Danger Brown

Yesterday, my combined income from my various online revenue streams totaled $600.77 net profit. Gross was about $1050. I don’t really pay much attention to gross profit as it doesn’t mean much other than for cash flow considerations. Lots of people get hung up on ROI or gross earnings. That shit doesn’t matter to me. As long as I can afford to keep things running, all I care about is net profit.

When I started this blog over a year ago, I was giving these constant updates about my progress in growing my online income.  I have shied away from that a bit as my income has grown. I don’t want to sound like a braggart. Hell, lots of people are making lots more than me, but in the interest of continuing what I started I’ll let you know things are going well.

I’m not rich yet, but I’m on my way. My online earnings for this month are on track to be very close to $10K net. My family and I live frugally on about $2.5K monthly. I draw a monthly check from my LLC which has been accruing assets. Right now, I could live for a year with zero income if things went bad.

Having that cushion of 12 months worth of money in the bank has given me the confidence to say that I’ll never get another “job”. I have had my online earnings rug pulled out from under me twice now where my income dropped nearly to zero. Both times I was able to reinvent myself within 6 weeks and get back to earning enough to survive. One time was a close call. I actually started job seeking as a back-up-plan.  Things worked out fine though.

You might think from reading this that I’m content. Not even close buddy! I’ll never be content with my online earnings. I know enough about this business to understand that a guy can earn tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per day online. The potential is greater than most people off the street can comprehend. Although my current earnings are at a 6 figure level, they are likely to fluctuate in the future. The uncertainty of online income has me highly motivated to build a nest egg I can use to secure an offline 6 figure income by buying 1 or more businesses.

I live a few hours from Denver and am getting ready to head out this morning. I’ll be getting there about noon so will miss some of the 1st day. Affiliate Convention is a pretty small affair and hasn’t been the best received in the community.

I debated at some length whether I would attend again this year. But decided I might as well. I met a few people last year that justified it. I’m really only going for the networking, but I’ll sit in on a few sessions as well. Sure, you can make friends in the industry long distance, but nothing really compares to shaking someone’s hand in person and sharing some experiences like lunch, dinner, or a drunken bender that lasts into the night.

Sorry, I haven’t been updating my blog very often, frankly it is because I’ve been too busy with my family. We just had our 5th child 10 weeks ago. Also, if I’ve been at my computer, I’ve generally been working on scaling up my stuff. I used to give updates about my income monthly and have really been remiss about that.

Here is a general update: Things have been pretty steady over the last year. Increasing a little bit every month. Last month I made about $8,600.00 net on about $16,000.00 gross. I have a goal of making $30K net in September. Cash flow has been one of the biggest factors limiting the rate I can scale things. I’ve finally reached the point where I have enough business capital to scale things as fast as I can do the work.

Sorry I don’t blog more frequently. I’m not a blogger who does affiliate marketing. I’m an affiliate marketer that does a little blogging when he’s bored. Who would you rather listen to?

July 2009
I had some good things going here, and made about $500net/day on July 4th and 5th. Then Adwords slapped all my campaigns for Resveratrol rebills and I was out of business. I took a couple weeks to rethink my strategies. I would rather not have my business at risk of being crushed at any time by Google. Therefore, this marked the end of my Adwords advertising. All of my July profit was made in the first week of the month. The next few weeks were spent inventing and beginning to implement a new strategy.

July money spent:
$2231USD

July gross profit:
$4158

Net money earned in July:
$1927.

August 2009
August represented starting over with new campaigns and traffic sources. Sorry, I’m revealing a little less about my earnings these days but I will say that YSM Yahoo Search Marketing is fairly prominent in my spending now when it wasn’t before. Late in August, we found out my wife was pregnant again.

August money spent:
$1487.

August gross profit:
$3891.

Net money earned in August
$2004.

September 2009
I shifted offers from one to the next in September and changed all my offers around entirely and by the end of the month things had become pretty stable. With my wife being pregnant I worked towards promoting more stable offers which would be less likely to be pulled down at a moments notice. No rebills for me now. I wanted to be able to take time off to take care of my family. With Janeen out of commission, I’m taking care of the babies, especially in the mornings. Also, it was a real struggle to shift away from my night owl working hours.

September money spent:
$2562.

September gross profit:
$5685.

September net profit:
$3123. +$102 Market Leverage referral income = $3225 total September net profit

October 2009
In October I pretty much just scaled up the same stuff I was doing the month before. I worked a lot less actually even though I made more. I continued to struggle to work while taking care of my kids and my wife. Her pregnancy gives her gestational diabetes which in turn causes her to faint and collapse unpredictably. I have to walk with her even just around the house and she is essentially an invalid until after she gives birth and recovers.

October money spent:
$4745.

October gross profit:
$11,693.

October net profit:
$6,948.
(Also I got $248 from Market Leverage as referral income.)
+$248
October grand total net profit - $7196.USD

I’m on track for November to be similar to October, but expect to be able to increase my earnings in December as I have a project or two in the works and am starting to build up enough capital to scale up a little.

Go back in time and see my affiliate marketing profits for June.

Things are changing here. It is July 5th, 2009. From the 1st to the 3rd I made $999.90 net. Saturday the 4th I made $527 net and today, Sunday at 6pm I have $430 in net profits.

This represents marked growth in my campaigns’ performance. It’s very exciting and a little unnerving. I am nervous about the rug being pulled out from under me. Google represents a large majority of the traffic and conversions I’m getting.

At Affiliate Convention, I told people that I was making $3K net monthly and that “Within two months I’ll be making $10K monthly net.” It’s only been two weeks, but I’m already there. Of course it needs to hold for a month for me to brag, but I’m really quite pleased.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be secure with this affiliate marketing income. Laws are changing. If you depend on Google for SEO or PPC, they can change their algorithms at any time and hurt your income badly. My basic plan is to make as much money as possible as fast as possible and sink it into offline investments such as real estate and brick and mortar businesses.

I want to have a totally stable and secure passive income which far exceeds my needs and only grows over time. In other words, I want to be wealthy in every way. Time, money, family, health. I want every type  of wealth there is and I’m on my way. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Have any of you gone through issues when it comes to adjusting to financial wealth? I’m having to work to push past the limits of my comfort zone. Please comment about your own experiences with income growth and it’s effects on your life.

I haven’t really expanded campaigns, but have improved the ones I have.

June 2009

Money spent:

Adwords                                             $4,947.28

Yahoo Search Marking                       $448.08

MSN Adcenter                                        $84.74

Ad buy                                                   $320.00

Total money spent $5800.10

Money earned:

Hydra                                                    $8,196.00

MarketHealth                                           $5.00 (second tier)

Adsense                                                  $360.60

Gross money earned                               $8561.60

Net money earned                             $2761.50

So, it’s OK, but I’m not satisfied with my efforts or my results. At least I won’t have to get a job.

After attending Affiliate Convention this month I’m pretty pumped up and want to take my wife to Affiliate Summit East in NYC in August 2009. It’s gonna take an earnings bump to justify the expense of a big trip like that but I don’t want to miss it. I figure if I can at least double this month’s net earnings I’ll go to New York.

And what’s the deal with people in forums posting gross earnings and talking about their best day ever. Gross means nothing. It’s a silly ego number. Net means everything.

This month (July 2009)  I’ll be pushing into new areas and building out new campaigns. Things will certainly be interesting. I also am going to be coming more into compliance with my landing pages. So that might cost me some profit. I hope not.

Feel free to comment. I could use the encouragement.

My 1st month

My 2nd month

Here we go. I actually am running fewer campaigns than when I started this month. I have built 3 new landing pages and tried promoting them without success. One of my two profitable campaigns has gone downhill and I stopped promoting it a few days ago.  That’s alright though I’ll keep at it. I’m still gonna hit that $10/K monthly goal.

May, 2009
Money spent:
Adwords                             $4516.16
Yahoo                                   $209.75
Total money spent $4725.91

Money earned:
Hydra network                 $6066.00
Neverblue                               $77.00
MarketHealth                         $50.00
Adsense                                   $190.94
Moreniche                                $15.00
Gross money earned         $6398.94

Net money earned              $1673.03

Some of that Adsense money is residual. But mostly I spent $81.03 to drive traffic to sites with a high CTR on Adsense ads. This is a remnant from before I started Affiliate marketing, so you could subtract those numbers if you cared to. I leave ‘em in because I’m feeding my family. To eliminate any confusion, I do not have Adsense on my affiliate landing pages. It is completely separate income. If you don’t count that income/expense the total is $1563.12 from affiliate marketing only.

These numbers come out to a 35.4% ROI. My profitable campaigns have done a little better than that, while my failures have lost money and hurt the overal ROI. I’d prefer to have my ROI at about 50%.

Further. Almost all my income is through Hydra right now. They put me on weekly payouts a few weeks ago, and that lets me quickly reinvest any money made through Hydra. Therefore most of my efforts are in that direction for cash flow reasons. If I get the money back in 10 days or so, I don’t care about ROI as much. With the weekly payouts, I could afford to spend $20K/mo easily. I just need more profitable campaigns to run.  Hydra is not the only network that will do this, but I was able to get approved by grossing over $1K/weekly.

In June I may be distracted a bit from the affilate marketing. A friend of mine and I are working on a new startup. Top secret until the launch. I expect to be telling you all about it in 2-3 weeks. Wish us luck! Don’t worry though, the startup will not stop me from my $10K/month goal. Feel free to follow my micro-updates on @dangerbrown on Twitter.

If you are a doubter, here is a big screenshot of my Hydra earnings.

My 1st month

My 3rd month

Report at the end of month 1 of affiliate marketing:

OK, here is where I stand. Unemployed and gotta feed my wife and 4 kids. Lost all income about 35 days ago, took a little while to get organized. Started my first campaign about 2 weeks ago.

Money spent:
Adwords                           $2329.82
Yahoo                                $58.35
Total money spent $2388.17

Money earned:
Hydra Network $2948.00
Neverblue $224.00
Adsense $79.70
Gross money earned $3251.70

Net earnings$863.53

I feel pretty good about this. I started a big campaign about 16 days ago, and another one about 8 days ago.  I know I’ve made improvements to these campaigns, and expect their profitability to increase over the next 30 days.  I have another campaign I’ll be starting in about 5-6 days.  Things are looking pretty good.

I’ve pretty much already hit my initial goal to survive without getting a job. If I don’t do anything, these two campaigns provide enough for us to scrape by. We can scrape by on $1700/mo but need about $2500/mo to feel comfortable.

One more moderately successful campaign will do the trick and I think I’m on to it. Wish me luck.

Mid range goal is to make $10K/mo profit by end of August.  I’m pretty confident I can do it. Follow my micro-updates @dangerbrown on Twitter.

See what happened during my 2nd month.