The great thing with Red Letter Days is you don’t even need to make that many sales to receive a prize, no matter how small it’s always nice to receive something for any affiliate efforts, on top of the nice commissions already!

So this is what I’m going to do, I am also going to pick one, possibly foodmixers.org.uk and document the whole process of building it, getting it into the Search Engines, and then hopefully making some cash on it!

In April I attended an SEO Course at the excellent SEO Junkies, I think I’ve got a decent grasp of on page SEO and wanted to get more insight into Link Building, I had been using profile linking a lot and it worked but I wanted to know how to do the kind of Link Building you might do if Argos came knocking on the door, the course was great, it confirmed the stuff I already knew and gave an insight into a few other bits of SEO, when you’re at home working, learning things by yourself, you never know if what you know is right, so it was good to confirm some of that knowledge with people who do it succesfully every day for major clients.

As I am now working 3 days a week in my main job, I have more time to work on the affiliate sites I have and it would be nice to at least double the amount I make at the moment , fingers crossed!

I will start the ‘Building a Niche Affiliate Site’ series very shortly

An increase of just under 100% on 2009, so if I’d actually sold it for the £2k figure I was looking for last March the new owner would have pretty much made their money back without even doing anything to the site, luckily for me I pocketed the money instead, it works out at an average profit of £184.62 per month.

I am in the middle of actually making the site into a WordPress site, and will actually make it a lot better in terms of the comparison prices with individual posts for each TV and hopefully it will increase sales.

The site received an average of 2,957 unique visitors per month, the highest income came from Amazon at £1172.71 followed by eBay at £548.15.

This is from a keyword with just 1,900 local exact match on it, when I see people answering questions negatively about if you can make money from a site/product with so little exacts it makes me laugh, it all depends on what the product is, one of the sites I sold just before Christmas only had exacts of 880 but made £3k every year.

I’ve set up a little group of Niche sites since January too, babydolls/org.uk which sits top of Google for ‘babydolls’ already likewise with babydolldresses/org.uk which sits top for that term too and babydollnightwear/co.uk which is sitting in second, as you can imagine it was quite pleasing on the eye making those sites, they are seriously thin sites for now and have made sales so I can’t complain.

I’ve got a to do list with about 4,342,101 things on it, I’d love to post more often about how to do certain things and make this blog a bit more interesting but 1) I feel so busy and 2) I don’t do anything groundbreaking that you haven’t already read elsewhere

December has always been my best month of the year, October and November are close too but the final Xmas push has always seen me do ok, this year I wasn’t so sure how it was going to pan out considering my Adwords account had been banned earlier in the year so I’m relying on purely search engine traffic.

Fortunately I managed to make just as much as last year but this time there was no Adsense to take out of the profit so I’m happy with that, saying that I still would have preferred to make much much more!

In December I decided to sell off one of my Football Stadium Tour sites, it was one of my first proper affiliate sites and I’d say one of my favourites, it had over 3 years proven income and I thought if I managed to sell for a decent price I’d have money to inject into all the other projects I had and look for new ones.

The site sold the same day I put it up for sale, it went with another Stadium Tour site which was thrown into the deal.

It’s the first money making site I’ve ever sold, I was a bit apprehensive after it had sold, I’m not sure why, at one point it felt like that was all my affiliate income gone, which it wasn’t, far from it, but that’s how I felt, once I’d started looking around for new opportunities that soon went!

The first purchase I made was for cyprus.org.uk, the domain was on Sedo so I made a bid, then it was put onto auction, don’t you just hate that! So bang went me getting it as cheap as I wanted, I did go a little over what I wanted to pay but I’d had it in my head that I was going to own it, I paid £1,451 for it, my ‘second’ max bid I’d given myself was £1,500 so I’m glad it stopped where it did, I love Cyprus and have been so many times, that’s why I wanted it.

I’ve registered a few other domains since, and bought a couple, multigym.net is one I’m looking forward to developing, I wanted the .co.uk but I wasn’t going to be paying €14,500 for it and I’ve ranked .net domains before without a problem so consider it a bargain at $209!

January 2011 has seen an increase in earnings from January 2010, with no Adwords, and also around 50% of January 2010 earnings was from the Stadium Tour sites I just sold, so all in all I’m pretty happy with the way things are going.

With not being in the mood to work I started to think that once again I just have too many domains and realistically will never get them all done, it’s better that I focus on 1 or 10 instead of hundreds, with that I’ve decided to get rid of loads of domains and work harder on the ones I really want to work on and grow, the Polo Shirt site for example, I also bought a couple of domains/sites on Acorn Domains that I’d quite like to develop too, Aftershave for Men and Spares.

I’m pretty complacent when it comes to Affiliate Marketing, I’ve just been happy with whatever income it brings in, even though I’d love to do it full time, and never really push myself to make sites make more money, so it’s about time I pulled my finger out and did just that, I want to be able to move to the sun and work by my pool

This is one of my favourite pictures from the US trip, from the top of the Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago

I’ll go straight into listing my top 5 (number of sales):

1. Buyagift.co.uk – 771 sales
2. Getting Personal – 192 sales
3. Play.com – 146 sales
4. Activity Superstore – 116 sales
5. Red Letter Days – 18 sales

As you can see Buyagift.com are still my top selling merchant, with the total top 5 selling almost 200 more items than the previous year, Play.com is in at number 3 but because of their silly commission rates the total commission is less than Red Letter Days, in fact Activity Superstore generated 1500% more commission than Play.com

It is a bit disappointing to generate £23k in sales and not even receive 1% in commission, with using Easy Content Units I always include Play.com as I think even pennies is better than no sales, but very frustrating when you can sell a TV on amazon and get around £20 commission and the same at Play brings you £2.

I’m not sure if I am too happy with my 2009 affiliate marketing, in terms of commission I would have liked more but then I think that comes with the more you make the more you want to make, I want this to give me a full time income, November and December generates more than my day job it’s just the rest of the year I need to get sorted, I feel I’ve learned a lot in 2009 as I’ve actually made a bit more effort to and things can only get better

Anyway, I was looking at my AW stats for the year and thought I’d look back to see what it was last year, so my top 5 top selling merchants for Jan08 to Dec08 were…..

1. Buyagift.co.uk – 1031 sales
2. Virgin Experience Days – 9 sales
3. Iwantoneofthose.com – 6 sales
4. Brown Bag Clothing – 3 sales
5. Getting Personal – 2 sales

As you can see it’s heavily in the favour of Buyagift.com, in 2009 this has dramatically changed and I’ll do a post after Dec 31st to show how it has changed because of the implementation of Easy Content Units in my sites.

My income in 2008 didn’t just arrive from AW but it even shocked me to see how much of my income came from Buyagift.com

Why have I started a blog? Well everyone else seems to have one so I thought why not, sometimes I get excited and want to tell someone about it so this may be my outlet to do that, I can’t promise to give any valuable information as I just do what I do and things happen and I don’t always know why. This is mainly related to my affiliate marketing activities, for example having sites that seem to rank top in google and others that don’t and not being able to pinpoint why this has happened.

I can’t remember too much about exactly how I got into affiliate marketing but it must have been about 7/8 years ago when I first came across it, I had bought one of those local county information portals and was looking of ways to make money from it and that must have been when it started, I remember the first sale coming through a friend buying from ASOS, I think it was about a pound commission but it still felt good.

Despite that I didn’t really do much more with affiliate marketing for a few years, my first proper site was selling Little Britain Dolls when I found out they were going to be a big Christmas seller, I registered littlebritaindolls.co.uk and the .com, put up a simple one page site and linked into IWOOT, If I remember correctly I made £115 that christmas selling the dolls and other Little Britain merchandise, from then I was hooked, it took a while for me to stumble across something else to promote though but these days ideas are never ending and now I have more domains than I can cope with, just like any other Affiliate I expect.