I was reading a post on Digitalpoint forums where someone who was trying to make money online with AdSense as they had lost their job!
There’s loads of ways to make money online, personally I wouldn’t start with the Google AdSense program if I didn’t have a source of income already (AKA a paid job).
Making money with AdSense is not a make money fast option unless you already own a popular website with no advertising. With websites it’s NOT a case of make it and they will come, takes a lot of time and effort to generate a lot of traffic to a website, sometimes years.
Make Money with AdSense
I’ve been doing what this person is trying to do for years (make money online) and I have Google banned sites making more money than what he reported: $2 a day from AdSense which you can’t live on in most countries (maybe in India and similar growing economies?).
Some of my Google banned sites have made more AdSense revenue than the person relying on AdSense as an income reported because they have a LOT of pages: they are Google penalized (not really banned as they are still indexed in Google) because the content is thin affiliate content and Google hates thin affiliate sites (meaning you use the affiliates content with nothing unique), Google will spider/index them but send very little SEO traffic to them.
I’ve also had websites with quite a lot of unique content that are under a year old and they don’t make a dollar a day from AdSense, not had the time to build links so the off site SEO element to Google ranking is missing.
The unique content tends to do well long term though, so anyone with a reasonable sized site with unique content should hold in there, as long as you work on the backlinks over time and don’t do anything stupid your site will gain traffic long term.
With websites and AdSense it’s not a case of you’ll be making a enough money to live off overnight, at least not from organic search engine traffic (there are other ways to generate traffic faster than Google).
How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
It’s difficult to make a living from AdSense/affiliate type money, I own ~130 domains many built to make money from AdSense and I could barely live on what I make from AdSense alone, looks like I’m making over $50 a day this month (far from my best month).
When you consider that’s from 130 domains it’s not a lot of money, admittedly some don’t have AdSense on them, others are SEO test sites and are Google banned/penalized, others I’ve not developed so it’s not 130 actively developed sites, a handful make most of the AdSense revenue: actually in the process of consolidating several sites into one site (this one) as it’s easier to SEO one site than dozens.
Even with a lot of organic search engine traffic making money from AdSense and affiliate sales is not as lucrative as selling your own products/services.
I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Amazon products, but for every $100 I made Amazon I only made around $6!
I only made around $35,000 from selling over $400,000 worth of Amazon products!!!
Interestingly I tended to make a similar amount from AdSense as well (would put AdSense on the Amazon affiliate stores) so I was making around 10-12% of the products value sold.
If I wanted to earn a living from selling Amazon products I’d have to sell over 1/2 million dollars worth every year! Until Google began penalizing thin affiliates I would have been able to get to that amount of sales, (quite easily actually) but now I can barely make $100 a quarter from Amazon!
I’m not saying you can’t make enough money from affiliate/AdSense type income to live comfortably, but it’s not easy any more.
Make Money with Free Google Traffic
It wasn’t easy to get to tens of thousands of free search engine visitors my network receives (used to get up to 50K due to thin affiliate content in 2005-2006) and I have excellent SEO skills, OK PHP skills, very good HTML/CSS skills, OK design skills, OK writing ability, excellent people skills: I get on with clients/customers: they are always right…
I took several year off doing any serious online site building other than my SEO business, my AdSense income halved, took months to build it back up. Actually because of my health problems I’ve probably only worked half the time I could over the past decade!
Anyway, if you work it out $50 from AdSense a day from tens of thousands of visitors isn’t a lot per visitor!
Admittedly some of my traffic is rubbish for making money (classic literature for example, about 8,000 visitors a day) since my first websites was built not for making money from them directly.
If you planned your sites content better you could make the same revenue as I make on far less traffic, still even if you can double my money made per visitor your going to need to pull in 10K visitors a day to make $100 a day from AdSense and that’s not easy!
Google SEO Rankings
For example the niche this site is in is not an easy niche to generate high traffic to, I’m pulling all my SEO and make money articles from other sites to here so I can concentrate the SEO better. I was checking my Google analytics account earlier and noticed I was getting several thousand search engine impressions for the one word keyword AdSense.
Checked Google and found I wasn’t ranked in the top 30 for that keyword (AdSense is going to be HARD). After scratching my head for 5 minutes remembered to check Google.co.uk :-) This site is ranked number 10 in Google.co.uk for the AdSense SERP, so when anyone searches for AdSense in the UK I get a search impression.
AdSense UK
That’s a very impressive SERP for an article I added here one month tomorrow (added it on the 9th March 2014, it’s April 8th 2014 now). Does show you the power of the SEO theme I develop (used on this site).
Guess how many visitors it’s resulted in?
4 visitors in a month!
Now it’s a new SERP (few days, so it’s really 4 visitors for a few days), below is a month worth of Google Webmaster Tools traffic data for the page ranked number 10 for AdSense, since analytics tends to be a few days out of date it’s March 6th to April 6th, so looks like 2 days at best into the top 10.
Google SEO Traffic
The reason for this is very few Google search engine users look past the first few results. You want traffic from Google it’s top 3 to be in the money and that can be hard for competitive SERPs like AdSense.
I wasn’t targeting the AdSense SERP, that page is about not cheating the AdSense program so a pleasant surprise to see just how awesome the Stallion Responsive theme is :-)
Given time the page might go higher for this competitive one word SERP, but look at what’s above me, 6 of the results are owned by Google, 1 is Wikipedia. So that’s 7 results I don’t think I’ll ever pass, there’s two pages I might be able to beat, so my best result is number 8.
That’s the sort of mine’s bigger than yours SEO SERP, pure vanity or hire me as an SEO expert SERP, because the traffic is going to be non-existent :-(
The sort of SERPs I’m targeting for this site is WordPress SEO Theme (trying to sell an SEO theme after all) and unfortunately it’s relatively low traffic SERPs: a few hundreds searches a month. If I’m going to get 4 visitors from the top 10 AdSense SERP from thousands of impressions I’m going to need to be number one in Google to make the WordPress SEO Theme SERP pay: currently ranked 5th in Google.com.
Even the WordPress SEO Plugin SERP (currently ranked 9th) doesn’t have a great deal of traffic, under 4,000 searches a month. Going to be difficult to compete with the top 2 in that SERP. The Yoast WordPress SEO plugins page at the WordPress repository (number 1) and Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin page which carries a lot of off site SEO value (lots of backlinks). SEOPressor will be difficult (PR6), but the on page SEO is rubbish, so should be beatable given time.
It’s a lot of work to generate organic Google traffic to this niche and I know what I’m doing.
Other Ways To Make Money From Affiliate Products
Because of the low amount you make from AdSense/affiliate product sales you can’t pay for your traffic from AdWords for example, so your limited to free traffic sources like Google organic search.
So unless you think you can get to 10K visitors a day trying to make a living from AdSense/affiliate based income isn’t going to be easy. I would say for the vast majority of people you could use this sort of money to supplement your main income: that’s what I do, though I do this sort of stuff more for fun than money since I could make more money selling another product/service (I find this an interesting challenge).
How I Make Money Online
Before I got into SEO I sold lingerie and sex toys online, I have no interest in these products before you ask, I needed a business that was online because I’m disabled (had to drop out of University in the final year on medical grounds: I studying genetics with a view to working in HIV/AIDs research) and through research found adult products have a GREAT markup.
Black Hat SEO Techniques Gamble with your Websites Future
After learning the basics of SEO (learnt on the job so to speak) I took a new site adultlingerieuk.com (now an affiliate store) from zero visitors to around 8,000 visitors a day, but used black hat SEO techniques (comment SPAMMING, got the home page to PR8) that eventually got the site Google penalized. Still in the year or so it did well I sold over £80,000 in stock and the profit for that year (which was all mine) was just under £25K (~$50,000).
Since most businesses make a loss in the first two years and at the time I had less than £1,000 to spend on setting up a business (actually spent about £300 to set the business up) that was really good.
Had I not used black hat techniques I’d have made less money in that time, but the site would still be working for me today and would almost certainly be making more than £80K is sales a year by now (the site sells nothing now).
Based on how I’ve helped similar online businesses with white hat SEO techniques if I had to guess how that site would be doing today I’d say if it was running well it would make me around £120K a year (profit) which is more than I make right now.
With all this in mind IF I didn’t own a network of sites or I was starting from scratch (like I did 10+ years ago) I would not go into affiliate/AdSense type sites to make a living. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use AdSense/affiliate products, but like now they wouldn’t be my main focus because you can make far more selling your own products/services online than you can make from AdSense/affiliate sales.
Think about it, AdSense/affiliate sales you make a small percentage of the revenue the affiliate and Google AdWords makes. With most affiliate type programs your lucky to make over 10%, which means to make an OK living you need to sell $500,000 of other peoples products/services! And to have a good living you need to sell $1,000,000 worth of other peoples products/services.
There’s not many people who can sell a cool million dollars worth of stuff every year!
And that’s just to have a good living, not a GREAT living.
On the other hand if you sell your own service/product you can potentially make 90%+ of the money you make (all depends on what you sell). This means you don’t have to make anywhere near as many sales as with affiliate products. And with how Google has changed over the years it’s far easier to sell your own products/services than it is to sell affiliate products/services.
Only problem then is what service/product to sell :)
Will add there is an exception to the affiliate ‘rule’, if the affiliate product has a very high affiliate revenue share you can make a lot of money. Clickbank for example sells products with revenue shares as high as 75%, if you can find quality Clickbank products to promote there’s money to be made on far less traffic than I’ve discussed above.
Affiliate Earnings
In early 2014 decided to reduce the number of SEO and make money online websites I develop/promote (easier to SEO one domain relative to half a dozen plus) and started moving content to this website (as I edit this June 2014) almost at 200 articles (plus 3,000 comments) on this website, probably 150 of the articles (and the majority of the comments) are from other websites of mine: moved the content here and updated it (months of work!).
Still early days SEO ranking wise (started developing this website February 2014: not even had a PR update yet, still PR0 home page), yet seeing some nice top 10 SERPs, so combining my SEO/make money online websites into one is working.
One of my websites (45 Year Old Millionaire) was pretty much just for tracking my affiliate revenue. Rather than add over 30 articles to this site detailing my affiliate earnings month by month, instead added the revenue reports as comments: about 30 of the comments are revenue reports, makes for an interesting read looking back as added my thoughts to the affiliate revenue reports at the time, so not just dry numbers of how much cash I made.
Good Luck making money online…
David Law
Website - SEO Gold Coast
I don’t normally bother to track affiliate based revenue regularly, but think it will be interesting and inspirational to track it from now on, month by month to see how my millionaire plans are progressing.
This does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for June 2008
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,203.32 ($40.11 a day)
ClickBank : $363.83 ($12.13 a day)
Amazon : $98.25 ($3.28 a day)
Private Ads** : $402.72 ($13.42 a day)
June Affiliate Revenue = $2,068.12 ($68.94 a day)
Extrapolation = $25,162.13 a year
Hmm, thought AdSense was going to break $50 a day on average last month.
ClickBank revenue is up, Amazon revenue down.
If I save every penny will only take 40 years to break one million dollars :)
** Few months back found a great way to sell ads that I’m not giving info on, have to keep this one secret as already doubled June Private Ads income for July and it’s only the 6th of July!
David Law
Had a good month, most important revenue forms have increased resulting in making 59% more affiliate revenue in July compared to June, that’s $1,228.18 increase (very nice!).
Amazing what a little inspiration can do :)
This does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for July 2008
June 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,635.86 ($52.77 a day) $1,203.32 ($40.11 a day)
ClickBank : $628.68 ($20.28 a day) $363.83 ($12.13 a day)
Amazon : $46.73 ($1.50 a day) $98.25 ($3.28 a day)
Private Ads : $957.08 ($30.87 a day) $402.72 ($13.42 a day)
Trying new revenue sources.
Commission Junction (CJ) : £9.85
Kontera : $0.63
Chitika : $8.32
July Affiliate Revenue = $3,296.3 ($106.33 a day) $2,068.12 ($68.94 a day)
Extrapolation = $38,811.27 a year $25,162.13 a year
If I save every penny will only take 26 years to break one million dollars from affiliate type revenue only :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 61 days) : $87.94 a day, at this rate will take just over 31 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire Winter 2039 when I’m 69 years old.
AdSense revenue broke the $50 a day average again at last, (at one point was making over $100 a day) last few days of July I had some $70 days so hoping this continues through August and eventually get back to the $100 a day mark.
Private ads has increased significantly. Had a couple of decent sales that has increased the monthly revenue. Starting this month at just over $1,000 so as long as I don’t loose any of the private sales it looks like there’s the potential to increase revenue by an extra $400-$500 a month: so might start at $1400 next month and so on until it peaks when I run out of places to ad private ads.
Amazon fell again, the affiliate percentage is so low I’m not promoting my Amazon affiliate pages any more (will let them die a slow death :)).
New Affiliate Programs etc…
Of the new revenue programs I’m trying here’s the details.
Commission Junction (CJ) – I started with a one page review (with a “this product is great, but could be improved” approach: I’ve had good results with this method), this reviewed a couple of related products from the same company that someone on DigitalPoint forum said they had got a really good performance through.
A couple of days later had my first affiliate order which made me £9.85 and thought cool, one page at ~£5 a day if this was the start of something (wasn’t BTW, that’s the only sale so far, typical!).
Also decided to try banner type ads with other CJ products on my recipe site which sees over 6,000+ unique visitors a day. Found half a dozen products (dieting for example) that had relevance to a recipe site and added some of the ads above the fold.
Believe it or not after 290,504 impressions I have had a massive ZERO orders through those banner type ad links!! I ran the ads for 2-3 weeks (removed now) and each ad records it’s own impressions: so one ad = one impression and 3 ads on one page = 3 impressions recorded. I added ~3 ads on each page so the 290K impressions is a result of ~100,000 page views.
Those impressions resulted in 147 clicks, with the one sale (not even from the recipe site, was the one £9.85 sale from the review page on another site).
I know banner ads are the past, but this is ridiculous, not a single sale from around 90,000 unique visitors
Not saying CJ products are rubbish, but my limited experience so far isn’t very encouraging. The irritating thing is CJ gives stats about the performance of each ad type and some of the ad units I ran where meant to be high performers (total BS in my experience).
Kontera – Had major problems getting this working, was supposed to get some sort of tag for each site and never got one. Eventually realised their WordPress plugin version worked without the tag, so got it working on my recipe site. No idea if I can run ads on other sites though.
I ran Kontera alongside AdSense for roughly 3 days. Impressions was around 10,300 for those days (not sure why it was that low, should have been 15K+). To cut a short story even shorter the CTR was appalling (0.3%) and the cost per click was lower than AdSense (6 cents). Worse still AdSense CTR dropped by around 2% and so overall was loosing money: my guess is all those text type links that you hover over distracted visitors from the blended AdSense ads, result lower CTR on AdSense.
I realise this wasn’t a fair test, should have ran the ads longer, but 63 cents from 10,000 impressions is low and less than what I lost from AdSense for those days. I’m out to make money not loose it.
Chitika – Chitika can be compared almost directly to AdSense since they have similar ad unit concepts. AdSense wise my recipe site has a CTR of around 6%, but only makes 7 cents a click! so would have been great to find another ad product that had as good CTR as AdSense, but the amount per click was higher.
From over 100,000 impressions CTR was just 0.09% making $8.32 at 8 cents a click.
Currently not running these new program seriously, will probably test them on a smaller scale on sites with less traffic and over a longer period of time to see if I can learn anything about these programs so they can compete with AdSense revenue.
Traffic wise (money made per visitor) the best performing program is Clickbank by far, the majority of the $600+ from Clickbank this month is due to a handful of pages on one site.
I plan to put more time into Clickbank, see if I can’t get Clickbank revenue competing with AdSense.
David Law
Excellent Post my friend.
Dave, again well written post on how to make money online. I would agree with most, if not all of what you say. However, the sites that make the big money from google adsense are often “user generated content” interactive sites, I think.
The users create the unique content. For example, free dating sites that take off, often rise to the top of Alexa (for what its worth) because once you get a user to sign up, they come back everyday for years sometimes. But most do not get the critical number of users. But if they do you get sites like plentyoffish or nasza klasa (the Polish Facebook).
These sites are the sites that really take off and generate income from adsense. Otherwise you will have to work hard and build content and make a pittance like Bob Cratchit for Scooge like affilates.
Selling your own product on the other hand is a good idea. Do what you love. But, also I would be curious if anyone has a detailed analysis of profitability, of various niches and sectors for online product sales not from affiliates.
ps you referred to clickbank in your other posts on how to make money, and your revenue reports and this type of affiliate revenue is often 50% not 10%. You could focus on a few good products that pay high here. Or you could create your own product and have others sell it for you.
Hi Mark,
I have to admit to have completely missed the boat on user generated content, I keep starting forums for various sites, but never get around to finishing them. Always a case of not quite finishing the template system (SEOing the forum script), and if it’s not perfect it doesn’t go live, so never quite gets done.
Another thing I’ve completely missed is mailing lists, you can make a small fortune through a list, you get people to join and they tend to stay for years as long as you don’t only send them SPAM ads :) With my 20K visitors a day it would be easy for me to build a list, I MUST do it one day!
Your right about Clickbank, I’ve tried marketing about half a dozen Clickbank products and only ones in one niche have sold well, 90% of my Clickbank revenue comes from one product right now.
My eldest son (who tried Clickbank before me) markets the same niche and also makes a small amount from this one product.
I know there’s a lot of Clickbank products and the revenue share is fair, but so far I’ve not found a way to sell Clickbank products that works for multiple Clickbank products. The success in one niche is due to reviewing the product I used (for real, I bought it to use), it’s not really possible to accurately review dozens of products that way.
I can save a lot of you some serious time, don’t eve waste your time just linking to Clickbank products, doesn’t work. One of my sites receives over 7,000 visitors a day and for about 6 weeks has had a set of links on the menu (site wide) to relevant Clickbank products, had 2 sales!!!! Two sales from all that traffic is pathetic, so you have to give your visitors a good reason to buy.
I think the problem is the SPAMMY way Clickbank product pages are made, the big bold text on the single squeeze page with a few well written testimonials of how this product changes the world. For a online shopper like myself it throws up big red flags, I wish they’d use normal product type sales pages :(
The sad thing is some of the products are very good, like I said I’ve bought some Clickbank products for personal use, but all have been thoroughly researched before buying (those sales pages put me off!).
David Law
Another good month, again important revenue forms have again increased resulting in making $10 more a day from affiliate revenue in August compared to July!.
Would have been more, but the last week of July I had serious server problems that cost quite a bit of AdSense revenue and other revenue! It appears one of my sites had a jump in traffic and this resulted in MYSQL issues, server kept hanging. Just rented a second dedicated server, so hopefully that will solve the problem.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for August 2008
July 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,921.74 ($61.99 a day) $1,635.86 ($52.77 a day)
ClickBank : $486.15 ($15.68 a day) $628.68 ($20.28 a day)
Amazon : $75.92 ($2.44 a day) $46.73 ($1.50 a day)
Private Ads : $1086.04 ($35.03 a day) $957.08 ($30.87 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Commission Junction (CJ) : £0.00 (£9.85)
Kontera : $0.00 ($0.63)
Chitika : $5.62 ($8.32)
Shareasale : $10.00 (forgot to add it to the calculations below, doh!)
August Affiliate Revenue = $3,575.47 ($115.34 a day) $3,296.3 ($106.33 a day)
Extrapolation = $42,098 a year $38,811.27 a year
If I save every penny will only take 24 years to break one million dollars from affiliate type revenue only :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 92 days) : $97.17 a day, $10 more a day than last month, at this rate will take just over 28 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2036 when I’m 66 years old.
Looks like I could be a millionaire when I retire, great, want it now so I can spend it :)
AdSense revenue broke the $60 a day average and the last week of August I had a $91 day and a $102 day (first time over $100 for ages). During this time I had server problems that on one day had my sites down for 8 of the most high traffic hours!
I estimate over that week I lost around 35,000 to 40,000 AdSense impressions (equivalent to 2 days offline!) I estimate a loss in AdSense revenue of at least $120 and most likely over $150 :(
I’d have also lost Clickbank sales, though that last fortnight of August my Clickbank sales took a big dive (not sure why). First two weeks made $344 from Clickbank, last 2 weeks $144, might be able to account for $60 of the loss due to the downtime, but the rest was for the unknown reason.
Bit disappointed in the Private Ads sales, was expecting a lot more, but they went a bit stagnant, maybe due to the poor economic outlook right now. At least it went up a little, so can’t complain (much :)).
New Affiliate Programs etc…
Of the new revenue programs I’m trying I am not impressed.
Commission Junction (CJ) – I gave up on them due to last months terrible performance, basically £10 in a month from all that traffic is rubbish. Currently have one review type page for one product (removed all the banner ads that never sold) and I still only have the one sale from last month.
Kontera – I never really gave this program a big try since the revenue was far less than AdSense and for decent CTR I’d have to put the ads where I have AdSense now.
Chitika – Similar to Kontera, I left an ad unit (way below the fold) on a site that gets 6K+ visitors a day and it made just under $6, so have removed the ad for September and might not try them again.
Although my Clickbank revenue is down for August it is still the best performing revenue form traffic wise (money made per visitor) by far, the majority of the $480+ from Clickbank this month is still due to a handful of pages on one site (couple of hundred visitors a day at best).
Still working towards more Clickbank products to promote, see if I can’t get Clickbank revenue competing with AdSense. Have added a couple more Clickbank products to promote (wrote reviews on them) but so far no sales.
My youngest son (aged 11yrs) has wrote a review on a How to Draw Manga Ebook, guess who had to pay for the ebook so he could review it :) I gave him a little help after he was on his second draft of his review, not bad for his first try.
He’s a gifted artist and has his own site for his art work: yes he wanted his name for the domain, expects to be famous one day, already gave him the Big Feature domain which I think is a great name for a site (not very SEO friendly, but you know these artistic types!). So far no sales, (he gets to keep all the revenue) but early days.
Middle son (age 14 years) is talking about writing reviews on Clickbank products as well for his Animal Forum site, since my eldest son (17 years old) did the first Clickbank review in the family (that’s how I learned of it’s potential) all that leaves is my wife to write Clickbank reviews, have a feeling that will never happen :)
Wish me luck for September, hoping I get more $100 AdSense days.
David Law
For once, its nice to read an honest and genuine article.
I have spent many many hours scouring the internet for ways to make and earn money online. One of the ¨CONS¨ that I have noticed, is with many so called money making plans, Get rich quick schemes, is that all the testimonials, if you cross reference them are all actually the same people endorsing other peoples systems. Just take a browse round, make a note of the names and you will see them popping up again and again and again! Seems alright if all you want to do is join a self appreciation society instead of earn any money. The whole point of the research in the first place.
Because of all these bogus webpages floating round the net, its hardly any wonder that many people are extremely skeptical about earning any real money through the internet.
It will be interesting to see how this moves forward in years to come, but I believe it will become harder to earn a real income from the net alone in the future because of all the dross out there.
I feel for websites to have credibility these days, they need to have real live people backing them, and if possible, legitimate business premises to be operating from, although I realise that this is sometimes not always possible.
Your (still searching!)
John
That’s a really good point. I took a look at a course/system called: Social Media Marketing System and wrote about it on another site of mine https://stallion-theme.co.uk/social-media-marketing-tips/ (recently updated the short article).
What pulled me into this course was the creator (Brian Campbell) had apparently given someone a big cheque for some reason (forget the details now, but it was another marketeer type person) and to get involved was free, (I never paid a penny) Brian Campbell had a paid version of his Social Media Marketing System, but wasn’t 100% necessary to buy it.
With my SEO skills and network of sites I should have been able to do really well with social networking and working with others.
The system started with signing up for Facebook and inviting everyone and their dog as a friend, (Facebook kept warning me I was asking for too many friends, I’d stop for a while as the system suggested, but the account was banned: probably had a couple of thousand friends) made a few FaceBook groups (one on AdSense and one on SEO and member wise they did OK: 1,000+ members now I think), but despite being willing to work with others nothing happened (I tried).
Basically the creator of the Social Media Marketing System was looking to pull in thousands of newbies and have some of them pay for his membership course, when people paid for the membership course it made it look like his membership course was a success since his revenue went up from people buying the membership course!!
Reality is if you don’t have a product or service of your own to offer you are going to be used by those who do have a product or service to offer. How badly you are used and what you make from it is where it gets interesting. For me with my above experience all I wasted was time, though did learn some new stuff (how to spot more scam like offers), so not that bad I suppose.
I have a BIG problem deliberately ripping people off, if someone offers a good product and only those who work hard can make the product work, fine that’s business. But offering a crap product/service knowing it’s crap just to pull in money goes against everything I believe in (I like money, but not that much)!
I’m thinking about offering my themes for sale via Clickbank, I just made a new WordPress theme that has Clickbank ads instead of AdSense ads and as far as I know there’s nothing else like this available? If there is I bet it’s not as good :-)
If I do manage to set it up as a membership site (offering all my themes for one price) I’m obviously going to benefit more from it than my affiliates, but at least it will be a good product and I’m not looking to rip anyone off. I’ve had people for years asking me to write a Clickbank product they can promote, but I tend to put my time into helping my SEO clients (they do pay me a lot of money :-)) and messing around: I only created the Clickbank theme because Google pissed me off when they banned a couple of my domains from their program :-)
I’m the first to admit I don’t take making money serious enough!
I’d have never even got into this business if it wasn’t for my back, if I had my way I’d be happily messing around with DNA in a lab now, I wanted to cure something like HIV (actually had a good idea to control secondary infections in full blown AIDS cases). Basically if it’s not an enjoyable challenge, I’m not interested.
David Law
A very good month, total affiliate type revenue for September was $4,790.33 (up over $1,000 compared to August which is awesome!). Made $159.68 a day which is ~$15 more a day from affiliate revenue in September compared to August!
After last months server problems that probably cost me $150-$200 in lost revenue, Google has penalized one of my most important sites traffic wise! My Free Recipe site by September 4th had gone from breaking over 10,000 visitors a day to dropping to under 2,000, which sucks big time!
I think I know what the problem is and have rectified the issue and put in a reinclusion request through Google Webmaster tools, but it can take weeks for Google to review a site that’s been penalized (that is if they reinstate the site).
Fortunately another revenue source (Clickbank) has increased significantly, so despite loosing a lot of AdSense income due to the loss of traffic I’ve still made more money this month than last! Not sure if this will carry through to next month though, Clickbank revenue is harder to maintain than AdSense.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for September 2008
August 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,318.96 ($43.97 a day) $1,921.74 ($61.99 a day)
ClickBank : $2,244.94 ($74.83 a day) $486.15 ($15.68 a day)
Amazon : $117.03 ($3.90 a day) $75.92 ($2.44 a day)
Private Ads : $1099.35 ($36.65 a day) $1086.04 ($35.03 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Commission Junction (CJ) : £0.00 (£0) (not promoted recently)
Kontera : $0.00 ($0.0) (not promoted recently)
Chitika : $0.07 ($5) (not promoted recently)
Shareasale : $9.98 ($10)
September Affiliate Revenue = $4,790.33 ($159.68 a day) $3,575.47 ($115.34 a day)
Extrapolation = $58,282.35 a year $42,098 a year
If I save every penny will only take 17 years to break one million dollars from affiliate type revenue only at the above monthly figure :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 122 days) : $112.54 a day, ~$15 more a day than last month, at this rate will take just over 24 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2034 when I’m 64 years old (wahoo, just before retirement age for the first time).
Had a disaster this month in the form of a site being penalized costing $600** in lost AdSense revenue, fortunately although the site was seeing 10K+ visitors a day it is in a niche (free recipes) that has a really low cost per click, so 1,000 visitors doesn’t make much money from AdSense anyway! Still I’d rather this had not happened as I was hoping to do other things with that site long term (just added a forum). Can only hope the reinclusion request works.
**Although I lost $600 relevant to last month it’s actually a lot more since in the last week of August AdSense revenue was approaching the $100 a day mark (broke $100 for the first time in ages):
Basically I’d just added 10,000 new pages to the recipe site and it was just taking affect in the SERPs at the end of the month. Taking everything into account I think rather than loosing $600 from that sites AdSense income in September it was more like $1,200-$1,500 due to the extra traffic and that sort of loss sucks :(
Still can’t complain thanks to Clickbank.
Wish me luck for October and give Google a kick to reinclude my recipe site, with it I might have made $6,000 last month from affiliate type revenue, now that would have been brilliant as at those figures would be a millionaire in 13 years (I’d be 51 years old, still time to enjoy it :)).
David Law
Another very good month, total affiliate type revenue for October was $4,885.30, which is less than $100 extra compared to September which I’m pleased with since last months increase was big (over $1,000 extra). Made $157.59 a day which despite making a little more this month is almost $2 less per day since October is 31 days and September is 30 days, so relatively speaking I made more per day in September vs October :)
Happy to report no server problems this month, but unhappy to report my Free Recipe site that by September 4th had gone from breaking over 10,000 visitors a day to dropping to under 2,000 has still not recovered despite putting in a Google reinclusion request. Either Google’s not looked at the site yet or they have and think something is wrong with it still!
Clickbank again came through for me, 2 months in a row making over $2,000 which is great. Almost completely lost some decent SERPs in the month when the latest blog link you get from DigitalPoint forum messed up my SERPs!
This latest blog link uses the anchor text of your latest blog post to link to the HOME page of the site. So I had hundreds of links pointing to the home page of one of my sites using the anchor text for an important page, since I name my pages with SEO in mind this told Google etc… the home page of the site was as/more important for this SERP than the page I’d specifically created for the SERP.
99 out of 100 times this won’t cause a problem, but guess what, yes the page the anchor text is from almost got deindexed from Google! You could only find this page through a Google site:domain.com search and when checking the money SERPs the page that used to have the SERPs was missing and the home page was listed instead, but not as high (the home page isn’t SEO’d for those SERPs, so the listing was due to the links from DigitalPoint).
After making a few changes the page eventually got it’s search engine listings back, though slightly lower than before! So lost some Google rankings there which if they don’t recover will cost me a lot of revenue long term.
Since this happened Clickbank revenue dropped a fair bit, basically I had three really good weeks recently making around $800 a week, which would result in Clickbank revenue of over $3,000 a month. Now I’m struggling to break $400 a week, (I think I’d be making $600 a week if it wasn’t for this SERPs mistake!) which though much better than say 8 weeks ago is likely to mean a drop in revenue next month (November) if I don’t recover this revenue somehow.
Nothing worse than loosing money when it was easily avoided. Just got to hope the rankings fully recover this month.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for October 2008
September 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,182.71 ($38.15 a day) $1,318.96 ($43.97 a day)
ClickBank : $2,269.66 ($73.21 a day) $2,244.94 ($74.83 a day)
Amazon : $40.53 ($1.31 a day) $117.03 ($3.90 a day)
Private Ads : $1,368.52 ($44.15 a day) $1,099.35 ($36.65 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Commission Junction (CJ) : £0.00 (£0) (not promoted recently)
Kontera : $0.00 ($0.0) (not promoted recently)
Chitika : $0.00 ($0) (not promoted recently)
Shareasale : $23.88 ($10)
Last few months not felt like putting time into these programs, AdSense and Clickbank are far more lucrative.
October Affiliate Revenue = $4,885.30 ($157.59 a day) $4,790.33 ($159.68 a day)
Extrapolation = $57,520.47 a year $58,282.35 a year
If I save every penny will only take 17 years to break one million dollars from affiliate type revenue only at the above monthly figure :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to October 31st 2008 I’ve made $18,615.52 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 152 days) : $122.47 a day, ~$10 more a day than last month, at this rate will take just over 22 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2034 when I’m 62 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal.
To meet my millionaire by 45 years old from affiliate type revenue I’m going to need to do something BIG.
David Law
Another great month, total affiliate type revenue for November was $5,802.50, which is nearly $1,000 extra compared to October which I’m ecstatic with since last 2 months increase was also big (over $1,000 extra). Hard to believe when I started tracking my affiliate based revenue on this web site I was at $2,000 a month and now I’m closing on $6,000!!!
Made $193.42 a day which at today’s exchange rate is almost £130 a day, interestingly since ALL my affiliate based revenue is paid in US dollars the weakness in the pound is benefiting me :) This is also true for my SEO business, majority of my clients are US based, so they pay in dollars, though because I price my SEO services in pound sterling it’s costing them more (lost a few clients recently, this won’t be helping)!!
Also my wife has been buying presents for Christmas so every penny helps :))
Another month free from dedicated server problems, actually had a very lazy month affiliate wise, updated a few Clickbank product pages which couldn’t have taken more than an hour or two work, other than that not done any affiliate promotion type work!
Can’t be bad, almost $6K without having to do much.
Still my Free Recipe site that by September 4th had gone from breaking over 10,000 visitors a day to dropping to under 2,000 is still not recovering. Looks like my Google reinclusion request has failed, which sucks as that would add at least $30 a day in revenue from AdSense if it fully recovered. I was happily adding new recipes when the penalty hit, I’d be at my 100K recipes by now if it wasn’t for the penalty (stopped adding recipes) and would probably be at 20K visitors a day due to the new pages. Recipes aren’t exactly high paying AdSense type pages, but with so much traffic I’d make at least $50 a day from AdSense, so it’s a big loss long term.
I love Clickbank, another great month from this affiliate provider. A product I promote was updated last month and had a lot of sales, in one 7 day period made $1,376.81, previous week made $497.62 so having that product update made a big difference this month.
Looking forward to a good Christmas period, since I tend to work in the make money market with the world economy worsening I should get more traffic!
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for November 2008
October 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,273.36 ($42.45 a day) $1,182.71 ($38.15 a day)
ClickBank : $2,982.15 ($99.41 a day) $2,269.66 ($73.21 a day)
Amazon : $42.03 ($1.40 a day) $40.53 ($1.31 a day)
Private Ads : $1,504.96 ($50.17 a day) $1,368.52 ($44.15 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $0 ($23.88)
Last few months not felt like putting time into new affiliate programs, AdSense and Clickbank are far more lucrative.
November Affiliate Revenue = $5,802.50 ($193.42 a day) $4,885.30 ($157.59 a day)
Extrapolation = $70,597.08 a year $57,520.47 a year
If I save every penny and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take 14 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 52 years old, still time to have some fun :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to November 30th 2008 I’ve made $24,418.02 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to November 30th) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 182 days) : $134.16 a day, ~$12 more a day than last month, at this rate will take just over 20 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 58 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but getting better.
Will have to think of a way to take into account interest earned if I did save every penny, just to see how many years that knocks of my millionaire by 45 years old goal.
Really struggling to think of other things to do that will take my revenue over the top so to speak. Clickbank is my big earner right now, but it’s so hard to find good affiliate products! A year ago I wasn’t making anything from Clickbank, so if I could find another Clickbank type revenue I could add a couple of thousand more dollars a month while still maintaining current revenue.
David Law
Hope that you will achieve your goal. It is better to have another millionaire in this world rather than another poor soul.
Total affiliate type revenue for December was $3,985.55 ($128.57 a day), which should cover my wife’s Christmas shopping bill :)
Although I’m down around $1,800 this month compared to November, it’s still a good month relatively speaking since I’ve been creating these revenue reports this is the first drop in revenue.
Didn’t do a great deal of affiliate type work this month again (busy with SEO clients). Really need to find some time to review more Clickbank products since page by page you can make a lot more from Clickbank sales than AdSense etc…
So can’t be bad, almost $4K complete profit without having to do much.
If you’ve been following my revenue reports since September you’ll know my Free Recipe site was hit with a bad Google penalty (possibly for selling text links) on September 4th costing the site about 8,000 visitors a day and a fair amount of lost AdSense revenue.
Well on December 4th the penalty was lifted, (about 50% of the lost traffic was recovered) wahoo, unfortunately one week on the Google penalty was reinstated which is weird! SEO consultant here and I’ve never heard of this happening before!
When I get 20 mins spare will send in another re-inclusion request to Google and hope the penalty can be lifted forever, fingers crossed.
BIG drop in Clickbank revenue this month. Since all my traffic is organic search if an important Clickbank review page looses some SERPs you can really feel it in Clickbank sales!
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for December 2008
November 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,315.18 ($42.43 a day) $1,273.36 ($42.45 a day)
ClickBank : $880.67 ($28.41 a day) $2,982.15 ($99.41 a day)
Amazon : $159.84 ($5.16 a day) $42.03 ($1.40 a day)
Private Ads : $1629.86 ($52.58 a day) $1,504.96 ($50.17 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $0 ($0)
Last few months not felt like putting time into new affiliate programs, AdSense and Clickbank are far more lucrative.
December Affiliate Revenue = $3,985.55 ($128.57 a day) $5,802.50 ($193.42 a day)
Extrapolation = $46,926.64 a year $70,597.08 a year
If I save every penny and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take 21 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 59 years old, still time to have some fun :)
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to December 31st 2008 I’ve made $28,403.57 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to December 31st) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 213 days) : $133.35 a day, ~$1 less a day than last month, at this rate will take just over 20 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 58 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
I’ve not had time to create new content on many of my sites, so been looking to buy content from others. Depending on the quality of the work you can buy articles from as little as 0.1 cents to over 1 cent per word. If an article has 1,000 words (which is a fair size) it will cost up to $10. If I add a article covering not to hard SERPs to one of my sites that tends to rank OK I should make that back eventually: really depends on the site I add it to and the SERPs.
A worse case scenario example: if a new article pulls in 10 new visitors a day then in 10 days it should receive at least 25 cents from AdSense (a low 2.5% CTR and a low cost per click of 10 cents). Therefore to recover the $10 investment it will take roughly 400 days. After that it’s all profit, so considering spending a few thousand dollars on new articles for my sites to increase revenue long term.
Note: I’ve never bought content before, all my content is either created by me or public domain content.
Happy New Year.
David Law
Total affiliate type revenue for January was $3,911.28 ($126.17 a day).
Little late creating this report, been busy creating new WordPress AdSense/SEO themes fr my use and the site I sell AdSense Themes at.
Pretty much made the same amount this month as I did in December, down a massive $70 odd :)
My Free Recipe site is still hit with a bad Google penalty (possibly for selling text links) on September 4th costing the site about 8,000 visitors a day and a fair amount of AdSense revenue. In December it recovered for 7 days before again being penalized, have sent another reinclusion request!!!
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for January 2009
December 2008 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,333.93 ($43.03 a day) $1,315.18 ($42.43 a day)
ClickBank : $779.93 ($25.16 a day) $880.67 ($28.41 a day)
Amazon : $63.02 ($2.03 a day) $159.84 ($5.16 a day)
Private Ads : $1,730.90 ($55.84 a day) $1629.86 ($52.58 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $3.50 ($0) LOL
Still not feeling like putting much time into affiliate type work.
January Affiliate Revenue = $3,911.28 ($126.17 a day) $3,985.55 ($128.57 a day)
Extrapolation = $46,052.17 a year $46,926.64 a year
If I save every penny and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take almost 22 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 60 years old.
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest)-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to January 31st 2009 I’ve made $32,314.85 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to January 31st) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 244 days) : $132.44 a day, ~$1 less a day than last month, at this rate will take just under 21 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 59 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
Bought a forum last month, Star Forums, cost $60. I’ve almost search engine optimized the template, so long term should do OK. It’s got a trickle of traffic so far, (made less than 50 cents from AdSense so far :)) but hoping after I add some links to gain some SERPs for the current content and any new content added (forum activity currently DEAD).
This month I’m working on AdSense themes, really been neglecting that site, so far this month have added 2 new themes taking to total to 13. The two are Connections Reloaded and Blue Blix, Blue Blix is based on Blix with Blue colours, currently working on a red version as well (not finished).
I quite enjoy creating AdSense/SEO themes as I use them on my own sites, without them I wouldn’t be making the money above.
Also this month I go for an operation on my back, was meant to have the operation in January, but was too ill (had flu that left me feeling as weak as a new born baby, still not feeling great!). I have two degraded discs and one protruding discs in my lower back.
My surgeon will be removing the remains of the degraded discs and addind bone fragments to fuse the spine (wonder where they come from?) so the two discs completely fuse! He will also pin the two discs for stability. Not going to touch the protruding disc, the theory is by fixing the two degraded disc (below the protruding one) it will stabilize the entire back.
Strangely enough I’m not that nervous, whenever I have anything that could make someone nervous I don’t think about it until it’s pretty much too late :) So I’ll be on the trolley waiting to enter the operating room, that’s when I’ll start worrying. So far it’s worked really well for things in my life (I rarely get worried/nervous).
Wish me luck, have the operation last week of this month.
Sign up for the ClickBank Affiliate Program.
David Law
wow thats a lot of money for the month of january congrats to you bud
Total affiliate type revenue for February was $3,589.41 ($132.00 a day).
Late again creating this report, spent six days in hospital after a lower back operation, if fully successful not only will I have a lot less pain (been in pain 15+ years), be able to finally have a fun life with my family (missed a lot of fun stuff due to being stuck in bed) but also be able to make a lot more money (make money in many more ways).
OK, back to the money :-)
This month I made about $400 less than last month, but February was only 28 days, so the daily earnings is actually up $2, so not too bad. Didn’t do a great deal of affiliate based work last month, so 99% of this revenue is based on work done previously (good search engine rankings basically).
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for February 2009
January 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,228.01 ($43.86 a day) $1,333.93 ($43.03 a day)
ClickBank : $518.95 ($18.53 a day) $779.93 ($25.16 a day)
Amazon : $108.31 ($3.87 a day) $63.02 ($2.03 a day)
Private Ads : $1,726.64 ($61.67 a day) $1,730.90 ($55.84 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $7.50 ($3.50) LOL
Still not feeling like putting time into affiliate type work. I have a three month period to recover from my back operation (two discs fused) before I start physiotherapy, so might get stuck into some serious content creation soon.
February Affiliate Revenue = $3,589.41 ($128.19 a day) $3,911.28 ($126.17 a day)
Extrapolation = $46,790.52 a year $46,052.17 a year
If I save every penny from 1st February 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just over 21 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount). Reality is I don’t really save this money, for example our fixed rate mortgage term ran out end of January and in February I paid about £12,000 from the mortgage (got the mortgage to about £75K now) and plan to pay up to another £10,000 maybe even £15,000 (have to decide what I need money for) from the mortgage just as soon as I can walk to the bank comfortably and then find another fixed rate deal for a few years.
That would make me 59 years old.
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from June 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to February 28th 2009 I’ve made $35,904.26 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to February 28th) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 272 days) : $132.00 a day, same as last month, at this rate will take just under 21 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 58 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
The forum I bought last month, Star Forums is still dead traffic wise, other than a few posts of mine there’s ZERO activity. Looks like the content isn’t as good as I’d hoped and still links haven’t aged, so not a big deal yet. Worst case scenario I wasted $60 on a dead forum :)
As mentioned above I went into hospital in February (26th) for 6 days. Had two vertebrae fused and have a lovely scar to prove it! The operation took 4 hours and I lost a little blood so needed a transfusion a couple of days later, my blood count was 7 when it should be around 14 (was a little anaemic before the op, 13. something). Have to admit having a blood transfusion scared the #### out of me, wasn’t worried about HIV/hepatitis since there’s thorough testing now, but the factors (prions) that cause Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) or mad cows disease. As far as I’m aware they haven’t figured a way to test for the damage proteins that cause CJD.
Anyway, I think the operation has gone well (still alive and not paralyzed), had AWFUL pain management the first 3-4 days due to poor communication between various hospital staff and the doctors not taking into account I’ve been taking 360mg of di-hydrocodeine a day for over a decade and in February I could manage about 1 hour (2 on a good day) activity a day on a very high dose of DHD (max dose should be 240 mgs, I should have been on morphine for years really).
Eventually after not being able to even move position in bed for three days the doctors increased my pain meds to 240 mgs time released morphine (two times 100mg tabs twice a day) I could then start to move (still hurt like hell). By day 6 was strong enough to travel the 1 hour drive, was meant to get hospital transport but they closed in the evening and it took so long to arrange the morphine prescription that I was going to have to spend another night in hospital!!! No thanks, so got a taxi home, was expecting it to cost about £100, but was only £55 (£55 was well worth sleeping in my own bed).
Got home and I’m now slowly recovering, currently (20 days after the operation) I can manage to walk for 20 minutes at a time twice a day. Aiming to walk three times to day, so three times 20 mins.
Funny thing, was meant to have my staples out day 10 which was Sunday, the staples really irritated my back a lot because I hurt my hip a few years back and can’t lay on my sides for more than a few minutes at a time, so have to lay on my back. Couldn’t get a nurse out until day 12 so got my wife to take a crack at it using a pair of tweezers so the sterile staple remover would stay sterile. Turns out the staples are curled into the skin like paper staples, so pulling them with tweezers would never remove them! Fortunately no damage done, after reading the instructions on the actual staple remover my wife removed all 20 staples in a few mins (a few hurt like a bitch due to being so deep). All the holes left from the staples scabbed over and are now healed.
Worst problem right now is because I spent three days lay flat on my back in the hospital unable to move I managed to bruise the left side of my lower back and it hurts quite a bit to even have a quilt lean on it!! I think what happened is because I couldn’t move the skin got rolled up a squashed (bed sore almost) and this has caused a bruise and possibly nerve damage. When a nurse helped wash my back on day 4 she thought I had faded black marker pen where the damaged area was, so presumably a lot of damage. It’s slowly getting better, lot less painful today than a few days ago.
Can’t wait to be able to walk to the beach again, been ages since I walked that far without worrying about it (less than a mile from home!). Which reminds me, I’ve pretty much completely neglected my car, think I’m going to have to buy a new one just as soon as I’m able. Was walking the kids to/from from Cadets a few nights back (5 mins walk from home) and a used car sales lot was next door and one of the cars had the number plate SEO3 (forget the rest). Was advertised at £3,000+, very tempted to buy it for the plate being an SEO consultant :)
David Law
good luck on your quest.
How have you fared lately?
Total affiliate type revenue for March was $3,453.37 ($129.89 a day).
This month I made about $140 less than last month, but March is 3 days longer than Feb, so not a great month. I’m still not feeling like working on affiliate type projects, so 95% of these earnings are from work 6+ months ago! I MUST get the will to want to add more Clickbank reviews etc… as these can make a fair amount of money with not too much effort. Shows how bad I am at getting around to some affiliate type stuff, this is the 10th month of doing these reports and it’s taken me to this one to add a link to the ClickBank Affiliate Program below for anyone to sign under me! That’s basic affiliate marketing, I really need to take this stuff more seriously.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for March 2009
February 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,255.60 ($40.50 a day) $1,228.01 ($43.86 a day)
ClickBank : $616.02 ($19.87 a day) $518.95 ($18.53 a day)
Amazon : $41.36 ($1.33 a day) $108.31 ($3.87 a day)
Private Ads : $1,536.34 ($49.56 a day) $1,726.64 ($61.67 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $4.05 ($7.50)
Still not doing much in affiliate terms.
March Affiliate Revenue = $3,453.37 ($111.34 a day) $3,911.28 ($126.17 a day)
Extrapolation = $40,660.65 a year $46,052.17 a year
If I save every penny from 1st March 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just over 24 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 63 years old.
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from June 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report March 31st 2009 : $3,453.37 $39,357.63 303 ($129.89 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to March 31st 2009 I’ve made $39,357.63 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to March 31st) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 303 days) : $129.89 a day, $2 down from last month, at this rate will take just over 21 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 58 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
As mentioned last month had a spinal fusion late Feb 2009. Almost 6 weeks since I had the operation and very slowly recovering, still in pain, still on morphine! Was hoping for a faster recovery, but considering how long I’ve had back problems and how unfit I became not that surprised my recovery is slow.
Sign up for the ClickBank Affiliate Program.
David Law
Total affiliate type revenue for April was $3,109.16 ($103.64 a day).
Another drop in revenue this month, I’m not working hard on affiliate type revenue so my traffic is pretty stable last 6 months, so looks like I’m getting hit by decreased sales etc…. due to the recession. Half way through May already and this month is looking worse, thankfully this isn’t my main income, so not a big deal if I loose it all.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for April 2009
March 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,091.19 ($36.37 a day) $1,255.60 ($40.50 a day)
ClickBank : $494.14 ($16.47 a day) $616.02 ($19.87 a day)
Amazon : $37.64 ($1.25 a day) $41.36 ($1.33 a day)
Private Ads : $1,481.27 ($49.38 a day) $1,536.34 ($49.56 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $4.92 ($4.05)
Still not doing much in affiliate terms.
April Affiliate Revenue = $3,109.16 ($103.64 a day) $3,453.37 ($111.34 a day)
Extrapolation = $37,828.11 a year $40,660.65 a year
If I save every penny from 1st April 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just over 26 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 64 years old.
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from June 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report March 31st 2009 : $3,453.37 $39,357.63 303 ($129.89 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report April 30th 2009 : $3,109.16 $42,466.79 333 ($127.53 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to April 30th 2009 I’ve made $42,466.79 from affiliate type revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to April 30th) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 333 days) : $127.53 a day, $2 down from last month, at this rate will take just over 21 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2028 when I’m 58 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
Still recovering from my back operation, had two discs fused and progress is very slow. Still in pain and on morphine, every time I do exercise I get muscle spasms in my back, quite large lumps near where the back was operated on which stops me exercising! Managed to tile half a bathroom wall this month,
David Law
Dave, Your income is respectable, do not worry about a decline, you had a major operation.
If your earning over 100 bucks a day from adsense and affiliate/private ads that is better than most, its very good in fact and I would put you in the top .1% of other guys swinging away out there!
I think people in the know are moving to private ads, I do like it for various reasons.
I like adsense as its low stress and very easy set up. I use your templates with good results.
For me I like building an adsense empire rather than too much dabbling in many things. Adsense is all about creating things on your site so people will come to it. If you have a few sites you all your eggs are not in one basket. If you every wanted to convert them into sales sites its possible.
Therefore your energy is put into building quality traffic rather a specific product. But you have made the point you get paid more on affiliates. But I say ahh yes, but you must work to keep them up. While adsense empires just build and build and slowly on auto pilot you get rich. Your creative energies go into content.
About your back. 2 years. My friends with operations are better in 6 months, but the whole healing process is about 2 years. I think healthy living etc is very important for the healing, but you know this.
As always best regards, Mark Biernat
Thanks Mark, appreciate the comments.
I have to admit I do prefer AdSense to trying to make money from ClickBank etc… as you say you put your creative energy into the content and what you do today can be still making money 5+ years from now. With affiliate content you always having to keep it up to date and if you want to do well have to cover products you have little interest in.
I like writing about SEO/AdSense/making money, but not so much reviewing products that I might like/use, but don’t really feel passionate about (not fun).
I started a WordPress SEO Tutorial a few days back and wrote the first 5 pages in under 2 days, some of them are really long pages :) I really enjoyed the process. In comparison I’m doing well if I write one product review every 6 months!
David Law
Total affiliate type revenue for May was $2,892.67 ($93.31 a day).
With this revenue report I have a full years data :)
Another drop in revenue this month, that’s 6 consecutive monthly revenue drops despite quite stable traffic levels (lost traffic in some areas, gained in others). Based on ClickBank sales (see screenshot) and private ad sale revenue I’m quite confident the drops are caused by the recession (less people buying), so not worried (yet). Little disappointing this month dropped below $3,000, but means it will look so much more impressive when it goes back up again :)
Clickbank Sales
My SEO business is loosing clients as well, one of my oldest clients (travel/vacation related business) just dropped their SEO service completely, so difficult for many right now and though SEO is very important, at these times it’s a bit of a luxury business expense! Happy to say no risk of my business/me going under, I could loose all my websites and 3/4s of my SEO business clients and still pay all the bills with money to spare.
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at SEO/AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for May 2009
April 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,074.06 ($34.65 a day) $1,091.19 ($36.37 a day)
ClickBank : $402.30 ($12.98 a day) $494.14 ($16.47 a day)
Amazon : $43.59 ($1.41 a day) $37.64 ($1.25 a day)
Private Ads : $1,362.83 ($43.96 a day) $1,481.27 ($49.38 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $9.89 ($4.92)
Still not doing much in affiliate terms.
May Affiliate Revenue = $2,892.67 ($93.31 a day) $3,109.16 ($103.64 a day)
Extrapolation = $34,058.86 a year $37,828.11 a year
If I save every penny from 1st May 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just over 29 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
That would make me 68 years old.
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from June 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report March 31st 2009 : $3,453.37 $39,357.63 303 ($129.89 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report April 30th 2009 : $3,109.16 $42,466.79 333 ($127.53 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report May 31st 2009 : $2,892.67 $45,359.46 364 ($124.61 average earnings per day)
LOL I seem to have lost a day, my year works out at 364 days :) Yep, I’ve been listing October 2008 as a 30 day month, must be all the drink! Doesn’t throw the numbers off by much so oh well :-)
Since June 1st 2008 to May 31st 2009 I’ve made $45,359.46 from affiliate type revenue sources. That’s my total affiliate type revenue for the year, not too shabby.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st to May 31st) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 365 days) : $124.27 a day, ~$3 down from last month, at this rate will take just over 22 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2030 when I’m 60 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire. I wonder if the 60-year-old-millionaire.co.uk domain name is still available to register :)
My recovery from a back operation is still going really slowly, I had the operation end of February so still early days (3 months) since the bone fusion can take anywhere from 3 months to seriously begin to 18 months to finish! Really frustrating right now as looks like I’m going to miss another summer with my family :( was hoping I’d be well enough to at least enjoy the odd long walk (so unfit). Still it’s only June, maybe another month will make a big difference.
I came out of hospital on 200mgs of morphine a day, been trying to reduce the dose and within a week of getting home was at 110mgs a day (60mg in the morning, 50mg at night), since then I’ve tried at least 4 times to drop to 100mgs a day (50mgs twice a day) and each time it’s felt like I was going through mild (but still quite painful/irritating) withdrawal symptoms! On the second day of dropping the extra 10mgs I’ve had quite bad muscle or joint pains (not sure if joint or muscle pain, maybe both) in my hips/knees and increased sweating (nose tends to run a little as well which is funny).
Very, very strange that I could drop 90mgs almost over night, but this 10mgs drop is really proving difficult. Last week decided no matter what I’d drop to 100mgs and have had a hell of a few days, three days of almost constant deep muscle/joint pain in my left leg/hip/knee, one night had to wrap my knee in a warm jumper to keep it warm enough to sleep (was a warm night as well). Looks like I might be adapting to the slightly lower level now. Assuming this back operation is a success, can’t wait for when I try to get off morphine completely!!!!
Made a good start on a new WordPress SEO Tutorial Series which I’ve been meaning to write for AGES, so if like me you use WordPress for many of your money making activities, well worth a read.
Been messing around with Twitter, I signed up for Twitter last year for social networking reasons, but never really got into it. Despite not really doing much I had over 300 followers a few days ago on Twitter and after making a couple of updates closing on 400 followers! Follow me on Twitter
Sign up for the ClickBank Affiliate Program.
David Law
decent with adsense
how many websites u have ?
Total affiliate type revenue for June was $2,875.64 ($95.85 a day).
Pretty much the same revenue this month as last, (just $5 less) my Clickbank sales are WAY DOWN recently which is hitting revenue overall. I only promote a small number of Clickbank products and think the problem is the main ones increased their prices just before Christmas when there was a big update (for those products). This with the credit crunch/recession has pushed sales down (similar traffic, much less sales).
Put it this way, for June I’ve had 2,623 hops (over every product promoted) and my hops per order is 163.94 which is awful (used to be much better, well under 100). Worst of all is a product I used to do great with 592 hops in June, 1 order which was refunded!! Used to get up to 10 orders with that number of hops! Another similar product (same niche), also put prices up: 296 hops no orders, used to get 4 or 5 orders from that number of hops.
Basically they have increased their prices WAY TOO MUCH, guess I’ll have to look for alternatives in that niche that have cheaper products as it’s a waste of good traffic and remember if I’m sending a product 500 hops I probably had to gain ten times that (5,000 visitors) to result in 500 click thrus.
Put some effort this month into private ad sales and next month I expect to make a few hundred dollars more in that area, maybe more, would be good to break $2,000 a month.
Not feeling like creating lots of content so my AdSense income, which pretty much relies on the creation of new content is not growing. Might have to buy a few content rich sites to increase it as don’t feel like making new content (been feeling lazy on the content creation front for over 6 months now :)).
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at SEO/AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for June 2009
May 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,023.09 ($34.10 a day) $1,074.06 ($34.65 a day)
ClickBank : $320.80 ($10.69 a day) $402.30 ($12.98 a day)
Amazon : $39.93 ($1.33 a day) $43.59 ($1.41 a day)
Private Ads : $1,484.49 ($49.48 a day) $1,362.83 ($43.96 a day)
New revenue sources as of July 2008.
Shareasale : $7.33 ($9.89)
Still not doing much in new affiliate terms.
June Affiliate Revenue = $2,875.64 ($95.85 a day) $2,892.67 ($93.31 a day)
Extrapolation = $34,986.95 a year $34,058.86 a year a year
If I save every penny from 1st June 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just under 29 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from June 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
June 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report March 31st 2009 : $3,453.37 $39,357.63 303 ($129.89 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report April 30th 2009 : $3,109.16 $42,466.79 333 ($127.53 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report May 31st 2009 : $2,892.67 $45,359.46 365 ($124.61 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report June 30th 2009 : $2,875.64 $48,235.1 395 ($122.11 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to June 31st 2009 I’ve made $48,235.1 from affiliate revenue sources.
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (June 1st 2008 to June 31st 2009) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 395 days) : $122.11 a day, at this rate will take just over 22 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2030 when I’m 60 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
Good news on my back problems, went to an ice show a couple of weeks back. Wife bought the tickets before my back operation in anticipation of me being much better by now. The show was Cirque de Glace at the Embassy Theatre Skegness, a two hour show which meant I was on my feet or sitting for over 3 hours. I took an extra 100mgs of morphine a few hours before and unlike before the operation on my spine I managed to sit relatively still during the show: helped a lot that it was a great show (really enjoyed it).
Prior to the back operation (spinal fusion) I would sit for 5 mins and have to move, few mins later have to move again and so on, within 15 minutes I couldn’t get comfortable at all sitting! Felt like I had bone touching bone in my lower back, wasn’t actually touching, but it’s what it felt like and nothing I did while sat helped (would have to move and preferably lay down).
At the ice show I sat for 2 hours with a 15 minute break in the middle and didn’t experience the ‘normal’ back pain (had this pain for well over a decade so was normal to me). My back was sore after, but it was a tired pain which is completely understandable considering how little activity I’d been getting prior to the operation and the operation required cutting the muscles in my back to get to the discs, so the strength in my muscles is very poor!
Also came away with a really sore bum! Not used to sitting any length of time my bum isn’t used to it, similar to saddle sore when you’ve not rode a bike for a while :)
So looks like the operation was successful, now have to build up my fitness and work through the muscle spasms in my back. I find the physiotherapy exercises hell (think they are slowing my recovery), so have put up a punch bag and punching that: used to keep fit by weight training, bit of boxing when I was in my teens and far more enjoyable than doing some weird stretches that I probably couldn’t have done well 20 years ago!
Since having the operation I’ve strained various muscles about 50 times! From a simple yawn resulting in a strained muscle deep in my neck to pulling a leg muscle running away from my wife: I was teasing her and she chased me and I got a painful leg muscle for ten minutes for my trouble :)
Last month posted I was closing on 400 Twitter followers, now have over 2,000, really easy getting new Twitter followers.
David Law
Dave, the reason I read your blog is it is real. Every blog on SEO or how to make money online is recycled information talking in a general way. Your blog tells it like it is, the good, bad, ups and downs. It is your personal experience in life with making money. If people wrote with your style, I think its better than reading a book on SEO.
About your back, I lay in bed working for a few hours a day as I have a back problem too, but not as bad as yours (I joke to my wife that I am turning into SEO Dave, she says ‘oh please’).
The physiotherapy exercises my doctor gave me are hard. I do not do them, but I found a Polish physiotherapist that taught be totally different exercises that even my “Havard Doctor” in Boston did not know. I do these exercises and mostly the pool and feel much better.
Your adsense templates are still working for me. I use them on most of my sites. I recommend them now to people even who have no intention of using adsense because, they are so well SEOed that even if you went to a large firm they would not do better. You can turn off adsense and use them as your site or blog.
My income lags behind yours, but I am an American in Poland and its cheap here :) so relatively I am pretty good. Also, I do other things of course like write language software etc. My real thing is languages.
PS if I see something important for SEO I will Tweet you. Let me know if you do not want these Tweets or comments. I can see, I might get dragged into the Tweeter mania despite my skepticism about its long term time/efficiency for making money.
How long did it take you to start making real money online?
Total affiliate type revenue for July was $3,453.12 ($111.39 a day).
Quite a good month, up almost $600, very good considering the downtrend I’ve experienced lately with Clickbank!
As mentioned last month put effort into private ad sales and that’s resulted in a $300+ increase in that area, looking at August revenue so far for private ad sales I’m at almost $2,000 (up another $200 almost). Still working on more private ad sales promotions, so with a little luck maybe make more than $2,000 in August.
Have created a little content for AdSense reasons in July, will take months for any revenue increases as on newish domains, also did a little link building work, the PR of my sites have died over the last year or so, used to have multiple PR6s and loads of PR5s, now finding it hard to find PR5 pages in my network!
As always this revenue does not include the money I make through my SEO business, themes sold at SEO/AdSense Themes or any investments, so ONLY affiliate and advertising (AdSense type programs) revenue.
Affiliate Revenue for July 2009
June 2009 revenue is listed in italics to the right
Google AdSense Revenue : $1,188.22 ($38.33 a day) $1,023.09 ($34.10 a day)
ClickBank : $367.93 ($11.87 a day) $320.80 ($10.69 a day)
Amazon + Shareasale : $89.47 ($2.89 a day) $39.93 ($1.33 a day)
Private Ads : $1,807.5 ($58.31 a day) $1,484.49 ($49.48 a day)
Still not doing much in new affiliate terms.
July Affiliate Revenue = $3,453.12 ($111.39 a day) $2,875.64 ($95.85 a day)
Extrapolation = $40,657.70 a year $34,986.95 a year a year
If I save every penny from 1st July 2009 and make this amount of money every month from now on it will take just under 24 1/2 years to become a millionaire (really would be less time since compound interest on the saved amount).
Money I would accumulate assuming I kept every penny (not including bank interest) from July 1st 2008-
Date Added Total #days
July 1st 2008 : $0 $0 0
Affiliate Report June 30th 2008 : $2,068.12 $2,068.12 30 ($68.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2008 : $3,296.30 $5,364.42 61 ($87.94 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Aug 31st 2008 : $3,575.47 $8,939.89 92 ($97.17 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Sept 30th 2008 : $4,790.33 $13,730.22 122 ($112.54 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Oct 30th 2008 : $4,885.30 $18,615.52 152 ($122.47 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Nov 30th 2008 : $5,802.50 $24,418.02 182 ($134.16 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Dec 31st 2008 : $3,985.55 $28,403.57 213 ($133.35 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Jan 31st 2009 : $3,911.28 $32,314.85 244 ($132.44 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report Feb 28th 2009 : $3,589.41 $35,904.26 272 ($132.00 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report March 31st 2009 : $3,453.37 $39,357.63 303 ($129.89 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report April 30th 2009 : $3,109.16 $42,466.79 333 ($127.53 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report May 31st 2009 : $2,892.67 $45,359.46 365 ($124.61 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report June 30th 2009 : $2,875.64 $48,235.1 395 ($122.11 average earnings per day)
Affiliate Report July 31st 2009 : $3,453.12 $51,688.22 426 ($121.37 average earnings per day)
Since June 1st 2008 to July 31st 2009 I’ve made $51,688.22 from affiliate revenue sources.
Average monthly revenue $3,692.02 $3,710.39
One year two months to break the $50K mark, was hoping for more, but we are in a recession, so can live with it :)
Since revenue per month can fluctuate, better to average my earnings over the entire period (July 1st 2008 to July 31st 2009) and then extrapolate with that average.
Averaging affiliate revenue per day (over the 426 days) : $121.33 a day, at this rate will take just over 22 1/2 years from June 1st 2008 to reach 1 million dollars : I’ll be a millionaire 2030 when I’m 60 years old. Still no where near my millionaire at 45 years old goal, but at least before I retire.
Clickbank revenue is still on the low side, barely getting any sales from what used to be popular products, I must find the time to change the products I promote to ones that actually sell! Now combining Amazon and Shareasale revenue, Shareasale is less than $10 a month and Amazon isn’t exactly stellar sales, if I add any more affiliates will combine them unless they make significantly more than $100 a month each.
Had a MASSIVE traffic spike from Bing last month, around the 20th a site on Conspiracy Theories received thousands of extra visitors, usually the site gets about 500 visitors a day, over the moon landing 40th anniversary it got:
Thursday, 16 July 2009 1,529
Friday, 17 July 2009 3,225
Saturday, 18 July 2009 1,569
Sunday, 19 July 2009 2,530
Monday, 20 July 2009 33,664
Tuesday, 21 July 2009 4,237
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 1,586
Thursday, 23 July 2009 1,065
Was back to normal on the 24th.
From a revenue standpoint it SUCKED, AdSense CTR below 0.5% so didn’t make a lot of money from this spike from Bing :(
Interestingly the extra traffic from Bing came through one SERP which suggests there was a temporary static SERP link on a particular Bing page for a while, one celebrating the moon landing (I couldn’t find it though).
Two months ago I posted I was closing on 400 Twitter followers, a month ago just over 2,000, today I have just over 2,500 Twitter followers. Haven’t done anything except follow anyone who follows me on Twitter this month (login every week and click follow a lot), so looks like I’ll slowly grow 500 new followers a month if I do no promotion at all.
Hmm, that’s interesting, I just followed about 120 people who recently followed me and this took the people I’, following 50 more than followers. that means about 50 people are no longer following me who was about a week ago since a week ago the number I follow/and followed by was the same (within 5 of each other). Twitter changed it’s interface recently which when you look at who you follow it no longer tells you if they follow you, makes it possible to follow thousands of people, wait for them to follow you then drop them and they can’t easily see this!
Found a web based tool for checking who isn’t following. Have removed the ones I can remove (can’t remove suspended Twitter accounts), was 56 Twitter Users not following back.
Still don’t know what to do with Twitter to make money other than SPAM the crap out of it, which I don’t want to do.
David Law