Affiliate Marketing Income Report: September 2013
November 4, 2013 Posted by Tyler CruzAs promised, I finally have for you guys my affiliate marketing income report for the month of September.
Unfortunately, there is no good news to report. In fact, it is rather depressing, as all my campaigns basically crumble and I end up making virtually nothing.
Only a few months prior in June, I had brought in a whopping $52,447.17 in net profit. 12 weeks later, I’m down to basically nothing. This is just further proof of how volatile affiliate marketing (and making money online in general) can be.
It is devastating going through such a drop in income, but the one thing that makes it easier to cope with is the fact that all affiliates go through this at least once (but likelier multiple times).
I mean, just off the top of my head I can think of 2 prime examples: Charles Ngo and Richard Bonner. In Richard’s case, he got up to making $50,000 a month right before his campaigns died, JUST LIKE ME. He’s now made more money in the past few years than you could fathom.
I’m HOPING that I can bounce back from this and get things rolling again. My drop in income has not discouraged me, but has rather only fuelled me to get back to the numbers that I was producing, and even beyond.
Anyhow, here are my affiliate marketing numbers (not inclusive of my other revenue sources, thank God) for the month of September 2013:
September 2013 Affiliate Campaign Income:
$35,576.00
The lowest gross monthly income my campaigns generated all year thus far…
And for the first time, I’ll include the breakdown of the multiple affiliate networks I used:
Affiliate Network Breakdown:
- Affiliate Network #1: $17,773.00
- Affiliate Network #2: $142.00
- Affiliate Network #3: $17,336.00
- Affiliate Network #4: $80.00
- Affiliate Network #5: $245.00
Expenses:
$35,108.88
Traffic Source Breakdown:
- Traffic Source #1: $5,789.86
- Traffic Source #2: $0.64
- Traffic Source #3: $19,812.72
- Traffic Source #4: $9,505.66
Don’t ask me why I only spent 64 cents at one source…
Net Profit:
$467.12
BOOM. Jealous?
I spent $35,000+ to make $467 profit. You can’t get slimmer margins than that, as that works out to a 1% ROI.
However, my goal wasn’t to maximize my profit of the small stuff I was currently running, but rather to find new profitable campaigns that I could scale and make big numbers with.
As a result, I spent just enough on looking for those big campaigns to where I’d still end up with a small bit of profit.
Year-To-Date Affiliate Marketing Results
September was by far the worst month for me this year (to date), basically bringing in nothing.
I am actually lucky that I managed to finish it in the green…
Here’s a monthly breakdown:
| Month | Gross | Expense | Net | ROI |
| January 2013 | $74,277.30 | $50,927.39 | $23,349.91 | 46% |
| February 2013 | $103,961.00 | $72,516.36 | $31,444.64 | 43% |
| March 2013 | $83,204.00 | $49,320.34 | $33,883.66 | 69% |
| April 2013 | $98,526.50 | $64,892.30 | $33,634.20 | 52% |
| May 2013 | $104,600.50 | $64,402.12 | $40,198.38 | 62% |
| June 2013 | $142,606.00 | $90,158.83 | $52,447.17 | 58% |
| July 2013 | $64,950.00 | $38,258.85 | $26,691.15 | 70% |
| August 2013 | $38,702.00 | $30,127.02 | $8,574.98 | 28% |
| September 2013 | $35,576.00 | $35,108.88 | $467.12 | 1% |
| Total: | $746,403.30 | $495,712.09 | $250,691.21 | 56% |
| Monthly Average: | $74,640.33 | $49,571.21 | $25,069.12 | 51% |
That 1% ROI sure sticks out like a sore thumb…
Net Profit Projections
The following linear projection is based off the past 9 months of data, and is projected for the next 5 months:
Since things have been on a downwards slope since June, the projection for February predicts that I’ll bring in around $4,500 net profit. With September being as bad as it was, I might just be happy with $4,500 a month…
Now let’s take a look at the running net profit total from my campaigns this year so far:
Since I only made $467 from my campaigns in September, I’m still at a total of $250K net profit from my campaigns this year so far.
In the graph above, the linear projection predicts that I’ll finish the year at a net profit of around $375,000, meaning that it believes that I’ll make an additional $125,000 net profit over the next few months. That’s rather optimistic!
These are just predictions though. My campaigns have really plummeted over the past few months, so we’ll have to see if the law of averages catches up.
September Recap
Since this blog post is so late in being put together, I’m actually having a hard time remembering what all happened in September.
Mostly though, the poor results were reflective of the fact that a few of the main offers I had been running got dropped, leaving me basically back at square 1.
As mentioned earlier, I spent most of my profits on trying to get new profitable campaigns going – looking for things that I could scale and run long-term. That is why I was able to spend $35,000 and basically end up breaking even.
I also worked a lot on landing pages during the month, creating new and innovative landing page styles and split-testing them like a maniac.
I also experimented a fair bit with different campaign angles, but simply was unfortunately able to get anything good going.
October Plans and Predictions
Normally in this section I list the plans I have for the upcoming month as well as predict how I think the month will fare profit-wise. However, since October has already come and gone, I will be skipping this section in this report, since I already know how October went!
I won’t be posting the October report in my next post as I don’t really want to publish two income reports back to back, but I can assure you that it will be up soon (most likely the post after the next one).
So how did October perform? Did I finally hit a red month this year? Did I manage to come back swinging and pull in huge numbers? You’ll just have to wait and see!
93 Responses to “Affiliate Marketing Income Report: September 2013”
Hey Tyler, that’s affiliate marketing for you. Keep your head up, I know exactly how you feel. I’ve been in a slump lately too. Keep pushing on.
Thanks – yeah, it sucks at times like these… oftentimes this time of the year is extra bad too, because of it being Q4 and big brand companies looking to push their funds through….
Yup, that sucks a lot 🙂
And BTW: no update from you for a couple of months, and I am assuming that you are getting immense success in those days.
Hope things get better soon man. I hope you can find the right niches and right offers, I’m totally new to affiliate marketing but not to e-commerce. I hope I can learn from your blog :-).
Have you tried offers in other countries? Or do you do that all the time? lol.
Yeah, I’m doing that right now actually. 180~ countries or so. One thing I really need to do is learn mobile. That’s on my todo list…
Just outliers, no worries.
Did you even find out why the ROI was dropping down? You should share the reasons why your campaigns dropped down as we can also learn from it.
I explained it in my post – most of my profitable offers died, so most of the stuff I ran was new or not very good.
Holiday season is coming, I hope you will recover soon.
This should be a lesson to all of us: Don’t get comfortable with your profitable campaigns. Keep cranking out new and BETTER ones than your already most profitable campaigns.
Tyler, did the offers drop or did you not satisfy lead quality?
Hi Tyler ,
I worked as an affiliate manager at a CPA company. So my advice will be, if you can do good volumes then go with direct offers so that the offers won’t die sooner.
🙂 Hope that tip helps you get double the ROI
Have a great day
Suresh
Hard to believe your this months Net profit.
IT’s gone way below my expectation.
Put some more effort to rock again.
Double that! 🙂
Not to worry, it’s quite common to go breakeven (or even make a loss) when testing new campaigns. It looks like you’ve got some good data focus on and build out your campaigns. Good luck!
Quite a cliffhanger 🙂 looking forward to the Oct. report!
Same here. I am also waiting for his comeback report for October and November.
I experienced the same thing. I had a great campaign going that was making me over $1.5k a day and it just died all of a sudden. I think I did a little over $70k profit.
Just keep pushing and keep those results coming!
Hey Tyler, even tough such ROI kinda do suck, makes me feel better to see that even a guy spending way more and making way more than i can still have big drops with his campaigns, and i don’t mean it in a way that i’m happy about your results. I’m sure you’re gonna rock it again soon:P Btw, is Facebook ads still your main traffic source?
No, I understand. Pretty much EVERYONE has their campaigns die though, so this is really normal. And it’s not like this is the first time my campaigns have died out… they die out constantly, it’s just that this time everything died at once so I’m really feeling it now.
That also means you know how to get right back up. When failure of such nature becomes familiar, it’s easier to get right back up pumping more campaigns.
Totally. One thing i was curious about: how do you not stress to much about spending 10-20-30k/month!? Specially with ups & downs in daily ROI…even hourly…
Because you’re thinking of it as one number. Don’t think of it as $50,000 a month. Think of it as $50,000 / 30 Days = $1,666 a day. Most of my traffic sources are “Daily” billed. If I was doing media buys, then that’s when the stress factor goes up and you’re prepaying $20,000+.
Wow! That’s a big drop. You are smart for saving your your money. Hang in there, I’m sure you’ll find something else soon because you are indeed a true entrepreneur.
$250K in one year is nothing to sneeze at. You are in the top 4% of the U.S. population in terms of income.
The good thing with it all is that you knew this could eventually happen. You had always hinted at the fact that it could all fizzle out and now it has. Good thing you prepared very well for it and you know what to do next.
You wouldn’t have bought a big new house if you didn’t know what to do next, 🙂
Well, I have other income sources as well, fortunately 🙂
Really…… can you give any hint? Is it SEO site or an offline business??
He’s too “good” to reply to comments like these. This type of attitude deserves these types of slaps to the face (aka income drop)
Obviously you have other sources of income… with all that extra money, of course you would. You are smart enough, 🙂
I always want to experiment like you’re always doing! Due to sufficient funds, my expenses and profits are quite less.. I always end up around 200-300 USD as a profit..
Good Luck for your upcoming days 🙂
a) if you can do it once, you can do it again
b) don’t get hung up about the number you use to do. Give yourself a fresh start instead of comparing your past achievements.
Every quarter my “record” resets back to $0.
Hey Charles Ngo,
From where you bring that motivation and tips man? 🙂
hats off . . .
I second that 😉
Lessons are learned always in Internet marketing especially when it comes to incomes and earnings.
The September income report is really discouraging especially for someone who had a few months earlier made over $50,000 as net profit in affiliate marketing.
I guess there is cause and effect, and there is a “reason” for a “season” which we should learn from 😉
In the content aggregation website, kingged.com, the above comment was left after this post was shared and “kingged”.
Sunday – kingged.com contributor
http://www.kingged.com/affiliate-marketing-income-report-september-2013/
[…] Affiliate Marketing Income Report: September 2013 – Tyler Cruz […]
Hey Tyler,
These report from Affiliate marketing wow 🙂 Really appreciate for your hard work. Keep rocking 🙂
Hard to believe your this months Net profit.
keep pushing and keep those results coming!
I’ve been thru this at 15 or more times over my career. It’s what makes affiliate marketers the best marketers on the planet.
I agree with that. I dont know anyone that made it big in the IM business without hitting the dirt at least once.
[…] месяца) уже $2200. И вот, герой сегодняшнего поста, Тайлер опубликовал отчет за сентябрь. Забегая вперед, скажу, что Тайлер, за сентябрь […]
Hello!
This is Bryan Knowlton over at the Daily Blogcast for Internet Marketing.
I just wanted to let you know we discussed your blog post on our show and would love if you could help get the word out to your readers!
Episode 004 – We discuss blogs on Split Testing – Google+ – Rich Pins for Articles – Google Webmaster Tools
http://dailyblogcast.net/2013/11/07/004-we-discuss-blogs-on-split-testing-google-rich-pins-for-articles-google-webmaster-tools/
We found the article to be well written and decided to feature it in this episode. If you woud like to provide any additional comments, you can do that directly at the bottom of the page listed above.
Since this is a Daily Podcast, we will definitely be visiting your blog from time to time to find more great articles to discuss. If you would like to leave us a comment, question or a voicemail, you can do that on the right side of the page at http://dailyblogcast.net
Again, thank you for the blog post! Without it we might have not had much to talk about! 🙂
You can subscribe (or let your readers they can) at http://dailyblogcast.net/itunes
Thanks again!
Bryan & Mark
http://dailyblogcast.net – Because reading is hard…
Hi Tyler!
i’m a newbie in the affiliate marketing, keep posting more report. I’m waiting to view the next A.M income report in October.
Wow Tyler! That really is a massive drop! But I’m still seriously impressed with how you’ve done up until now and a bad month can just help you focus more. I’ve certainly had ups and downs and it’s part of the fun of it!
Interesting.. But i still dont believe it!
dude.. that’s really bad.. $467 it’s very low but you’ll get back on.
anyway you still did really good this year..
Hi Tyler,
A real lows in income, but you tend to find new ways to create good income. Work on, do not give up.
Yep – the main thing is keeping motivated – you’ll do well again if you can keep going when things appear to be going against you.
I thought as much. I didn’t think you would post this using your real name.
Thats quite a skinny margin :/ Some serious 80/20 rule check is in order. Either optimising expenses or just letting go of some projects would be in order. Maybe its just a phase who knows.
Epic Fail. It’s you real face.
Great update 😉 Nice work Tyler.
I am sure you will bounce back Tyler! Don’t get discouraged. I’ve had many of my campaigns tank as well. However keep in mind that my campaigns have never reached anywhere close to your level of success. But I feel now that I am running traffic on Facebook as well I can get my earnings up there. If I can even make a couple hundred dollars a day I’ll be super happy!
Looking forward to another update in your income report that show you back in the huge profit margin area again.
Earnings in affiliate program will go up or down based on our performance,I have tried different affiliate programs but I am not able to get a fixed monthly income.so I have left all the affiliate programs and now concentrating in direct advertisements.
Interesting to hear that, Andrew. So, how is the direct advertising working for you?
C’mon man it’s Middle of december and no report for october yet 🙁 Dont let us down!
Geran, I am with you. It is now mid-december. Tyler, please keep to you word, you said “it will be up soon”. I hope your soon doesn’t mean 2 month.
You guys should know by now that Tyler is one of the laziest people out there.
Tyler doesn’t owe anything to anyone.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but at the end of the day getting a campaign profitable again’s more important than a blog post.
Its his blog so he can do anything he wants. When I got hit a couple of times I didnt wanna see my blog, my sites or anything to do with IM so there is no need to ask for anything.
Great income report I have not tried any affiliate program planned to start on upcoming year between really you are best in this affiliate marketing keep rocking
There has not been any monthly reports on long time, maybe we can get to see a report for the whole of last year, it had been intersting.
Am eagerly looking forward to the next update! After the last massive drop in profits we want to know if you managed to turn it around! Hopefully you’ll not have lost money, something that’s a worry when you’re spending that much per month.
I hope Tyler didn’t commit suicide. After all, it’s only money that we are talking about. Tyler, post ANYTHING, even one “I’m still alive” sentence, so we know that you haven’t done anything stupid like jumping off a bridge or something.
Hello Tyler,
What happened, as you are not updating this site?
Is there everything all right.
regret to say that everyone else: what happens with the updates of monthly reports
Every business man ( be it any business ) , who have been sucessful , have surely experienced the same volatility or unpredictability that you have explained in your post . The secret is to never give up ( and also to have a slush fund ).
Things have gone quiet since Nov 2013 (It’s now Jan 2014). Hope you’re having a well deserved rest…then come out fighting…
Nice Income Report I Will Also try Affiliate Marketing To Earn Money
Hey Tyler,
the key is to diversify the traffic sources and income streams. So PPC traffic is the worst traffic in my traffic mix. So the focus should be on direct and organic traffic.
Kind regards,
Tobi
I am also seeing a heavy decline in conversion and quality leads with ppc (adwords in my case). Organic surpases it tenfold.
Hey Tyler,
These report from Affiliate marketing wow 🙂 Really appreciate for your hard work. Keep rocking 🙂
Hi Tyler,
So what is the main reason your profit got so low in September?
Regards, D
Well he said he was testing a bunch of new campaigns rather than wriging out his currently profitable ones.
Love all the recent updates. Your success and hard work is an inspiration to us all.
I second that 😉
Hi Tyler,
What about blogging? The monthly reports which I followed with great interest.
That is quite impressive. Tyler what CPA course you recommend for promoting Peerfly offers via Facebook?
Is there any specific you would like to recommend?
Love all the recent updates. Your success and hard work is an inspiration to us all.
No new posts? This was very interesting insight. Please update on how things are going now.
wow.. Good.
This is really strange, cant understand how a big blogger can disapare for months?
Tyler bought a new house with his girlfriend a few months ago. He’ll be back
Everyone needs some time off, so just check back every now and then and all will be well 😉
An awesome post. “If there is a will, there is a way”.
This post is the very useful for all bloggers. I created my first blog on blogger. After about two months, I saw that about 25000 visitors visited my blog. But I have not idea about these visitors. Today I start my own self hosted blog. Today, I know that blogging is a good career opportunity.
Thanks for the post.
Sad news to report everyone. Just found out that DJ Email Submit popped a cap in Tyler’s ass and he’s no longer with us.
Tyler was busy trying to catch up on his email and didn’t even see it coming.
RIP Tyler. You made up positive results with the best of them. Everyone scatter a little poutine in remembrance for one of the greats of the affiliate marketing world.
How come you’ve not posted for a while? Is everything ok?
Hi Tyler,
I look forward to a new monthly report on revenue and expenses, it was interesting to follow it.