Routine is Good, Albeit Not Very Sexy

posted in Getting Started |

One nice habit to get into in the affiliate world is to set aside a block of time each week to check your stats and take stock of the bigger picture in your affiliate efforts. For those of us with a day job, the best time is usually Saturday or Sunday morning, when it’s usually more convenient to drink a cup of coffee (or three) and ruminate on things.

So here’s some rumination, in no particular order, on a variety of topics:

  • This project has been more fun than I imagined, as I really do get off on this stuff (as sad as that is) so it’s been very easy to devote time to it. I think the format helps a lot, as far as not feeling pressured to cover every single aspect of affiliate marketing, in order, from A to Z, with all of that done before unveiling the site.
  • The fact that I have traffic from the poker blog to, umm, leverage (Jebus I hate that word) helps a lot. Knowing that I already have an audience makes it infinitely easier to spend try trying to put up helpful, juicy content. It’s also going to skew things a bit when I report stats and earnings for the week, which sucks a bit but is unavoidable. I’d hoped that this project would illustrate a lot of the things I was discussing in posts, as far as it taking months for any traffic or income to appear, but being able to immediately generate some traffic and income from links on the poker blog is going to distort that and make it some easier than it really is to make come cash from you first site.
  • On the Adsense side of things, for the week I made $0.53 from 4 clicks, with a click-through-rate (CTR) of about 4%. To be fair, the site was only live for about four days, so those figures should be taken with a grain o’ salt. That also includes no search engine traffic as the site isn’t yet indexed in any search engines.
  • I made $102.50 at Commission Junction for the week, which included $100 from Falstaff at BoogieTurtle.com signing up for Web hosting at HostGator and $2.50 from another kind soul who registered a domain name at 1&1 . (One thing to note is that your stats typically don’t tell you who signs up where, and I only knew it was Falstaff from a comment he left.) Again, those numbers are a bit misleading as it stemmed directly from traffic from my pre-existing poker blog, but I promised to be completely transparent about all the goings-on of this site, so there you go. Hopefully it’ll also help to see the potential income from advertising for different programs, too.
  • For the week, I made $103.03. Ignoring the fact that my hourly earn rate was probably $.04/hour, due to all the time I sunk into getting the site up and running, that’s pretty good. Again, though, not indicative of your average first site, as normally I’d have basically zero traffic, due to the site not being indexed in search engines.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Getting Started. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  1. 1 On December 23rd, 2006, John said:

    how do you get motivated to write so much though? with casino bonuses I always want to do more bonuses but with writing or creating websites it just gets boring after a couple hours. It seems that only way I can do it is if I am forced to like class or a job.

  2. 2 On December 23rd, 2006, ScurvyDog said:

    John,

    It definitely becomes work, no matter how you slice it, and there’s not much fun about work.

    I think the biggest obstacle is simply getting over the initial hump and seeing that you can make real money from the work you’re putting in. I also think it takes a lot of patience, as more often than not you’re playing the compound interest game, with all of the pennies and dollars you make steadily accumulating and building, as you roll out new sites and your older ones steadily keep earning you money.

    It’s also a lot easier if it’s a topic that you’re into anyway.

    All that aside, you can also make decent money by just putting in 15 or 20 minutes a day, writing 2-3 new pages of content, so you don’t even necessarily have to slave away for hours and hours at a time.

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