I made $604.38 in August

[willkriski]

I've been extremely frustrated doing internet marketing, not seeing results, trying lots of things and having nothing working. I've tried adsense, affiliate products, creating my own products, membership site, etc. I want to make this a success so badly, but often doubt myself and am discouraged by lack of results each month.

I haven't got a lot of support from my spouse over the years and have spent many years doing day jobs that I absolutely hated. I've been off work since november and have spent most of my time working on my sites, while I burn through my savings.

My wife asked me to add up my sales for this month of August so I went into paypal, google adsense and various affiliate networks. I was happily surprised to see some half decent sales.

The breakdown is as follows:
-my guitar lesson online courses and membership site $286.27
-2 guitar lesson affiliate products $215.38
-internet marketing affiliate products - $29.16
-google adsense - $73.57

For the guitar lesson affiliate products I've done a video review using my webcam and posted on youtube and other video sites using tubemogul.com

For internet marketing affiliate products I put links within my blog posts and in the sidebar of my blog on membershipschool.com

For Google adsense I have 50+ videos on guitar lessons at youtube.com/wkriski.

For the site, I created a membership site at $19/month using Wordpress and the Wishlist member plugin. I also took some of the content and made a few other products at $29 and $97 for instant access to the videos.

I've just used Wordpress and organic search results, no PPC, no Wordpress direct. I've used market samurai a little for keyword research but not for ads or articles. I didn't use traffic bug either. I use Google reader and google alerts to get posts in my niche, then I post these articles or write my own on my blog. I haven't done many articles recently for ezinearticles.com

I post this to encourage those that are discouraged and to mention that this takes time to develop. I hope you will all work at it each day until you reach your goals. This is an emotional roller coaster. I happen to be excited after I just added up the results, but many days it's discouraging as nothing happens. As Ed says we can only control what we do - implement the system day after day with consistency.

Will

[AlekNovi]

Originally Posted by willkriski

implement the system day after day with consistency

EXACTLY, lol

If anything, the only reason we're not increasing our profit much faster is because of finding unimportant stuff to do. If you for example chose 10 micro-niches to do... and you basically just implented the 30day challenge every month of the year... you'd easily be making a decent passive income (think dayjob killer).

And that's probably just 3-4 hours a day, if you didn't do the unimportant stuff we continually do (spend 5 days to tweak a wordpress theme "just right" and other excuses lol).

[LuckyA]

Well done for never giving up!! It's your persistence against the odds!!!

[Clive Owens]

Well done willkriski, the figures are very good and encouraging, not everyone can achieve success of the kind you have experienced, you have put in hard effort and it has paid also.

[JaneKT]

Originally Posted by willkriski

I've been extremely frustrated doing internet marketing, not seeing results, trying lots of things and having nothing working. I've tried adsense, affiliate products, creating my own products, membership site, etc. I want to make this a success so badly, but often doubt myself and am discouraged by lack of results each month.

Congratulations Willkriski - you give me hope as I could have written your opening sentence myself..............

You don't say how long your sites have been up - if you are relying on organic searches I'd be interested to hear how long it has taken you to build your ranking.

[willkriski]

Thanks guys! Mydomain1[dot]com domain is 1 year old (membership site and lesson products). Mydomain2[dot]com is 4 years old but I don't make anything from it as it's a free site and I had removed all adsense until recently because it wasn't working. Youtube vids (for adsense and seo) have been added over the past couple years. 2 or 3 vids get the vast majority of views.

As I mentioned, for me this isn't a get rich quick system, but I have been terribly inconsistent (not blogging or doing anything for months/years as I worked fulltime, adding then removing affiliate links, adsense blocks, etc).

One of the most valuable things I've noticed is importance of video/youtube and using tags. When you find a keyword that looks worthwhile, you can put it in the video tags, title and blog posts titles/tags as well. Youtube vids are put in many search results. Many people are afraid of doing video which could affect results, but you can use a screen capture program like camtasia and do more of a presentation style.

I also collect emails for the guitar site but I haven't seen much results from that, although once again I went for months and months without sending anything to the group.

There was basically no money coming in until the last 6 months when I've been actively and consistently adding blog posts and affiliate links with new videos. One of the fundamental mistakes I made was putting affiliate links and banners in sidebars and below posts, or on separate 'resource' pages. Now I try to embed them in the post and make the post relevant and targeted to the product.

When I get discouraged, I try to think of it this way. People are spending billions of dollars online every year via amazon, itunes, etc - why not grab a cut of those purchases by having people buy through your websites? One blog post I read recently said every blog post or page is like a store front into the amazon/itunes/etc stores. So every day you just build new storefronts each day like clockwork. As Ed says you really need to understand the niche you're in - so read and study a lot of blog posts, books, etc so that you can teach and write about it intelligently.

Another thing I forgot to mention was that my site traffic is not that great, often well under 100 visitors per day. I know many successful sites that are getting huge traffic but I haven't been able to get there yet. Instead of spending too much time posting on other people's blog posts, forums, etc I will quote the article in my own blog post and put my opinion on it along with affiliate links.

Good luck to you,
Will

[edithrusso]

Thanks for the advice, down-to-earth'ed'ness and pep talk!

[totville]

Originally Posted by AlekNovi

EXACTLY, lol

And that's probably just 3-4 hours a day, if you didn't do the unimportant stuff we continually do (spend 5 days to tweak a wordpress theme "just right" and other excuses lol).

That is funny about the tweaking. I've got that process streamlined now, but I sure wasted time on that in the past!

[jbordxyz]

I have been concerned how I am going to be able to manage this without all the high-powered software. I really can't afford to put a lot of money into this until I'm sure I want to keep working at it. (I have no idea how much any of these things cost,yet!)

It's nice to know that if I decide to try it without WPD,traffic bug, etc, there is a way. Time will tell. I don't know if I'm computer-savy enough to manage it. I got started late on the challenge, and am only to day 10 at present.

I'm in So Cal and have been a bit distracted by the fires in the mountains above our home, so I haven't been working at this project. But I'm feeling pretty good right now, because I just finished my eZine article and submitted it - Yea!

[AlekNovi]

Originally Posted by jbordxyz

I have been concerned how I am going to be able to manage this without all the high-powered software. I really can't afford to put a lot of money into this until I'm sure I want to keep working at it. (I have no idea how much any of these things cost,yet!)

It's nice to know that if I decide to try it without WPD,traffic bug, etc, there is a way. Time will tell. I don't know if I'm computer-savy enough to manage it. I got started late on the challenge, and am only to day 10 at present.

I'm in So Cal and have been a bit distracted by the fires in the mountains above our home, so I haven't been working at this project. But I'm feeling pretty good right now, because I just finished my eZine article and submitted it - Yea!

There is a way to do it for free. Just 2 challenges ago we did everything manually, with no software. Its not so bad as it sounds. Its like, if you use a flat-screen now, you don't wanna go back to a conventional CTR screen... But it wasn't that bad when you used one.

===Free Version===

wpd => fantastico + install plugins yourself. Just get a trial WPD account, setup a test blog, login to the wordpress it installed for you, (domain.com/wp-admin/ then click the plugins section)... Then simply install the same plugins yourself on your own non-wpd blog. Its 3 minutes of work and requires no skill or technical knowledge.

TrafficBug => Google "social bookmarking" services, and you'll find info how we did it half-manually before traffic bug

Samurai => Nothing replaces the samurai in its entirety But you can replace some of its individual parts (for keyword research, the free google external tool), (for seo competition analysis google on the subject), (for content search, manually search the same services that samurai searches for)

But honestly, it doesn't make sense to not get samurai. You need to be crazy. It saves you like 3 months cumulatively over a year, it adds up. Some of the newest modules in samurai are world-firsts... they do stuff no other tool does, and had to be done by hand before samurai. GET SAMURAI, lol. No matter what. The licence is for life, and the price can only rise from here. Get it for some special now, and its yours forever, and you get all the improvements they add to it.