Danger Brown

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.

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

I signed up for Market Health because one of their affiliate managers spotted one of my campaigns and contacted me. Of course he wants me to sell their product. But yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with him. It was very pleasant. I’m focusing on Health and Beauty, so it works for me.

One of the things that sets them apart is that about 90% of their offers are in house. They also have a legal department look over every offer so they won’t have to shut it down. If you have done any affiliate marketing, you know the feeling to have a profitable campaign pulled out from under you when the offer you are promoting disappears. This problem should be minimized with them.

Also, they have invisible link tracking. When people click your affiliate link it will look like this:
http://www.markethealth.com/
instead of this:
http://www.markethealth.com/?aid=314867

Which do you like better? Both of these links are my referral signups. (Which costs you nothing) View source if you are into that technical stuff. There is an extra script right after this paragraph. It’s easy, just like pasting adsense code.

Now, I do my due diligence and checked this company out. There are a few complaints out there suspecting tracking may be imperfect. The sad reality is that it is imperfect no matter what network you talk about. Also, lots of people have bad campaigns and want to blame someone else for their poor conversion rate. I was pleased to learn that the company has been around long enough to change their name. It used to be JoeBucks.com.  I also think the advantage of invisible affiliate tracking would compensate (increase sales) for any imperfection in the system.

Due to the easy signup process, and my great experience interacting with them, I would recommend them especially for anyone who has been denied by another network.  Keep in mind that if you break rules, they will drop you like a greased bowling ball.