So the totals are…

BANS $2880 (through EPN), $525 (through Commission Junction),

Text Link Ads $725

Wealthy Affiliate Commissions $860

Total(ish) :  $4187.00

Holy cow.  I never would have thought a year ago that I’d be telling you I earned over $4000 doing affiliate marketing!

What about expenses?

Well there were some…hosting ($9.95/month), domain names (bunches), Wealthy Affiliate membership fees ($290).  I’m not including advertising fees here because those were all for clickbank products and the whole package there was pretty much break even.

I did spend a good part of my earnings reinvesting…things like buying article packs, hiring a site designer…but so far everything has paid for itself easily.

I’m having a blast doing this and here’s hoping this coming year is exponentially better!

I wish that I had taken the opportunity to share with you guys in real time what I’ve been learning, but in  retrospect, you don’t always know what it is that your learning, and what portions of it are valuable.

Here is a brief update:

I am workign on a PPC campaign for a clickbank product.  This is my 3rd iteration of the campaign.  It is pretty much break even so far between sales and adspend.  You see this in a lot of the posts on wealthy affiliate…someone has made $2000 in sales, but also spent $2000 in adspend.

The secret to turning a profit is learning how to make your campaign more effective on a number of different aspects…

-reducing advertising costs

-obtaining more leads

-increasing the conversion rate of each lead

-increaseing the number of sales to each prospect or customer.

The past few weeks I’ve been focusing on obtaining more leads (for teh same adspend), and increasing the coversion rate of my sales.  I’ve done this be totally redesigning my autoresponder sequence to invoke more curiousity, and making more frequent promotions of the back end product.

At the same time, I try to engage my list by being personable and offering good advice.  It’s amazing the responses that I get from people on my list…even those who have not purchased from me, still thanking me for helping them with their problem!  (which makes me think that maybe I helped too much…and solved their problem without them buying teh product).

The second MAJOR thing that I’ve been working on is a partnership with several members of Wealthy Affiliate.  We had all been helping one another on the forums there and realzied that we all had talents that were mutually beneficial.  So we formed a real business entity and are currently working on developing a product that we discovered a demand for by doing research in our niche.

We have really high hopes that this will do well because it is a frequent topic in the news and we are devoping something that just isn’t out there yet.  I can’t say what it is yet, but in addition to the product itself, we are developing an amazing affiliate support package that will teach our affiliates everything they need to know about how to promote the product, track and test their results and increase our affiliates profits…which will naturally boost our own profits.

So stay tuned  for more updates!

All I can say is that so far it has been mind blowing! Myself and 3 others have taken him up on this challenge. THere are 4 different forum threads going, with each of us cross posting to one another, and hundreds of views of the threads by other members of the forum.

There is so much more to SUCCESSFUL affilaite marketing than just trying to sell. The keys to the vault are in tracking and improving what’s working and scrapping what isn’t…the real question is how and what do you track?

It seems simple on the surface, but it takes work, effort, the ability to make a plan and follow through, and a blueprint for where you are going. It doesn’t mean that you know where you will end up, but the PROCESS of getting there is the single most important aspect of success.

In one year, I will kiss my “day job” goodbye. Hold me up to this promise, OK?

PS You can check out the four thread’s of “C’s challenge” in the Forums at Wealthy Affiliate (sign up for a trial membership and see what you think)

For example, in the header of the page, I had the text that reflected the NAME OF THE DOMAIN.  Even though that target page had a different focus.  By putting my domain name there in big headline letters, I may have been confusing people who arrived via a different keyword search.

That was easy enough to fix, but hte sort of thing that perhaps is only paid attention to by a more experienced marketer.

I now have that single page nicely tuned, so I copied the page, and targeted for a different keyword that I looked up in Wordtracker. I did a search that resulted in about 3 good longtail keyword phrases.  My plan is to optimize a page for each keyword, and then create a new adgroup for each landing page.

This really is a lot of work, it’s not “Make Money Fast” on the internet.

I know this is a product that sells, and I’ve proven it already.

But now I’m focused on making this a profitable campaign and squeezing all I can out of the niche through many different angles, mastering one angle at a time.

Worse, is the fear of stopping something that’s working in order to test something that’s unknown.  Without exception, experienced marketers have learned that a well optimized landing page for your ad, keyword or article, will result in MORE affiliate sales than a direct linking campaign to the sales page.  The trick is in learning how to keep your landing page from getting in the way of your sales.

Ed Dale calls this “slippery-ness” of your content. If your content is slippery, your reader will click through to your link to learn the rest of the story, read the punchline, or satisfy his curiosity that you’ve raised in your copy.

Wealthy Affiliate includes one-on-one mentoring and coaching with Carson & Kyle via PM on the site.  After then landing page I had set up last week (the one I started with Site Rubix & polished with Dreamweaver), I thought I had a “perfect” campaign set up.  OK, not really, but it was at least a campaign in which I thought I’d followed all the basic rules of affiliate marketing:

• Compelling landing page
• Targeted keywords
• Common Keyword Technique (learned on Wealthy Affiliate’s 8 week course)
• Good Converting Merchant Product

Thankfully Carson was honest and pointed me to additional tutorials on the site.  I modified my landing page (yes, it’s better), then simply redirected my current (converting) direct linking campaign to have those same ads point to my own landing page & mini-site.

So far, my CTR (click through ratio) is good, but it’s only been a few hours.  The real test will be if my content on the landing page is “Slippery” and results in clicks to my merchant page.

I’ll keep you all updated.