Pursuit of Profit

All I think about is my affiliate campaign. I check Clickbank constantly to see if I have made anymore sales, then cross reference that with my adwords account to make sure my budget is not getting away from me. The past week and a bit have seen a whirlwind of activity, here is a short list of a few things that have taken place since June 5th.

June 5th Site and landing page are completed traffic starts to flow in from adwords, no sales.

June 6th I got my first sale, now I know my conversion tracking and systems are working.

June 7-10 Sales are increasing, but I am still losing about $70 a day.

June 11-13 Adwords stop running because I have hit my limit on my credit card, time to move some money around.

June 14-15 Sales are still climbing, but my losses are staying the same. Which means this campaign is getting closer to becoming profitable.

June 16 My credit card has hit its limit once again, and my ads are down. I have just called to get an increase on my credit card limit. Also my first pay period in clickbank has come to an end, which means I will be getting my first check in the mail pretty soon!

Every penny I have is on the line on this campaign, I just hope it becomes profitable sooner than later!

Setting up an affiliate landing page is a lot of work! I once had the impression you just host a pre made site, slap some tracking on it, start sending ppc traffic to it and watch the money pile up. This is probably why I’ve had mixed results with ppc advertising in the past.

There was a time a few years ago that this way of marketing could net you a couple hundred dollars a day. This is when I launched my first affiliate marketing for a peer to peer music downloading program, and without much tweaking I was in the profit zone. I made sales of between $50 -$100 a day and a profit that would go from $10-$50 a day depending on conversion rates.

I tried promoting with this old school style more recently, and basically it just doesn’t work! Nowadays you need relevant content, you need a catchy landing page and you need golden keywords that have low bids. This doesn’t sound very easy, and I am 2 years removed from the game, so this affiliate site I’m making could be a very expensive learning experience if I’m not careful!

I just put up two new ad units for Neverblue Advertising on the right sidebar. I get the majority my CPA (cost per action) campaigns through them. In the next few weeks I will start tracking a few campaigns that I will be advertising for them. So if you want to follow along and create a similar campaign feel free to sign up and get access to their massive inventory of high paying campaigns.

There is some ambiguity in my previous post about how I plan to achieve my goal of $10k a month. First let’s get two things straight!

1. I don’t plan on making my income solely from this blog!
2. I don’t plan on relying on google’s adsense for my income!

Okay now that I’ve said that let’s move on.

Question: How do I plan on making the money?

Answer: I plan on creating multiple streams of income. Okay, that’s probably not the clear concise answer you are looking for. But that’s not what this journey is about. It is about testing and trying new things, and seeing which ones work. The ones that have potential I am going to invest more time and money into to, in hopes of creating highly profitable revenue streams.

Question: Any hints at what kind of systems I am going to try?

Answer: I do plan on focusing on increasing my traffic and backlinks at the beginning of this journey because those are crucial to readership. I also want to give domaining a shot; I have no experience in it so it is very interesting to me. I’ll give arbitrage a go as well as affiliate marketing.

However, I have not ruled out anyway of making money online yet (except things that fall outside my morals). I may even sell on ebay to complete my mission, who knows?

But now that I do have about $10 I am thinking of investing it in a domain name. That way I will be in control of all my content, and the site will actually be mine as opposed to google owning it through blogger. What do you guys think about using this month’s money towards a domain name? Also any suggestions on a domain name?

Now that I got my first goal complete, I’ve gotta start thinking about how I can double the money I made. Time to find a new revenue stream! Should I do some PPC ads for the blog to increase readership? Should I focus on publicity or building a different revenue stream all together like an affiliate campaign advertised on google adwords?

In keeping with yesterday’s momentum, this blog got it’s adsense clicked a bit more and bumped me up to a 2 day whooping total of $4.28. I don’t think I should get too excited and declare this a huge victory yet! There are still 11 months ahead of me with each one increasing by 100%.

I knew the first month would be pretty easy to take care of, but I didn’t think I would almost be there in the first 36 hours. You are the ones who helped me making it to my first mini milestone, thanks!

I’m by no means a super elite web baller by any means, and anyone without experience can do what I am doing. To see this check out my google adsense check from the last 4 months. It’s $109.48 if you can’t read the amount, that’s just over $25 a month (and thats between 4 sites). So basically for the past 2 days of starting this blog and employing adsense and common sense I am already on track to beat my average of $25 a month by more than double. I thought a Shoemoneyesque adsense photo was appropriate.

I have put adsense up and talked about complimentary colors in ads, which I submitted to Digg (the king of social news sites, please Digg me!). Since doing this I went in and checked my Adsense account, I’ve made a whopping $0.67 (edit: scratch that I just checked and I’m up to $1.91 well I think I am going to get to the first goal of $5)! Just wanted to keep you posted on this journey.

Plus I have found another similar blog called the 31 day challenge, where a girl from London is putting herself to the test and trying to make as much money as possible in 31 days. Stop by and wish her luck.

One of the easiest things you can impliment on a site to make money online is Google Adsense. Basically what it does, once installed, is read the content of your pages and display relevent ads to your traffic.

Installing and displaying the ads is the easy part, but getting your traffic to click your ads is an art form. I’ve found from trial and error that complimentary colors work best for attracting attention and increasing your CTR (click through rate). When I switched from a blended ad layout to a complimentary layout my CTR increased from 3.5% to 5.8%, thats a 60% increase! They don’t blend right in to the background and they don’t look awkward.

My way to achieve a complimentary set of colors is by using a color wheel and colorzilla.

• I first select the background color with the colorzilla firefox extention and set it as the background color in my adsense.

• Next I find the main link color on the site, and open it in a color wheel
• When I have this opened I leave the main gradient of the color and change the hue to an opposite color (ie if it’s blue go red or yellow)

After I have the title and background set I just pick the main text color and use it as my ad text color
For the link I set it as a light grey on a dark background, and a dark grey if the background is light.

As you can see I have added a complimentary adsense banner in the top right corner of my blog using this technique. Another CTR booster is placing your ads high up on your site so your visitors do not have to scroll down to see them.

Hopefully this tip helps you out! Also if you don’t have adsense yet on your site you can sign up here. Let me know how this works for you.

Here’s the deal, this blog will track my progress on making money online and go in depth on what’s working and what isn’t.

So at the end of April I’ll need to make $5 and double that each month for a whole year. The only money I can use is the money from the previous months. Here’s the break down:

1. April $5
2. May $10
3. June $20
4. July $40
5. August $80
6. September $160
7. October $320
8. November $640 (this is where it starts to get interesting!)
9. December $1280
10. January $2560 (from here on is going to take wise investing as well as action)
11. February $5120
12. March $10240

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need a lot of it!