Adventures in Lifestyle Design from a Path Less Traveled
Website Building Update – Week 45
Okay. I’m starting to feel anxious here. I’m getting dangerously close to 52 weeks here and I’m not a freakin’ millionaire yet! In fact, my current monthly earnings only put me at about $15,600 / year gross income. This is probably about 1/3 of what I would like to be making. Granted, my friend tells me that everything is 1/3 cheaper in Buenos Aires, so I know I can get by somewhere on what I make now. Still I have dreams of visiting more expensive places like Europe, Japan, Austrailia, and New Zealand (I have to find some way of personally thanking Mark Ling for turning my life around). But I’ve still got just under 2 months to ramp this up.
The only problem is I’m grappling with burn-out and exhaustion. Fortunately, one of the skills I learned in my 6 years of college is self-inflicted suffering, so I’m not going to give up. Not by a long shot.
Anyway, I’m still slugging away. More directory submissions. More web 2.0 sites. More wasting time reading news stories when I know I should be working.
Someone in Florida likes me (and no, I’m not talking about that girl I used to date that went to UF)! This week I won James Pruitt‘s blog commenting contest. I want to return the favor, so I will be keeping you all updated on how effective James Pruitt’s social bookmarking efforts are on my sites. I’ve been thinking of branching out into other means of getting traffic besides SEO, and this is a great opportunity.
I don’t know if you know this, but in addition to Affilorama, I’ve also been really interested in Niche Profit Classroom. The legendary Jem008 at Affilorama (you know, he’s the guy that was making over $1000 per week in the success stories forum) says he combined AffiloBlueprint with NPC to get his explosive results. Anyway, last night Adam Short, the guy that run NPC, held a webinar where he gave out a free 1-month membership to NPC. So I got in on that. I’m snooping around to steal as many cool ideas as I can to hopefully copy Jem008′s success.
This weekend I’m going on a short camping trip to Mt. Rainier. I wanted to go to Victoria, Canada, but the costs of ferry tickets plus hotels kind of added up. I’m too poor to really afford a proper vacation, but my girlfriend got some time off work and I think I could use some time “unplugged” from the internet. This should be fun!
Things have been going well this week, sales-wise. I’m excited to dive back in though and make that final push to get up to a living wage.
PS: Hey if you haven’t heard yet, I’m taking part in the AffiloJetpack launch. So if you’re thinking of buying AffiloJetpack check out my cool AffiloJetpack bonuses.
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Is there any reason as to why you only focus on affiliate marketing via Clickbank?
I’m sure…heck I’m positive…branching off into other affiliate programs would help increase your monthly earnings.
@Clayton, these spikes are damn sweet! Looks like you have finally nailed “a sale a day”
Well,Yolanda is right, you could make money off other affiliate networks.
This is my focus at the moment and I must admit it has had a negative impact on my clickbank sales since am not doing enough for my AB sites.
WoW…your coming down under…look forward to seeing you.
dont worry much about NZ/Australia – you could always get a part tym job and work a few hours to pay your bills.
Easy way is get into a hostel(single room) with your gf and work within the hostel whilst getting free accomodation/food!
cheers
Dennis
Hi !
Jem008 still shakes the minds ;) In fact, I had several messages with him while we both were the members of PPC Classroom.
He also was a star in PPCC community (under a different nickname), claiming to kill it with Clickbank and adwords (both direct link and landing pages, and making up to 10000 a day in net profits from direct linking to CJ products and UK aff products. However, nobody was near that close to even low ROI with clickbank and adwords while Jeremy “shaked” the community with his success stories. However, at that same time he also became a member of Affilorama and started doing SEO and then left PPC Classroom.
So, I personally see a lot of contradictions in his claims. In PPCC, he never shared any screenshots of actual earnings. Here in Affilorama, he showed high numbers in CB account and told this is thanks to consistent article marketing Niche Profit Classroom style.
Well, wether he’s the real IM genius or who knows?
Btw, I agree with Yolanda on CB products. I see you are making over 1000$ in ten months. Had you any experience in the IM before starting Affilorama? Cb converts really worse than physical products, and sometimes (with health supplements) the average commission is much higher than typical CB product commission.
I think that Mark Ling and Adam Short are 2 real experts in killing it with Clickbank, and their courses are real gold, but they both stress the importance of building lists, since this is the nature of promoting infoproducts. We need to build relashionship, to appear experts before people buy info from us.
With physical products, this is not always necessary. People are already product oriented, and if they know a little bit about some brands, it’s easier to convert them. My last 2 weeks-old site is converting like hell now, making me 1-2 sales from just pennies of Yahoo traffic. I can imagine what happens if I hit top 5 in google…
Hey Clayton,
Don’t give up yet! Your earnings are impressive. It may not be enough for an American living, but just think, at this rate you can retire in 2 two years.
That linkbuilding package is very cheap for what you get. I may try them out. I’ve just started experimenting with http://goodlinkbuilding.com which is more expensive, but focuses on high PR backlinks. I’ve had good success with it for a couple of my sites so far.
Tony
Okay. I got back from camping today! Tons of comments here!
@Yolanda, That’s something I’ve been really thinking of doing for my next few sites. My current site are strongly geared toward clickbank info products so switching to physical products or other affiliate networks might be tough. I follow Chris Guthrie (makemoneyontheinternet.com), and he makes most of his money through Amazon. He’s supposed to release some kind of e-book this month, I think explaining how he does it. I’m really looking forward to that.
@Dennis, LOL. Thanks man, but I still have those 2 big “zeros” on my CB report. I can’t wait till I can fill up every day on my sales report. Yeah, I’d love to visit Australia and New Zealand! It would be great to travel somewhere and not have to bother with learning a new language :) I have a friend that moved to Sydney (I think?) after she married an Australian guy. Plus, I’m hoping I can somehow sneak into Affilorama HQ and meet Mark Ling in person.
Let’s get a beer or something when I finally get out there (I’ll do my best to hide my American accent)!
@Anton, I see there are more rumors of Jem008 on the internet :) I don’t know if his story is true or not, but I choose to believe it simply because he really has no reason to be lying. He’s not trying to sell anything and he doesn’t really spend much time on Affilorama (so he’s not just there to brag). To me, he’s sort of like Roger Bannister (the first guy that ran a mile under 4 minutes and shattered a limiting belief for society). I’ve really used his story as inspiration to keep me going through all the hard times–especially the beginning.
I pretty much knew nothing about IM before I started with Affilorama last August. I did a little bit of direct-linking with PPC before that, but I didn’t fare too well. I’m really looking to branch out from CB in the future once I get caught up on marketing my current sites. Sometimes I feel really limited by CB in the niches I can enter. I’ve always wanted to do a travel-related website, but the only product with good gravity on CB is some stupid Disneyland guide. I’m definitely eager to try out new affiliate networks.
@Tony, Thanks. I don’t think I could give up even if I wanted to. I mean, it’s not like anyone in the architecture industry is hiring these days…
Yeah, I don’t know what to do about link building yet, but something’s got to give. I need to take myself out of the equation! With these link-building services, do they tell you what they do for you? Or is it just like some kind of ‘black box’ and they never tell you exactly what they do? I want to make sure that my sites are promoted properly and that I’m not just getting a bunch of spammy backlinks.
Hi Clayton!
Considering that you knew almost nothing about IM except for some direct linking, I think that 10 months and 1000+$ in income is not bad with Clickbank.
You could have make it quicker with physical products and Affilorama style sites due to higher conversion rates of real products, but I think CB is a great experience anyway!
I know for sure that jem008 uses the winner approach to IM, which is keep doing stuff and not fail before success comes. in PPC classroom, he launched several campaigns every day, same with SEO sites, scaling it to 10, 20 and more sites, and using the same strategies of promotion. This creates a flow, since you know what to do, and you just grow the volume of properties. Bouncing from strategy to strategy, from course to course is a sure way to fail.
So since you are focused on 1 thing, I think you will see your 1000$ a week pretty soon.
Hey Clayton,
Jeez man, You have been working your butt off far harder than most of us and deserve the success that you are having.
Don’t stress about the one year thing – I read a post somewhere – I think that it was from James, anyway it basically said that there are no unrealistic goals, just unrealistic time frames.
Crikey, You have achieved far more in 10 months than I have in 18 months and you even get to go camping!
It may not feel like it now, but you are starting to live the dream – good on ya!
@Anton, Thanks. I’m still not sure exactly why but when I started with AffiloBlueprint last year I just believed in it 100%. I probably would have jumped around between a bunch of different programs if it weren’t for people like Jem008. I actually printed out one of his screen shots and kept it by my computer. I’d look at it everyday and dream of the day my CB account would look like that. I still have a ways to go, but I think I’m almost half way there :)
What do you think of PPC classroom? I thought about trying that out, but my budget didn’t really allow for it. That’s currently in my “someday” file.
@Rach, Yeah, I seem to keep pushing back my goals. LOL. I like 1 year because it makes a nice milestone, and I think I can only last a few more months without a significant income increase. I guess I’m just setting an arbitrary deadline. Have you ever read the 4 Hour Work Week? I think Tim Ferriss called it Parkinson’s Law. Setting deadlines helps to boost productivity otherwise a task will just drag on forever.
With the one I use, they give you links to all the profiles they create for you. I wouldn’t consider it spammy since it’s not annoying anyone. Although, they are from inner pages of high PR sites so I’m still skeptical on how valuable they are.
@Tony, yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t really gotten into profile links myself. But I’ve heard a lot of people swear by profile links, so I guess they must help.