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

Affiliate Marketing Income Report: November 2013

Okay, let’s get back to business – I still have some catching up to do on these affiliate marketing income reports. November was a while ago, but better late than never, right?

As with my last report, since this report is so 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).

So, let’s proceed with my November 2013′s affiliate marketing income report, shall we?

November 2013 Affiliate Campaign Income:

$30,345.20

Yuck. This made November the new lowest gross monthly income my campaigns generated all year thus far…

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 November):

Affiliate Network Breakdown:

• Affiliate Network #1: $24,150.70
• Affiliate Network #2: $32.75
• Affiliate Network #3: $6,161.75

Expenses:

$24,794.15

At least my expenses weren’t too bad – the lowest all year-to-date as well.

Traffic Source Breakdown:

• Traffic Source #1: $5,747.80
• Traffic Source #2: $3,650.41
• Traffic Source #3: $15,128.13
• Traffic Source #4: $267.81

Net Profit:

$5,551.05

Hey – not too shabby. While a drop in the bucket to what I was making a few months before, I’ll take $5,000 net profit/month. I can live with that.

It’s certainly better than what I did in September, and it makes for 3 months of consecutive growth.

It also works out to a 22% ROI, which is pretty good.

Year-To-Date Affiliate Marketing Results

Here’s a monthly breakdown:

Net Profit Projections

The following linear projection is based off the past 11 months of data, and is projected for the next 5 months:

What’s interesting is that despite the data sample rate increasing to 11 points of data, that these projections may be entirely useless.

With affiliate marketing being as volatile as it is, one could go from making $3K a month, up to $40K the next, and then back down to $1K the month after that.

As a result, I’m not sure just how effective these projections really are, and may discontinue them in future reports…

Anyhow, let’s take a look at the running net profit total from my campaigns for 2013 so far:

Starting with my last income report, I now use a polynomial algorithm to project my net profit graph. 2013 looks like it will finish around the $255K mark.

I will not be including this graph in the next report, since that will mark the end of the 2013 year!

November Recap

November was an incredibly busy month for me as I was busy with closing the sale on my condo, buying a house, moving, and getting all set up in my new place. That is very time consuming and draining to say the least.

From what I can remember, I barely touched my campaigns in November (apart from some very basic maintenance to make sure they were running decently) as I was so busy.

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

I’ll give you a bit of a teaser though: it’s rather dramatic.

I expect to publish it in about 2 posts from now, so stay tuned!

It’s Time to Do Another 180

I better get another blog post up before I let it get too far away from me again.

This post will still not be the "Where the hell have I been?" post that I plan to publish soon, but is somewhat related to it.

Many years ago, I used to be super-focused when I worked. I was passionate about it, and was able to work what seemed like all day. It was fun.

And when something is fun, it’s not work. Like my good buddy Confucius once said:

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

Now, don’t get me wrong; I still love what I do and wouldn’t trade it for anything. But over the past few months, I’ve really noticed myself losing focus while working.

I used to be able to work with what seemed like pure focus. I had tasks that needed doing, and I did them. But now, even though I am still diligent with my work "sessions" (timing them and whatnot), I find that I can only work for like 5-10 minutes at a time before needing to take a break by browsing Reddit.

Reddit itself is not the issue, and the problem wouldn’t be solved by implementing some sort of block on the site. The problem, I believe, is that I have lost passion in what I’ve been working on.

The Affiliate Marketing Grind

I’ve been focusing on affiliate marketing for the past 2 years now, and while I’ve learned a good bit since the beginning, I find that so much of what I do is repetitive grunt work.

I know that some people would suggest for me to delegate and outsource the grunt work out. That’s a lot easier said than done though when it comes to affiliate marketing, due to the secrecy and competitive nature of it.

It got so repetitive, in fact, that I actually started feeling like a robot. I had a routine of checking and analyzing stats (to a sick degree), optimizing accordingly, and then always trying new offers, angles, and traffic sources for stability and growth.

When you spend countless hours doing the same thing over and over again, you start to get bored and lose focus, no matter how good the money is.

I’m not bashing affiliate marketing here. I had an unbelievable year, despite things falling down quite a bit since summer.

I’m simply saying that I’ve grown a bit bored and tired of affiliate marketing, after doing the same thing over and over again for so long. I’ve lost the passion for it.

Going Back to My Roots?

While my focus has been on affiliate marketing the past 2 years, before that I had only ever dabbled in it here and there.

For those that don’t know, I used to make my money from a network of content-based websites, using primarily private ad sales and various ad networks for monetization. I also used to make money by flipping domains and websites.

Three years ago, I sold my largest website, which meant that I lost a good passive monthly recurring income. I got a very good price for it (enough to live off for 2-3 years) – but I knew that I had to find a replacement for that lost recurring income. That is partly why I started to try my hand at affiliate marketing again…

…and so we’ve come full circle.

Sometime around 6-8 months ago, I had an idea for a website. The idea kept bouncing back into my head every once in a while, and so I finally decided to look a bit into it to see if anyone else had the same idea and beat me to the punch. But I didn’t find anything.

I did find a couple of domains that would have been perfect for it which had basic "Coming soon" signs up – from the descriptions, they appeared to have a similar idea to me – but they appeared to have been abandoned more or less. In short – I couldn’t find any competition.

The website idea I have is a type of social crowdsourcing. It has numerous business model possibilities, although monetizing a website is never a concern if you ask me.

Part of what really intrigues me about this idea is that it’s a site for the general public, unlike virtually every other website I ever created, which has typically always been relatively niche-specific, apart from Movie-Vault.com.

Over the past month, I’ve especially been thinking about this website idea… it’s an itch I can’t scratch and just won’t leave me alone.

In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I spent a long time perusing the Internet for a good domain for it. I was willing to spend upwards of $15,000 for a real good domain, and after many hours of research, made a shortlist of around 20 domains.

I polled various contacts from my instant messenger lists and got the domains narrowed down to 3. The top domain would cost me $4,000, #2 $600, and #3 $10 (registration fee). This is only a voting sample size of 11 though (including my own vote).

I have still yet to decide which to go with, but my point is that I’ve gone far enough to the point to where I almost bought a $4,000 domain for this idea.

A Longshot?

When I started to get more serious about actually going ahead with this website idea, I started to see more potential issues with it. Here’s a list:

• It’s a bit more complex than I had originally thought. While the idea of the website is simple, making sure it is programmed well enough with the right features will actually take a fair bit of development. This is factoring things in such as spammers and cheaters.
• Sometimes I question the entire idea itself – wondering if anyone would actually be interested in such a website. Maybe that should raise red flags… but then again, when Twitter first came out, I used to think that was a horrible idea. And I still don’t understand the popularity of Pinterest.
• It’s going to take time and money to develop. I do have time and money, but I don’t have time and money to waste. Is this really a good enough idea to spend $20K-$25K and countless hours on?

Entering the Mobile Arena

And then there’s mobile.

Apart from running some mobile offers via affiliate marketing, my mobile knowledge is next to nothing. Yet, I am very aware that mobile is a big part of the future and will only continue to grow. I’m also a big gamer…

Yup, you guessed it – the other idea I have on my mind is to develop a mobile game.

I know what you’re saying – "But Tyler, http://www.robotwarz.com/ was a huge failure". Well yes, it was. But it was also a good learning experience. It was also not a mobile game.

I’ve done some preliminary research, and to develop a very simple mobile game – a simple but well done and polished game (something like Tetris or Bejeweled, for example), it will cost around $20,000 – $30,000.

My RobotWarz idea, fully formed in mobile, would probably cost more like $200,000.

I also looked into buying an existing mobile game from sites such as http://www.apptopia.com/. The prices seem abnormally high for what you get though.

In general, mobile app/game development prices seems to be undeservedly high for some reason.

The problem with developing a mobile game is simply that I have no experience with this market outside of basic marketing. I’d also not be able to contribute too much to the project other than money… I’d be more of an investor than anything else.

Which to Choose?

There’s no rule that says I can only choose one of the above options. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my many years of making money online, it’s to focus. The more focused you are, the better.

While it’s good to have backup plans, multiple sources of income, and not to have all your eggs in one basket – you’re always going to be better off focusing on 1 or 2 projects than you are trying to juggle 6 or 7.

I still haven’t decided. There are pros and cons with each path.

This is where I lie currently… at the 3-way fork in the road. I’m actually not doing any affiliate marketing at the moment (apart from a very small test here or there). Instead, I’ve been working on tying up all the loose ends and getting back up-to-date on all the things that I’ve let accumulate since focusing on affiliate marketing (such as my blog!).

Feedback is Welcome!

What do you think?

Perhaps you have a mobile game for sale, or can recommend a reputable gaming studio? Want to invest with me? Have an idea where I can invest some money (I’ll be regretting asking that)?

Contact me (don’t leave a comment asking me to contact you!).

I’m really open to ideas right now. I want to be passionate about work again.

Affiliate Marketing Income Report: October 2013

Hello. Remember me? I used to blog…

Despite having gone AWOL for 5 months (good lord, has it really been that long?), this post is going to focus on October 2013’s income report for my affiliate campaigns, and won’t be touching on where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing all this time. I’ll try to do a separate post for that later.

That being said, since this report is so long overdue, my memory is going to fail on the particulars of what went on that month with my campaigns, so I won’t be able to go into too much detail in this post.

The good news is that despite being absent from my blog, I was keeping up-to-date with all my numbers and logs as I knew that I’d eventually get back to posting, so all the numbers are completely accurate.

Let’s proceed with my October 2013’s affiliate marketing income report, shall we?

October 2013 Affiliate Campaign Income:

$36,992.97

Only $1K more than the previous month, this made October the second-lowest gross monthly income my campaigns generated all year thus far…

And like last time, I’ll include the breakdown of the multiple affiliate networks I used:

Affiliate Network Breakdown:

• Affiliate Network #1: $22,321.62
• Affiliate Network #2: $2,856.75
• Affiliate Network #3: $11,756.60
• Affiliate Network #4: $18.00
• Affiliate Network #5: $40.00

Expenses:

$34,703.57

Traffic Source Breakdown:

• Traffic Source #1: $5,138.79
• Traffic Source #2: $130.07
• Traffic Source #3: $130.14
• Traffic Source #4: $15,789.60
• Traffic Source #5: $13,514.97 

Net Profit:

$2,289.40

Ugh.

I spent nearly $35K to make just over $2K profit. That works out to only 7% ROI.

When you factor in things such as currency conversion fees, wire fees, and income taxes, that number basically fades to nothing.

Year-To-Date Affiliate Marketing Results

While a better performance than September, October 2013 still paled in comparison to every other month in the year.

Here’s a monthly breakdown:

Net Profit Projections

The following linear projection is based off the past 10 months of data, and is projected for the next 5 months:

Since things have been on a downwards slope since June 2013, the projection for 5 months later, in March 2014 predicts that I’ll actually be hitting negative numbers. Since this income report is so late, I actually know what the real numbers for March ended up being, but you don’t… yet

Now let’s take a look at the running net profit total from my campaigns for 2013 so far:

In the graph above, the linear projection predicts that I’ll finish the year at a net profit of around $350,000, meaning that it believes that I’ll make an additional $100,000 net profit over the next 2 months. That’s rather optimistic!

It also goes to show that the linear projection in this case is really not an accurate predictor.

So instead, I changed the projection to a polynomial algorithm, and here you can see that it appears to be much more accurate:

With the polynomial projection, 2013 looks like it might end around the $255K-$260K mark.

October Recap

Since this blog post is so late in being put together, I’m actually having a hard time remembering just what all happened in September.

From what I can tell though, it appears that I was still recovering over being dropped from 2-4 of my main offers, and was testing new offers and new ad copy. I really can’t remember much other than that, sorry.

November 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 November has already come and gone, I will be skipping this section in this report, since I already know how November went!

As I mentioned in the introduction of this post, I actually did keep full records of my campaign numbers while I was away, so you can expect for me to post the rest of the income reports up soon.

I don’t want to post them back-to-back though, so it will take a little while to be all caught up to date. I’m thinking about publishing them for every 2nd post.

So – am I back to blogging? You’ll just have to wait and find out. My apologies again for being so absent!

Affiliate Marketing Income Report: September 2013

As 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:

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!