Money-Code » goals

Analysis and Goal Settings

admin — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:41:05 +0000

2010 was an interesting affiliate marketing year for me. I probably spent the least amount of time while having the best year ever. This is largely in part to the foundation I laid in place in the prior years. Sites are aging and content is getting better, etc. The disturbing thing to me, is knowing that I could have made a TON more if I was working it harder.

Areas that I did work on in 2010, analyzing sites and how they’ve performed historically. Basically, find the crappy sites and make them better… or get rid of them. Even though sites might be poor performers, that does not mean they still don’t have potential. I often make test sites to see if a niche has potential with Amazon, EPN, Adsense, etc. These test sites are usually the losers and need tweaking. They might create low traffic and horrible EPC in EPN, so they might be a good candidate to focus the site to Amazon or Adsense or at the very least a *support* site. I also find sites that were good.. and aren’t so good now. What’s changed? Is it a SEO deal? Is it PPC deal? Figuring out how to get it back is a good direction to focus energy.

In 2010 I hardly created new sites.. a few here and there, but nothing like 2008/2009. I know that optimizing my sites helped with my bottom line. I should have maintained a more consistent build schedule to keep the average growth up, but these are items / goals I’m setting for 2011.

I know my decision to scale back came from the obvious data that was looking at me straight in the face. The sites that I spent the most time, that had the best content, and generated the best buyer/reader loyalty…. made the most money. Weird? Not really. My crappy thin, just whip-it-out-on-a-evening sites that I never rework… make the least amount of money. Weird? Not really.

Every year, I set up goals and expectations for my efforts. I exceeded my 2010 goals, but I feel like I left a lot on the table and sold myself short, so for 2011, I’m going to set up a few things to account for this. Normally, I set up a monetary goal figure for the year, and that could be the reason for laziness. This year, I’ve set up percentage increase over 2010 (I’m thinking 30% gain in gross), and divided this across four quarters. This way, I’ll be really seeing how it’s breaking down.. and I want a fluctuating goal to constantly challenge me. If in Q1 I’m looking at 32% gross increase, that will be the new bar, and so on.. but it won’t go down. This will push me in Q2, etc. I’m also getting to focus on Q4 a little differently for 2011. I normally just maintain consistency, and don’t go too hog-wild for x-mas. I’m thinking about adjusting my PPC budget for x-mas this year, also devote some time in Q1 for building sites targeting for Q4. This will be a little test with the Q1 sites – I’m not going to go too crazy (possibly creating 5-10 sites with the emphasis)

One consistent goal that I seem to have problems with is diversity. For 2011, I really want to improve my Amazon/CJ sales. Amazon has definitely improved, but is crap in the big picture. CJ has been consistent and I want to improve that as well. So for 2011, I set up dollar goal amounts for these networks. By separating them and analyzing their growth by quarter should help gauge where I need to focus on.

One other goal I have for 2011 is getting back to basics. I feel like my lack of time on affiliate/internet marketing took away from some of the basic SEO strategies and traffic generation. For me, it’s often hard to justify the time spent creating backlinks, commenting, etc. The basic rules for traffic generation. I know the sites I spent time on this… get good traffic. Weird? Not really. But, I remember the work is difficult, tedious and takes a while to propagate. I know that’s the game, and I need to do it, but when PPC is so quick, it’s some times hard to justify. But by going back to basics, and diversifying traffic generation methods with PPC – is a good thing. I know that. So I’ll try to be better with it.

Goals are important for staying on track, but to successfully goal set, you need to understand your history and not to extend past your potential. You don’t want to get discouraged either – so find the right balance that works for you.

Getting Inspired

admin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:44:55 +0000

Looking at my earning reports, I’m well on my way to the $20K mark for 2008 (gross not net) sales. I felt this was actually pretty good with the set backs this year. I think if eBay didn’t move away from CJ, Google AdSense terms/privacy change didn’t happen and finally the YSM change didn’t mess with my expense bottom line, I would have done much better. I know those factors slowed my development. In fact, today, I launched my first EPN site since the cutover. Even with the run of bannings, and my confidence at a all time low with this affiliate program, I still punched a site out. Earlier this year, I would stress that building was the key. Build and learn, but always stay proactive. I know after the summer, I took a more passive role and maintained my earnings, while not building to earn more. That was a mistake, but I think it was necessary to ensure that these changes didn’t drastically impact my portfolio first.

Areas that I’ve been focusing on to help light a fire under me was to first join the Wealthy Affiliate program. I have to say that this is a fantastic program, and I have learned a lot. I have not been able to see great returns at this time, but the foundation is in place. I know that down the road, I will be focusing on PPC/Offers more, and this was the BEST way to understand some aspects of the game. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing, I strongly recommend joining.

The latest change I’ve done was to finally upgrade my PopShops account from Pro to Enterprise. This allows me to have multiple PIDs for my CJ campaigns by offering profiles per shop. I’ve been running PopShops on one domain, and it has shown a profit every month. The interface at PopShops is awesome to say the least. I’ll be branching off into more affiliate store fronts using Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network and LinkShare. The commissions are so much better that EPN, and I need to focus on diversification within this 4th quarter.

I’ll also be establishing some goals for 2009 in the next few months. I’ve stated before that setting realistic goals is important, as well as planning different ‘angles’ on achieving those goals.

This month, a good affiliate friend of mine and myself, have created our own 30 day challenge. This was primarily set up to motivate while learning from each other. We set up a simple challenge where in 30 days we need to launch 3 sites and see a return net of $100 combining all 3 sites. We will compare notes when we’re done, by showing niches, techniques and strategies on how we did it. I think we’ll both be able learn a ton from each other! So far I have launched 1 site out of 3 (eBay site). I’ll be launching a PopShop site for number 2, and a product review comparison site for number 3. I’ll promote all with YSM/MSN PPC as well as general SEO/link building. If this works, I can see us pushing the sites and/or returns higher in the months to come.

Hopefully, all of you are still forging ahead and trying new things. To make it in affiliate marketing (just my opinion) you need to stick with it and constantly push yourselves.

Setting realistic internet marketing goals.

admin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:52:06 +0000

The dream of quitting your job and counting your millions of dollars seems to be the common dream that people have when starting internet marketing. Making money on line with nothing but a laptop, DSL account and a few hosted domains is pretty sweet, but we need to keep our dreams somewhat contained, so we can focus on gradual constant success. Let me say this again “Gradual Constant Success”.

When I set goals, I work with two sets of goals. Short term and long term goals. Just like everyone else, I think it would be cool to be a millionaire from internet marketing, so I keep that as a long term vision goal. But for the short term, I break that into one year and five year goals. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wanted year one to be more of a learning year, a year spent to understand the ‘game’ and to potentially find some productive niches and affiliate networks. But I did have a one year “lofty” goal of 10k gross for 2007. It looks like I’ll fall short, reaching 8k, but I’m fine with that. I also had a ‘side’ goal of never dipping in the red in 2007, and I met that challenge (this was done by diversifying niches, and forms of revenue generating sites).

I think for short term goals, it’s good to look at percentage of your yearly income. What seems realistic? 1% of your yearly income, 10%, etc. This will set the bar to see if you can reach that number. Once we’ve calculated a number at the end of the year, you can use that as a stepping stone for the following year. So I’ve made 8k in gross revenue from internet marketing in 2007. I feel that if I don’t do anything different, no new sites, etc, I should hit 8k in 2008. If I double my sites, and assume that all of my existing sites from 2007 will be better ranked in 2008, I could double or triple that number in 2008. So 2008 will start the five year cycle. Basically, I want to double my gross revenue every year for the next five years (lofty again).

This business takes a lot of patience, since returns might not fly in initially. It also takes a lot of persistence and awareness to understand where you stand in the big picture. I literally think about commissions all day long and try to figure out new ways to expand and get more commissions.

So let’s set some goals and focus on achieving gradual constant success.

2008 Internet Marketing Goals and a look back at 2007

admin — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:57:47 +0000

So 2007 is coming to an end. It’s time for reflection and to start planning goals for the coming year. I think reflection is really important. You need to know where you are coming from before looking to where you want to go. I officially started internet marketing in October 2006. That is when I signed up with CJ. I had a few sites running Google AdSense, but I was making about $15/month. Nothing to get excited about. After getting the CJ account, I began seeing the potential. My first month I made $90, followed by $190 for November and $120 for December. At this time, I knew I could make some money.

2007 started with my diversification plan. I had one community site that was doing well with CJ, so I decided to make another on a similar topic but exercising the 10 degrees of separation. Almost immediately, it began to gather content (generated by the public) and was getting traffic. Also at this time I generated a on-line article site dedicated to another area I’m interested in. The goals for both of these sites were simple.

Community driven content
Generate money from AdSense
Generate money from CJ ads
Generate money from paid banners
Provide a launching point for other sites in development

The first quarter of 2007 didn’t show much improvement from the earlier income stats, but I knew this would take time to develop worthwhile traffic. At this point I wanted to experiment, and decided that 2007 would be a year of testing. I needed to find what directions were promising or a bust. What advertisers were good, or a bust. I needed to learn from the big guys and get a feel of the ‘scene’. I spent a ton of time on Shoemoney.com (but lately, I’m keep feeling it’s a sales-blog more than anything now-a-days) and DigitalPoint forum. I’m not the type of personality that gives up quickly or expects overnight results, which is good, since this area of marketing is tough.

About half way through the year, I decided eBay was where I was beginning to see the best results and decided to work that angle harder. Here is when the eBay store fronts (not BANS) begins to come into play. I began fishing with store fronts. Picking niches and seeing what had good opportunities. I also wrote a pretty extensive site tracker. This tracker shows all of my sites and the amount of expenses vs earnings. This is broken down by months with a year end profit/loss total. I needed to see what sites were earning or losing, and ensure that end of the month bottom line was showing profit. This is absolutely critical to my business.

I began to isolate niches that showed promise. Dipping into the third quarter, I wanted to play with PPC. I dabbled in it off and on throughout the year, but I decided to stick with Yahoo and begin to play the sites a bit. It definitely cuts into your profit, and it’s hard to beat the organic Google love, but there is absolutely not a better way to get your sites off of the ground. Determining good PPC sites, I began to see how the PPC game is played in a limited sense. Profits started to climb. CJ sales were reaching the $600-$800/month mark, while AdSense was hitting over $100/month. My subscription banners were bringing in over $200/month, so now my monthly income from affiliates was hovering around $1000 – $1300/month. Not bad from $15/month when I started. Here is a post where I discuss this in more detail.

So what are my goals with 2008? My learning year is ‘over’, so I better step up to the plate in 2008.

Launch at least two community sites (my goal is to sell the sites in 2009.. we’ll see).
Double my eBay store fronts by September
Create at least 4 store fronts using CJ API only (no-ebay)
Double my paid subscription banner sales
At LEAST double my 2007 sales in 2008. I’ll be disappointed if I only double.
Start playing more with CPA landing pages with PPC
PR4 ranking for Money-Code.com

I’m hoping that I’m obviously illustrating that this takes time, patience and persistence. You need to constantly be pushing forward. Don’t get LAZY! I’m a web developer and Linux systems administrator by profession, so I have a busy day. Every spare minute or hour is devoted to this. When I hit a spot where I don’t have a lot of web dev projects, I don’t go on vacation or start sitting on the couch, I jump in full affiliate mode. You have to motivate yourself. See improvement, understand your failures and learn from them. Improve your skill set. That means getting into programming for some of you, or for me getting into business and sales. You also need to be creative and adventurous, identify potential revenue streams, and pursue those streams.