When I started this challenge, I really believed I could put in 8 hours plus per day, and that I would smash the $1,000 barrier. 30 days later, I didn't even get halfway towards the $1k and 2-4 hours per day has been my usual amount of productivity.
That doesn't mean I consider it a failure though, in fact far from it. I'll go more into why later, but for now, here's how much I made:-
Week 1 - $105
Week 2 - $35
Week 3 - $206
Week 4 - $40
Total - $386
I'm not sure I've even made half that during a month since I have been in IM, so it shows I've definitely made progress. During those weeks before Christmas when I didn't make a cent, if you'd told me I'd make $386 over 4 weeks, I'd have taken it in a heartbeat.
I've got into some good habits - things like leveraging my content by rewriting, spinning and syndicating it. I've also been a lot more organised than before, partly down to this blog and partly down to the productivity software I bought a few weeks back. I've learned some new things - how to put a squeeze page up, how to upload and sell my own digital product to name two.
In terms of the money I generated, it came from three areas - a couple of sales from my main niche site, my JV PLR article pack WSO and largely from a CPA offer I have been promoting. I'm going to look at these 3 in depth.
Main Niche Site
Just a couple of Clickbank sales from this is very disappointing. Although I concentrated more on ranking it higher in the SERPs and building a list, to only get 2 sales from it is a poor showing. Just from the search engines alone it gets 15-30 unique visitors per day. I know that isn't many, but the Clickbank products on there are pretty prominent so I'd expect more. I think one of the main reasons it doesn't convert is because there is a LOT of information on there about every aspect of the niche. In fact, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, a visitor could be well on the way to fixing the problem that makes them go there by implementing the information and advice on there.
It feels good that the content on the site is helpful to the visitors, but I'd like to make some money from it too. With most of the products on there costing $37 upwards, no wonder they usually don't buy any of them. I plan on writing and releasing my own product in the coming months, at a cheaper price than other similar products, maybe that will make a difference.
The site holds the number 10 spot in Google and 7 or 8 in Bing, and the keyword phrase gets searched 500-600 times per day. Maybe things would change if could get the number 1 spot. But instead of thinking like that, I'm going to look at the site and see what changes and improvements I can make. I'm also going to continue trying to build my list and tweak anything I need to on that front.
PLR Article Pack WSO
In terms of the PLR article pack, we sold 14 of them, which isn't bad for a first WSO. I never expected to sell the entire 50, but if I'm honest I'd have liked to have sold at least a few more. We wrote the articles for Warriors only, and I'm glad we did but if we hadn't and had advertised/promoted them elsewhere, I wonder if we could have sold more. I'm probably going to do another PLR pack, but I'm going to look more into places to sell/distribute them. In fact, in the future I may even create a PLR article site. Definitely something to think about.
CPA
With the CPA sales, I think I struck pretty lucky, although saying that, I would have liked my clicks to have converted much better than they did. Throughout January, my site was getting 20+ unique visitors from Google every single day and my site/articles/press releases were dominating the keyword phrase they were coming from. At this moment in time, I don't have any active offers on the site, as they have either expired or been dropped by the networks I am in. I'm currently looking at other networks to apply to. As I've said before, I was happy with the 3 I was in and didn't really want to join any more. I have no choice now though.
My stats for this offer during this challenge are something like 6 actions from 300 clicks. Not terribly bad, but the problem I have with those stats is that the keyword phrase people were typing in to get to my site is exactly what the offer gives them. I found driving traffic to the site(aside from the natural Google traffic) to be difficult as the keyword phrase looks a bit on the 'spammy' side, being as it has the word 'free' in it. Once I have got into a couple more CPA networks, I'm going to continue with this offer though, and if I can rank for the main term I want to, I should still pick up regular traffic and sales.
There are some areas that I really need to improve on - namely list building, traffic generation and article marketing. In terms of the last one, it's most of my strategy, but I don't get the CTR's I want. I know I'm a reasonably good writer, but I think I'm going to step back and really critique my writing style - perhaps I'll buy a course or WSO to help. There are so many variables though - the main niche I'm in is difficult to predict and gauge, and the niche where all the CPA sales have come from is the same.
I have a LOT to learn still, but I'm always willing to do just that. Not only am I nowhere near finishing my IM education, I've barely even started. I am determined to stay determined and motivated though - and that's what will hopefully carry me through to where I want to be.
I've pretty much decided that writing things down, and sharing things with others is something I want to continue, so I'm probably going to put up a Wordpress site in the near future. I'm going to blog(not every day like here though!), do reviews and document my strategies and plans. I guess it will be a step towards being in the make money online niche, which I'm sure I'll be in at some point in the future.
I made $386 in the last 30 days, and know I could have made more. At the same time, I know if I had been doing the things I was doing months ago, I would have made much less, so overall I'm pretty happy. I've really enjoyed this challenge, and I hope you guys that have followed along have too - thanks for reading, and I'll see you soon.
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Day 30 - Solid Yet Disappointing
Today was the final day of the 'challenge' aspect of things, but I am going to write a detailed conclusion tomorrow so I'm just going to go over what I actually did today in this entry.
I prepared two of my articles for spinning(with the Article Productions Spinner)by rewriting each title and paragraph 3 times. As I usually do, I'll spin 20 versions and spread them around the article directories and web 2.0 sites. I timed myself doing this, it took me 1 hour and 43 minutes in total. Not too bad, considering I'll get 40 articles ranging from 70-95% in uniqueness as a result.
I did my daily blog commenting too. I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but my strategy is very simple. I'll go to Google Blog Search, go to advanced search, type in a keyword phrase, type in any words I don't want results to include, set it to blogs from the last day and 100 results per page. I pay no attention to dofollow and nofollow like a lot of people seem to, I just try and contribute to each blog I comment on with something helpful, and have a link back to my site in the anchor text. I spend half an hour each day doing this, and Google seems to find the links very quickly.
The 3 articles I submitted to EZA yesterday went live. So far, the CTR's are poor, although I picked up 2 new subscribers to my list so it's not all bad. I really think I need to look at my article writing technique, because it's not getting me the results I want in terms of traffic, subscribers and sales. I've gone from not giving much away and getting high CTR's, to being as helpful as possible and getting low CTR's. Maybe I need to find a happy medium. I also think I need to look at my resource boxes. I might actually shop around for WSO on this by one of the article marketing experts.
I ran into some frustration later in the day though, yet another CPA offer I'm promoting has expired, meaning the links on the site that has made me the most money in the last few weeks lead to nowhere. I spent time going through other networks to find ones that carry the same offer. It looks as though I'm going to have to apply to at least two. I don't like applying to new networks because like I've said before, I have trouble keeping everything organised. I was happy with the 3 networks am in, and feel like any more and I am spreading myself a little thin. Saying that, most people that do well with CPA encourage you to apply for 10+ networks, so I'll have to suck it up.
Like I said earlier, I will be posting a detailed conclusion, probably tomorrow. I'm going to dissect the entire challenge, find out what I've learned, and decide where I'm going to go from here.
I prepared two of my articles for spinning(with the Article Productions Spinner)by rewriting each title and paragraph 3 times. As I usually do, I'll spin 20 versions and spread them around the article directories and web 2.0 sites. I timed myself doing this, it took me 1 hour and 43 minutes in total. Not too bad, considering I'll get 40 articles ranging from 70-95% in uniqueness as a result.
I did my daily blog commenting too. I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but my strategy is very simple. I'll go to Google Blog Search, go to advanced search, type in a keyword phrase, type in any words I don't want results to include, set it to blogs from the last day and 100 results per page. I pay no attention to dofollow and nofollow like a lot of people seem to, I just try and contribute to each blog I comment on with something helpful, and have a link back to my site in the anchor text. I spend half an hour each day doing this, and Google seems to find the links very quickly.
The 3 articles I submitted to EZA yesterday went live. So far, the CTR's are poor, although I picked up 2 new subscribers to my list so it's not all bad. I really think I need to look at my article writing technique, because it's not getting me the results I want in terms of traffic, subscribers and sales. I've gone from not giving much away and getting high CTR's, to being as helpful as possible and getting low CTR's. Maybe I need to find a happy medium. I also think I need to look at my resource boxes. I might actually shop around for WSO on this by one of the article marketing experts.
I ran into some frustration later in the day though, yet another CPA offer I'm promoting has expired, meaning the links on the site that has made me the most money in the last few weeks lead to nowhere. I spent time going through other networks to find ones that carry the same offer. It looks as though I'm going to have to apply to at least two. I don't like applying to new networks because like I've said before, I have trouble keeping everything organised. I was happy with the 3 networks am in, and feel like any more and I am spreading myself a little thin. Saying that, most people that do well with CPA encourage you to apply for 10+ networks, so I'll have to suck it up.
Like I said earlier, I will be posting a detailed conclusion, probably tomorrow. I'm going to dissect the entire challenge, find out what I've learned, and decide where I'm going to go from here.
Monday, 1 February 2010
Day 29 - A Great Start To The Week and February
If I could reproduce the amount of work I did today 5 times a week, I'd surely get to where I want to be sooner or later. I put in a good solid 5 hours(probably a little more actually) and got a good range of tasks completed, including the following:-
-Blog comments
-CPA research
-SEO research
-Article submissions(to my site and EZA)
-Created some new Web 2.0 properties
-Done some social bookmarking
The research tasks really needed to be done. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm really disorganized when it comes to CPA offers. I put together a list of offers I want to promote, it's just a case of getting sites and landing pages together for them and/or where on my existing sites to put the offers.
SEO research can be a real eye opener, and sometimes not for the better. I have been wondering why this one site has been dominating a keyword I have been targeting(my site is at the top of the second page). It's been a while since I've even seen the site in question have any content on it, it has usually redirected straight to a CPA offer. I analyzed it's backlinks today with SEO Spyglass and what come up was.....interesting. Most of their links are poor quality web 2.0 properties and blogs. When I say low quality, I mean the same article posted multiple times on the SAME Squidoo lens, paragraphs that make no sense and keyword stuffing. Why Google rewards such little effort with the number 1 spot is beyond me. Those of us that do things the right way and offer value to readers and visitors will surely surpass these kinds of sites, I hope so anyway.
I put a new article on my main niche site, and submitted 3 others to EZA. I'm really interested to see the CTR's and views for those 3 articles as I've barely submitted to EZA in the last few weeks.
I really want to keep up this level of productivity, I know I have to if I really want to make a success of my online business. I think the penny has dropped about that aspect of things. Tomorrow is the last day of the challenge. I may not be making much money, but I'm learning so much along the way and am getting into some really good habits that will hopefully serve me for years to come. So I'm pretty happy.
-Blog comments
-CPA research
-SEO research
-Article submissions(to my site and EZA)
-Created some new Web 2.0 properties
-Done some social bookmarking
The research tasks really needed to be done. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm really disorganized when it comes to CPA offers. I put together a list of offers I want to promote, it's just a case of getting sites and landing pages together for them and/or where on my existing sites to put the offers.
SEO research can be a real eye opener, and sometimes not for the better. I have been wondering why this one site has been dominating a keyword I have been targeting(my site is at the top of the second page). It's been a while since I've even seen the site in question have any content on it, it has usually redirected straight to a CPA offer. I analyzed it's backlinks today with SEO Spyglass and what come up was.....interesting. Most of their links are poor quality web 2.0 properties and blogs. When I say low quality, I mean the same article posted multiple times on the SAME Squidoo lens, paragraphs that make no sense and keyword stuffing. Why Google rewards such little effort with the number 1 spot is beyond me. Those of us that do things the right way and offer value to readers and visitors will surely surpass these kinds of sites, I hope so anyway.
I put a new article on my main niche site, and submitted 3 others to EZA. I'm really interested to see the CTR's and views for those 3 articles as I've barely submitted to EZA in the last few weeks.
I really want to keep up this level of productivity, I know I have to if I really want to make a success of my online business. I think the penny has dropped about that aspect of things. Tomorrow is the last day of the challenge. I may not be making much money, but I'm learning so much along the way and am getting into some really good habits that will hopefully serve me for years to come. So I'm pretty happy.
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