I made Forty Dollars in Commissions yesterday

Mar 26

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Logged into Commission Junction this morning and saw that we made $39.12 in commissions yesterday. I know, I know, for some people that’s nothing. But, since we’re lost $263 online so far, it was kind’ve exciting. Monday was our highest performing day on CJ in the past 30 days.

How did we do it? After all, we’re still a small-time money making website.

Internet Cashflow Stream 1 - Organic Traffic (Profit: $9.75)

$9.75 came from a commission selling Skype. We didn’t spend any advertising money to get the lead. It came from an organic search from Google. Someone was looking up SkypePro Reviews and landed on our site.

Then we did a google search on SkypePro Reviews and discovered that we are in fact on the first page. Which is kind of exciting as well. We knew from our visitor stats that a few people were trickling in from this topic, but this was the first time we’ve seen a commission. Maybe we’ll spend some time looking into getting more traffic about this topic…

Internet Cashflow Stream 2 - Paid Traffic (Profit: $9.46)

The rest of the commission ($29.37) came from our one Pay Per Click Search Marketing campaign that we’ve managed to get off the ground. To be honest, with recent changes in Yahoo Search Marketing, we thought the campaign was a goner. But, fingers crossed, we’re still in there.

Mind you, we spent $19.91 on advertising with Yahoo yesterday to make those sales, but we’re still walking away with a profit of $9.46.

Here’s what we did:

We increased our advertising budget to $20/day (from $5 / day). I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but the last time we tried to buy more traffic by increasing our advertising budget, our money making machine didn’t work. It didn’t rise to the challenge. We took this to mean that the taps were turned on all the way and this was all the water we would get.This time, we took the spending limit off of our campaign and just had an account limit of $20/day which got maxed out.
We also added some similar keywords. One of the keywords we added brought in a lot of traffic, so we’ve now added a custom tracking code (SID) on that keyword to see if it’s actually bringing in cash, or just costing us money.
We also tweaked our ads. We tried to create a natural sense of urgency so we added the phrase, March Deals! We noticed that as we get closer to the end of the month, we’re getting more traffic on that ad.

Bottom Line: We made $20 yesterday doing absolutely nothing. (Well, we were working on our Domain Names mini site, but that hasn’t begun to pull in money yet.) I don’t think we’ll be able to consistantly make $20 per day online, but it’s a small taste to motivate us. Maybe we’ll look into doing some SEO work to get more natural, organic (and free) search traffic.

Question: How do you get traffic to your site? Do you pay for it? Do you get it through people searching on Google? Do you use social networking? What’s your secret?