Joseph Archibald’s Internet Marketing Income for October 2010

Its that time of the month once again and no doubt October brought as many frustrations and ups and downs as any of the 3 previous months that I’ve been posting up about my income. Its a roller coaster ride, that’s for sure!

Sidenote: if you want to avoid reading through the pre-amble, then simply move down towards the half-way point on this post to get to the meat and potatoes of income for the month.

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But before I get into the nitty gritty, I just want to go back to the end of October last year, if I may. This time 1 year ago…

I had committed to leaving the United Kingdom – the country that I had lived in for the previous 42 years, to go and live in Malaysia and just see how things went. I did have some savings – not too much – a few thousand pounds. No family support, no other income.

I lost a contract I had in the UK earlier in the same month of October, and I was really counting on that continuing whilst I was in Malaysia – at least for the first 6 months anyhow. I had given up my own business in landscaping so there would be no more income coming from that.

So, basically, all I had was about 3.5k UK pounds in the bank (that’s about 5.5k US dollars) and an income of £350 (550 US dollars) from my internet marketing in October.

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That £350 I made in October 2009 was the best month from all my efforts online so I was kinda happy, but at the same time a bit concerned. The “what ifs…” started to get to me just a bit. What if I could not make more than £350/500 US dollars a month from my internet marketing? I could get a very cheap place in central Kuching and live a simple life. Yup, some westerners do that, so maybe I could too. Hmmm…. na, not my idea of enjoying life…

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That was 12 months ago.

12 months later and I earn nothing from any other source other than my online income from internet marketing.

Yes, I’ve been offered a number of lucrative contracts to SEO for individuals and for small companies too, but I’ve turned that all down. I could also have pursued SEO coaching to a greater extent than I have done, but up till now I’ve turned down almost all those opportunities also. I maybe could have purchased that silver Porsche Boxter that I had been dreaming about…

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To see how far ahead I am this year when compared to this time last year from my internet marketing efforts, you will have to read through the following post.

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I’m not saying any of this stuff to brag. After all, I have some online acquaintances who make much more than I do online, and they’ve been working at it for less time than I have. How then can I brag? No. Its not about bragging. It is about saying what is possible for you to achieve.

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I’ve not been so focused over the past 12 months. There have been months when I really struggled. In fact, a big part of the reason I undertook the Warrior Forum 40 Day Challenge was because I had lost focus on my online business. If I’d kept that focus I’d probably be a lot further ahead in terms on income than I am now.

Such is life.

So I say this for you – for your benefit. And I say this for me too. Because sometimes I can’t quite believe how well this stuff has gone. And its good to actually write it down in a post and then read it through for myself and kinda get in a sort of party mood while doing so

I’ve tried so many ways in the past to make money. Geez, even at the age of 7 I was selling books to folks on the street in a garage sale. My mom told me to take all the money that I had made back to the folks that had purchased the books. Kinda killing my business instinct.

And yup, I did reasonably well in my multi level marketing stuff, which if you read my About Me page you will be familiar with what I did in that.

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And yes, I’ve got quite a few academic qualifications and certificates of academic achievement, even though I’m not particularly academically inclined. Pointless bits of paper that if I could turn back time and focus on my online business instead, I would not hesitate to do so! I was very close to going onwards to completing a Doctorate but my love life got in the way of that (and that ended in utter disaster!).

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But this internet business stuff – its full of problems, its a roller coaster ride, that’s for sure. But it works and it can work incredibly well indeed!

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Thus, I gotta put it to you. If you are having doubts about your own capabilities to make very good money online, and you are maybe even on the verge of packing it up and going back to the 9 to 5 job. You’ve had enough of the nagging from the girlfriend, the wife, the boyfriend, the husband… You’ve been spending a fair bit of your savings on trying hard to make this stuff work for you.

You’ve been coming home in the evening after a hard days work, and eventually – after the kids are in bed and your partner is snugged up and comfy in front of a good movie – you can get a couple of hours online to make a little progress with your online business.

If its all getting too much for you, then let this message sink in as to the potential of online marketing and really making a good or great living from this stuff.

And keep in mind that month on month I’m still making mistakes, but yet month on month income keeps going up very nicely. Personally I’ve never had a job where I saw a good pay rise every single month, have you?

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Okay, on with the proceedings and the crux of this post…

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Up until the 22nd of October I had pretty good sales on eBay, and also was doing nicely on AdSense in comparison to every month over and above the years results up till now.

I had 3 highest income days on the trot with AdSense, but then suddenly that was all to change! Many of you will know about my best performing site being smacked by Google and its now way down the rankings for a lot of long tails and thus only receiving around a quarter of the visits it previously was. So eBay has taken a bit of a whack there, as this was by far my best performing site on eBay.

AdSense took a whack too as it was doing okay on that website, albeit click thru was very low, which is to be expected when your ads are competing against something like eBay for a potential buyers attention. But with sheer number of visitors I was still seeing some decent income days via AdSense.

Not only that though, I’ve noticed that my AdSense clicks are on the whole not paying out as much as they were before. That too has been a bit of a smack in the teeth, and I have to now wonder is it worth continuing with AdSense on my eBay related sites – is it really worth it? I’ve only got AdSense on 4 of my eBay sites, but those 4 were making up a nice chunk of the AdSense income. I’m continually frustrated with AdSense – can’t seem to get it right.

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And lo and behold, my Shelby site is now being dumped down the rankings for some of the better performing keyword phrases. Again, I’ve been hitting this hard over the past month with a ton of backlinks, and up until a few days ago it was seeing reasonable results. That’s all change! At least for now anyhow. So I just gotta grit my teeth and wait until both those sites come back, and hopeufully come back real strong too. I’m a bit surprised that Google has reacted in this way to the Shelby site.

Over the last year I’ve been adding backlinks to it reasonably consistently. But they don’t seem too comfortable with something I’ve done – although the probability is here that its just a massive dance going on with quite a lot of my keyword phrases that I was ranking fairly well for on this site. No real worries – I doubt that Shelby is a good seller over the Christmas period anyhow.

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I’ve another site that I have been gently backlinking to which is seeing continual growth in daily uniques. At the beginning of October it was seeing around 100 to 150 unique visitors per day on average. Now its close to the 400 unique visitor on average per day.

That’s a great jump up in such a short time and only by doing some gentle linking and some more on-page SEO than I have been doing previously. The only issue is that this is not really an evergreen product range, and high sales at this time of the year are not to be expected.

Oddly enough, I get the occasional day where sales are really high (eBay commissions are still piddly low, regardless high sales volume on a relatively expensive product). I don’t fully understand why that is. May even be the occasional Christmas splurge happening already. But, I expect if I can keep something of the same unique visitor count growing and growing on this site, come mid to late February and this site could be a big winner!

And there is another site which quite a while back was doing relatively well with regards income. Then Google had its merry way with that one too.

Happy to say that its very slowly returning to perhaps former glories. At the beginning of October it was only seeing around 50 uniques a day. Now that’s up and over 200 uniques a day and growing. Again however, this is a seasonal type of product, but no doubt there will be Christmas sales in November and December for this too, then come early spring or late winter if you like, sales should be more consistently rising.

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I’m not going to get serious with backlinks on these two sites though. Its going to be gentle all the way. I know for sure if I get serious with backlinks then the same thing is going to happen to Shelby and to my top performer. These days its even more important to take care with the velocity of backlinking to a site because Google are getting more and more sensitive – I think what I’ve been seeing over the past 3 or 4 months to a variety of my own sites is proof of this.

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On to another matter. Before setting off to Thailand for what was almost a week’s holiday, I invested fairly heavily in some backlinking tools. In hindsight it may have been a little too early to invest, but once I get something in my mind then that tends to be that. On return from Thailand I then went straight ahead and advertised for writers.

So I found myself suddenly with 6 staff – 5 part time and one full time. I’m now down to 2 part time, which is fine because I do not like the idea of spending more than half my internet monthly income on outsourcing combined with SEO type tools, which are expensive and costs soon mount up with those.

In fact, I can’t afford to dump large chunks of cash on outsourcing and tools since this is my only income and I have no other forms of support. Even 2 part time writers is quite a burden but I’m thinking that this will be worth it in the short run (particularly with the Christmas spend just about to begin!), and most definitely in the long run.

Already I’m seeing some decent rankings from their work alone, as mentioned in my previous post which you can read here Build My Rank review.  Not much customer spend on those rankings as of yet, but that will probably begin in the middle or towards the end of this week or there-abouts.

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Just a brief note to anyone who is reading this and who has spent a lot of time building up their Christmas orientated sites. I don’t mean necessarily purely Christmas gifts, but rather – things that do tend to sell fairly well at Christmas. Clothing or handbags for example. For sure November and December can be quite amazing.

Where you may have been seeing small sales ratios on the likes of Amazon, suddenly you can be seeing 5 times this amount, right from the first week in November until about the 22nd of December. Then, it goes DEAD! So, be prepared. Things can go very quiet for online sales between just before Christmas Day and until late January when folks get paid.

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But let’s get on so I can have a good moan about things

Thanks to everyone who made a purchase via my aff links, or continue to make purchases – much appreciated! Wish I could buy you a drink and we could sit and have a chat – maybe one day…

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I’ll begin with eBay again this month because I’m frustrated with progress on eBay. Again, exchange rates I will use 1.58 US dollars to 1.0 UK pound sterling (even though its now gone above that level). Some of my income is paid to me in dollars, while some of it is paid in UK pounds.

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eBay: as you know, eBay income took a hit this month due to the down turn of that site. That’s a real pity because otherwise its a certainty that I would have broken the 1,000 UK pounds mark very easily from eBay alone this month.

I seem to have hit a plateau with eBay income and its irritating me. To be honest, I’m now exploring other avenues of income more than I have for the whole of the previous year. eBay is really good, but it would be nice to see much higher returns on all the hard work it takes to do all this IM stuff.

Having said that, I spend about 4 or 5 hours a week working on my eBay sites – some weeks more, some weeks perhaps a little less. So can I complain that I make almost 1,000 UK pounds a month from what is now less than 20 hours a month’s work? When you look at it like this then it really hits home about what “passive income” really is!! Its a lot of work to get there, but once you are there you can kinda sit back and chill, if you so wish.

Anyhow, eBay income for this month: a frustrating £933.60 which is $1475.

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Travel site: ah… pain in the ass this is. No matter how much better my rankings are for various keyword phrases, this site never makes much money.

I know, its not the season and perhaps I should be patient. But I gotta wonder now, will it ever make enough cash flow to bring it into profit or is it a constant drag on profits? With the Google ranking tool I mentioned in this post…., I can see that my rankings in Google are different to my rankings in Google dot com – or at least different to what Scroogle shows me. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Google tool is more accurate here. Hence I wrote a post about the tool, and still got some folks poo pooing it.

Well, that’s their loss. The Google tool is a better tool for assessing real rankings over-all. I don’t think I will bother about any more travel sites in future. Maybe some folks are making good income from theirs, but this one for me has not been good. And I don’t recommend anyone using Hotels Combined to affiliate for. They pay utter peanuts!

Anyhow, my girlfriend’s hotel is very quiet too, its just not the right time of the year. Income from the travel site this month, a teeny $4.59 which is £2.90. That is simply pathetic!

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Amazon dot com (as opposed to Amazon dot co dot uk): I don’t perform well with Amazon at all. Never really have done except in November and December of last year. My click thru to buy ratio (whatever that’s called – ultimate conversion ratios) is as low as 0.69% which is terrible. Obviously my product choice has been very poor when I first set up the sites. But hey, that was almost 18 months ago, so lessons learned.

I have dumped quite a few of those older domains which were hooked into Amazon affiliate stuff, while keeping the slightly better performers purely for Christmas sales.

Will I keep them next year? Very doubtful. Its time to really take drastic cuts, which over the past 5 months I have been doing. Even more is needed.

Income this month from Amazon – a piddly $16.78 which is equivalent to £10.60 and that’s from a grand total of 12 sales. November will be a bit better, but not going to be wild that’s for sure!

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WF 40 Day Challenge eBook: another decent month this month with sales count standing at 17, which brings in a total of $313 (£198.oo). This is all 100% profit now because I’ve obviously paid my writer and made enough from sales to cover that fairly hefty cost. And there are no other fees except for what Paypal occasionally takes, but I work that into these figures (they were taking just over a doller per sale fees last month, whereas this month they have not taken anything – now give me a year to let me work that one out…).

Thanks to all those who made a purchase! Even if you do not put everything in the eBook into practice, its still solid information that does work. Pat Flynn has recently shown that these methods work in his Challenge with Tyrone Shum. He’s been utilizing the same principles outlined in my own WF 40 Day Challenge and he is now ranking on top page of Google. Great work Pat!

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ClickBank: $112.90 from 4 sales, which is £71,00. Not much I can say about CB sales because apart from with one other site which I am in the process of ranking for in Google SERP, all other CB sales would come from this blog. Chances are pretty good that the amount of CB stuff I am focusing on will increase over the next couple of months. Can’t help but like the larger commissions, can you…

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Other affiliate stuff: PayDotCom paid $80.00 this month (£51) which is a big drop on last month.

And Link Juicer which paid $11.75 (£7.50).

Unique Article Wizard: $80.40 this month from 3 sales (£51 ), dead on the money from last month!

I saw a couple of sign ups to Hostgator via my affiliate link but no commissions are as yet paid. Thanks Bea and also to the other person!

Here’s a little rant. I had a “mate” sign up some while back via my Hostgator link on my blog and I actually offered an incentive to him for doing so. Not only that but I advised him time and time again about how to improve his blog rankings etc etc.

Well, you know what? He happily took my incentive of $20 and then later cancelled the account so I made no commission from his sale.

I don’t offer incentives now for signing up via my aff links and this sort of behaviour simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you are reading this post then you know who you are and I hope you are happy with yourself mate.

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Finally AdSense: a bit disappointing this, even though its by far the highest monthly income I’ve seen in about a year. I’ve explained the reasons for that so noneed to go into it again. Income this month from AdSense: £338.26 which is $534 US.

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So what’s the total for the month of October, which notoriously is a poor month for sales – probably because folks are saving for Christmas and a variety of other factors too no doubt. Have I continued to improve on income, regardless the fact that my best performing site/s is/are now way down the list of best performers?

And it has to be said that its too early for my investment in backlinking tools and in staff (I employed my first member of staff on the 11th of this month) to really be paying off and thus, income from that is thoroughly minimal as of yet.

Income for the month of October is $2629 which in UK pounds is £1664 (or for those from Malaysia following my income reports, that’s 8319 ringgits at current low exchange rates – UK pound still being weak). So this is a rise of $320 US dollars (£202) on last month and the 4th month in a row since I first started to post up my income stats on the blog here that income has increased rather nicely.

They say that investing in housing or in gold is a good long term investment. Investing in an internet marketer is far better (hint, hint…)!!

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I’m not going to detail expenditure for this month. I will do along the way, but not for this month as it has been erratic. And it has no reflection on this month’s income so it does not really make sense to me to detail the costs in this particular post. You would do so of course in over-all profit and loss accounts, but this is not such an account.

But put it this way, I’ve invested a lot more than the teeny $68 US I invested in my business last month, that’s for sure

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Anything new on the horizon? As I’ve been talking about over the past couple of weeks, I’ve one JV which is certainly taking shape now. Got some semi decent rankings going on for a couple of keyword phrases in that line. So its a case of building on that.

We are also going to venture into working some high end affiliate stuff – you know, that stuff in the fitness line that is massively competitive because there are a million and one affiliates all wanting for a piece of a limited pie.

I’m not sure whether I should dive in at the deep end and go for some really hot keyword phrases – just smack, bang, wallop my way up the rankings in Google for some key terms, or to take a more intricate approach and try to find a couple of sub sub niches that these sort of products could well work with.

Not sure what angle to take with this. Which ever it is though, progress is slow so I do not expect to see any income results from this possibly until January. But the coming year bodes very well for this particular JV, I have little doubt about that!

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Another thing that merely over the past couple of days or so I have been toying with and that is writing my own eBook. Notice I did not say “creating”. I will have to get somebody who is good at graphics to do that for me, so “writing” is the better word as I think of myself as a half-decent writer

To be honest with you, its Pat Flynn who has inspired me to do this. So currently I am researching. I’ve assessed my own interests and my own life up till now but nothing quite fits the bill as of yet.

We’ll see how that progressess, but there is no doubt that if you hit the nail on the head with your own product you can make a ton more income than what I am currently making – from that one eBook! So I don’t know about you but I think its time to look into this more seriously.

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It remains for me to wish everyone who has some websites up and running the best of luck with November’s income! This month last year was the time that really kick started my online business. Up till this time I was making peanuts really, but along came November and finally I was seeing some serious sales of stuff that was seeing sales in dribs and drabs for the previous months.

And this should last until around the 23rd of December, so make sure you enjoy it because chances are good that from the 23rd December on until the end of January its going to be very quiet.

Constructive comments are always welcome, thank you for reading!

Tagged as: how to make money from your websites, internet marketing income for October 2010, making money online