India & Malaysia for the 5-6 weeks. Internet was relatively cheap when compared to us Aussies.

I think I could get away paying about $20-$40 a month for 4G internet. Not to mention how cheap food & transport was! Once I get a bit more stable with this stuff, particularly with my organic side of the business, I might seriously consider overseas living! There’s just so much more human experience in these countries and personally I felt them to be more lively when compared to Australia. I do love Australia though and am grateful for what it has provided me with but paying almost $15 for a decent meal, $1.70 per liter for petrol and closed shops after 5pm on most days sucks when compared to the countries I just visited!

Campaign Building for Record Revenue

The month of December is where I think I learned one of my most valuable lessons about affiliate marketing. To achieve $1000 days all I need to do is KEEP BUILDING CAMPAIGNS. I have named 2014, the year of The G.R.I.N.D. I’ve spent 5 months of last year experimenting and I think I’ve got a good feel of what works/doesn’t work in this industry. It’s time to just trim the fat and just keep replicating the process that’s working for me. I’m hoping to just pump out campaign after campaign until I hit $10,000 a day profit by the end of this year. Yes, that’s a BIG goal but I know with hard work, it can be achieved! I’ve heard some of the senior guys mention a few times now that the only secret to hitting big numbers is to just keep building more campaigns.

Non Recorded Revenue

My daily stats only include the revenue I get from direct advertising for that day. I decided not to include the revenue I get from bonuses or affiliate referral links that I haven’t paid to advertise. Affplaybook for example. I’ve got a few sales from this website and currently am fetching about $100/month from just Affplaybook.

The $1,000 bonus came in from MaxBounty as well which I haven’t added to the income total.I think I’ll continue to do this for now or it’ll just get too confusing. Maybe I’ll add another page once I start getting passive income from my organic businesses like this website and future ‘pop shops’. What do you guys think?

All up I think I’ve made $1200 more, so if you were to add that to the total I’d be $3,500 in green. Not bad for my first six months of paid affiliate marketing!

Achievements

✓ Broke into Google PPC for physical Products

✓ understood that the way to make this a long term business is to diversify and just build campaigns

✓ Starting to figure out how to expand winning Google PPC campaigns

Conclusion

Most of December was pretty slow. I only did about 2-4 solid days of work as most of my time was spent travelling and resting from my operation. Although I seemed to have gone back a bit with my earnings, I learned a lot from the AffPlaybook masterclasses and am confident with my strategy moving forward.

– Keep building on my PPV & Google PPC Campaigns

– Post 2 articles a week on AffEngineer.com

– Bust out 50-100 pop shops for some serious organic earning for the second half of this year!

Let’s see how I go 🙂

Wish ya’ll a prosperous and healthy 2014!

Ciao