September Income Report

Welcome to my September Income Report and Update

In this post, I will be sharing what I have earned and learned over the past month. As with everything I do online I hope that you get a lot from this so I have included some concise points at the end.

I know it is already almost November, but my business has a key difference compared to most affiliate businesses that is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

Most of my affiliates are not massive players like Aweber, Clickbank or Amazon, so each month I wait for their emails to tell me the numbers. This is a disadvantage in that I often have wait a few weeks for all the numbers to come in and then send invoices.

However it is also a huge advantage because I have little competition and the earnings are often far greater. Good relationships with my affiliates also enables me to do some really cool things – like promotions and new products. In this instance, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

If you have signed up to my newsletter, you will have received an email from me showing how I basically create my own affiliate schemes with companies. It also explains how you can do it too.

It is a pretty unique way of generating much higher income that most affiliate marketers only dream of, but it is also very easy to implement.

My New Useful Niche Website

I have decided to reveal my new useful niche website in an upcoming post. This will be at the risk of copycats and possibility of lost income, but I feel the need to be an open book because I think it is more valuable to you.

So far it is only two months old, but it seems to be on track to being an excellent case study for others to follow and also making me some income for many years to come. It is important to point out I am building this site very part time and until I started building it two months ago – I had never built a website myself before.

About a week ago it made its second affiliate sale and traffic is increasing steadily. So far I have made two sales with just 128 unique visitors.

This does not sound very exciting at first glance but I can see potential for good things to come.

The Plan

My goal is to spend 150 hours on it over a two year span and then for it to make $300/month for many years to come. Based on the 128 unique visitors I have had in total and two sales made – things are looking pretty good.

So far I have spent about 80 hours on the site and it only has seven pages. Time and the regular addition of new pages will steadily move the site up onto the front page of Google – when that happens I expect good things because the site has already proven it can convert traffic to sales.

Because I am focusing on building a niche website that is useful, it will easily last three years, probably much longer.

So let’s do the math on my hourly rate for just three years:

$300 X 12 (months) X 3 (years) = $10800 / 150 hours = $72/hour

Of course these are all just estimates, but you have to do that with business online. Make a good guess and just do it.

Forget business plans – just make sure you are in a niche where people are spending money and be useful.

Let’s now put that $72/hour in perspective. No risk (except my time), no boss, part-time and no formal education required. This is also the first website I have ever built on WordPress. Believe me, if I can do it, anyone can do it. Also given that I am learning everything from scratch building my next site will be much faster and probably more profitable too!

So far so good – here is the organic search traffic the site is receiving:

This is just the beginning. I expect this site will be a success but the real value of what I am currently doing is in what I am learning. Even if it fails (I don’t think it will) I will build more sites.

Here is what I have learned:

• Most internet marketers despite all the radical changes in Google still think having a keyword focus is the way to go. They are missing a very big opportunity and one that anyone can capitalise on simply by having a value add focus.
• The search landscape is full of failed attempts to game the search engines. This means competition is extraordinarily low in some niches.
• One of the biggest mental blocks for many people getting started online is an idea. I will be writing a series of case studies that will address this issue, and I posted my in this series last week.
• If you want to leave the cubicle as quickly as possible freelancing is a great alternative to useful niche websites. Tom Ewer wrote a great post that covers this possibility. That said, it is not something I will be doing, because there are much greater long term benefits from generating income from websites. For those who want to escape the cubicle immediately – why not do both? That’s what Tom is doing.
• Most link building schemes are a total waste of time, however I still think there are a few things you can still do to seed a site. I shared these seeding tips in a comment on this post. However, I must point out my focus is on building natural links, which can only be achieved with a website that adds real value to the world.
• I started outsourcing using VAs (Virtual Assistants) through oDesk and Fiverr to do some small jobs. I encourage everyone to do a few small trials with outsourcing – it has just opened up a world of efficiency and therefore opportunity to me. Start with a small research project.

Without further delay, here are my earnings for September 2012

Workgateways.com

This Months Income = $3417
Last Months Income = $3487

Difference = -$70

Jobaroo.com

This Month Income = $459
Last Month Income = $515

Difference + -$76

New Site

This Month Affiliate Income = $10
Last month = $10

Grand Total Income = $3856

Difference -$156

In the interest of full disclosure, these figures are best as I know at the time of writing. They do sometimes get adjusted with refunds or extras that I do not know about until later.  These are also income figures and so not include expenses (which are minimal) but I plan to include these in future posts so you get a full picture. Right now however my goal is to give you a solid picture of my progress.

Overall I am very happy with my progress mostly just because I have learned a great deal and remained positive. The income does not show it, but I am OK with that. Building a business is a marathon not a sprint. Almost all of the income I have just reported above is from work I did years ago and the work I am doing now will pay off in the future.

I also want to assure you that every day is NOT a box of chocolates. But remaining mostly positive in the early stages of building a business is very important. I have a favourite quote that I often remind myself of

“How you think when you lose will determine how long it takes for you to win”.

I apply this saying on days when I am having a tough time. Basically I remember that feeling or being negative is losing – so I do what makes me positive again. This is usually pretty simple for me – going for a walk or simply having coffee with a friend works for me. Lately I have also been going fruit shopping because it makes me happy. Sounds weird but my point is, having some little tricks to make yourself happy is vital to running the make-money-online marathon.

Thank You for reading

I want to thank all of those who have been commenting on my blog and signing up to my newsletter. No matter where you are at with your journey I want you to know, we are in this together. What do you find useful? What else do you think works? Please leave your comments below.

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net