My Affiliate Earnings January 2008
I haven’t been trying to earn affiliate money for long. Aside from sticking AdSense on a handful of personal blogs, and the occasional Amazon link on those blogs’ posts, I’ve really only been actively working on affiliate sites for about a month. And I was away for 1 1/2 weeks of that.Still, during that time I earned a little over $1 on AdSense bringing my total from AdSense to just under $8. I earned a little under $1 on Squidoo, bringing my Squidoo earnings to $5.50 plus $1.83 Amazon commission that hasn’t cleared yet, and a few cents that are being donated to the Grameen Foundation.
Clickbank has yielded $44.36 as the result of one sale of Build A Niche Store through one of my affiliate links. That pays for nearly half of the cost of BANS, putting me out only about $50 for the program.
Commission Junction has seen absolutely no conversions, though I’m getting quite a few click throughs. However, most of those click throughs are on an item that runs between $20,000 and $65,000 (a type of car, but I’m not saying more right now). It’ll only take one conversion to pay for my BANS program 20x’s over- and cover the time and effort I put into all of the sites that I’ve currently built. Unfortunately, excuse the pun, but most clicks are just tire kickers.
So why am I talking about my “earnings” when they’re so low? Well, the whole point of this site is my effort to make money from affiliate marketing. Not only do I like to talk about what I’m doing and how I’m doing, but I want other new marketers to realize that it’s ok to not get a $1000 commission on their first day. That’s awesome if you do (and please let me know), but it’s not necessary.
Affiliate marketing is not a business that you can quit your job and be making wads of cash right away. For Pete’s sake, it can take you a full day just to build up a basic site or search out the perfect template. You certainly can’t forget adding content and checking out all of your links before starting promotion. I haven’t even begun promoting any of my sites yet (aside from linking on my personal blog) since I’m not satisfied with any of them.
But do you want to know what my biggest earner has been so far? I’m not counting my sale of BANS since I believe that was a blogging buddy who simply liked the software. It was an obscenely simple page on WordPress, designed to be link bait. It hasn’t made it as link bait, but has somehow become extremely popular in the search engines. I get more AdSense clicks there than anywhere else, and it’s one of my steadiest sources of traffic. The content is virtually non-existant, and if I ever achieve a page rank, I’m certain that the income will jump. Are You An Idiot? Click the link to find out.
