This Affiliate Marketing Path

I’m still here, it’s just been a rough start… in January my mother passed away and I haven’t done much with the sites.  

I’m just getting back into things, though, and will be posting income and hopefully some plans and goals for this year soon.   

I really have good feelings about 2008, and cannot wait to get some wheels spinning as far as plans go for the year.  I just got my planning page refills for my planner and took Monday off just so I could write out some plans and get really organized!

Just reading some other blogs today gave me a lot of inspiration, too - including Liz who has some great plans for 2008 and who recently got a mention in The Washington Post (WOW), and BJ who recently had some $200 and $300 days and who has decided (much like me) to focus on promoting this year, along with many other blogs that I regularly check out.

After writing out a site “to-do” list today, I realized I really need to get some focus and prioritize things.  I thought I might come up with around five things that I thought I really needed to do with the sites, but it ended up being more like 25.

I also have a few personal goals, including getting back into piano playing (my true passion), reading again (actual books), taking more vacations, and losing 30 pounds to get back to my college weight that I was very happy with.  I may be posting about all of that here as well since I don’t have a personal blog (hmm…) and since it’s all related in my mind anyway.

Speaking of taking more trips, I’m going to stop putting all of my earnings back into the business this year (I actually stopped a couple of months ago) - not that I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I just want to enjoy some of it now and also use some to pay down bills!

I’ve got a new goal for December - and I think that, if I can manage to do it, it will bring me loads of natural one-way links over time.

I’ve been playing around with creating WordPress themes (and really enjoying it!), so I’m going to try to make one theme designed around the topics of all of my sites - so that means I’ll have to create around 50 themes (I have around 50 sites and 50 blogs now, and will have two links on most themes).

This is very daunting to me - but what better way to bring in the new year?!  It’s also a great way to get related links, too.  For example - I had created a candle/aromatherapy theme a few months ago with my candle site link in the footer, and now I’m already getting related incoming links.

If you’re looking for a fresh new way to get inbound links, and enjoy designing, I think this would be a great thing to try out!

With a combination of heavily focusing on one site, creating a blog network, and posting loads of articles, I actually hit my target of $100 a day for November!  (Yay for the holidays!) Here’s the breakdown:

$2065.27 - Adsense
$1153.74 - TLA
$92.92 - CJ
$31.24 - ClickBank
$28.63 - Amazon
$10.05 - Kontera
_____________
$3381.85 = Total

Now, let’s just hope things are half as good for Jan. and Feb. - now’s really the time to do a big push so the sites don’t suffer terribly after the holidays.

Also, I’m going to be thinking up another challenge for next year - or looking for some good ones out there (BJ??).

I was trying to decide where to put my focus next, and I’m torn between promoting the main sub-pages of my star site and promoting the main pages of a few of my other sites.

So I could either keep putting a lot into the one great one, which is toggles between two and three on Google for its main keyword, or promote some of the many other content sites I’ve got out there.

Feel free to chime in with suggestions - I’d love to hear thoughts on this!

Part of my business budget over the past few months has gone into sponsoring WordPress themes.  I first tried it this summer and now I can see that it was a good investment.

Since Google updated backlinks, I have a lot of these showing up as backlinks to my site.  A lot of them are from personal blogs, too - so it’s really like getting organic links to your site over time.  And I really believe that these have played a good part in my recent surge in SE placement for certain sites of mine.

A word of caution though - if you do buy WP themes, try to get something really attractive.  I had paid for one awesome looking blog theme and that one seems to be getting me the most inbound links; while some cheaper, ok looking blogs haven’t seemed to help much.  As with most things - you get what you pay for.

$1,612.69 - Adsense
$952.75 - TLA
$195.59 - CJ
$38.34 - Amazon
_____________
$2799.37 = Total

Close to the $100 a day goal but not quite there - so that’s my goal for November, to finally reach that mark.  With it being the holiday season, I’m thinking it shouldn’t be *too* hard - but I still plan on putting a lot of effort into it.

Since the big PR crash that took place a few days ago happened, webmasters everywhere have been chatting incessantly over some major drops in PR. 

And I was no exception - on the blogs on which I use Text Link Ads - my lovely PR5’s dropped to fours, and my fours dropped to threes.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t care - because PR doesn’t matter, right? ;)  However, since TLA ads pay mainly based on PR, and since they usually don’t even accept blogs with PR3 and lower, I’m getting a little concerned.

Concerned and a little disgruntled - I had hired writers to post a BUNCH of new posts on those blogs, and had promoted them over the past few months - so it was not what I expected.

But I suppose that’s part of the excitement of affiliate marketing - adjusting to these unexpected bumps.

A few months back I mentioned my plan for really focusing on one site until it got into the top three rankings - well it’s finally happened - my home improvement site is now number two for its main keyword!

This is very exciting for me for two reasons - one: more revenue - yay!  And two: I get to move on to promoting other sites!!  After looking at this site, figuring out creative ways to promote it, and figuring out how to make it look just right for months - it’ll be great to move on to some other ones!

Here’s what I did over the past few months to move it up from oblivion to number two:

1. Posted articles on it regularly - about 2-3 a week
2. Promoted it by good old fashioned article directory submissions - only submitting to three directories - Ezine Articles, Go Articles, and Article Biz
3. Sponsored a few WP themes at Digital Point
4. Submitted to directories, including a small handful of paid ones that looked good (for around $25 each)

I still plan on adding articles on a fairly regular basis, and doing some promoting here and there - I’m just going to test things out to see what it takes to keep a site in top rankings (and I’m still working towards getting in that number one spot ).

As for my next goal - now that I have some more finances to work with, I’m going to promote three of my sites that have been around for a while until I can get them up there in the top rankings as well.  Starting… now!

I went to check my Adsense earnings for today and noticed that I’d only gotten 17 visitors to my home improvement site so far, which is very low.  This made me very nervous - and sure that I’d dropped from my number five spot on Google - I went and checked and I’d moved up to number four - beating out a very big site!

So then I made sure that all of the pages were still indexed in Google, and sure enough they were - so I guess it’s just one of those odd things.

At least I have some other decent sites to compensate when earnings fail on others.  I guess that’s the moral for today - diversify