After a partial month in July, I was very satisfied with my results in August.  As it seems many new affiliate marketers do, I spent WAY more on Adwords than I had anticipated, but the investment still payed off with a 73.94% ROI, which I didn’t find to be too bad for my first full month.

For the month, I built a specialized website for Sony Bravia V Series LCD tv’s, which was built to drive traffic through Amazon.  While expensive to advertise, I was able to make a decent return on the site (with fairly good conversion rates).  I spent $556 on Adwords promoting this site, mostly because it was a brand new domain and I knew it wouldn’t rank organically for many months.  Luckily, its ranking #3 on Bing for the term “sony bravia v series“, which is the phrase I was going for.  Google is going to be harder (as usual) thanks to the numerous dashes in the domain name…Bing doesn’t seem to mind them.

Along with the Sony Bravia V Series site, I built an almost identical Sony Bravia Z Series site as well.  This site has struggled mostly and I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more money on ads than I’ve earned.  Lesson learned: find the right products before you spend time building a site for them.  I’ve found that keeping a sharp eye on Amazon’s Top Sellers lists is a great way to find products that will sell like hotcakes.  These items are usually priced very competitively in the market, and given Amazon’s trust factor, they are usually winners.

On top of that, I had my existing Amazon Gift Cards business running, which has been a hit since day one.  I can usually count on this campaign to average around $25/day on an average of $12/day budget (100% ROI ain’t bad!).

Here’s the breakdown:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $17.81
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $1869.43
ClickBank Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Shareasale Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
Commission Junction Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
TOTAL Gross Affiliate Revenue: $0 (nothing done with this account yet)
(Minus) Adwords PPC Spend: $981.79
(Minus) Adcenter PPC Spend: $95.45

Total Net Affiliate Revenue: $812.50

Not a horrible month, though I know I can increase the ROI to well above 100% in the coming months.  I’ll have to be selective about which campaigns I keep going, and as always: TEST, TEST, and TEST!