Disclaimer: At this point I am focusing on something else and I am not into bum marketing. I am also going to be mentioning a bit technical details so it’s just a post full of stats.

In any case, I have a blog that I started on a specific topic on a niche with 25 posts in total. The site would receive about 20 uniques a day of organic traffic. Now, I logged in my affiliate stats and I saw a sale coming from that site. Pretty neat. I logged into my site panel and I noticed the following stats for today alone: 134 page views and 72 visits. I checked out the click-through rate and it seems 12 (which makes it about 16% visitor click-through and 9% CTR) clicked on my affiliate link on the page. Well, I also checked the stats on the page to see where the traffic is coming from and I noticed that a lot has come from an article I had posted on EzineArticles (I just have one article on this topic there). To my surprise, the article has 1,324 views… and, it’s click-count to my site is… 547! That’s a CTR of over 43 percent!

I also checked where I got those 1,324 visitors from. And… it seems my EzineArticles page is ranked #2 on Google for the search term I was targeting! I am hoping that’s it’s there to stay.

At this rate, if the traffic does not drop off, hopefully I should be getting one sale every ten days. That accounts to 3 sales a month which is about $50 a month. Wow, the ROI is so low… Anyway, I added one more affiliate link on my site so that it gets thrown in the visitor’s eyes as he/she visits the page. If all goes well, it should help me get my CTR above 9%.

But it at least shows that with persistence and luck it is possible to make sales. Too bad I (hopefully) won’t be doing bum marketing for a while now… On a different note, I find two problems with what I am currently starting to do. Here they are, if you are interested.

1. I am reluctant (I was gonna use the word afraid but reluctant will do) to do stuff as it might result in me losing money and somewhere in the subconsciousness (and not only) I do not like that.
2. I keep searching for information elsewhere = mostly wasting time. Searching for podcasts (couldn’t find many), e-books, and, oh no, reading forums.

These problems are related to each other. Maybe they are essential part in the process of doing something but I find it hard to be getting past them anyway. You see, lastly I have gotten a very good belief (and I think I do actually believe it) that everything boils down to practice. Hard work is what actually gets results and reading is a waste of time. Well, not exactly - reading is fun and it can help you set the direction where you wanna go. But practice is the most important thing here and while you can get far with work & tracking alone without theory, you won’t get anywhere with just theory and no work. But… I still find it hard to walk my talk and to actually do it anyway. I can’t help it.

But oh well, I am pretty optimistic and I do believe that I will get results and I will get through these problems and even though at this moment there are many things that suck I am positive that I will be able to solve them. I’ll be reading this post later and just laughing at these good old times (which won’t be very old compared to the time I will be reading it anyway).

Not mine. Here is the story…

I have a site about MacBooks I had quickly thrown up (it’s a .com domain). I used to be getting a few visitors every day from one long tail keyword from MSN but those few visitors were not converting. I thought, to hell with it, and decided to pull a little stunt.

I redirected the domain to an eBay page of search for “macbook” with my affiliate id embedded.  Surpsire, MSN didn’t stop sending traffic. Not many but a few visitors every day. And only today, I checked the stats. Watch:

(hint: I intentionally narrowed down the spaces using GIMP to make the screenshot fit better.)

Now, my affiliate network wouldn’t tell me what exactly I sold so it could be something else the user bought after having visited that page, but it is very likely that it was a MacBook. It took me about 107 visitors to make a sale so that’s a convertion rate of roughly 1%.

The traffic trend seems to be declining now. Still, a funny story.

Okay, I have a story to tell!

I had set-up two affiliate advertising campaigns in Adwords last week. I kept logging in from time to time to check the statistics of those campaigns but I kept seeing 0 clicks and the costs as $0.

Then, today, before going to do my stuff, I logged into my affiliate account and I saw this:

Okay, the first two were organic sales I had made (yup, I’m starting to get some luck reward there too!) But the two for the last period, that is, $49.59 couldn’t have come from organic sales.

I logged into adwords to check the statistics. I kept saying 0, so, I wondered, what’s going on. Then, I changed the data display period for the whole month and I saw that I had actually received 152 clicks on one campaign with the total cost of $16.35 and also 48 clicks on the second campaign with the cost of $12.25. I checked out and noticed I had made one sale in the latter one to the total of about $30 while I lost money on the first one. Overall, I spent $28.5 to earn $49.59 which is a return of 74 percent.

Now, I know not that much about affiliate marketing, I did not do much tracking and my campaigns were not tweaked that well. But, from these results, I can see how I am getting to start it!

If I learn to manage the campaigns better, do better tracking and continue on organic sales, maybe in the end I can get my own product and get myself and later, affiliates to promote it for passive income! If that’s the case, I can actually manage to make a living like this!

Now, these are just baby steps and they are quite late but I am getting to get it and so this really motivates. I think I’m gonna keep on doing some more stuff from now. Wish me luck! :)

P.S. I checked the first campaign in Adwords and noticed (as I was doing placement-targeted advertising) that I was losing big on all the other sites except one where I was getting very cheap clicks. I cancelled all the other sites and left that one only. Too bad it isn’t getting so much traffic… About the second campaign, well, I can’t really do much because it’s keyword-targeted (except to search for more keywords). We’ll see.

I’ll cancel everything else out untill I find out something. In fact, I’ll do that tomorrow. First, let me explain why.

First of all, I am kinda interested in Internet Marketing, so… No, that’s not where the story should begin. Once, I downloaded a podcast called Rush Hour. The guest telling his tips was Jeremy Schoemaker, and, shouldn’t you know who he is, just google it. This post is not about that. Rather, this story told by Jeremy on that podcast, I found fascinating… now they have transcripts of the podcasts, so, check this one out. I’ll quote the important part for you:

Jeremy: I know that we’re running out of time, but can we talk more social media stuff because I have something really cool. I’m sure a lot of your listeners might (like)… <…> Alright. I did this thing about this guy <…> who <…> paid a company like $600 to make a video for him <…> He got over three million views. When I last talked to him, he told me he converted at 1%. <…> Let’s do that math real quick, right. So, if he converts that 1%, he got 3.2 million page views, he’s made over $1.2 million dollars in three months.

Wow! That’s 1.2 freaking million US dollars. Right? Wrong…

Today I remembered this story and I googled this guy again and let’s see his part of the story. Again, some quotes:

This was the first time I really ever created a product before or tried anything a bit quirky, and I scored slight success managing to conquer the number 1 spot in the Google Video top ranked videos, scoring over 3 million views. <…> Talking numbers I probably spent $1,300 on the site, sold around 70 none-affiliate copies at $37 taking in a few thousand dollars. <…> I decided it was a good time to sell and let him go to a new home. <…> I settled on $3,000 <…>. In all I made around $4,500-$5,000.

Wait. We started playing law-ball… But, seriously, we’re talking about a difference of 240 times or 24 thousand percent (that’s 24,000%). To talk about hype… It seems, that guy has even made up his mind about all of this eventually.

So, we reach a conclusion that this was way over-hyped. But how would that matter? It boils down to talking about the plausibility of doing this IM thing succesfully at all. If such a succesful project with an okay copy, an affiliate system and 3 million people watching the video that is actually bringing traffic to the page, he could only pull in 5 grand (including the sale of the site), come on, how plausible is actually doing this with success? Getting to the point where we will be needing Myth Busters to confirm it.

Now, I don’t want it to sound like as if I was whinning about it. I’m not or that’s not my intention anyway. I just managed to notice a small problem here. So, I’m willing to play a myth buster and actually try this out. No, not trying out that product and that niche, of course. Just trying this out.

Pick a product. Send real traffic from everywhere possible untill a sale is made. Knowing the traffic was real people and pretty-much targeted, count around a) how many visits were needed to make that sale b) how much time and effort did it take to get those visits. Ed Dale said it’s about 200 visits if the copy is bad. Let’s find out.

That’s why I’m cancelling everything out. Starting tomorrow morning (mid-day, actually, granted I like to sleep). I’m going to get back at you tomorrow evening. :)

The Internet at my room broke so I’m now sitting in a shopping center (centre, for those of you British-English fans…) or should I call it a shopping mall with my laptop on my lap and writing this. It’s funny because even being Internet-deprived normally and being here for business-matters, I couldn’t resist wasting some time “just browsing”. Whatever. I now have a plan, I have chosen a niche, haven’t done any niche research whatsoever and I now have registered a domain name. I am on the verge of setting up my mySQL settings for the new site now. Then, only design is left. I’m quite bad at design but I’ll be getting some examples to work on so that I’d have a working copy of the page to just upload to the server early tomorrow and begin phrase 2. Phase 2 is a lot of work but it’s okay since I’m going for my dream (I coined that phrase from someone). Well, one of my dreams, sorta.What else what else? I’m going to make it this time so I have to start thinking about other stuff too. There is not THAT much stuff going on but there will soon be other stuff to discuss. Currently, I feel like I should be keeping my focus on one thing which I will. So, okay, as for now, I have to do some other steps for the design preparation needed.As the Japanese say, ganbarimasu!

Here is the funny story… I created this website, programmed my self-made list and offered a free product to be offered in the future.

Then, I did nothing, except this:

And then I got this:

So, I got two real users to enter their e-mail waiting for the free report and one of them has even activated his account.

Considering it’s a free report, even though my copy is far from fantastic, it’s converting more than poorly. But that’s not it. The funny part is…

I don’t even plan on making that report!

That’s right. That’s a niche I am not passionate about…

I don’t really know what to do. I guess I’ll be doing this, though…

I’ll be optimizing the page, adding a few articles and doing some more promotion (preferably so that I would not have to pay for it monetarily). If I can get… hmm, let’s say 30 active real subscribers, I’ll reconsider this whole thing. Sounds like a plan, right?

In the meantime, I’ll be searching for a thing to do something I have been putting off for almost half a year now. Also, let’s move onto the other things. As they say, do everything till something sticks.

Long story short, I will be participating in the Thirty Day Challenge. It’s all about internet marketing and pushing your product to make the first sale in a month. The challenge is totally free-of-charge and you shouldn’t spend a dime.

While I know what Internet Marketing is and I know theoretically how to do it, but only practice makes things happen so I’m gonna do this for real.

We formed a pretty darn good team with Income Hero, Giacomo Mimura and Alan (ahh, I haven’t really talked with half of the team - whatever, that will be fixed soon) and we are going to win this challenge.