TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Affiliate Marketing Income Report: January 2014

Okay… I’m making some progress with these reports… I’ve finally made it to the current year!

In January, I got an 8-week-old puppy. This proved to take up an astonishingly massive amount of my time and energy. I really struggled to find even a couple hours where I could actually sit down and work properly.

As a result, I didn’t do much affiliate marketing-wise (my focus at the time was catching up with e-mail), apart from keeping some existing campaigns running and testing some small campaigns on other traffic sources that I had tried in the past.

As with my last few reports, since this report is long overdue, my memory is going to fail on the particulars of what went on with my campaigns, so I won’t be able to go into too much detail in this post apart from the numbers (which are 100% accurate).

Anyhow, let’s get on with it.

January 2014 Affiliate Campaign Income:

$10,922.80

In January, I ended up using only one affiliate network:

Affiliate Network Breakdown:

• Affiliate Network #1: $10,922.80

Expenses:

$8,908.47

I ended up using a total of 6 different traffic sources during the month. From time to time, I’ll go back and re-try and re-test traffic sources I’ve tried in the past that didn’t perform well but had potential. I almost never re-try traffic sources that were down-right horrible (-80% ROI) though.

Traffic Source Breakdown:

• Traffic Source #1: $4,087.67
• Traffic Source #2: $2.87
• Traffic Source #3: $3,952.83
• Traffic Source #4: $245.59
• Traffic Source #5: $200.00
• Traffic Source #6: $419.51

Net Profit:

$2,014.33

Meh, pretty crappy. That’s like what… just slightly better than McDonalds wage?

Oh well. It’s sure a hell lot better than flipping burgers and fries all day.

That works out to a 23% ROI too, BTW.

2014 Affiliate Marketing Results

Now that I’m into my 2nd year of these affiliate marketing reports, here’s a recap of how 2013 fared for the entire year:

And here’s a monthly breakdown of 2014 so far (rather pointless now considering it’s only the first report of the year!):

Not really the best way to start off a new year… but the positive news is that I managed to profit every single month for the past 13 months in a row.

I averaged $21,571.64 net per month in 2013, so I have a long way to go just to match last year’s numbers, let alone surpass them.

Net Profit Projections

I decided to cease including my graphs for projected future numbers, as I decided that there really are no trends when it comes to affiliate marketing. It’s simply far too volatile, and so much of it is out of your control.

The graphs were all over the place and the predictions were just unrealistic; there’s no way I would ever let my campaigns finish $75,000 in the red.

All you guys really care about is the bottom line anyway; the gross, expense, and net numbers.

Lastly, it’ll make these reports a little bit quicker to do up in the future!

January Recap

As I mentioned in the introduction, I got an 8-week-old puppy in January which took up a tremendous amount of my time, so my affiliate efforts for the month were mostly limited to letting things run low on auto-pilot, apart from doing some small tests on older traffic sources.

Most of the work that I did do when I managed to find some time and energy to work, was getting caught up on my very backlogged list of e-mail.

As a result, my overall numbers (both gross and net) were very low.

February 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 February has already come and gone, I will be skipping this section in this report since I already know how it went.

I will have February’s affiliate marketing income report up in probably 1 week from now, after I get a different post I have in mind up first.

I’ll give you a hint though; the results are far different from anything you’ve seen me post in the last 6-7 months.

IMGrind is Now Completely Free

To anyone who is even remotely up-to-date in the internet and affiliate marketing world, this will be "old news" already.

But I thought I’d post about it anyway because despite it being announced close to a month ago, it’s really fairly big news:

IMGrind is now completely free.

IMGrind is a training and discussion forum for affiliate marketers that up to now, used to be a private forum with a monthly membership cost of $77/month.

It is a large community of internet marketers (mostly affiliate marketers) who discuss, share, teach, and learn from one another.

I did a thorough review of them a year and a half ago in case you’re looking for more information.

Here’s a video from Ruck (one of the co-founders) announcing the change from paid to free:

(Note: You may need to visit the post directly at TylerCruz.com if you’re reading this via e-mail or RSS in order to see it.)

My Thoughts

I was pretty surprised when I first saw the e-mail in my inbox from IMGrind stating that it was becoming free. After all, they’ve made millions from the forum, and it has only grown over time.

Personally, I have mixed feelings on it.

On the bright side, the obvious benefit is that those looking to learn affiliate marketing now can do so even cheaper; the ones that were on the fence of having to fork out $77/month now have complete access for free. It opens up a lot of knowledge and access to those seeking to learn.

But there’s a big downside. I feel that, over time, opening up the forum like this will inevitably lead to the quality of the forum dropping considerably. Being private and charging members a membership fee weeds out the "tire-kickers", trolls, spammers, and "talkers". I feel like it will become a lot more like WarriorForum, with a lot more "dreamers" and a lot less pro-active "do-ers".

In addition, it’s not so beneficial to share all the secrets and gems out there with everyone. I don’t really want more people to know how to improve their CTR or know about X or Y network as it only creates more competition for you and me.

Now, hopefully I’m wrong and IMGrind will continue to stay informative, relevant, and on point, but one of the main reasons I feel it was so successful to begin with is from having quality control on its members.

Lastly, there’s the question as to why to make it free at all. Only Ryan and Ruck know the real answer to this – they "claim" that they made it free because they already have other multi-million dollar businesses and don’t really need/want to charge members anymore, but I personally think that’s complete bullshit .

They’re obvious major capitalists (their job is to make money!) and this is, in my opinion, an obvious strategical business decision. They probably feel that they can make more money with a larger user base over time, driving traffic to their seminars and workshops, networks, etc.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that they are now free. It also means those of you who are still thinking about trying affiliate marketing but don’t know where to start have yet one less excuse as there is an enormous amount of information on IMGrind.

Missing the Private Factor?

If you’re like me and really miss the exclusivity and private factor of a membership-based training forum, there’s still StackThatMoney.

Be sure to check out the comprehensive review I wrote (and recorded in a 20-minute screencast) almost exactly 1 year ago today.

I guess in the end, this is kind of the best of both worlds. Those who don’t want to pay a monthly membership fee now have IMGrind, and those who enjoy the private factor can use StackThatMoney.

I’m a member at both forums, so I’ll see you there!

Affiliate Marketing Income Report: December 2013

I’m still getting caught up with these affiliate marketing income reports. I hope to be all caught up by the end of May though, so please bare with me here.

I don’t want to post these reports back-to-back as I personally find that a bit boring, so I plan to continue to post them every 2nd post until I’m all caught up.

This report marks the last month in 2013, so it’ll be interesting to see how I ended the year when the beginning was so great.

As with my last couple of reports, since this report is long overdue, my memory is going to fail on the particulars of what went on with my campaigns, so I won’t be able to go into too much detail in this post apart from the numbers (which are 100% accurate).

Let’s proceed!

December 2013 Affiliate Campaign Income:

$10,142.54

Absolutely insane. I did 14x that revenue back in June… but ugh… I have to stop living in the past. This is the new reality.

And like I’ve been doing the past few reports, I’ll include the breakdown of the multiple affiliate networks I used (only 3 in December):

Affiliate Network Breakdown:

• Affiliate Network #1: $10,101.39
• Affiliate Network #2: $4.90
• Affiliate Network #3: $36.25

Expenses:

$9,814.52

At least my expenses were low as well…

Traffic Source Breakdown:

• Traffic Source #1: $5,468.61
• Traffic Source #2: $122.47
• Traffic Source #3: $88.72
• Traffic Source #4: $4,134.52

Net Profit:

$328.02

BOOM! Don’t be hating on me just because I bring in the big bucks. $10 a day folks – I’m living it big!

That works out to a 3% ROI too, BTW.

2013 Affiliate Marketing Results

Here’s a monthly breakdown:

There’s a few interesting things to note here:

First, despite the last 4 months having less-than-stellar results, I still managed to pull a profit each and every month of the year.

Secondly, it shows how having a few really good months completely offsets the fact of having a few really poor months. I think this is mainly because you are still in control of what you’re doing. If something isn’t working, you can always just shut it off and try something new… you’re not going to lose your shirt if you can’t afford to.

The only way you lose money in affiliate marketing is by trying out new stuff to look for the next profitable campaign, so you’re always in control of how much you can lose.

Lastly, I didn’t end up grossing a million dollars like I was hoping, due to the poor performance of the last third of the year. But I’m still very pleased and proud of the end results: $258,859.68 profit for the year (from my campaigns), averaging out to $21,571.64 a month.

My 2014 goal, of course, is to try to beat that. But that’s a hugely ambitious goal…

Net Profit Projections

The following linear projection is based off the past 12 months of data, and is projected for the next 5 months:

This graph is really starting to get skewed, and I think it’s because I started off at around $22,000 net profit in January 2013, which acts as the baseline.

Let’s take a look what the polynomial algorithm says…

Ack! Even worse!

The high variance in my campaigns really messes up any mathematical formula predictors. Hopefully they become more accurate as more points of data are entered.

December Recap

While a bit less hectic than November, December was still a very busy month for me, mainly due to house stuff.

I turned off most of my campaigns, only leaving a few here and there, as can be seen with the low revenue that was generated.

I basically did nothing affiliate-marketing wise in December. So in a way, I’m really not disappointed in the month, because I put no effort into my campaigns during that time.

January 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 January has already come and gone, I will be skipping this section in this report, since I already know how it went.

I expect to publish it in about 7-8 days from now (after another post), so stay tuned.

My 1% Cash Back Cheque From Visa: 2nd Year

Last year, I posted about receiving my first cheque from my Visa credit card cash back program. It’s a pretty good post, and I also go into a little rant about how I think it’s ridiculous that so many people go into credit card debt (without knowing about getting help with your debt), and how so many people view credit cards as “evil”.

The card I use pays out 1% with no cap (the highest reputable card I can find available in Canada), and only costs an annual fee of $100 per year with which anyone can be able to get loans for people on benefits very easily.

Recently, Visa has been sending me some promotions in the mail (with some real nice quality matte-paper packaging) for a new sexy looking card. It was around $500 a year and a type of travel air miles card – but I don’t travel that much to make it useful to me. I just want straight up cash back.

The cheque I received last year was for $3,301.99.

The cheque I received a couple of months ago for the year of 2013 ended up being: $5,960.46, which means I ended up spending $596,046 on it last year.

That works out to a average spend of $50,000 a month on my credit card, every month all year.

The point of this post, like my last one, is to again illustrate that using credit cards can (and should) be beneficial.

In my opinion, barring exceptional and unanticipated situations, there is no justification for individuals to accumulate credit card debt. One should exercise prudence in managing their finances and avoid incurring unnecessary liabilities. However, in case one finds themselves struggling to pay off their debts, seeking professional help from a reputable debt collection agency like oddcoll.com can be a wise decision.

I received my first credit card around the age of 16 or so (co-signed with parents), and I had always just thought of it as a debit card… with perks such as being able to purchase things online. It never came across my mind that people would spend things on it when they didn’t have the money for it… unless in dire emergencies.

One thing I do have to work on, though, is to simply use my credit cards more – especially on my personal use. My personal card is a MasterCard (with a point system in which you can now exchange for cash at a 1% equivalent), and while I do try to remember to use it when I can, I still find myself paying cash for too many things.

For small and time-based convenience purchases, cash still makes sense. But for everything else, I should be using my credit card. It all adds up.

My affiliate marketing efforts have really dried up lately though, so it doesn’t look like my 2014 cash back cheque will come anywhere close to setting a new record… but there’s still time to catch up, and I’d love to be able to post an even bigger cheque next time.