Hi all, I think I've got a fairly interesting story to tell and I've always liked this community, so why not here?
This is a year-long story about how I went from making zero, to $12,000 in a month, then quickly back to... well, almost zero.
I hope this proves to be both an inspirational and cautionary tale at once that really delves into the game we're in with affiliate marketing. If nothing else, if you read closely, you can find some easy, VERY UNSPOKEN ways to make money. at least for a little while...
So, it all started about a year ago. I picked up an expired domain name for fairly cheap, and it integrated well with the niche I had up to that point, reef aquarium sites. This domain was reefhq.com
It was a good name but I really didn't have any use for it, so I thought, "what the hell?" and set up a wordpress blog with affiliate links for reef sandals. (It's pretty much exactly now as it was before).
Then a couple sales came in and I was hooked. Over the next several months, I registered many domains, set up many wordpress blogs, and made a fair amount of money - to an average of a little over $100 per day. I worked my *** off learning about SEO from places like here and digitalpoint.
I set my "quit the day job" goal at $300 per day and was well on my way to that thanks to the Digitalpoint Ad Network. Then Google dropped the hammer on sites using the ad network and it dropped pretty fast. POOF! Money was gone.
I worked even harder.. set up new sites, with more and better original content, that didn't rely on the DP co-op for SE rankings. I did well at first with every site in MSN, but after a few weeks the ranking would drop and the money would go away. POOF!
Gaming MSN for a few weeks was pretty easy... keyword in the domain name, title tag keyword only. It still works on keywords which have about 500,000 or less results in MSN... but I wanted sustainable income and this wasn't it.
So I played a bit with adwords. Why? SEO was proving way too inconsistent... spend hours setting up a site, get good rankings in 2-6 weeks, then POOF! drop like a stone. My quest for a sustainable model continues to this day, but I digress...
Around October of last year I had a couple Adwords campaigns going that were doing fairly well. Again, with lots of work, pegged at about $100 per day.
Then I saw an offer at Azoogleads for Shoebuy.com - $10 off $30 coupon with a $15.75 payout. That, my friends, was the gold. I set up adwords campaigns for Crocs, a pair of sandal/shoes hybrids thingies that were gaining popularity and cost just over $30 per pair. The money and conversions came flying in! Before I knew it I broke $500/day profit. Then $800. Then I broke $1,000 in a day. I was writing my resignation letter in my mind, believe me!
Why did this work so well? A few reasons... First, $30 is a low-involvement purchase for the consumer. Take $10, i.e. 33% off plus free shipping, and it's a no-brainer. Second, the adwords world revolves around commission-based sales. If I was going through Zappos, I would have made $4.50 per sale and barely broken even. Nobody caught this high payout on a low purchase except me (that I know of).
Then...the inevitable POOF!. If we do some simple math, we can see that the Shoebuy folks didn't think this offer through very well. On a $30 pair of shoes, they pay me $15.75, Azoogle their cut, and of course knock $10 off the consumer's price with the coupon... AND ship it free. I knew this math pretty early on, but I thought maybe Shoebuy was seeing the value in gaining a new customer (they should have) who would repeat the purchase (they did, I'm sure). Anyway, Shoebuy saw they weren't doing so well on this offer and cut the coupon to 10% off $50 instead of $10 off $30. Traffic dropped, conversions dropped, and as quickly as the money rolled in, it went away. In other words..... POOF!
After that I tried some coupon offers on shoes from CJ using the same model. It worked OK until the reversals hit. Then google dropped the hammer on landing pages. POOF! You see, all these adwords ads clicked to a landing page with a simple coupon image I created and nothing else. (Yes, this model will still work if you can figure out how to get the quality score algo to play nicely).
After about 10 months of working my *** off, learning, optimizing, failing and trying again, I decided I needed a break. This is where I'm fortunate to have a very well-paying day job... no big deal, I wasn't counting on that money from affiliate marketing, it was my retirement/corporate escape fund.
So I took a break... and the money is just flat-out gone. Why? Because none of it was sustainable. It was all subject to SE algo updates, adwords quality score updates, changes in consumer trends, etc. So as I stopped building, the money stopped coming.
The moral of this story? There are several...
- Work hard and you'll make money. Stop working and you'll stop making money.
- Don't quit your day job.
- Recognize an opportunity and capitalize on it.
- In this business, a good thing doesn't last long. You've got to keep moving.
- Most importantly.... POOF! happens. Almost without fail.
There are probably many more lessons in this story. Most important for me was making sure people who are new to the affiliate marketing industry know what they're getting into... your whole world can, and will, change in one day. You'd better be ready for it.
As for me, I'm still looking for that holy grail of sustainable income based off a model that can be repeated long-term.
Wish me luck.
T
Rags to Riches to Rags
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