I'm Just Sharing

Posted by Mitch on Feb 3, 2009

Well, finally some better news. The economy of the country might be going down, but the economy of my online internet marketing has gone up. Can’t say I’m rich yet, but it’s going in the right direction, so that makes me happy.

Without further ado, my January cash total was $73.37. That’s the best month since I started keeping and reporting statistics on this blog, so I’ll take that, though I know I had one better month in the summer. This month, I’m going to give a full breakdown of not only those programs I made money from, but those I made nothing from. Here’s the list:

Commission Junction – 18 cents
Google Affiliate Network – 0
Clickbank – 0
Adsense – $55.16
Mining Gold – 0
Startup Rebel – 0
Shopping Ads – 0
Widget Bucks – 15 cents
Solutions Medical Billing – 0
Joel Comm – 0
TLA – $14.60
Kontera – 42 cents
TTZ – 25 cents
LinkXL – $2.50
J-V Network – 0
Share-A-Sale – 0
Chitika – 11 cents

This was my best month ever for Adsense, which pleases me, and I made most of it from my medical billing site, which I’ve talked about before. The rest of the earnings all came from this blog, which means it made $18.21 for the month. Not bad, but now it’s time to change some things around some more.

What am I going to do? Well, the first thing I’m going to do is remove Widget Bucks from this blog, and only use it on my other sites. Every once in awhile this site loads slower, and I think it’s that widget. So, I’ll lose that 15 cents from the blog; c’est la vie. I’m also finally giving up Mining Gold; that’s an affiliate program through Shawn Casey that I actually joined 3 years ago, and I’ve advertised it a few times on some of the posts on this blog, but no longer. I’m also not going to be wasting time advertising Startup Rebel anymore, as it’s pretty much a one trick pony. The same goes for Tweet My Blog, which I didn’t even mention here, because, well, I never got any money from the past when I know people signed up for it through me, and now I just don’t trust them. Outside of those two links, I’m done.

Next, about Clickbank. As you know, in the recommended products to the right there, four of the five items are from Clickbank. Well, I’ll be removing the one link that’s not them, which is for my marketing tool book (no link this time), because I’m going to be listing the book on the left side with my other products. Matter of fact, I’ll be moving my products up the left side more, since those are my creations, and one of the things most “true” internet marketers say is that you should promote your own products first before promoting other things. True, that’ll be my only product that’s related to the internet in any way, but products are products. And I’ll be creating more as I go along. Anyway, I’m going to search Clickbank and add one more product of theirs to my recommended products, then we’ll see where things go. I don’t think I’ve promoted Clickbank products all that well, or probably anything else; I need to work on that.

There is one thing I listed that most of you won’t know anything about. It’s the Solutions Medical Billing affiliate program. They only market medical billing books, and I’ve been marketing those books on my medical billing site only. It seems that, if you find a niche, most of the time you’ll be able to find an affiliate program specifically for it; neat, eh?

And there you go. Some of the other affiliate programs here I haven’t done all that much with, but there will be items rotating on this site as I give other things a try. The latest is a Shopping Ads 250×250 that you see there on the right after the recommended products. Hey, this is supposed to be my internet marketing blog; it’s time I started marketing better.

29 Comments »

Ken Lauher:

This is great. Glad to see that you’re moving on the uptick. Would be interested in your thoughts regarding an ad exchange such as http://adsdaq.com.

The real benefit is that you are able to name your price that advertisers will pay you for your space on a page level. And when ADSDAQ does not fill your ad, you can place back-up tags for Adsense, etc. As a result, many find a much higher ROI while not losing out on revenue from other networks or exchanges.

Mitch Reply:
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:19 PM

Hi Ken. Went to your page and there’s nothing there except a contact page. The page from your name link only has a few links on it also. I don’t think I’m getting the concept, based on what I see.

Ken Lauher Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:38 AM

Take a look at http://exchange.contextweb.com/sellingdesk/. Using this ad exchange, it gives you the ability to name your own price for your advertising. And when the ads are not being filled, it reverts to your backup ad networks, exchanges, etc.

February 3rd, 2009 | 9:26 AM

Trade Show Guru:

hi Mitch,
Congrats on going up, since what I see is a lot of business activity going DOWN in this economy.
And thanks for sharing ACTUAL numbers and results, as we can all learn from them. I think you’re right to reassess all your programs and dump the ones that aren’t performing. That’s just smart business. ~ Steve, the trade show guru

Trade Show Guru´s last blog post..Trade Show Zombies

Mitch Reply:
February 3rd, 2009 at 7:56 PM

If there’s one thing I am, Steve, it’s honest. Doesn’t do me much good to pump up the numbers if that’s not what they are; frauds are always found out soon enough.

February 3rd, 2009 | 6:12 PM

SPR:

Good to see some honest, modest figures. Most of the stuff you’ll see is in the four figures + range. This is along the lines of my experience with Adsense. The thing I can’t my head around is I’ll have a great traffic day without clicks and then a low traffic day with big revenue.

Self-Publishing Review´s last blog post..The Past, Present, and Future of Ebooks

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:04 AM

It’s hard to predict how and what people will do as it pertains to sales, especially Adsense, SPR. My feeling is that if people like the content, they’ll see other things as something that might help them get more of what they’re looking for, and why not get paid for that, right?

February 4th, 2009 | 12:22 AM

Donace:

some nice figures indeed; I finally started to act on monetisation on my site.

So far not spectacular but still

Donace´s last blog post..Free SEO Tools

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:05 AM

The act is in the doing; the rest will follow, at its own pace Donace. Good luck with it all.

February 4th, 2009 | 7:01 AM

ap:

its not that easy to make money from affiliate programs.

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:07 AM

True ap. but if it were easy, then everyone would be doing it.

February 4th, 2009 | 7:41 AM

Boyz II Men:

Hey Mithc, good to see the numbers on the upswing. Like Steve, I’m glad to see your honesty about the numbers and comments on the various networks. It helps to show the worth of different ad networks.

Two thoughts:
ONE – Good riddance to WidgetBucks. I used them once and they were awful, changing your pay values after reporting them to you, slow ads on the site that often wouldn’t make it.

TWO – Have you ever tried infolinks? I used to use kontera on my site but honestly, kontera is so-so and the company can be questionable. THe ads I got with it never seemed related. Infolinks on the other hand seems far more direct and related to the data on your page.

Boyz II Men´s last blog post..Keith Mitchell: After 7’s Untold Story

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:06 AM

Hey Matt; no, I never have tried Infolinks; truthfully, I think I totally forgot about them. I’ll have to add that to the testing list, since that’s what I’m all about. Have you cashed in well, so to speak, using them?

Boyz II Men Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 8:42 PM

To give you an idea, I had previously been using Kontera, and after switching, I’ve doubled my daily earnings from it. And just as important, the ads are more relevant. You’ll notice a lot of times that Kontera ads will just be “LiveSearch” on the term that’s highlighted.

The downside of Kontera is that they only allow one in-text ad network on your site at a time (from their terms and conditions). However, infolinks allows you to use multiple ones if you want to try adbrite or what have you.

Boyz II Men´s last blog post..Keith Mitchell: After 7’s Untold Story

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

I’ll probably end up taking a look at it, Matt, but I’m not sure if people don’t click on those things because the ads that come up aren’t worthy, or whether they’re just not interested in clicking on links to begin with.

February 4th, 2009 | 8:00 AM

Beverly Mahone:

Last week I received my FIRST check from Google for $102.36. I really don’t know how this all works but it was nice to receive it. My husband actually set up the account.

I guess after two years of having ads on my blogs, those $.01 clicks finally accumulated . Now, I’m hungry for more!

Beverly Mahone´s last blog post..College Life and Murder

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 9:02 AM

That’s how it gets you, Beverly. We all love getting checks, and we want more and we want them faster. I’m waiting on my next Adsense payment also.

Boyz II Men Reply:
February 5th, 2009 at 8:27 AM

Hah yea, this is what made me wonder if you should try and expand your site roster quickly. If you get a lot of sites, that are all just costing you 10 dollars a year for the domain names, can you build up enough clicks to make EVERY domain pay itself off with a little extra cash too?

Boyz II Men´s last blog post..Keith Mitchell: After 7’s Untold Story

Mitch Reply:
February 5th, 2009 at 10:05 AM

You could, Matt, but it can be dicey. I have a friend who has more than 100 websites. At least half he bought “used”; I still don’t know how one goes about finding already existing sites that are pretty much dead, but he does it. Thing is, I’m not sure I want to go about maintaining over 100 sites. He does make a pretty good dollar on it, though.

February 4th, 2009 | 8:50 AM

Ajith Edassery:

Hey Mitch,
Congrats on the improvements on AdSense front. I think, some of those things (ShoppingAds…) I talked about earlier are being removed by you already

To be frank, I feel that Kontera, as well, is not worth for low to medium traffic blogs. You may have to wait forever to get the first check.

Btw, I still have problem in accessing your site. After long waits and loading the page IE throws up a messagebox and everything becomes blank! This happens during 3 out of my 4 visits at least. If I have to read or comment, I need to append a #comment to your post URLs so that it stays on screen that’s my hack for now. What’s the actual issue?

Ajith Edassery´s last blog post..SEO – Link Building Series: How Search Engines find your blog or website?

Mitch Reply:
February 4th, 2009 at 3:57 PM

Hi Ajith. First, I’m not sure why you’re having any difficulties. I’ve removed the Widget Bucks, which was thought of as the culprit before, and I’ve tested it on my own system on both IE and Firefox (well, I only use Firefox, so IE was the test), and both load very quickly for me. Until I can duplicate it, I’m not really sure what it can be. Just asking, but have you thought about trying Firefox?

Second, I’m not sure how long I’ll stay with Kontera. There’s really no way to promote it since it’s those javascript links, so I’m not really surprised it makes little money. But we’ll see as things go on.

February 4th, 2009 | 3:07 PM

Ajith Edassery:

Mitch the problem is reproducable consistently on IE 6 and 7. On Firefox and Chrome I didn’t notice this Attaching a screen shot here. This message comes once the page is almost loaded. And if you press that OK button the screen becomes blank.

Though things work on other browsers, somewhere there’s some script error. Could it be Kontera which loads at the end??

http://www.dollarshower.com/junk/iescreenshot.jpg

Ajith Edassery´s last blog post..SEO – Link Building Series: How Search Engines find your blog or website?

Mitch Reply:
February 5th, 2009 at 1:03 AM

That’s kind of odd, Ajith. I still can’t duplicate the error with my IE 7, so I just don’t know what to do. I did some research on the subject, as it seems to be a common things, and it could be Kontera. What was recommended was moving it to another spot, just above php_footer, which I’ve done, but since it was working for me beforehand, I’ll ask you to test it for me again, just to see if that corrected things. If not, then I’ll try removing it and asking you to try it again. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Of course, the place I got this last bit of information said that everything would be fixed if everyone stopped using IE! lol

February 5th, 2009 | 12:21 AM

John Dilbeck:

Good afternoon, Mitch.

Thank you for removing WidgetBucks. Now, I’m having no problems at all in accessing your blog. It loads first time, every time.

I’ve been sick for about a week or so and I was offline almost all of that time. While I was sitting around feeling miserable, I came to the conclusion that I’m tired of promoting anything that makes my life harder or which pays me less than $250 per year, and I prefer programs that pay me that much per month.

So, as I have the time and energy, I’ll be removing lots of affiliate programs from my marketing and from my various sites, as I rebuild them this year.

It turns out that most of the things I’ll continue to promote are the same ones that were also in my highest earners a few years ago.

The two that lead the pack are Sitesell’s 5 Pillar program (Site Build It!) and Google Adsense, followed not too far behind by sales from my CafePress store.

A few years ago, I was earning good checks from Art.com, various programs withing Commission Junction, and Amazon.com.

All of those have tanked. Where I was earning in the hundreds from Amazon.com, I’m barely making any sales at all, now. Since I like to recommend books, I’ll stay with their program and maintain my Astore, but I won’t be promoting them nearly as much as before.

I’ll be dropping Art.com and everything powered by Commission Junction. I’ve also decided that I don’t want to promote things being sold on ClickBank, partly because my income is much lower than it was at one point and partly because there is so much junk available through them.

Since September 2008, my affiliate commissions have dropped dramatically. I’m sure some of them will rebound over time.

I don’t know which program shows the double-underlined links in your posts, but I’ve clicked on a few of them and wasn’t very impressed with what came up. That’s an uninformed opinion, I’m sure, but I don’t think I would want them on my sites. For whatever that is worth.

I’m sure that my results with the products and services I recommend will differ from what you and your other readers may experience. I know people who are earning thousands of dollars every year from Amazon, but since I don’t promote electronics, games, and other high-demand products, I don’t think it’s going to work well for me in the future.

On a different topic, I had my first meetings with some local offline businesses yesterday and it looks like there is a pretty good chance that my ideas for marketing consulting and local promotions online has a good chance of being successful. I’ll be pursuing it vigorously over the next three weeks to see, for sure. If I can sign up ten new clients with monthly retainers, it will be a go.

Act on your dream!

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

Mitch Reply:
February 6th, 2009 at 2:31 PM

Great stuff, John. I’m going to slowly reduce things that aren’t making me much money also, mainly because there are so many other things to try. As you saw, I got a recommendation to look at Infolinks from Matt, and I’ve heard of another company called eclickz, and there are just so many that to stay with something you don’t like doesn’t make sense. And, after all, I’m the testing guy, right?

And, with this presentation I’m giving next Friday, who knows, maybe that part of my offline business will jump. That wouldn’t depress me at all.

February 6th, 2009 | 2:05 PM

John Dilbeck:

Good afternoon, Mitch.

Good luck with your presentation.

I agree; testing is the key and there are more affiliate programs now than there have ever been.

Each of us just has to find what works best for us.

Act on your dream!

John Dilbeck´s last blog post..I now have three primary blogs

Mitch Reply:
February 10th, 2009 at 9:01 PM

Thanks John. Testing is what I do for my craft! lol

February 10th, 2009 | 3:34 PM

Brandon:

Not a bad start brother, it will only get better from here. Feb. is already looking real solid for me.
Blessings,
B

Brandon´s last blog post..How do you define wealth?

Mitch Reply:
February 14th, 2009 at 9:34 AM

Thanks Brandon, I’m always hoping to grow. I only look at Adsense regularly, though, until the beginning of each month, and it seems pretty steady thus far.

February 13th, 2009 | 11:35 PM

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January Statistics Report – Getting Better

Posted by Mitch on Feb 3, 2009

29 Comments »

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