“No great thing is created suddenly”
-          Epictetus (A.D. 200)

Well that is what is keeping me going at the moment.  The knowledge that it takes time and effort to build a successful ‘anything’ – in this case, a successful internet marketing business.

I don’t know what went wrong this month.  It was my worst month since the terrible month I had in February – for both income and website traffic.

And to add insult to injury, I was ‘hijacked’!

Someone decided to use a robot of some sort to click on every link on three of my websites.  This resulted in my Amazon.co.uk click through results looking absolutely terrible – with just a 5.71% conversion at Amazon and an incredible 26.77% click through rate from my UK websites to Amazon.co.uk.

The picture to the right shows my Amazon clicks for one of the effected websites.  On 24 and 25 July the clicks skyrocketed.  When I checked my website traffic reports the visitor numbers were normal indicating that some sort of robot obtained the links from the website – i.e. the website wasn’t actually visited by 29 unique visitors who clicked on 105 of my links.

Anyway, I am feeling a bit despondent at the moment.

I am way too busy with my day job to focus much effort on affiliate marketing, my website traffic is down, my income is down, an idiot is causing me problems with my analysis by stuffing up my Amazon click ratios, and right now I am about ready to put this whole thing on hold.

But, like I said at the start of this post, and have mentioned previously, building a successful online business will not happen overnight, but it will happen if I keep working at it.

So I will be back again next month with another income report.  But due to other pressures I don’t expect to be putting too much time into this over the next month unfortunately.

A quick summary of my July income:

Amazon.com:

$4.00 from one sale which was actually made in June but despatched in July.  No orders in July.

Amazon.co.uk:

As per the following summary, after eliminating 140 Amazon clicks from the analysis table:

Footnote:

The purpose of these Amazon Income Reports is for me to one day look back and remind myself how far I have come, and how hard it was in the beginning.

If you, as the reader of this report find benefit from it, then that is an added bonus.

Until next month,

Richard

My plan for May was to concentrate on one main thing – backlinking.  And to also write a couple blog posts about my backlinking experiences.

I also thought I would create one or two new websites but make them .com websites linked to Amazon.com rather than .co.uk which is what I have been concentrating on for the last four months.

Little did I know that I was going to become extremely busy with my day job and not have anywhere near as much time as I wanted/needed to spend on my IM business.

I am not too concerned though as, at the end of the day, it is my day job that pays the bills and IM is still a hobby that I hope will expand to a stage where I can start replacing some of my normal income and therefore justify spending more time doing IM.

So I created my first .com website in the first week of May, and created a second the following week.  I also spent about an hour a day building backlinks (I will discuss further in my next blog post) until around the 15^th of May and then I just ran out of time to do any more IM work.

The first .com website I created was pretty much an exact copy of my best performing .co.uk website.  This was a website I developed using WPZonBuilder in January to promote something that I had purchased online as a Christmas present for my wife last year.

As you can see from my analysis of this websites performance from January to May below, after an initially slow first two months, Google discovered it and it has started generating a nice passive income for me with no additional work.

I am hoping to now do the same with my .com equivalent which I have also built using WPZonBuilder.  In both cases the websites took about three hours to build from start to finish, and now, the .co.uk website is bringing in good monthly traffic and converting reasonably well to Amazon click throughs – with 7.26% of all page views resulting in a click through to Amazon.co.uk.  This is slightly below my overall average, but I think it is acceptable.

Someone, a while ago, left a comment on this website along the lines that he thought I was over analysing my website traffic, click throughs, sales, etc, but in writing this report today I have just realised that my initial concern about my .com equivalent is nothing to worry about at this stage.

In the first 4 weeks of the .com version of the above website I had 202 visitors, 364 page views, 38 clicks through to Amazon (a rate of 10.4%) and one sale – an Amazon conversion rate of only 2.6%.  But when I look at January and February in the above table I actually see that this is better than I was doing with the site that is now performing well, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about.

My second .com site was also built using WPZonBuilder and has had 64 visitors and 122 page views, generating 23 clicks through to Amazon.com.  Again, a good click through rate.  But no sales yet.  It is promoting a much higher priced item that any of my .co.uk sites, with an average price of around $250.  Because of the cap on Amazon.co.uk sales there really isn’t any incentive to promote such high value items as an Amazon.co.uk affiliate, but I figure that one or two sales a month at $250 each would make this website satisfactory and I think I can do much better than that.  That said, it is a seasonal product and will only sell during the summer.

My next .com affiliate site though is likely to be a replica of a .co.uk site I created in December last year promoting a winter seasonal product.  In January of this year that website earned me £49 in affiliate commission in just its second month, and then winter ended and it hasn’t earned much since.  But the plan is to get it’s .com equivalent up and running soon so that when the US winter hits, the website will hopefully already be well ranked on Google.

My May Income:

And now for my income report.

In keeping with the format of previous months, the following summary shows my monthly earnings for each month this year.

I finally broke through the £100 commission barrier.  Something I expected to do in February based on my January results – but I have already discussed why this didn’t happen above.

Website traffic was up 67% on April and over double March’s traffic, and while the Amazon conversion rate was slightly lower than March and April, at 8.5% it is still very good.

My percentage click through rate (Amazon clicks over website page views) remains steady at 11% and overall I think things are progressing nicely.

I have actually done a bit more analysis and I am now even more certain that this (Internet/Affiliate Marketing) is all a numbers game.  For the last three months my number of sales divided by the number of website page views has been consistent at between 1.01% and 1.10% – effectively meaning that for every 100 page views I get on my websites, I will make one Amazon sale.  And if I work that out at a per website visitor rate the percentage is consistent at between 1.79% and 1.91% – meaning that I need between 52 and 56 visitors to my websites to generate each Amazon sale.

So what does this mean?

 It means that in order to generate 100 sales I need between 5,200 and 5,600 website visitors.  In May I had 3,693 unique visitors.

If my average commission per sale remains at about £1.50 (and my aim is to increase this, especially with a focus on the Amazon.com market) then those 5,200 to 5,600 visitors will generate me an income of £150 – or £0.027 to £0.028 each.

That doesn’t sound much, but if I can generate 100,000 visitors per month to my websites, then I will be earning £2,700 to £2,800 per month.  Now that is what I call a good passive income.

Or in other words, I need to get 36 website visitors for every pound I want to earn.

So what do I need to do achieve this?

More websites plus more backlinking equals more visitors.  Simples!

Review websites versus WPZonBuilder websites

I referred to this subject last month.  I know that I only have one ‘review’ website, and that to be honest I really need to put more time into this and write some more reviews, because it is only currently reviewing two models of one product together with a comparison table of about 8 or 9 different models, but in May the review website didn’t product any income at all – from 48 Amazon click throughs.

The WPZonBuilder website I have that promotes the same products earned me £21 from 38 click throughs and three sales.

Go figure.  The gurus say that review websites are where the money is, but my experience is telling me to develop hundreds of WPZonBuilder websites – with each one taking just a few hours to build which is much less time that that required to research and write reviews.

So that is what I will do.

Other summary reports:

I would prefer to supply too much information than not enough in these monthly income reports, so the following screen shots are the other reports that I have been including in each months report up to now.  I have included both UK and US reports:

Amazon.com:

These results are for two brand new websites created this month.

Amazon.co.uk

Some people, including my wife, might ask why I am doing this:

• Why am I spending so much time and energy to earn £60 in a month from Amazon when I am a reasonably highly paid computer software consultant?
• Why am I spending an hour or more once a month writing about my meagre income on this blog?
• Why am I maintaining this blog?

Well, I have a belief, a vision.

I believe that the effort I put in last month will generate income next month.  And the effort I put in in March will also generate an income in the future months.  And the effort I have put in every week this year will contribute to my future income.  And that one day soon I will see the rewards for all that effort.

I believe that one day I will earn a decent enough passive income from the work I have done to build my internet marketing business over the last few months that I will be able to reduce, and maybe completely eliminate the need to do a job that I find extremely stressful and less and less fulfilling as the years go by.

I also know that if I don’t analyse my monthly results I won’t know what is working for me and what isn’t. 

And I enjoy my new hobby.

And as I have mentioned previously, this blog is mainly about me keeping my own diary of my progress in the world of internet marketing.  It is something that I hope to read back in years to come and remember how much work I put in to get where I have gotten to.

And maybe it might also be something that helps other people who are new to the world of internet marketing in the future.

I really have no idea how many hours I am putting in to this hobby on a monthly basis, but I can tell you that other than spending a couple hours converting one of my non-Amazon product websites to point at Amazon products in the first weekend of April, I have done very little during April as I have been in New Zealand for a combination of work and holiday.

Anyway, how did April go:

The following summary shows my monthly earnings for each month this year.

April was slightly above March due to a 24% increase in website traffic over March and an almost 100% increase of January and February.

My conversion rate once visitors were on the Amazon website was also my best so far at 9.79%.

The only downside was that my average sale value was 7% lower than March and 21% lower than February.  Obviously, the higher the average sale value, the higher the resulting commission.  Although that said, as I have mentioned a couple times now (Amazon commission caps, cookie expiry, and tiered commission structure and Amazon.co.uk pays 15% less than Amazon.com) Amazon.co.uk have this ridiculous cap on the amount of commission that they pay on an individual item which means that one of my sales this month was capped at 3.85%.

Also, my top commission percentage was 5.5% because I only managed 42 sales.  In the UK we need to produce 51 sales in a month to move to 6% commission whereas on Amazon.com affiliates only need 7 sales to get paid at 6%.

Further analysis:

I have 14 websites linking back to Amazon.co.uk and 13 of them are listed below.  The 14^th didn’t generate any traffic at all last month because of a technical problem that I never got around to investigating.  It hadn’t produced any income, and not much traffic either, so isn’t high on my priority list to resolve.

On 2^nd April I decided to convert one of my non-Amazon websites to refer visitors to Amazon rather than the two merchants I was linking to as the website had generated reasonable traffic during February with absolutely no sales.

The result of this is as shown on the second line of the tracking ID report below:

111 clicks from 916 page views – a click through rate of 12.1% which is slightly above my overall average, but a conversion rate of only 5.4%.

The five sales that have been dispatched so far produced £11.05 in commission, and there was another order placed with Amazon on 30 April which will give me another £2 or £3 in commission.

As it happens, I had to leave a couple links to the other two merchants on the website because there were three products I was listing that Amazon didn’t sell, and these links also produced two sales, so the website itself produced a total of £20 in commission – to add to the £20 it had produced between November and March.

I think converting the website to point to Amazon was the right thing to do, but to be honest I think it is too early to tell for sure.

Review sites versus product catalogue type sites:

In the above report I have put a circle around the fourth and fifth lines.  These two websites are promoting exactly the same products.  One is a product review website and the other is a catalogue type site which I developed using WPZonBuilder.

The product review site probably took 20 to 30 hours work to put together (including writing the reports).  The WPZonBuilder developed site took maybe two hours work.

The WPZonBuilder site is ranked at number 8 on Google for its main keyword and the product review site is ranked at number 9.

Also, the WPZonBuilder site is a .Org.Uk and the Review site is a .Co.Uk.

Which one is which?

Well surprisingly, the product review site is the first one listed with 36 clicks through to Amazon for the month.  The WPZonBuilder site is the second one listed with just 13 clicks, 3 orders and 2 items dispatched (the third came through on the 29^th and will pay £5 or £6 in commission when dispatched).

Life to date (the WPZonBuilder site is three months old and the product review site is two months old), the situation is similar with the product review site generating more traffic and more clicks though to Amazon, but less sales:

Interesting isn’t it.

I have read that product review sites are the way to go but that is not what my own statistics are showing.

To be honest though, I think it is too early to make a decision on this, and I think I need to do a couple things before I can make a decision on which way to go.  I need to write some more reviews for the product review site.  It currently consists of two long (2,500+ word) reviews, a blog, a comparison page that compares all the products listed on the WPZonBuilder site in a table format) and a number of images and video clips.  But I think i need another three decent reviews on the website.

And I also think I need to create two more product review websites in order to make a comparison between the two website types.

The four websites I have marked with an ‘X’ are the four that I have created using WPZonBuilder.  I have previously written about this product and think I will be using it to create more sites of a similar nature in the future.  They are quick and easy to create, and as can be seen above, they generate revenue.

I read once that one way to make money online is to create 1,000 websites that each generate $10 per month in income.  I wonder whether that could be where I am headed.

Anyway, I am sure I will write again about this subject.

Our friendly competition:

And just before I finish, after I wrote my first income report at the end of January I found another guy, Raymond Selda, who was doing something similar.  I had earned an income of £74 in January and he had earned US$79, so I challenged him to a friendly competition to see who could generate the most affiliate income through Amazon each month.  Ray is promoting through Amazon.com and I am promoting through Amazon.co.uk (and potentially looking to also move to Amazon.com) and whilst I have enjoyed the competition to date, I am now on a 3 nil losing streak!

Ray earned US$134 in April which equates to about £80.  And year to date, January to April, Ray has earned US$505 which is about £362 versus my £199.

Well done Ray:

                                Ray:                       3

                                Richard:                0

While I wish you well, I am hoping that I can reverse the tables this month

And one last thing, I am going to be on holiday when it comes to the end of May, so it is probably that I won’t get an opportunity to write my May income report until mid June.

Until then,

Richard