September earnings made my day!
With a quick burst in sales in first days of September, the income went down a lot – I even calculated the gross earnings on Sept 20 and found that I haven’t made even $3000! That supposed to be a huge drop – after all, despite the “slow” August my income still was on the highest level. So I got mentally prepared for the drop…
But what happened later, in the late days of September – was a crazy buyer frenzy! Sales started picking up really fast, and conversion rates were through the roof. While in the mid-September I started to getting used to below-$100 days, now my income hit new records.
September 29 – $562.46 day, 12 hours after – total of $754.41. I also had several $200 and $300 days before. I have to admit – many of us get emotionally attached to the incomes our sites generate in organic rankings. Not WE generate them, as there are outside factors that we cannot control.
Probably you’ve heard about SWOT analysis? S – strengths, W – weaknesses, O – opportunities, T – threats. Since I’ve learned this strategy from Jeremy Palmer, my understanding of the business has changed. There are ALWAYS 2 variables that we don’t control – we can (and should) take these into account prior to starting a busness/campaign/site, but never take these under our control.
So, instead of checking stats 10 times a day and jitter over these, I better concentrate on my own strengths and weaknesses and work with these. Keep building sites, hiring staff and planning our future steps. I became less emotionally attached to the stats – that definitely doesn’t convert into more sales.
If we don’t have sales for 3-4 days and our sites are still getting traffic, well that might be temporary issue outside of our control, but we always can so something to improve conversions.
OK, let’s get down to the stats:
September 2011 – $6730.80
I still have underperforming sites, and several domains that need the highest priority attention. If you see the new trend/keyword that is very promising – it’s very important to launch and get the site indexed as soon as possible. All others will follow, and harly ever rank in the top 3. Why? Well. let’s imagine if 1000 sites are agressively targeting the same keyword – which sites will get #1 rankings? Those with more backlinks? 
I also have another site that sent over 1180 clicks to the offer. It made only 10 leads and $450 in income. So the conversion rate was below 1% (!) I guess that’s because of the low quality of content, that is not preselling visitors. I’m planning (someday…) to get to this site seriously and work on CR improvement. Over 1100 clicks from site to offer is a huge potential – I guess this is a perfect situation for building a list and promoting to it.
I also build new bigger sites now, writing the content myself and working will all the wordpress posting. This cannot be outsourced since every page should be laid out for maximum conversions. That’s why I sometimes think of adsense sites – it’s so easy to outsource and promote these sites, and scale the business much faster than affiliate sites!
So far I’m working on 2 adsense sites in the education niche. Pretty competitive but the clicks are over $1-2 each. OK it’s time to sleep – it’s 4:20 am here, I’ve been working on 1 single page for over 5 hours… The site has over 30 pages.
You’re welcome to share your own progress, please leave a comment below!
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Wow – very nice earnings, Anton! Glad to see things did pick up late in the month! It seems your current strategies are starting to pay off quite nicely indeed. You are definitely someone to watch in the upcoming months!
I would love to hear more about how you are promoting your sites as well. Are you still using Blog Blueprint? I used them quite a while ago for several months, but found that the links disappeared to quickly for my liking. What other methods are you finding success with as well?
Also, still waiting to read your guide to CPA marketing….;) It’s something I’m starting to get more interested in (watched a webinar on the topic recently) but that I also find a bit overwhelming. Someday, however, I’m definitely going to give it some more serious consideration – especially after reading your income reports!
Michelle recently posted..August 2011 Monthly Update
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Brilliant stats! hope i get there some day…..
At this point in time how many websites do you have to earn $6700 ? i read alot of comments online that say you need 100s of sites and others that say that a few sites can earn you big bucks.
I just dont know if to start building masses and masses upon sites or spend months on 1-2 before moving onto the next 1-2
I ve bought blog blueprint just need to get the best spinner now and start backlinking , Do you use any other backlinking or just submit to blog blueprint.
I think when you get time Anton you should write your own course!!! id buy it!
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How much did you spend on expenses, VA’s, links, etc?
You should post more about your current strategies! even if you’ve posted about them before maybe you’ve changed some things and it could help the readers here!
Thanks.
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Grand Reply:
October 7th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Hi Ron, Michelle and Ian!
Sorry for not replying – currently I have some health issues that prevent me from spending a lot of time online (in fact I hardly work now). My mom was taken to a hospital also because of some emergency issues with kidneys, so I’m left to handle all the hosehold etc,… while having a serious vascular disorders.
I hope to get back to you as soon as I manage to cope with all of this.
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Michelle Reply:
October 7th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
@Grand, Sorry to hear about all the health problems, Anton. I am taking care of my aging mom, who has many health problems, so I can truly relate – except that fortunately I rarely have health issues of my own (although my toddler brings home quite a few cold and flu bugs). Anyway, hope things get better soon!
Michelle recently posted..August 2011 Monthly Update
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Grand Reply:
November 3rd, 2011 at 8:51 pm
@Michelle, Hi Michelle!
Wishing health to your mom! You’re truly an inspiration to many women as you manage to raise your online business while having so much other duties such as caring for your mom and small son.
I’ve tried to recover and right now feeling a bit better, but don’t devote too much time to working online.
But anyway – regarding the CPA sites: I’ve been doing mostly product name sites in 2010, which didn’t pay off well, as there was only 1 site that brought some nice earnings (between $500-$1000 a month) – but it did last for only 4-6 months and then offer “died”. This happens quite often with CPA offers – some brands receive a huge attention due to massive online buzz, but then demand declines towards this specific brand, so the site becomes another income-less asset.
Later I decided to concentrate bigger sites, still targeting the product name, but receiving traffic from lots of RELATED long-tail phrases.
The site structure was quite simple – I wrote several pages about the product I promoted (it were pages, not posts) – like review, comparisons, faqs… and the main page was also talking about the product.
But I also did some good keywords research and looked for searches that are done by the same people who would potentially buy this product.. Like – if the product was some home fitness equipment, I’d also target an ocean of kewords like easy ways to lose love handles, best way to tone muscles, how to reduce tummy fast… etc. — where the product fits perfectly into the desires of the searcher.
So I created several categories after identifying keywords groups, and ordered several articles earch targeting the keyword or 2 from each category.
I also used Yet another related posts plugin, and did manual internal linking between all pieces of content (which is easy in wordpress) for any keyword in the text that had relevant article targeting it.
All I did is some article marketing to these inner posts (and main pages too) with UAW and some blog networks – which results in a massive growth of traffic. This strategy is VERY similar to Adsense100K Blueprint (I got it recently) – so it’s proven not only for adsense but for affiliate sites.
Unfortunately, this site is now down to page 2 for main keyword and a handful of other keywords, so it’s not quite successful now. but this way of approaching CPA offers delivered long-term incomes for almost 6-7 months in a row (there were couple of months in spring when the site got hit by the 1st panda, but then recovered) .
Blog Blueprint – yes I still use it, in a mix with other blog networks. I decided to track my articles that are published in BB, and found that many articles are residing on the blogs with PR2-5.
How did you identify that links from BB are disappearing? It’s interesting Michelle, as I guess you didn’t use Yahoo Site Explorer to check these links?
OK Michelle! Hope to hear your thoughts soon!
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Ian Wilcox Reply:
October 8th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
@Grand
Really sorry to hear that, I wish you and your mum recover very soon!
Ian
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Grand Reply:
November 3rd, 2011 at 9:21 pm
@Ron, Hi Ron,
I’ve got ongoing payments like memberships, hosting and assistants and also situational expenses in case I decide to buy some service, content, or domain renewals etc..
Hosting is 127$ a month (this is Indianets SEO hosting with 60 c-class IPS). Plus, I pay for memberships – between $400 and 500 per month, and my VAs are $400-500 a month (1 of them is not working for me on a daily basis, but via the Odesk per hour basis). So my usual expenses are $1000-1500 per month.
As fro the strategies – in fact my approach is quite simple – as much diversified backlinking profile as possible, and good quality content that is highly relevant to the searches, which gives trust in google, and high conversions.
I do a lot of blog network links (contextual+IP diversity) and high PR blog comments + press releases + article marketing + scraping competitors backlinks.
I still hope to recover from my health issues and devote more time to blogging (as well as business!), in Oct I only worked on 1 site because of health restrictions.
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kidneys – eto seriozno, zdorovia tvoey mame.
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