April and May 2014 Income Report

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 Apr 1st, 2014 to May 31st , 2014

Income
Talk about slacking! Not only did I not have time to do the income report last month, but I also haven’t created any new content or done much of anything, at least not on the affiliate sites. I have done a bit of web design and maintenance, but mostly life is just keeping me busy with work, family, and so many other things. I know I need to find the time to get things done, I just can’t seem to find it!

The good news, however, is that one of the EFPS sites (#1 actually), has taken off and is now paying for itself! 1 out of 5 is not a good ratio considering the cost and the fact that EmpireFlippers is supposed to be so great, but it’s a start I suppose.

Here’s the stats from the last two months:

APRIL

MAY

As you can see, it’s jumped up quite a bit! March made $0.57, while April was about 18x as much. Most of which came from EFPS #1. The other you see listed is one of my old adsense sites that’s still out there kicking around. I figure it counts since it’s an affiliate site.

May saw another increase by about 30%

Total Affiliate Income Earned (both months): $25.09
Total Affiliate Income Earned (this year): $27.64

Rankings
Here are the rankings for April and May of 2014. Interestingly, they really didn’t change much between the two months even though May saw more revenue.

APRIL

MAY

Expenses
Unfortunately, there’s always expenses….

APRIL
Hosting: $24.95
Fiverr: $5
BigLots: $13
WSO’s (I still buy ‘em lol): $50
Long-tail Pro (monthly fee): $17
Total Expenses: $109.95

MAY
Hosting: $24.95
SocialAdr: $37
WSO’s (I still buy ‘em lol): $10
Long-tail Pro (monthly fee): $17
Total Expenses: $88.95

Total Expenses both months: $198.90

Grand Total – last two months (Income minus Expenses): -$173.81
Grand Total – this year (Income minus Expenses): -$588.56

Looks like I’m losing about $100 a month at the moment. If all 5 of those adsense sites were doing as well as the first one I’d probably be breaking even… Oh well.

So what’s the plan for next month? I’m not sure right now, and I don’t even want to say anything since I can’t seem to keep up anyway. Next month is looking better on free time, but of course it’s also summer and that’s when I tend to get the things done around the house that need fixing.

I guess I’ll let you know what I did after it happens next month. =)

March 2014 Income Report

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Time Period
This report covers Mar 1st, 2014 to Mar 31st , 2014

Income
Well, the only official affiliate sites I have up right now AND MONETIZED are the EmpireFlippers Pre-Sold sites from the Adsense Case Study #1. The amount of revenue and page views is laughable, it’s not even worth my time to go look at the google analytics, (but I did anyway and they were useless – thank you Gogle for “Not Provided”). This month so far, they’ve made a total of $0.57. That’s pretty pathetic. =(

Total Affiliate Income Earned (this month): $0.57
Total Affiliate Income Earned (this year): $2.55

I do have one other site up at the moment, but it isn’t ready to be monetized yet. You can read all about it under Case Study #2 . I’m also having a third site built on an old domain name I’ve had around for a while. It will be an Amazon only site. It should be ready sometime this week.

Rankings
Here are the rankings for the EFPS sites for March 2014.

			Current			Change
Site	KW	KC	Google Rank	Bing Rank	Yahoo Rank	Google	Bing	Yahoo
EFPS #1	Primary	30	Not In Top 100	62	62	0	38	38
EFPS #1	Secondary	29	50	5	5	50	3	3
EFPS #1	Secondary	25	26	5	5	46	2	2
EFPS #1	Secondary	24	Not In Top 100	20	20	0	9	8

EFPS #2	Primary	28	Not In Top 100	21	24	0	8	5
EFPS #2	Secondary	26	33	7	7	0	0	0
EFPS #2	Secondary	27	70	7	7	10	5	8
EFPS #2	Secondary	25	81	8	7	-3	9	12

EFPS #3	Primary	29	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	0	0	0
EFPS #3	Secondary	28	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	0	0	0
EFPS #3	Secondary	28	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	0	0	0
EFPS #3	Secondary	27	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	0	0	0

EFPS #4	Primary	26	Not In Top 100	66	66	0	-18	17
EFPS #4	Secondary	26	Not In Top 100	38	38	0	-6	-6
EFPS #4	Secondary	22	Not In Top 100	66	66	0	-34	-36
EFPS #4	Secondary	23	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	Not In Top 100	0	0	0

EFPS #5	Primary	27	61	36	78	-1	4	-38
EFPS #5	Secondary	27	59	16	16	41	2	1
EFPS #5	Secondary	25	27	3	3	8	0	0
EFPS #5	Secondary	27	Not In Top 100	12	26	0	16	0

The first two sites are moving up in the serps, while the remaining three are either stagnant or decreasing. So much for ranking on their own without any backlinks. As soon as I get socialadr setup I’ll send some links to all of them.

Expenses
Unfortunately, there’s always expenses….

Hosting: $24.95
Domain Names: $10.16
Pre-built Sites (2): $148
WSO’s (I still buy ‘em lol): $24
Long-tail Pro (monthly fee): $17

Total Expenses: $224.11

Grand Total – this month (Income minus Expenses): -$223.54
Grand Total – this year (Income minus Expenses): -$414.75

Last month’s plan was 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. The only part of that which happened was me re-writing the EFPS bonus content and getting that up on 4 of the 5 sites. The 5th one I’ll get up this weekend. This month’s plan is to write a couple of good articles for the new website that uses the FB page, and see if I can monetize it or start collecting emails from it. As always, time is a precious commodity around here and this month is worse than normal. Lots going on!

Talk to ya soon.

Case Study #2 – Community Cash

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On March 5th I purchased a site from Tom aka Wolfmmiii on the WarriorForum.

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/898774-guaranteed-traffic-community-cash-make-killing-online-via-facebook-limited-availability.html

The basic pitch for the WSO is “never rely on Google again”! The idea is that he builds you a website and a facebook page, and then starts off your fan page likes with a week long advertising spree. that way, you have a built in audience to sell to. Of course, he recommends that you don’t sell to them immediately as you need to build up the trust factor.

The good news is that you can use other peoples content because this is Facebook. Since you don’t care about ranking in Google, you also don’t care about duplicate content. And the icing on the cake is that Tom will buy your site back from you within 14 days, (I.E. full refund), if you follow his guide and aren’t happy with the results.

So, by now you are probably wondering how did it go for me?

Well, first I’d like to say that Tom was super easy to work with, quick to answer my questions, and quick to get the site up and running. You just have to remember that he doesn’t work weekends. 🙂 The site itself looks great, it’s got a custom header and design that matches up with the facebook page for brand recognition. I didn’t really like the theme that he used and I definitely didn’t like the ad placement or the plugin that served the ads, but those were minor details and easily rectified. Once he’d finished the site, I went in and added my personal touches and voila! I had a complete site plus FB page all set up.

Tom originally added about 5 articles and a couple of videos to the site to get it started, and also posted them to the fb page.

I’m not sure if the FB campaign he ran actually went for one full week as I wasn’t added as an admin until Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, however, I have no reason to doubt it. I do wonder if he has a cap on the amount spent per day; I assume he must or else he wouldn’t make any profit. By the end of the week I had 204 likes from his campaign. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s a good start.

Total cost for all of this? $99. Of course that was almost three weeks ago and he’s now selling the package for $119.

What have I done with it so far?

Not that much I’m afraid. Time is always hard for me to come by, hence why I’m buying these completed sites instead of creating them from scratch. I’ve managed to make a few posts on the fb page, but I haven’t done anything with the website. One thing I have figured out already though is that people on fb aren’t that interested in leaving fb to go somewhere else, they are however very interested in photos and memes. Especially ones with exceedingly good-looking women in them. =)

My next course of action for this site will be to find some more photos, videos, memes, etc, basically anything visual that will catch the person’s attention, and start posting them regularly. Then I’ll add an email capture funnel on the website, and start posting one original article each week on the website which I’ll link back to from the fb page. Hopefully that will start to build my email list which I can then use to market and make money. I also need to make a twitter account and a pinterest account, and probably run a fb campaign to get more likes.

Like most money-making ideas, the work doesn’t stop once the site is built – there really isn’t anything that is “set it and forget it”, but without having a VA to do all the work for you, I’d say that using fb for traffic is a lot more work than the usual keyword research + articles + seo route. It’s also a lot more fun. It’s pretty cool when you see people like and comment on the stuff that you post. =)

Bottom line, so far I’m happy with the price I paid and the service I received. In fact, just today I bought one of his amazon sites. I’ll let you know how that goes…

February 2014 Income Report

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Income Report For February: Or How Well Is This Sh!t Working?

Time Period

This report covers Jan 1^st, 2014 to Feb 28^th , 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 6^th, 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!

Affiliate Noob

Join Me On The Journey!

April and May 2014 Income Report

March 2014 Income Report

Case Study #2 – Community Cash

February 2014 Income Report