After writing in a previous post that I was having the best month ever despite being out of the country, sunning myself in Tunisia (wouldn’t recommend it to anybody – preferred Egypt much more!) I was starting to remember one of the reasons I had got into Affiliate Marketing again – to make money while I slept! Basically the fact I could build some websites and they would make me money without me directly working on them each day.

Over the last month, I must be honest, my motivation had been slipping as my sites weren’t performing. I am getting more traffic than ever before, but this month was looking like the worst month ever, with earnings sitting at around 25% of last months! I think the problem was that I came back off holiday and I was sooooo happy with the amount I had made I had a few more days out (worst idea ever!), then started working on the SEO for a few site which weren’t mine which I am extremely happy with – as are the site owners! During this time my sites made no sales, which totally sucked my motivation as the they weren’t making any money.

As a result I decided to carry on with the SEO on some other sites and spend way too long reading different bits and pretty much wrote this month off as a “learning and working for others month”. Over the weekend though I kicked myself up the arse and made myself do some work on my own sites. One of the sites which had made £xxx last month was sitting at low £xx this month, with all traffic coming from 1 keyword (an exact match on the URL) so I decided to work on the SEO for another 3 keywords (both singular and plural, plus the singular version of the main keyword). The site now has all 8 keywords on the first 2 pages, around 5 or 6 on the first page and despire only making 2 sales so far this month, made another 3 this week which has more than tripled the amount that site has earnt.

One of my main sites from through the summer, which is a very summery product is getting even more traffic now which is strange. It is a gift which could double as a Christmas Present, but I didnt think it would INCREASE in traffic after summer. One of the problems is that one of the merchants was advertising the main product at 20% less than they were selling it at in Google shopping, which appeared right above my result – which had the price listed in the META description!It resulted in traffic dropping for a bit, but they have gone now and traffic has increased, however I’ve only just noticed that BOTH of the merchants I promote (there is a script which checks stock levels at the first merchant, if they are out of stock, changes all the links to the second merchant.) which has meant that I couldn’t convert the traffic…however, yesterday the more expensive merchant got them back in stock and I sold another 4!

A few of my other sites have now started converting again which is strange as they have all been “dead” over the last month, but I guess with the “big day” not far away I needed this kick up the arse to get myself out of thinking that I could sit around all day and make money without doing anything! It’s not directly proportional by any means, but I’m definately in the mind set that the more I work, the more I earn (at the minute!).

My gold locket site hasn’t made me any more sales yet, but it is still ranking number 1 for “Gold Locket” and number 10 for “Gold Lockets” – I just need to boost the plural rankings and hope it stays there and hopefully it will make a few more sales before Christmas. I THINK I am still winning the competition, but must admit, I haven’t looked at the forum recently as it seems to be turning into a bit of a spammers paradise/noob asking the same questions over and over again (I’ld be happy for LiquidLunch to come back – at least his posts were funny – even if they weren’t meant to be!).

On a side note, I’m off to see Al Murray on Friday! Went last year and absolutely loved it, by far the best comedian I have seen so hopefully this years will be good! Oh, and if anybody wants 2 tickets to see Jason Manford in Nottingham next October I have 2 available (at cost price), about row 8 or 9 I think.

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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!