This Affiliate Marketing Path

Well, as I mentioned, I started over so to speak, and I think I’m at the point where another blog was in order. This blog is great for posting earnings and sharing personal/online stories, but I wanted to have a blog where I could post web tips and WordPress designs of my own that was sort of catchier, more ‘brandable.’ I plan to keep sharing a lot of my journey there, but I want it to be more valuable and tip-centric… I always want to write about some new online adventures there, and maybe even follow some guides step-by-step on the blog and let users see the site being created.

It’s FrostWurks.com if you want to stop by and update your bookmarks

I may pop in here and there to discuss earnings and things like that sometimes.

Well, in the past few months I’ve been maintaining my $4500/mo earnings, however, it’s starting to bother me that this hasn’t been increasing.

So I stopped and took a breath and looked at was has been working for me, what has not been working for me, and what has been working for others (I simply looked at the top performers in the niches I’m interested in) and decided to start all over.

And I’m going to use much of that $4500/mo to subsidize the new sites. That’s right, new sites.

Here are a few things I realized:

• I’m no expert at marketing blogs, I had hired a handful of awesome writers to blog for a few months and I let them run wild with the topics. While the posts were very high quality, I just can’t get visitors without keyword focused articles. So I’m going to put those on hold until I decide what to do with them.
• Linking to your own related sites is OK.
• As I mentioned in the first point, keyword-focused articles have always worked best for me - so I’m going back to the basics and starting again with keyword-focused sites.
• I’m too lazy to post articles on straight HTML sites these days so every new site from this point will be WordPress-driven, but will look like normal sites (leaving out comments and other bloggy things).
• I do see the value in quality - so I’m going for 100% high quality articles now and am willing to pay much higher prices for articles than I would have before.
• I tend to focus on working on sites I enjoy, so I’m only going to work on topics I like from now on, regardless of how well the keywords pay.

So that’s the plan. Also, I’m going to go into more of an ‘internet publishing’ mode rather than an affiliate marketing mode and will be posting more on these new sites on my personal blog - Fyrewurks - since it is my home business and since it does take up much of my personal life. Then I’ll leave the boring affiliate marketing stuff that my family and friends don’t want to hear about for this blog

Yahoo! web hosting SUCKS!!!! If you get nothing else out of this, just remember this: never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever get Yahoo hosting!!! Over the years I have had so many AWFUL problems with them - and you can’t even get out once you’re in a lot of times (for various reasons I won’t get into… one being that sometimes they have a real problem transferring your domain!)

Once again, they have royally screwed me over. Last week one of my sites went down… they have no idea why, but their customer service rep’s swear they keep ‘resetting’ it. After spending countless hours doing my best to write polite emails despite being infuriated, as well as countless hours sitting on hold only to reach a bumbling idiot on the other line telling me they don’t know what’s going on and I’ll have to email this other department, my site FINALLY came up today.

So I decided to let them know that this site had been on page one of Google for over a year up until this week when it dropped to page 10.

And WTF do you know?!? A minute after I shoot my thank-you note off it’s down again and someone tells me they need five different kinds of information from me for them to look into the issue!!

ARGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!! So I start Googling my problem to see if there’s anything I can do, and I find no solutions, just pages like this!

Now, I’m going to try to forget that Yahoo! is losing me lots of revenue every day and try to get some sleep… :’(

Creating these niche WP themes has inspired me to start making personal WordPress themes as well - so I’ll be posting them over on my personal blog, Fyrewurks.

The one I’m using right now is one my husband helped me come up with - “Dreams of Dandelions” - and I lvoed his idea so much I put it together yesterday and decided to use it at Fyrewurks. Feel free to leave me comments or suggestions for other themes at either site if you like

This week I’m working on adding a bunch of free WP themes on different niches to Savvy Web Design. The new themes are compatible with the new WP 2.6 image/caption functionality, Adsense-ready, and widget ready.

I’m open to niche suggestions!

Feel free to leave me feedback too

Looks like it’s time to ride the affiliate marketing roller coaster again… after enjoying a year of having my main site on page 1 of Google, it’s suddenly dropped to page seven and the earnings are suffering… today I had a lower Adsense day than I’ve had all year - $38.

Time to stop spending all of the income on the business and to start paying off bills, I suppose, and time to start getting up early again to roll up my sleeves and do some major work on these.

So, sadly, I won’t be able to hire my wonderful new bloggers again this fall, and I’ll have to put new projects on hold.

Last year around this time I started seeing a real increase in my earnings, and I even remember that was around the time that my home improvement site jumped to the number one spot in Google for it’s main keyword.

I focused on that site all of last year, and then once it got there, I went on to other things. Well it dropped to number three, then number five, then number nine, and I wasn’t worried because it was still on page one and was still making a decent amount of money. Well yesterday it dropped from page one to page seven

Time to start focusing on it again! I guess that I need to do some ‘maintenance’ things on a regular basis to keep things going.

I’m not complaining though, my earnings have increased significantly since this time last year and I just need to get back to the point where I’m putting a lot of the business money back into the business. Here are my June & July earnings from Adsense & TLA (not including the smaller sources of income):

June - $4569.67
July - $4596.54

I did!

OK, I don’t know about awesome… but I just bought the domain LURV.ME and I have a grandiose plan for it!

Yesterday afternoon .ME domains became available to the public, so now’s a good time to jump in and grab that catchy ____ me domain name.

I want to make it a fresh, new social bookmarking site and I’ve already got an idea of the logo, graphics, and target audience.

Now I’m going to go see about setting up a project at Elance for someone to create a social bookmarking site for me (don’t have the time to sit and try to figure this one out) and then I may even find a designer for the site… or I may do that myself, we’ll see.

I think I will post all of the details of this project here, from the building and designing of it to the marketing of it and so on - so stay tuned for more details

Unfortunately, I’ve spent much of the past month wrestling with WordPress’s latest release and image upload errors.

I found out there are two things causing the errors, and it’s not happening for everyone, just with certain versions of IE and certain versions of FireFox and the WP update.

One of them is caused by erroneous commas that IE doesn’t like, and this fix was the hardest for me to find - but I finally found it here: http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7573.

The second problem has to do with coding that needs to be added to the .htaccess file and you can find a plugin for that fix here: http://lud.icro.us/wordpress-plugin-image-upload-http-error-fix/.

Now, once I go and edit all 50 of my WordPress blogs I can have images again… yay WP.

I’m happy with how things are going, but with all of the leveraging I’m doing, I sure haven’t seen an increase like I’d like to. May earnings were slightly less than last month:

$2,370.31 - Adsense
$2,196.37 - TLA
$10.23 - Amazon
$35.27 - CJ
__________________
$4,612.18

So I need to carefully evaluate what I’m going to invest in next month… I’ve got these new blogs that are high quality but not making anything yet, then I’ve got older sites, some of which are slipping and some rising in the SERPs… plus my budget will be a little different… I will post more once I figure out what to focus on.