How exciting! My first commission..I logged into Commission Junction and found my first commission earned: $8.40 USD sitting in the bottom left corner of my screen. In Google AdWords, it tells me I’ve spent just under two dollars working towards that commission. So, the profit was around $6.00 - based on pure optimism. (Sure, the client could cancel their order and my commission would be corrected accordingly. Sure, I’m just starting and I haven’t collected any real data to see if the campaign will be stable or profitable - but I’m starting to see how things work, if only at the speed of mud.) One day, when I’m making tens of thousands of dollars through search marketing, I’ll look back at this day. My first commission!
Now I have to figure out which of my links worked. The challenge is that I’ve got two Ad Groups for this product as well as running the links in some other sites and blogs, so I don’t know who to thank! (And where to concentrate my efforts…) Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden talk about SID in their book, Affiliate Millions. Shopper Identification (SID) is a unique variable that you can add to Commission Junction links to identify the source or the link that lead to the commission. I read about it in their book, but I wanted to wait for my first commission before I added any extra coding to make sure my links were working. Now I just need to add some SIDs to my links to track down where the profit is coming from.
Next Steps…
- Add SID to my links to track where the links are coming from.
- Work on adding more keywords to my search campaigns.
- Earn $16.60 more in commissions so I get get my first commission cheque sent to me (in the next billing cycle which will be in 60 days, but that’s okay.)
- Retire as a millionaire.
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March 26th, 2008 at 6:47 am
I have that kind of feeling when I first saw my Adsense income reaching a 100. It will boost your motivation to move on. It has never been easy to earn money online, but perseverance is the key to success. Winners never quit.
Cheap Web Hosts’s last blog post..What is Google Adsense? Make Money with Google
March 26th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
$100. That magic number with the payout from Google AdSense where it all comes together… I noticed that your recent post on Google AdSense didn’t actually include an affiliate link to google adsense. Do you find those suckers convert at all?
(Truth be told, I think the kind of person to hit money making blogs, are, well, bloggers trying to make money… who already know about Google Ads. I’ve never had someone sign up with a Google account yet. But we’re small fry. You’ve broken the 1 million mark on Alexa. Congrats!)
March 27th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Hello WebDiggin,
I hope Google would forgive me for saying this: “I earned a $100 after one and a half year of running and developing a site.” Then I looked back. And I went to Smorty, CJ, LinkShare, ClixGalore. Truth to tell: I haven’t earned a single dime from CJ and LinkShare despite the hundreds of clicks. Then I looked back. No, this is not the best way. So I started immersing myself with PHP, Joomla, SMF, MySQL, Flash, Photoshop, Drupal, etc. Today I got an email that says: “I have a friend who wants to have his own web site, how much will you charge for it?”
WebDiggin, that email has a face of money more beautiful than what I could possibly see from the click reports of all the programs mentioned above.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I think it’s neat how everyone is experimenting with making money online, and what works for some, doesn’t work for everybody.
$100 in adsense cash after running a site (that you’re running for your own skill development anyways) is a nice bonus. I don’t recall getting paid to learn at school, so I’m happy with any adsense money. (Some sites never reach the $100 minimum payout level, so think about all the money Google keeps from small bloggers…)
I think if I look back at the commissions I’ve made from affiliate links (Commission Junction), maybe $50 came from contextual links from my blogs. The other $800 came from Pay Per Click driven links and initially, we made some bad decisions so our advertising costs came out to be $1300… Hmm, when I put it in that light, maybe I need to rethink PPC advertising to drive the affiliate marketing campaigns.
Having said that, yesterday, we pulled in $19.69 in commissions from CJ. But yesterday, we also spent $19.69 in advertising on Yahoo to generate those commissions.
At first glance, we didn’t make any money, but we’ve moved over $2000 of product for the advertiser this month which means we’ll get bumped up into their next tier of commission. In a month and a half, when the commissions lock, we’ll get a bonus of 20%.
So all in all if we spend $100 in advertising, we should make $20 profit. A 20% return is better than what I’m getting on some of my mutual fund investments. And it’s heaps better than what I’m getting in interest from the bank. Plus, there’s the added bonus of skills and knowledge development. (But who knows, maybe we’ll miscalculate and get burned like we did at the start with our advertising mistakes.)