October was a fairly average affiliate marketing month for me with a few exceptions.  Revenue was up about 15% from just over $900, which I don’t consider to be a significant jump by any means.

Improvements

What IS encouraging is that last month I had 9 days with negative ROI’s (only amounting to about $50), whereas this month that number dropped to 2 days and only $20.  This tells me I’m polishing my current campaigns and plugging the holes.  This is even more apparent when you tally my negative days in the month of August (10 days for a loss of $215)!

Even MORE encouraging is that my affiliate marketing ROI is up from 247% in September to 277% for the month of October.  I attribute this to thinning out my herd of campaigns and terminating paid ads for any that weren’t performing well (or performing at all).

Underachievers

One of the under-performing sites was my Sony Bravia V Series website, which didn’t convert well enough to be a good CPC campaign.  My focus for it now is simply organic traffic, as sparse as it may be.  It does, however, rank fairly well on bing for several terms (#7 on Bing for “sony bravia v series” and #5 for “sony bravia v series reviews”), and I’m seeing several hundred uniques each month.  This month, the site converted 1 46″ Bravia V Series LCD hdtv for a commission of about $45.  Nothing to complain about, but I definitely wouldn’t mind some more conversions.

Non-Affiliate Earnings

My Adsense campaigns are struggling, but I haven’t really given them much attention lately.  I did start blogging more often, but the site is still climbing its way up the search engines at this point.  Time and more quality content should help increase that revenue trickle into a revenue stream (or even better, a revenue river?)

I still plan to start marketing within some ClickBank niches, but I haven’t had time to start that endeavor quite yet (the 9-to-5 is keeping me really busy lately).

Break it Down (dancing optional)

Here’s the breakdown of revenue for this month:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $19.18
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $1,437.14
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: $1,456.32
(Minus) Adwords PPC Spend: $367.75
(Minus) Adcenter PPC Spend: $13.16

Total Net Affiliate Revenue: $1074.24

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!

For all intents and purposes, this was my first month of real affiliate marketing.  I had been an Adsense user for several years with minimal success, but July was when I finally said “I’m going to actually try this”.

For Adsense, I’ve got about half a dozen random sites that pretty much just sit around collecting a tiny bit of traffic.  My most successful Adsense is my old funny t-shirts business that I created, owned, and operated for 5 years.  This site still gets around 1500 uniques each month despite being completely closed for business.  For several years, that site ranked #1 on Google for the term “funny tees”, which was a fiercely competitive niche.

Granted, I didn’t get started until nearly July 20th, so this was more indicative of about 1/3 month than a whole month.  You’ve gotta start somewhere and I’m glad I did!

Here’s the breakdown:

Adsense Revenue (7 sites): $24.13
Amazon Affiliates Revenue: $128.77
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 Affiliate Revenue: $152.90

While this seems like a fairly mundane amount, it was enough to spark my enthusiasm for the concept of affiliate marketing.  Now I’m probably spending 12 to 15 hours a week on my various affiliate marketing campaigns.