WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Sifting through the rhetoric and the find-out-how-I-made-millions-online type blogs, it’s hard to find data from real people trying to make money online. For one thing, you can’t publish anything beside total expenses or earnings with Google AdWords and AdSense. Besides, who in their right mind would publish how much money they’ve lost online. (Besides me.) I read once that the average person who tries affiliate marketing burns out after a month or two. Eight months into the experiment, and I’ve lost just under $500.

Table 1. CashFlow Report for 2007 (All figures reported in USD.)

Lessons learned in 2007

1. If a campaign isn’t working right away, change it, or end it.

Several of my earlier campaigns were hemmoraging money. In June, July and August, I had the mentality, let’s wait and see what happens. Maybe some of the traffic will convert into commissions. Maybe tomorrow, the sun will come up. After all, some of my affiliate links have a 90 day referral period. (i.e. the tracking cookie will expire 90 days after the initial click, so if the visitor returns within 90 days to make a purchase, I’ll still receive the commission.)

Looking at the difference between the click date and the posting date, I’ve found out that 75% of my commissions were earned on the same day the visitor landed at the merchant’s site. Four days accounts for over 90% of the commissions. There’s no need to wait weeks or months to see if any of those advertising clicks will turn into commissions. One day (or a few days at most) is enough to know if your campaign is working. If it’s not (or even if it is), fine-tune the campaign.

2. Not All Search Marketing Campaigns can be Scaled Up.

Search Marketing campaigns have the greatest potential for making money because once you have a successful campaign (i.e. a positive return per click), you can scale up the campaign by increasing the budget and opening up the flood gates of clicks. But sometimes what is restricting the number of clicks you get from a search engine isn’t your meagre budget, but rather the total number of clicks from people searching for that item (and the number of search marketers bidding on that item.) In other words, you may open up the taps, but there might not be any more water to flow through them. (As I found out with my first money making machine.) I still agree with one of my posts earlier in December. I seem to get more clicks from Yahoo than Google at lower bids. For example, running identical campaigns, Google will tell me that I need to raise my bid for the keyword to be active, whereas Yahoo will send me a trickle of traffic.

3. The Landing Page makes a Huge Difference in your Return. (Check daily)

I travel. I wish I could say that I live a life of leisure, traveling the seven seas and occasionally checking my accounts to confirm my online empire. One day, perhaps. Anyways, due to irregular access to the internet, I wasn’t on top of my campaigns and the merchant’s website. At the start of December, one merchant had a great landing page advertising a variety of holiday gift ideas. Then, they switched their landing page to give away a special holiday discount… only available in stores. I can’t be certain, but I suspect my drop in sales and commissions was around the same time as when my retailer changed their site. In short, my landing page URL stayed the same, but the merchant changed the landing page on me. So the moral of the story is… the landing page makes a huge difference in your returns, and… monitor your accounts daily. (If I had been checking my commissions daily, I would have seen the drop in sales and investigated.)

4. Have another look at Dynamic Content Based Ads. (Like Google AdSense or Etology)

For a while, I was passing up Content-based websites in favour of the potential riches from Search Marketing. But a few days ago, I received a $35 commission from a site that I started several months ago and just left alone. It wasn’t a site that I was buying traffic for with Yahoo. Someone found the site through a natural search. This, of course, is the way that other people are experimenting with making money online because it doesn’t have any expenses. After spending $881 in advertising costs in 2007, getting a $35 commission the other day for free was lovely. 2008 will bring in a renewed focus into the potential of content websites to make money.

5. Keep Moving Forward.

You could say 2007 was a bust with the majority of my efforts landing me in the red. I spent nearly $900 on advertising, but I recovered nearly half of it back in commissions. Isn’t the glass half full? I’ve yet to discover the pathways that lead to online riches, but Thomas Edison failed numerous times before inventing the light bulb. I’m in good company. Every failure leads us one step closer to success. Here’s to more failures in 2008 and one day being a millionaire.

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