This Affiliate Marketing Path

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
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$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.

I haven’t made much headway towards my $1000 a day goal yet, so I think I’m going to rework some of my plans.

My new big project for this year is my new blog network, and while I love that the writers have been adding great, high quality articles every day, it has really put a dent in my budget and I have yet to earn anything from them. So I think I’m going to take most of the ads off of them today (since they aren’t very effective right now anyway) and just promote them as much as possible this week.

Then I’m going to cut back on them by only keeping the best writers and cutting the posts down from five a week on each to two a week on each.

Then, I’m going to use the money I’ll have saved on building up a few of my sites that have been doing well over the past year.

I need to be mindful of what has been working for me so far and keep that going as well.

In the mean time I need to get the new ProBlogger book and sit down and read that before I put much more into my blog network.

$2492.75 - Adsense
$2154.92 - TLA
$13.29 - CJ
$1.54 - Amazon
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$4662.50

Now about $2,000 of that is going into my new blogs - which is getting scarier and scarier as I have yet to see any returns… But I know (I know) these things take time.

While these were a bit lower than last month, in further retrospect, they were great compared to last April’s $733.02 (maybe I should just keep doing what I did from this point last year… hmm…)

I’ve always had Darren Rowse’s blogging blog - ProBlogger - bookmarked as a site to check out now and then.  It was always useful, interesting, and from the personal bits he throws out here and there, Darren just seems like an interesting guy anyway.

But lately, with my new blog network project, I find myself heading over there all the time when I ask myself things like “how much should I pay bloggers” (Rowse pays well, around $50 a post and upward for some of his blogs) and “what’s the best way to monetize a blog” (I was looking for a new advertising method after getting a major PR slap after placing Text Link Ads on my other blogs) and many more questions.

So I’ve been getting to know ProBlogger fairly well over the past few weeks because he usually provides detailed answers to my blogging questions. 

That’s why I was particularly happy to see that he’s now releasing a ProBlogger Book which I will definitely have to get my hands on.  I’m really excited to learn some tips and tricks from someone who’s been quite successful with his own blog network!

Ok, I have a long way to go by the end of the year if I’m going to reach my $1000 a day goal - but here’s what I made in earnings in March:

$2,372.90 - Adsense
$2,206.07 - TLA
$66.26 - Amazon
$33.29 - CJ
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$4,678.52

Pretty cool when I compare it to last March’s $705.52.

My main strategy at this point will be on promoting my new blog network blogs and I’ll probably come up with a site focus plan - I’ll probably focus on one site every two weeks from this point on.

Ok, I’ve now got the blogs in my new blog network looking the way I’d like to and I’ve got bloggers posting on them five days a week.

I have the bloggers login and post the articles themselves each day - and create appropriate tags and categories.

As for the pay, I’m paying them $10 per blog post.  After looking around, it seems that this is a bit on the high end, but I’m really going for quality on these blogs - and for the most part, I’m happy with what I’m seeing.

I’ll keep you posted on how things work out with these - so far this month - no incoming revenue and $800 outgoing revenue -  that’s a bit hard to swallow, but considering that they’re brand-spanking-new, that’s to be expected.  And  think it will be a wise investment down the road.

Recently, a man who wrote articles for me a few years ago emailed me and asked if he could re-use the articles that he had written for me.  In this email, he pointed out that we never had an agreement about copyright.

This was annoying, as you can imagine, I hire people to write unique content so that my ‘unique’ sites will be more valuable to readers.  Now this guy wants to go and distribute them willy nilly. 

Of course, I hadn’t made any sort of agreement so I had to tell him, “sure, go ahead…”

Now, however, I’m a little concerned.  I went to Elance and didn’t see any type of copyright terms built into the agreements - so I’m wondering - would it suffice for me to put something in the business terms?  Should a create a full blown contract and have them sign it? 

How do you handle copyrights?

I recently mentioned that I was thinking about starting a high quality blog network; well I got things rolling on Monday. 

First, I posted a project on Elance entitled “Blog About Your Passion!” and asked for writers to tell me what they loved.  I then picked four of the writers that had bid on the project and created four blogs around their topic of choice - and so were born the first four blogs in the Go! Blog Network: Fly Fishing Dish, That Dog Blog, That Parent Place, and The Knitter’s Niche.  

The requirements were that all posts must be unique, providing a mix of personal stories along with tips and occasional references to other sites or videos; and that they write one post a day every weekday.

Stop by if you get a chance and let me know if you have any suggestions!  I’m still working on the templates and will be adding more images to the sides - I’m up for suggestions for that too.

To see updates to the network, visit the Go! Blog Network blog.

And wish me luck on my newest adventure

It’s been a while since I’ve posted earnings here, so I wanted to catch up and post January and February earnings.  I also wanted to revisit why I post earnings - it’s because when I first started I wanted to see what was working for people, so I feel that if I can blog about what I’m doing, and then let people know how it’s working for me, it might offer readers a way to gauge their work.   At least I hope it’s useful in some way

I’m just going to post my combo earnings from Adsense and TLA for these months because I don’t want to go back and research the smaller earnings:

February: Adsense 2,381 + TLA 2,017 = $4,398

January: Adsense 2,770 + TLA 1,752 = $4,522

I’m thinking that the next project I’d like to start is a high-quality blog network - where writers are passionate about the subject matter and can write daily.  I’m at a point where I can afford to hire one or two writers to post regularly to get it started, but I still have a lot of things to consider:

• Is it better to have them all on one domain and use subdomains or is it better to have many separate domains?
• How will I monetize it?  Will using Text Link Ads mess up my PR (if I’m even going to worry about PR) or should I use other advertising methods? 
• Should I start doing this on a blog network I already have, though it has duplicate content right now?

These are just a few of many things I’m contemplating.  Have any of you ventured into creating a blog network?  If so, what was your experience?