How To Build Blog Making $100+ a Month on Autopilot Under 3 Weeks – Final Chapter
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This is a final part of building $100+ a month blog case study where you’ll learn what can happen and what to do AFTER affiliate products blog is launched. Simon story will not be complete without this chapter.
First lesson Simon learnt was Repeat what works for you! Gurus will push a plenty of products on you just to make a sale, and before you know it – you’d be overwhelmed with information and paralyzed to act. If something working for you – rinse it 5, 10, 20 times over. After success with the first blog, Simon started building a second blog in September and launched it first week of Oct.
As before, he went through business plan processes, niche research, collecting content and putting together a blog. This time it took him less than 2 weeks, because he already had a product blog template to reuse for 2nd blog. Launch of the second blog came at the right time, because Google slapped his first blog (others called it Google sandbox) in October. It was expected and did not come as surprise, Google does it all the time for new sites and especially product-oriented. Simon task was to continue building quality content and links back to the first blog. From profits made during first 2 months, Simon hired ghostwriter to write 8 posts (unique content) for about $70.
Second lesson learnt – reinvest profits to grow your business. My recommendation is to outsource 8 to 10 posts, so that you have UNIQUE content to publish for the next 2 months (4-5 posts a month per product blog). Also, make sure to continue promoting product blog through social bookmarking, comments, Yahoo answers or whatever way you do it.
Traffic to the second blog was going steady according to Google analytics, however [for some reason] number of clicks on eBay items was very low (see picture below with mid-October “crash”, marked by red arrow). After quick investigation, we found that the reason was eBay campaign for 2nd blog was not set correctly, we switched it to eBay Default campaign and it fixed the problem.
Third lesson learnt – track and test every aspect of your blog. Since the launch of first blog, we tracked CTR% (number of clicks per 100 page views) and it was on average 40% CTR. That’s why we knew that something was very wrong with mid-October “crash”. And as you can see from clicks/earnings picture – after correction was made to eBay campaign – clicks and sales shoot up.
It’s important to diversify traffic sources – optimize blog for search engines, bookmark blog, comment on other sites and blogs. Why? If Google slaps your blog for few months, you’d still have traffic coming from other sources. As a rule, you should aim for 20%+ of traffic coming NOT from the search engines.
November was the worst month for Simon blogs as first blog was still in Sandbox and sales came mainly from the second blog. November was also a month when Simon added affiliate programs other than eBay, enrolled in few affiliate networks and started publishing ads. Here is a picture of eBay sales from 2 blogs in November.
On a top of eBay sales, two blogs also made $20+ from other affiliate programs for a total of $140 in November.
Fourth lesson learnt – research and add as many affiliate products for the niche as you can. Initial focus of the blogs was on eBay products, however adding other affiliate offers brought healthy 16% increase in profits.
Around November 20, first blog came out of Google sandbox and also got deeply indexed by Yahoo and MSN. Y and M are slower at indexing and usually behind Google about 2 months (keep it in mind). Now, what’s going on in December? It’s not yet end of the month but 2 blogs made $200+ already in eBay sales only, and about $40 in other affiliate offers. Simon is very well on his way to $300+ a month with TWO auto-pilot blogs! His plan is to build 10 blogs for a total of $1,500+ automatic income… and I am pretty sure he can do it.
Fifth lesson learnt –approach your online business systematically. What does it mean? Develop and test SYSTEMS for your business – niche and keyword research system, how you identify affiliate products to sell, content system, traffic and promotion systems and so on. Make flowcharts or step-by-step guides for EACH system and follow it to the letter. It will make a HUGE difference in your online success.
2 Comments
January 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Wow! Very impressive Max. I’m dying of curiosity on the niche of Simon’s blogs. I know they are eBay product blogs, but well Ebay has loads of products, so that doesn’t exactly narrow it down any. lol.
In any case, those are very nice numbers for such new blogs. And the $1,500 in monthly income from 10 blogs on auto-pilot sounds awesome. A worthy goal indeed.
I look forward to hearing more on this mystery Simon guy.
Missy.
Missy (from G34 Media)s last blog post..I Won An iPod Nano!!!
January 7th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Missy, sorry, cannot tell you more about niches - it does take time to research and find good ones. However, I am talking with Simon about publishing ebook on the subject and “exposing” one of his blogs as a study case. Let me know if you’d interested… and Simon is not a mystery guy
- he is my friend who knew nothing about making money online, wanted to know how to do it and had quite a success.
On a separate note, congrats with selling twilightmovie blog, BUT… it was getting good traffic and already making $80 a month. With a little bit more efforts you can pump up profits to $100+ a month easily. Why to sell? Would it be better to start your own blog empire?