Weekly Update #7 (July 14-20)
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 8:15I had a fairly good week last week with AdSense and Clickbank, earning $182.48. One of the highlights of the week was having my highest AdSense earnings day ever ($24.97), although my Amazon and other affiliate sales were nonexistent. Here is the breakdown:
AdSense: I earned $69.12 for the week, but there were lots of ups and downs in terms of daily earnings. One site I was quite excited about that had taken the #2 slot for a major keyword early in the week, slipped back to #8 again on Thursday, and then moved back to #2 slot again by the weekend. It appears to be sticking there this time, although other than the record breaking day on Saturday, I am not seeing a huge boost in my earnings yet. My daily average was up from last week, however, averaging $9.88 a day. Here is a screenshot of my earnings this week (click to see a full sized image):
ClickBank -This week had six sales, zero refunds, resulting in $113.36 for the week. I’m starting to see more $100+ ClickBank weeks than not at this point, and I have to say the weekly ClickBank direct deposits into my bank account are much looked forward to! My daily hop count is at 103, and sales were at 1 for every 120 hops. Here is a shot of my ClickBank account this morning:
Amazon – Nothing to report sales wise. I’m seeing several of the sites that I built last month now sitting on page two and three of the search results, and I’m hoping that in another month or so I will start see the benefits of these new sites.
Other Affiliate Sales – Nothing to report.
This week I finally got a system in place for using Sick Submitter on a daily basis (which involves running it primarily at night while I’m sleeping), so it will hopefully stop distracting me from the main work I need to be doing: site building. I’m tempted to purchase Magic Submitter based on kick-ass review by JamestheJust of the program, comparing it to SENuke. I’m sure I’ll find that quite distracting as well once I have it in my hands.
However, in the meanwhile, I’ve been tinkering around with different free WordPress themes and finally found a theme and system for setting up my Amazon sites that I’m feeling pretty good about. I’ve based it on the design principles found in Dave’s excellent post about Making Money with Amazon, and have been doing some work revamping sites I built last month using this system. I’m also doing keyword research for the new sites I’m building this month, and will be starting on those sometime this week (hopefully!).
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Lisa says:
July 21st, 2010 at 12:27 pm
I’ve been looking for the right theme to showcase products too. In the past I’ve used studio press themes, but I am looking for something different now. Do you know a good place to look for free themes?
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John says:
July 21st, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Hey Michelle, congrats on your record earnings for a day on adsense. I am still in the beginning process of my ‘passive income journey’ and i hope to have a personal site up soon giving my weekly (maybe more?) trials and tribulations as an internet marketer. I am still learning so much from you and others online so thank you! I guess here is now my obligatory question of the week
.. I remember reading your backlink strategy for a new site during the first 3 months awhile ago and let’s say you establish yourself on the first page of SERPs how often do you still create automatic backlinks for that site once you’ve reached your goal? Is it something that you do indefinitely or once you see you’re not ‘bouncing around’ do you just lay off until you see yourself sliding then go back at it? Thanks again!
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Michelle says:
July 21st, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Hi Lisa. Nearly all the themes I’ve used so far have been free themes that I find in WordPress using their theme search function when in admin mode, with a major exception being the theme on this blog (called “Vibrant”) – which I think I found here: http://wordpressthemesbase.com/.
You do need to be careful when downloading wordpress themes from random websites, however, as sometimes malicious code or other stuff may be hidden in files. This theme, for example, requires I leave the footer in tact and the footer code is encrypted. I used a decryption program to check the code over and make sure there wasn’t anything bad in it. The link to Blood Pressure is a link the developers put into the footer code (not to one of my sites), but nothing bad was found.
John - Thanks for your words of support and encouragement. I plan to write another post on how I do backlinks for my older sites, but it’s a bit more complicated since their status can vary so much. If a site is sitting at position #1, for example, and my competition doesn’t appear to be doing much backlinking, I can often just leave it alone or throw a few EzineArticle links at it every month or two.
On the other hand, if my site sitting on page two and I really want to boost it, and it has some age and diversity to it – I may start sending 1000 links to it a month, or even more! But in general, right now I have projects running for most of my older sites using UAW, creating 30 links a day, and I’m doing forum profile linking – sometimes quite aggressively for sites I want to really boost. So, yes, I do sometimes kind of “lay off” the linking once I’ve reached a good ranking, as long as my competition isn’t too stiff. Hope that helps and I look forward to seeing your site (hopefully soon!).
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Ruth - Web Career Girl says:
July 21st, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Michelle I love following your progress, seems like you’re really getting results and steadily working to improve them! Keep updating (I know you will
) because it’s inspiring. I might try out Sick Submitter.
Ruth – Web Career Girl recently posted..Passive Efforts Are Really Suffering
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Joseph Archibald says:
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:12 am
Hi Michelle, thanks for sharing and congrats on a great week!
Nice to see you are doing better and better with AdSense, while I am doing no better at all with it. Its frustrating me, somewhat! Very hit and miss, and every day is so, so different to the day before. You could of course argue the same for any type of internet marketing, of course
How do you assess your rankings Michelle? Do you find it to be accurate to what you see regards to visitor count?
Do you also sometimes wonder where Google gets the stats for potential search volumes? I have one web page – just for example, which to my knowledge is ranking first in Google for my much-covetted phrase. Which apparently should obtain 22k exact global search per month.
I do presume its ranking first in Google because in all 3 proxies I use to determine rankings its sitting pretty. However, the visitor count I get each day is paltry in comparison to the actual potential. Any thoughts on this?
You do very nicely with Clickbank, which is making me re-assess with regards to using this as a way for monetizing. I have avoided CB now on the whole due to sniping and what appeared to be a rather odd stats system they had. Some folks swear blind that CB snipe some of the profits for themselves and thus do not show actual real sales to affiliates. I personally have no comment on this. What are your own thoughts Michelle?
I think I did read up on James “the Average kick ass Elancer” with regards the kick ass review. Best look again I guess, if its such a hot product!
Good luck with the new themes and looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts regards to Sick Submitter, odd name that it has!
Cheers Michelle!
Joseph
Joseph Archibald recently posted..I’m Botching Messing Up! on Google AdSense!
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Michelle says:
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:02 am
Ruth - Thanks. As you already have some experience with profile linking, I’m guessing you’ll find Sick Submitter to be very useful, and I suggest you try it out if only for a month (it’s very cheap too, BTW). I hope you get your housing situation sorted out soon!
Joseph – Thanks! Things are picking up (I had an $80 day yesterday!). In all honesty, AdSense is probably one of the more difficult marketing programs to work with I have found. I started my IM career with AdSense, and I’m glad I did, but I know that a lot of people also get discouraged with it as well (not just you!). To be utterly honest, I have about 17 sites with AdSense on them right now, but only five or six are consistent performers on a daily basis, and just one site makes up the bulk of my revenue (it has an amazingly high CPC). That particular site doesn’t get much traffic (although I rank #1 for the primary keyword, and now #2 for a major secondary keyword), but I only need a few clicks a day to earn close to $10… As to your other questions:
How do you assess your rankings Michelle? Do you find it to be accurate to what you see regards to visitor count? Do you also sometimes wonder where Google gets the stats for potential search volumes? I have one web page – just for example, which to my knowledge is ranking first in Google for my much-covetted phrase. Which apparently should obtain 22k exact global search per month. I do presume its ranking first in Google because in all 3 proxies I use to determine rankings its sitting pretty. However, the visitor count I get each day is paltry in comparison to the actual potential. Any thoughts on this?
I use rank checker (firefox plugin) to check my rankings with Google. There is also a neat application that I use from my SEOLinkVine membership (now canceled, but the app still works) that checks my keywords each morning when I start up my computer. But in terms of visitor counts, I haven’t noticed any huge discrepancies in terms of what I’m expecting. Keep in mind that even if you are in the #1 slot, probably only half the daily visitors will visit your site, and if you are position two or three, much fewer. I usually see a huge boost once I take the number one slot for any keyword.
One thing to consider is how much “leakage” there is on your sites. For example, if you are using article marketing for an affiliate product, the visitor is often going to have to click on your article first, then visit your website, and then click through to your offer – that can result in a tremendous loss of visitors. If you do something silly like have AdSense on your affiliate site as well, you’ll lose even more, and so forth. So, sometimes the numbers might seem to be low, but there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Also, make sure you aren’t logged into your Google account when checking your rankings using Google, as they will be skewed (sounds like you don’t have that problem if you are using multiple proxies already). But you might want to ask a trusted friend to check your rankings from his or her location as well, just to make sure things look the same from where they are.
That said, I think sometimes I get different search results from different keyword tools, and I’ve sometimes wondered about that. I think I tend to avoid those that seem a bit questionable in terms of the numbers I’m getting returned, which might be why I am not experiencing some problems others have.
You do very nicely with Clickbank, which is making me re-assess with regards to using this as a way for monetizing. I have avoided CB now on the whole due to sniping and what appeared to be a rather odd stats system they had. Some folks swear blind that CB snipe some of the profits for themselves and thus do not show actual real sales to affiliates. I personally have no comment on this. What are your own thoughts Michelle?
In general, I think CB is my favorite affiliate program (I have some experience with Plimus, E-junkie and Amazon as well, plus a few independent programs). It is very simple to use as an affiliate and I love their regular payment processing (weekly direct deposits). I know some people complain CB might be swiping some of their sales, but personally, I don’t buy it. First, I really don’t think CB has any reason/need to do this, but more importantly, I think it’s easy for people to blame the CB system rather than fix what is wrong with their own marketing practices (from what I’ve seen, it seems like most of the complainers are people on Digital Points forum who either aren’t very successful with IM or are fairly new to it). I’ve never suspected CB is ripping me off in any way and I’m not worried about this at all. I actually wish I had started sooner promoting CB products, as it has become profitable much more quickly than AdSense is (I’ve only been doing CB for about seven months, Adsense for over a year).
However, there are some other challenges using CB. For example, some people find it difficult to find products they feel good about promoting with CB (the “scam” factor). Depending on the product, you can have a high refund rate as well (mine averages between 10-20%). Some of the vendors may use opt-in forms or scripts that override your cookies (be sure to carefully check out the landing pages of products you are promoting). Finally, many of the keywords for popular products are very competitive. It can be a lot of work to get your site to rank high for these keywords – although once you snag a top spot, it can be very profitable as well.
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Bristolboy says:
July 22nd, 2010 at 11:17 am
Amazing earnings – well done!
Bristolboy recently posted..Top Cash Back Review – The best cashback site
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