After hoping that this was going to be my best month ever again for my earnings, Im starting to feel that I may be on for my worst month in a while! My main site just hasnt been converting! Traffic levels are higher, Its sending the visitors through to the merchant, but nobody is buying. This seems to becoming more and more regular, with my seeming to start each month with a post complaining about my earnings (see here, here and here).

Hopefully things will start picking up now though! I’m currently working on my first PPC site which will also be my largest site so far (hence the reason for developing the Adwords Keyword Tracking Tool), The average commission value will be anything from around high £x, up to low £xxx, although I think the average will be around £15.

The site I completed at the start of the week is still sending an average of 10 clicks to the merchant each day, so im hopeful that it will turn at least a couple of sales this month, which will give me a decent chunk of commission. The problem is that the landing page I am sending them to had a handful of links to different products, around 40% of the links are broken! I told the merchant a week ago now, but they just dont seem interested in fixing it. One of my single product sites is due to get some TV coverage within the next week so hopefully that will give me a push in commission as well.

Oh well, onwards and upwards…

A couple months back I registered a new domain name for a new niche and did my usual ‘new domain’ routine…set up the hosting, installed wordpress, added one article, had 30 profile backlinks made pointing to it, created a custom image for the header in wordpress and then left it. It wasn’t until last week I decided to check the stats for it and noticed that it was already ranking 7th for the main keyword and had around 300 uniques last month! I hadn’t even changed the wordpress theme (other than a more suitable image for the header), let alone added any affiliate links so I decided to push this site to the top of the pile for developing.

I managed to design the site and create a new wordpress theme in a couple of hours on Monday night with the hope of pushing the website up the rankings over this month and creating a few sales from it. This morning I checked the ranking for the main keyword again…5th! It may have been a coincidence, but I like to think its more to do with the onsite SEO of the new custom theme compared to the standard theme

Unsuprisingly when I loaded Analytics up there was a ‘massive’ spike in traffic yesterday. The site had averages around 8 uniques per day during the week and 14 uniques per day at the weekend over the last month, yesterday there was 25 uniques, all from Google. I’m hoping this will translate to around 800-900 uniques per month at 5th, and I had originally guessed at around 2000 uniques per month once I hit first, although Im starting to think this may be even higher.

So by changing the theme, I’ve (hopefully) trippled the traffic to the site! I also managed to push 17 clicks to the merchant! According to the affiliate network, this merchant has around a 9% conversion rate, however Im hoping to convert 1% of the traffic I send them as they are high priced items. Providing I can reach the top commission tier (which would only require 3 sales per month), I’ll be making high £xx per sale. Combined with the fact the site could realistically get 2000+ visitors per month (from which I would expect at least 10-15 orders) without spending a penny on PPC, and this little niche starts to look like it might be worth expanding on!

Since last Friday (a week ago today), I have made a massive total of ……£0.00! After my best ever start to the month (almost as much in the first 6 days as the whole of last month) I was really excited about how much I could earn this month, but as I said, the last 7 days made me a grand total of zero!

I know Affiliate marketing will have peaks and dips, which is why Im not too bothered about it, however what is a bit concerning is that out of the 4 sites that regularly make sales (plus the A4U compeition), not one of them made a sale in an entire week!

The reason why the Gold Locket site didnt make any sales, was because it didnt have any traffic. Google decided to drop me for a week. I THINK the reason this happened was a massive surge in backlinks. I had done around 10-15 blog comments, however on 3 of the sites I ended up with site wide links due to “recent comment” blocks, resulting in around 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours! The day after placing these comments, guess what…the site dropped from the rankings! Last night I removed some of the duplicate content and replaced with unique content, and removed some of the keyword stuffing I had done. Today the number of backlinks dropped from 2000 to 1500 as the site wide links start to disappear and as if by magic, the site is now ranking back at 12th!

As for why the other sites have made no sales, I have no idea! One sites had the best month ever (again) traffic wise – but dropped from a 10% conversion rate over the last couple of months to 0% for a whole week. Normally the amount of traffic I sent the merchant would have resulted in around 20-25 sales, and a nice low £xxx in commission for me, but it didnt make a single sale, or penny in commission! The other sites are the same, decent traffic, but no sales!

Today however, the site mentioned above has made 2 sales from 3 clicks, another site has made a decent sale, my Gold Locket site is now back in the rankings and I have the next week off work – everything is looking up…again…for now!