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I hate long titles, but I couldn’t really think of any other way to shorten it. At the beginning of December I wrote a post saying how I made only $186 profit in November. That’s about $6 profit per day. I listed the reasons why, and I also listed what I was going to do to completely turn it around. Was I joking?

Just a couple days ago profits on my campaigns hit $10,000/day. The offers I run are not seasonal, they actually do a lot worse around the holidays. It’s consistent as well, not 10k today and 500 tomorrow.

This didn’t happen over-night, it took some time, but in 1 month I increased my profit by 166566%! I’ll do my best to share as many of the reasons why I was able to do this :

Hard work. I had to just buckle down and choose not to be lazy and do some work. The next challenge is staying hard at work, as the more money you make, the easier it is to become lazy.

Play the hand I was dealt. Last month one of the big reasons I tanked was the breakup with my girlfriend. Was I able to overcome that, forget about it, and not think about it all month? Nope, I wasn’t. Trying to do something like that is completely impossible, something like that will take months. What I did realize is that all you can do is play the hand you were dealt. If you’re dealt what seems like a crappy hand, don’t cry about it. Man up, take what’s good from it, and play it out to the best of your ability. I had lost the relationship portion to my life which definitely sucks more than anything, but I realized what I had left, and what I had left was business. Instead of crying about what I lost, I learned to make the best of what I had.

Focused on 1 offer. Yep, I don’t have 10 campaigns making $1,000/day. I have 1 campaign making $10,000/day. I focused all my power and concentration on 1 thing, and it paid off. I’m still going to work on scaling what I have and getting that to $15-20k/day and ride that out as long as possible.

Focused on traffic that works. My last post was about some smaller traffic sources that simply weren’t converting. I got ripped on by a few people about it, but hey rip away. I have 2 huge sources of traffic. One is Google, and the other I’m not going to tell you :). Rather than try and fight to get the 10 other sources to all work, I just scaled and raped the two big ones that were working.

Focused on volume over conversion. I tested a few pages and some variations to find the best converting page and ads, but most of the work has just come from working on more volume. Right now the revenue is around $19,000 for $10,000 profit, so I’m happy enough with that. But with volume potential as high as it is, it’s more worth it to work on that. So every day is used making new ads, new campaigns, different pages, etc.

Those are the main reasons I can kind of give out without revealing too much.

I just want to prove to everybody out there that it’s completely possible to go from the bottom to the top, and FAST.

From a business perspective, last month was the worst month ever. This month was the best month ever. Affiliate marketing is all about roller coasters, I just have to make sure to stay at this peak as long as possible. Where do I go from here? I’m not changing a thing, I’m just going to scale scale scale. The first week of December I was happy when it was doing $700 profit/day. In a week or so it was up to $3k, then jumped in another week to $5k, then in about 3 days up to $10k. I’m just going to keep on churning out the traffic and hoping I don’t get slapped lol.

Oh and my employee did nothing to help me make the money, I did it all myself he did nothing. I’m probably going to just fire him.

Happy New Year!

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Yep that’s right kids, and no you didn’t read it wrong. Did the stats for last month and profit came out to $182.64.

When most affiliate bloggers make a post about earnings, it’s to boast about how much they made and/or for link-bait. Hey, I did it myself a couple times and it does it’s job. But what most affiliates don’t post about, are the bad months, and the very bad months. And last month just happened to be my worst month in affiliate marketing, ever. Nobody has the balls to admit when they’re struggling. I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have the balls to post this if I hadn’t turned it back around and was doing awesome now. If I was still in a slump I’d probably just keep it quiet.

So instead of telling you how I earned $300k/month and what I did to get there, I’m going to tell you what I did to let myself slip and have a horrible month. Because affiliate marketing really is a roller coaster ride, there’s ups and downs. The real trick I’ve found out is getting off the rollercoaster and onto something more consistent, which is more longterm niches and getting on the advertiser side of things. Here’s why I bombed out in November :

1) TOO MANY THINGS AT ONCE.

Easily the biggest reason. I had way too many things trying to go at once. And it’s hard with at least 5 affiliate managers IM’ing me every day saying “yo man check out this offer a pub is rocking it doing this”. So I’m like alright I’ll give it a shot. I end up giving 5 offers a shot in 1 week, they all lose money and I have to end up pausing them all because it’s too overwhelming.

So while I had a couple campaigns doing well, losing money on all these new offers I tested just sucked the profit away. Got in way over my head with too much to do and not enough time to actually put an effort into it.

2) Beating a dead horse.

I had a campaign that rocked in October, like $5k profit/day rocked and it was great. But I knew from the start that it would be temporary and it would die for a number of reasons. Well around the last couple days of October, my predictions came true and it did indeed die out. Instead of accepting the fact that it died and moving on, I tried to revive it in November. I jacked bids way up, was completely careless, and ended up losing A LOT of money.

3) Playa got dumped!

I usually don’t involve too many personal things in my blog, but since this was a big contributing factor I might as well mention it. My girlfriend and I were together for almost 3 years and I got canned at the end of October. If anybody has been in a long-term relationship and dumped, it’s HARD. For the longest time (pretty much all of November) I barely had the urge to work. I’d sit down at the computer everyday like I always do for hours, but somehow I’d barely get anything done. Just no desire to do anything really, so when things tanked I just kind of said whatever and didn’t really care.

4) Testing things with actual potential.

This isn’t really a reason you should try to avoid, but it’s a reason for the crappy month. I actually had an offer I knew had potential, so I made the investment to test out a bunch of stuff and right now it’s paid off.

5) Played around with some non-affiliate sites.

I had a couple ideas for sites that could go viral, so I spent a lot of time building them, and then spent a few thousand on sending traffic to them. That hasn’t paid back at all, but I thought the ideas had potential (and they still do). So there’s another $5-10k + Time gone.

6) Dating died for me.

I got back into dating for a few months and it was doing pretty well. Margins were still really low, but it profited decently and I got a ton of Amex points. Then pretty out of the blue I get cut by True. Alright, move to Spicy over at Copeac. Does pretty good again, and then out of the blue my EPC gets cut almost in half. Margins were low to begin, so cutting conversions in half had me losing a pretty penny. I tried to beat the dead horse for a week or so but just ended up losing more and more money. Woot!

After actually typing out all the things went wrong, I’m still actually very surprised I managed to profit at all haha. But looking into the future, and looking into now, I’ve turned things around pretty well. The first 2 days of December have been totally awesome and it’s looking only up from here. So now what did I do to turn it around?

Focused on only 2 projects. I knew I was getting in way over my head, and knew I had to simplify things. So I had 2 things going for me – the 1 affiliate offer that had potential, and the product I’m working on creating and becoming and advertiser for. I told myself that no matter what, I was going to work on these 2 things exclusively. Well, amazing things happen when you actually listen to yourself and commit to something. I’ve been working on this affiliate offer and it’s doing extremely well and growing fast. Instead of making one landing page for 3 offers and testing them all, I tested multiple pages with this one offer, put more focus on ad copy, and tested a couple different offers. Just focusing hard on ad copy alone, my cost per conversion is about $7 lower and my CTR is almost double. This makes clicks cheaper, quality score rise, and more profit. Then I have the product I’m working on that I’m pretty much outsourcing all the work to, so my work comes in just managing it and planning everything.

Getting a grip. I had to realize that just because I’m glum from being dumped doesn’t mean that life wouldn’t pause with me as well. My house needed to be maintained, I still had bills, and an employee to pay. I already have enough money saved up for quite a few years of that, but when you have a $100 profit month, it still scares you. And I know a bunch of big guys that have plenty of money, but when their biggest stuff starts to dry out, they get worried too…it’s just natural.

Burning and cremating the dead horses. Sure other things out there make a lot of money and other affiliates are doing insane things with them. It was a dead horse for me and instead of going back and trying to bring it back alive, I just burned the horse and spread it’s ashes in the sea. I stopped worrying about what I could be making with these offers, and started accepting what I did make with them. Doing this allowed me to just focus on 1 main offer, which has been paying off great.

Haven’t really posted in a while and just wanted to let you guys know that nobody is invincible, and you really can go from everything, to nothing, back to everything in 1 month. Pretty crazy.

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