March was a little better than the month before:

Total Spent:  $8,555.97
Gross Profit: $14,638.15
Net Profit:       $6,082.18
ROI:                        71%

So it’s not the bigtime, but I’m happy to have done better than the month before. On top of that, I basically took the month off.  I did do a little work here and there, but mostly I’ve been on sabbatical. I’ve been working on hobbies like brewing (honey mead, merlot wine, apple cider, dark beer), and fixing up an old RV I bought to take the family camping this summer. I’m really enjoying the intellectual challenges of fixing up the RV. This thing has been sitting for several years and has a lot of complicated systems that need to be brought back online. Maybe I’ll shoot some pics/video of it.

Anyway, I expect the next few months to be okay, but I’m planning on taking a lot of time off this summer to take the family to some camping events.

To your success!

Danger Brown

February has been the worst month yet for me in a long time. First some numbers:

Total Spent:  $6,580.07
Gross Profit: $10,242.92
Net Profit:       $3,662.85
ROI:                        55.7%

I really hate posting numbers like this. It’s embarrassing. But I made a commitment to share my results on this blog.

The 3 main reasons my income sucks right now:

1. I’ve been lazy

2. When I did work, I neglected my active campaigns to work on upcoming projects.

3. I have 5 kids and our 11 month old and my wife haven’t been sleeping well at night. So I wind up babysitting until 1 or 2 pm while my wife gets some shuteye. After that, I have trouble getting motivated feeling like the day is shot already.

I spent several days looking into and studying new niches and new traffic sources. Basically, it’s like I’ve been going back to school.

I spent about 7-10 days side-tracked working on developing a board game. Probably sounds silly to some people…. I’m a born entrepreneur and have always been easily side-tracked by whatever new idea infatuates me at the time. I’d put this as the #1 reason I’m not rich yet. A person really needs to focus on one thing to achieve great success in life. Learn from my experience. Focus on only 1 or 2 traffic sources and 1 or 2 niches.

To your success!

Danger Brown

January has been crap for me. It’s the worst month I’ve had since about 8 or 9 months ago.

Here are the totals for my January 2011 Affiliate marketing efforts.

Total Spent:  $6662.13
Gross Profit: $12,837.00
Net Profit:       $6,174.87
ROI:                        92.6%

Though I can make the excuse that my niche (financial) tends to crap out in the winter, I’d expected to scale things up to compensate for that. My MSN campaigns have suffered from several slaps and I’ve been trying to adjust my landing pages to keep MSN happy. Just about 7 days ago I implemented a change that has slightly hurt my ROI but has so far kept the slaps away.

I’m getting sick of these slaps and unpredictable volume. I’m getting real interested in moving into other traffic sources.

This is pretty late for an earnings update. My wife and I went to England and Paris from the 3rd to the 13th of November. At the beginning of November, I was too busy getting ready to be gone to blog much.
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October was about what I expected. I had been making most of my money from Yahoo Search Marketing paid search. As they were taken over by MSN Adcenter I saw a decline in profit.
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October 2010 internet marketing earnings totals:
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Total Spent:  $11,206.51
Gross Profit: $22,975.72
Net Profit:     $11,769.21
ROI:                105%
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We’ll see what happens in November. Right now, I’m expecting it to be similar to October. Being gone for half the month isn’t helping much. I’m now working hard though to boost earnings.

I didn’t achieve my goal of $30k net in September unfortunately. I had a couple campaigns/offers go down and other things that hamstrung a couple hopeful projects. I really hate posting a decline from one month to the next. I’m only satisfied if the numbers get bigger. I made a commitment to myself to post my income on this blog though. I figured it would be a good motivator. Even if nobody were to read this, I think it does help me to stay oriented.
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September 2010 internet marketing earnings totals:
Total Spent:  $11,544.68
Gross Profit: $29,250.03
Net Profit:     $17,705.35
ROI:                153%
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So, things are OK. I’m disappointed that I didn’t make my $30K net profit goal. But of course, big goals are needed to have any hope of attaining anything worthwhile. I’m maintaining my goal to make $500K net profit from Sept 1 2010 to Sept 1 2011.
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Hold onto your hats. It’ll get a little worse before it gets better. I’ve focused my energies on paid search and have been using Yahoo for about 90% of my traffic. In the next 2 weeks Bing is absorbing Yahoo search advertising and I expect it to be a setback that will take me a month or two to recover from. So be warned that I expect October and November to be weak. We’ll see though. I’m busting my tail to recover my income as quickly as possible.
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To hit my $500K goal, I’ll need to hit $60K net or more per month within a few months. I’ve also got several offline obligations that will eat up time that could be used to increase profits.
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Want more? Subscribe to my newsletter, or check out my affiliate marketing earnings from August 2010.

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.

November was OK. I didn’t scale up too much, but did make a little more money than last month. I’m only working on campaigns that I feel will have a long stable life. I want to be in a position to take months off as my wife is due to give birth on about April 5th.

November money spent:
$5,179.30

November money earned:
$13,153.32
$151.76 referral income from Market Leverage
=$13,305.08 total gross profit

$8,125.78 total net profit for November

Looking forward to December my goal is to net $15,000.  My strategy to achieve it is to focus on increasing ROI….specifically I’m working on reducing my CPC and using the surplus to fund new campaigns. Also, I’m working on increasing CTR and Conversion rates.

Go back in time and see my affiliate marketing profits for July through October 2009.

1. Liability. #1 You need to protect yourself from liability as much as possible. A LLC can protect your personal assets from lawsuits while allowing your business income to pass through to you. Having an LLC is only part of it. You need to use your LLC. Have your domains, CPA accounts, PPC accounts, bank accounts, everything used for your business, in the company name using the company tax id number. Note that an LLC will not protect you from criminal liability. Also note that I am not a lawyer and that laws vary one place to another.

2. Taxes – Several US states have no income tax. You can save some money on taxes with an LLC but to justify it for this reason alone, you probably need to be making $10K or more per month. You still need to pay federal taxes and if you live in a state with income tax you will generally still be paying taxes to your state for any salary or bonus you take.  If you are making big bucks, there can still be tax advantages but you should be talking to a tax planner to set it up right. If you don’t do things right, an LLC can be a tax liability putting you in the position of paying taxes twice. Be careful with this. But if you ARE making big bucks than it will be worth it to set yourself up properly. For example, if you are banking a $million per year, you can leave the assets in your company which may be taxed at a lower rate than you. The company can also do clever things like own your home and car or pay for your health insurance and have an “employee” retirement plan.

3. Stability – It’s a big temptation to spend your money in the good times and be broke in the bad times. Personally, I live on a fixed salary which I draw from my LLC. Anything over my salary stays in the company accounts and is building up to become a warchest I can use when it’s time to take things to the next level. My plan is to have my LLC own rental properties which will provide  hedges against inflation and loss of income.

4. Security – Got PPC accounts? CPA accounts? An Adsense account? Well if you have an LLC, it has it’s own tax id number and can have it’s own accounts separate from your own. If you lose a critical account of some sort, having an LLC in place can offer you a way to get your foot back in the door quickly. If you’re smart you’ll have backup accounts ready to go before you have a problem. Be careful here. Lots of people use this as a technique which may violate user agreements with some companies. For increased protection from loss of critical business accounts, you might want to use a registered agent service which gives you a different (forwarded) address for the business and further isolates it from you. This can give you access to credit cards with multiple addresses which you may enjoy.

5. Trust – If you live in certain countries you may find it more difficult to get approved for CPA accounts etc. If you have run into this problem and want to avoid it in the future you can set up a USA based LLC and legally it is as if the company is a US citizen. Your company lives here, pays taxes here, and can get in trouble with the law here. It can be sued or even fined for criminal offenses. The Limited Liability Company gives you a US presence. With a registered agent service, you have a USA based address which will forward all mail to you wherever you may be.

6. Estate planning – If you have kids like me and plan to be mega rich, you have to figure out how to set up your estate. My “Wyoming Close LLC” allows me to make my kids members of the company. The company can own assets like real estate. When they inherit the estate, the Wyoming Close LLC will reduce their tax liability by about 50%. It also provides a form of protection you’d never think of but which I like. Should one of my 5 kids get divorced after inheriting their membership in the company, their ex-spouse cannot touch or acquire any share of the company. It essentially functions as a bulletproof prenuptial agreement for all my kids.

THE ULTIMATE PROTECTION: If you are a big affiliate and are playing chicken with the FTC, or consider yourself at higher risk of lawsuits, you might want to consider having businesses set up overseas which in turn operate in the USA. I can’t provide any advice to this end. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. But if you have a foreign company structure like this, then if anybody wants to sue you or come after you, then they’ll have to pay for lawyers in the USA and in whatever country you’re based out of. Of course so would you but you’re rich right? Anyway, it is possible to have multiple jurisdictions like this which increase the barriers for legal actions against you. Personally, I’m not operating in a very high risk fashion at all and a USA LLC is good enough for me.

Can you tell us another good reason for having an LLC or do you have experience with foreign entities? Please let us know in the comments.

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.