I have to admit I haven’t had a very productive summer. It’s only been a few months since I’ve gone full time in affiliate marketing, and to say the least I haven’t been doing the best job at staying on top of my business.
I took my new found freedom a little too lightly and spent a few too many days on the golf course and just generally messing around.
It’s almost the end of the month and looking at this months numbers my gross commissions have slipped about $1500 dollars since hitting a peak back in the Spring.
What exactly am I talking about?
At the beginning of the Spring I was enjoying gross income around $5500-$6000 a month (before expenses). After briefly looking at my numbers for September I’m down to just over $4000. Am I shocked? Unfortunately not. While I don’t like to admit it I usually know when I screw something up and well, I know I’ve screwed something up.
How ever I’m not going to panic. I haven’t lost my ability to market, nor do SEO etc. So I’m going to lay out a plan for the rest of the year to bring myself back on track to hit my ultimate goal of $10,000 a month in affiliate commissions, and I’m going to document the journey here on my blog.
Here’s how I plan on documenting everything:
- Provide End of Month Updates on income and growth over previous month(s)
- Write daily about what changes I’m making, tests I’m running and over all how things are going
I’m going to use both my blog as well as a thread at DigitalPoint Forum to track my progress and hopefully pick up some readers along the way who can follow me on this journey.
Here’s the 30,000 foot view of my plan
- Work on Improving the conversions on the pages I have right now in the search engines ranking well and earning me money. I’m going to do this by split testing pages, working on new copy, testing headlines, calls to action etc. This is the best place for me to start since I have some traction with these pages already.
- Next I’m going to increase traffic to the pages I have already ranking some where in the SERPS to boost the traffic that is coming to these pages. This could mean link building to improve ranking on the first page or possibly bringing a page from the 6th page in the SERPS to the first page.
- Lastly I will add more pages to my sites to grow my reach in the search engines for each of my markets. The key here is I don’t want to add informational pages. Rather I want to add content pages that I think can add sales to my bottom line. I’m looking for converting keywords not just volume of pages & traffic here
That’s the plan in a nutshell. It might seem simple in those 3 points but I’ll be doing this across 5 or 6 sites, and of course each one of those points has a lot of work underneath of it.
I won’t be revealing my actual sites n any of the upcoming posts, but I will reveal exactly what sort of changes I’m making and give details on the work I’m doing.
Why?
Because a big part of goal setting is accountability, and since none of my friends or family (except for my wife and a couple of key other people) really understand what it is I do for a living it’s hard to find someone to be accountable to. What better place to find accountability for this goal then online with other Internet marketers.
I’m going to keep myself on track by taking a few minutes each day to just day dream about what it will be like when I achieve this goal. Also I’ll be making daily notes in my journal and keeping on top of monthly, weekly and daily goals.
While my GOAL is to achieve $10,000 in commissions in a month I’ve broken it down to achieving two sales per day for the entire month on average for each site. This will bring me over my goal, but it allows me to focus on actions rather then dollars earned.
It’s easier for me to concentrate on generating the traffic and conversion rates to achieve two sales per day for a particular product then it is to try and earn $2500 a month from a particular product.
If you’re interested in following me along this journey to achieving my goal you can sign up for my RSS feed notifications at the top right of this page. I hope you will as I think we can both learn a lot along the way.
To yours and my success in the coming days, weeks and months!