December was the first month where I generated any measurable amount of money online. I didn’t start using Amazon or Ticketmaster until halfway through the month, so January should bring in more than December.
I’ve been learning a good amount about what works and what doesn’t, so I look forward to growing this in 2008.
December Income
Amazon.com : $15.32
Ticketmaster: $10.50
AdSense: $0.78
Total: $26.60
After having a big day on Wednesday, I was disappointed to find that I did not make any money on Thursday. With 17 Product Link Clicks, Thursday had 5 more clicks than Wednesday, yet there was a lot more buying action on Wednesday.
Thursday also marked the first full day where I ran AdSense on my Amazon Affiliate Site. I figure I can pick up some loose change and maybe push my AdSense Account a bit so I can finally get a check from Google. Really that’s the only reason that I’m interested in using AdSense at this point - I’ve banked about $45 from other websites, but unless I get it up to $100, I’ll never see a dime of it.
So of course this brings along the question - is the AdSense going to cut into my Amazon Sales? We’ll see how things go over the next week. With the holidays upon us, it probably isn’t the best time to be testing out ideas, but this is the first month of my Amazon Affiliate Site, so I’m just going to try a lot of different things - by this time next year I should have it honed and working like a well oiled machine.
Yesterday my Amazon Affiliate Site had 17 Google Organic visitors, which resulted 29 clicks and 4 sales (13.7% conversion rate) and should bank me $8.00. I’m not really clear about why I keep having days where my clicks outnumber my visitors, maybe my linking scheme is working well enough and people are clicking the “Click Here” links multiple times.
I think it is important to note that all of my sales came for the same item, and I don’t know if it was one person buying 4 copies, or if it was 4 different people - but this particular brought 12 of my 17 Google Organic visitors. This is how things have been working so far for most my blogs - if you can get one post that drives a good amount of traffic, the other things will fall into place. Having that extra traffic gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside while you spend time building more posts, and hopefully learning something from what made your one post good enough to bring in the visitors.
Over the last two days, I have had 40 Google Organic visitors to my Amazon Affiliate site - 20 visitors each day. On Monday I had 15 “Product Link Clicks” and yesterday I had 2 “Product Link Clicks” - not sure what causes a difference like that since I haven’t changed anything on the site. Of these 17 Product Link Clicks, I haven’t had any sales. Overall I have had 100 Product Link Clicks and 3 sales, totaling $3.21 in profits for myself.
I’m guessing that Christmas is also helping to balloon my numbers a bit, as a lot of people will be searching for gifts now. I’ve been able to target specific search terms for each page, and have found certain search terms that work better than other. Basically you’ve got to look at the competition and see where you can slip in at a weak spot.
So I have thus far maintained my 3% conversion rate. I would like to keep it above 3% and get a few more sales before Christmas.
I’ve been getting pretty good traffic to my Amazon Affiliate site… By “good traffic” I mean that today I have 17 visitors so far. I had a spike in traffic last week, then a drop, then it has been climbing steadily ever since. I think this is partially due to the advantage that you begin to gain as you build a cache of posts on your site. The more posts you have, the more pages you have that can be searched. I’ve been posting 1-2 times per day, and focusing on specific long-tail search terms.
Thus far, for the entire life of the site, I have had 3 sales via Amazon. Not all of the the items have shipped yet, but the total income for me should be right around $3.19. It all equates to one sale per every 9.33 Google Organic visitors - which I think is pretty good. If I get 1 or 2 more visits today, that should get me 2 sales today - hopefully banking $2+ …
It’s all the beginning stages though so I don’t want to get my hopes up or set any unfair standards. Just keep posting, doing good SEO, and the hits will start coming.