Income Report For February: Or How Well Is This Sh!t Working?
Although I also have income, (and expenses!), from my web design and maintenance services, I will not be including them here. This income report is specifically for my affiliate endeavors. If you’ve read my About Me page, you’ll know that I’ve had success in my business selling SEO and web design services, but now I’m trying to make a passive income through affiliate marketing. As such, I want to keep all income and expenses as separate as possible to see how well this branch of the business does on its own.
Time Period
This report covers Jan 1st, 2014 to Feb 28th , 2014
Income
Well, the only affiliate sites I have up right now are the EmpireFlippers Pre-Sold sites from the Adsense Case Study #1. So far, they’ve made a total of $1.98. I’d say they’ve got a ways to go still. =)
I only just added google analytics the other day, so I’m using the adsense page views as my traffic measurement for this time period. Officially, the sites weren’t finished until February 6th, but I’ll be covering the full time period as there was one click earned in January, plus there were expenses in January.
Total Affiliate Income Earned: $1.98
Expenses
Unfortunately, there’s always expenses….
Hosting: $24.95/mth x 2 mths (Jan and Feb) = $49.90
Keyword Research: $45 (I bought some keyword packs from misterkeyword.com to use as the basis for three different sites, one as a possible public case study in the future)
Dreamstime: $17.99 (stock photos for the blog and articles)
Article Outsourcing: $20 (bought (5) 500 word articles from the WarriorForum to use on one of the EmpireFlippers Keyword Only Sites)
LongTailPro: $47 (I bought this because #1, Market Samurai stopped working AGAIN and I was pissed, and #2, misterkeyword and EmpireFlippers both used the KC metric as a judge of ranking difficulty and I wanted to be able to compare them. By having the tool I can check both them and any future keywords for the KC metric and use it to make decisions.)
GoDaddy: $13.30 (two domains for use with the misterkeyword keywords)
Total Expenses: $193.90
Grand Total (Income minus Expenses): -$191.21
Now that all that is out of the way, let’s take a look at the keywords themselves:
The rankings are only for the home page itself.
| Site | KW | Search Volume | KC | Google Rank | Bing Rank | Yahoo Rank |
| EFPS #1 | Primary |
1,000 |
30 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #1 | Secondary |
20 |
29 |
Not In Top 100 |
8 |
8 |
| EFPS #1 | Secondary |
10 |
25 |
72 |
7 |
7 |
| EFPS #1 | Secondary |
10 |
24 |
Not In Top 100 |
29 |
28 |
| EFPS #2 | Primary |
1,300 |
28 |
Not In Top 100 |
29 |
29 |
| EFPS #2 | Secondary |
90 |
26 |
33 |
7 |
7 |
| EFPS #2 | Secondary |
110 |
27 |
80 |
12 |
15 |
| EFPS #2 | Secondary |
70 |
25 |
78 |
17 |
19 |
| EFPS #3 | Primary |
720 |
29 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #3 | Secondary |
320 |
28 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #3 | Secondary |
210 |
28 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #3 | Secondary |
50 |
27 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #4 | Primary |
1,600 |
26 |
Not In Top 100 |
48 |
49 |
| EFPS #4 | Secondary |
70 |
26 |
Not In Top 100 |
32 |
32 |
| EFPS #4 | Secondary |
140 |
22 |
Not In Top 100 |
32 |
30 |
| EFPS #4 | Secondary |
20 |
23 |
Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 | Not In Top 100 |
| EFPS #5 | Primary |
2,900 |
27 |
60 |
40 |
40 |
| EFPS #5 | Secondary |
140 |
27 |
Not In Top 100 |
18 |
17 |
| EFPS #5 | Secondary |
110 |
25 |
35 |
3 |
3 |
| EFPS #5 | Secondary |
10 |
27 |
Not In Top 100 |
28 |
26 |
All of these keywords have a KC of 35 or lower which is supposed to be easy to rank for according to both EF and MK. In fact, they are all 30 and LOWER so theoretically they should rank quite easily even without backlinks. So far though, they aren’t doing too well. But, officially they’ve only been in service for 22 days now, so I’m going to add the bonus content EF gave me and wait until next month to pass judgment on how well they rank naturally. I’ll let them season for a little while more. =)
One thing I don’t like though is the tiny amount of searches for the secondary keywords, 320 is ok, even as low as 110 is ok, (if you had a bunch of them), but 10? 20? We aren’t trying to sell a high-ticket item here, the monetization method is adsense so volume traffic is the name of the game. You need a hundred visits generally to get one click, it’s a total waste of time to target kw’s with a 20 search volume. The time it would take to write 5 articles, (5 x 20 = 100), to get 1 click is ridiculous. No ROI there! Oh well, that’s why it’s a case study. =)
So that’s it for now.
My plan for the next month is to add the bonus content to the EFPS sites, write some articles for the misterkeyword sites, and possibly put up two amazon sites using content that I already had written last year. I’m still working on a client’s web design project right now so time is limited for the affiliate marketing part of the business, but as they say, How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. =)
Catch ya later!