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

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.