Review - Money Made, Lessons Learned & The Future

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.