More on not giving up

[Irwin1138]

Well, there is no doubt that I failed the Thirty Day Challenge. I'm a late starter, but I guess that's not the issue, since there are more than thirty days passed since I started the challenge. I must note though, that failing the challenge itself does not bother me much. Why is that? The answer is simple. There is so much more to Thirty Day Challenge than a challenge.

You know, on the internet the information is scattered and not easy to understand most of the times, and only after good old process of harvesting and scavenging you will have more or less clear understanding of what you have wanted to learn. The process is very time-consuming and often is not resulting in complete understanding of the topic. To make things worse, its not uncommon for the non-free sources to be as unclear and chunky as the free ones, and sometimes even totally useless!

I know some folks who spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on courses and books of internet marketing "gurus", offering easy millions, and still couldn't make a living on internet marketing alone.

I am not one of them, I never really paid anything for information on internet marketing, making money online, and stuff like that, but there were times I was really interested in the idea of making money from the internet. I never actually gathered enough information to try something to begin with.

But then someday, I stumbled upon a Steve Pavlina article about financial independence. His article was more on basics directions than on concrete actions. Reading it motivated me to try again, and I started the information harvest from the Steve Pavlina's forums, where I found a post which described the Thirty Day Challenge and an actual link.

After watching the both 2007 and 2008 pre-seasons (somehow I received links for both of them, and I thought that it wouldn't hurt to watch both) I realized that this is exactly what I was looking for. A complete starter's guide to internet marketing all in one place, and for free! Even better, the challenge itself is about making first dollar without spending a penny! This is so uncommon.

And I want to thank Ed and everybody for these incredible tutorials on internet marketing.

Reading Steve Pavlina's article I got it clear where should I go, but the Thirty Day Challenge showed me how to make the first step. Sometimes basic guidelines are useful, but when you know nothing about the subject, basic guidelines without the "how" are next to useless. If you cant walk yet, compass wont help you much.

Now, done with the introductions, lets present some story of my challenge.

I have two niches, with keywords for both within the Thirty Day Challenge limits.

After about a week after starting the first niche, I suddenly found a new, slightly different keyword for the same niche with much less competition and a little more traffic (Note: poor initial keyword research). At that point, I decided to restart the niche with a new primary keyword. Why? I don't know!

I could have simply add the new keyword to the secondary keywords, but for some unknown reason I didn't. I erased my previous blog and started a new one, with my new main keyword. I did the same with squidoo, hubpages and weebly sites. Oh well, I don't really know what made me do this, but what I do know, is that I should not repeat that mistake.

By the way, did I notice I was a late starter? The thing is that I was going through about 5-6 days of the challenge each real day when I actually started.

Anyway, the whole process of restarting the niche took me about a day. After about 2 weeks I was receiving somewhat stable traffic of 10 to 20 unique visits daily with some 50-80 spikes from stumbleupon.

Until that point I haven't made a single sale, so I decided to start a second niche, to have something already started in case the first one turns to be a complete failure.

Oh, by the way, about the time I started the second niche, my first niche just started receiving organic traffic.

Its been a week since I started the second niche. Now here is some statistics. *wears analytical hat*

First niche:
I rank at the first page of google for my main keyword (currently #4), and one of the secondary keywords (#7). Phrase match.

I had 1500 visits and 2500 pageviews. 1350 visits are from Stumbleupon.
45 clicks for two of my affiliate links (20 is for the link in one of my posts and 25 is for the on-page affiliate product). If I include clicks from the old main keyword site (40), its 85 in total. By the way, I didnt change affiliate products nor the affiliate links. Still, no sales. I receive 2-5 visits each day from organic search now.

The problem is that the somewhat big numbers of visits compared to low click count and no sales is really disturbing.

The question: Should I ignore the Stumbleupon traffic?
Note: Stumblers don't click my affiliate link. At all. I checked.

If I do, then I should just subtract the Stumbleupon visits from the total count which results in about 150. Does that mean I should continue to run the niche to reach the magic 200 visits (total, not daily... yet)?

lol, did I just answer my own question?

Second niche:
Well, my second niche is rather young, and compared to the first one has very little effort invested in backlinking. I rank #30 at google for my main keyword, had 1140 visits and 1000 of them are from Stumbleupon which results in 140 visits. 8 clicks to my affiliate link. No sales yet. Oh, and obviously Im still not receiving any organic traffic.

So... I think that's all for now. Ill update this post once I have some significant results.

[update #01]: ...sort of. Well, I think that I was pushing the decision day too much forward, but I guess I can't deny the data I have.

First niche:
3200 unique visitors, and 2900 are from StumbleUpon. Miserable amount of clicks, zero sales. That makes $0.00 . Seems like the niche testing shows me that the niche is hopeless in a way I approach it. It means, that either I let it go, or approach it differently.

I decided to do a little bit of both - I have set up Google AdSense account and put up some ads on my website. I decided to not continue updating it until I earn something, so I will know whether it is worth to do something about it. Currently the data shows me that no, it doesn't.

Second niche:
My second niche was sort of frozen until now. It is a mistake indeed, I shouldn't have forgotten about it. It didn't receive much of my attention, but that's what I'm currently doing - backlinking and promoting. I just started though, and its SERP is around #30 for the main keyword both broad and phrase match. No sales yet, but something tells me that this niche is going to be more successful than the last one. Sure, it could end up being just "a little" more successful, which isn't really that good.

But I learned so much from the whole process of first niche, that I think it did worth the time, all the experience and mistakes which I hope will never repeat ever again. And even if the second niche fails as well, I'm still not going to give up. I'm currently getting ideas for new niches to test, so I will continue.

Yeah, I'm not giving up. I'm going to achieve what I want, and each failure brings me closer to succeeding, teaching me internet marketing firsthand on experience.

So, how are you folks? Are there any more like me, still not giving up and struggling to make the first $1? Or first $100? Someone with same experience as I am? Come on people, share your thoughts, your experiences, where you are now, what have you achieved, if it won't help me it still could help others! That's why I started this thread by the way.

Also, I will gladly hear any advice or suggestions 8)

Thanks for reading!

[David E Frank]

I am new to all this as well, but I would think that with that traffic you should be able to get some sales. Sounds like some testing is in order.

From what I have learned here at the 30dc I would start "hanging out" via forums and such with your market. Find out more about what they need and want. It seems that you have a market, and every market has a need or a problem to solve. Figure that out and you are on your way.

By all means keep posting to the blog(s) and putting up back-links.

I have gotten some good traffic from Yahoo Answers, find some questions that relate to your market and answer them. Always put a link back to your site. If the questions have real merit do some research and additional posting on that topic. There may even be some additional keywords in there too.

Thanks for the post.

[ccastell88]

How about using google adsense to generate some revenue, instead on purely realying on affiliate products.

[Irwin1138]

Yeah, I still post and build backlinks. I thought about adsense, but I think I will try this as a last resort.

Actually, today I discovered a very important fact. I didnt have any sales from some of my certain affiliate links (thу most active ones) for a reason. After deep-testing one of the affiliate links I realized, that it is almost impossible for me to get revenue even if a visitor actually buys something!

Here is the thing. The product my affiliate link points to has a trial version. Certainly, if you have an option of trying before bying you will use it, right? But the problem is that this trial version does not contain my affiliate link! It means, that I will receive any affiliate commission only if someone buys something right at the page ignoring the trial.

So, even if someone liked the product and bought it, I know nothing about the fact, and, obviously, I dont earn anything.

Thats a good lesson for me: always test your affiliate links if you can!

Im switching to another affiliate, and hopefully I wont mess up again.

I hope you can learn something from my experience. Dont repeat my mistakes!

[Irwin1138]

I have updated the first post, check it out, leave some responses 8)