June Stats: 303,841 Site Hits, 68,913 Sponsor Clicks And $1,315 In Sales

This is not completely accurate either because I have a few sponsors that aren't working with niftystats yet so you can add another $50 to that.

I remember when I could pull in 3.5k in a good month. I guess I need to learn again.

How do you manage to live of 1,315 In Sales ? and that is even before hosting, designs and tax

Man hope you will be able to make more than this.Cause look like you have a lot of clicks and not so much sales

I only have $8/month business expenses.

yep, not using my sidebars very well at all. Could probably double this.

I hope you have a day job

My living expenses are very low because of where I live. Indiana is not like a lot of other places.

303,841 hits? how many splogs is that?

and what is a "hand written splog"? i thought splogs were cpntent pulled from someplace else

congrats mike for finally making more than 1k

the first 1k is always the hardest

Without seeing your blogs, it's hard to give any sort of constructive criticism.

Don't feel bad Mike... last month I had over 120k hits to JOIN and barely made $1200 in sales. That was with more than 400k/day to FHGs.

Wow what ratio is that ?

First impressions are that your CTR is pretty good but you got hit with whatever it was that hurt all of last month. ratios are already picking up this month for me.

i'd suggest moving to PPS .. even if you could pege an avg 2 rebills for every join ( not likely on a system wide avg right now ) , you should be running PPS until you get to the point where you're making enough sales to branch back out to revshare.

I figure you're in a growth period right now, and it's nice to have money to develop / live with.

I agree with Thurbs,

If you DO NOT want to go PPS, then consider a Split. and this seems to work well for a lot of people.

Start out with lets say 75% PPS and 25% Rev. Watch thigns, and as you see the Rev grow, you can then start to shift the %. All of a sudden it will be 50/50 and then the other way. At least with some niches/programs. Cams usually work best on rev and so does dating.

Hit me on ICQ about some blog ideas. I have a few of my own and might be able to pass on something that you have not already thought of.

ICQ 174228679

Replicate and recreate. Once I feel I've 'maxed out' a blog I will research another niche and push another one.

I'd change to PPS if I were you. Over 100 sales and only $1,300? With the same 100 sales you'd be doing over $3,000 fo sure.

Could you expand on that?

When and why is it good to go PPS/ RevShare?

Thanks.

Oh, and if you do decide to change to PPS: SEE SIG!!

:P

Make sure you are promoting fresh things. If you are promoting tired old programs your ratios are going to suck ass big time

sure :

currently with his stats .. he has 18% of his income coming from rebills. if this was all stats coming from first 35 days of sales ( which I doubt ) you'd assumg that either the full month signups he was making weren't retaining, or the conversions from who he's promoting are lacking.

now, in this current climate ( with credit card limits lower then previous years, and current balances higher ) I'm assuming that this would be the trend he'll see for a while from these sponsors. maybe I'm wrong, but this is a wild stab. unlike a program, a small affiliate has no aggregrate data to base his opinions on outside of Ratios and Earnings, and right now, based on his numbers, his earnings per click are handicaped by a lack of conversion / rebills.

Take his first sponsor, he's effectively earning 16.57 a sale. even with a big pickup of rebills / conversions, this might peak at 35-40 per sale, and that's a big if, especially based on the limited stats we have to see.

Had he been promoting a PPS sponsor or the PPS option at the avg 35 PPS, he'd have earned $490, instead of $232, a 211% gain on earnings.

While the money from revshare should pick up, that's later money, and revshare is a winner primarily for those who have volume of sales ( which he does not )

If any of his plans for growth entailed outsourcing labor of any kind ( Design, writers, scripts ) he would need money for this. Money that his current plan really doesn't afford him, as the OP has said he lives on this money and his expenses are only $8 a month plus whatever he values his time at.

He plans on growing sales 25% in a months time ( commendable ) however, there is no gaurantee that his rebills will see this growth, since that is out of his hands.

PPS would afford any small affiliate the means to invest in their growth and expansion, and do so in an instant fashion. In business, they say time is money, the more time he waits to expand, the more people will expand in his place.

If his or anyones goal is to start small and end up big, my suggestion is to go with PPS. higher margins on a faster payscale is the key to earlier growth. that's simply a fact, no one grows overnight while counting on theoretical money 3 months down the line.

paysites have a limited earning potential for affiliates, signup + retention. ( These handicapped earners should be his PPS area )

alternatives like cams / datings, have more viable earning potential, in the form of upgrades, credits, and special offers. ( These supplemental ads should be his revshare area )

all of this is based on assumptions that I can't say are accurate since I'm not the poster, but in the example I've given, you can see why PPS is the better bet for the affiliate at current stage.

He sent 68913 clicks to sponsors, say he had a paltry 1:1200 avg with avg pps at 35 PPS, that's $2010 USD vs $1315. I doubled the avg b/c some PPS sponsors may convert differently then his current revshare ones.

If his ratios stayed the same, 1:675, he'd have earned $3573 , a 271% increase.

Since it looks like his sponsors are alot of Full Trial joins, you might say his ratios would get even better as PPS is typically Trials joins over Fulls.

Just my 2 cents

Nicely written Thurbsie, I agree with everything you've said here

You have 11 sponsors that you made 0.02$ per click through or LESS.

Get rid of them for a start. And use those other sponsors instead, or find new.



Why bother with those loosey sponsors?? One of them you have 40 sales. Then 10, 14,6,4,4,4 -- those are the ones that deserve more traffic. If you have to, depending on if they are niche based or not you can just sell your terrible blogs, and invest more time in to the ones with the majority of sales/profits.

Hope this could help you out some.

Sometimes you need the bad sponsors as well, because you use their content to get traffic to the whole domain. That is why I think the average income is more important than the single sponsor.

If I look at the trafficpattern of a regular user, they RARELY sign up for the content that made him visit my site to begin with.

Opinions vary but many people tell me that a blog that is made and dumped to directories and never touched again is a splog.

over 300,000 hits and only 1300$ in sales?

Guys, before you go into rebills you should know that two of those are cam sponsors that nifty only counts as sales even though I do revshare so it's more like. 55 sales and 22 rebills.

yep, people say my ctr is good though. I don't think it is.

From my own perspective point as a webmaster: What kind of traffic do you have, what geo? You can have millions of hits, but if they are from "bad" countries its useless.

good stats though

you need to work on increase your $$ per sale. your average is $12,80 per sale, that can be almost double.

How do you avg less than 13 a sale? Do you have small cam sales or pay per email in there or something?

props to everyone in this thread, and no ridicule for the OP at all I think most people are hurting...

If GFY keeps getting rid of the retard negative posters there'll be more positive threads like this.

Great post Thurbs this is why hahaha pays you the big bucks.

Also to the OP i would and do always go PPS the only time i don't go PPS is when they don't have a PPS option plus add some more sponsors and keep changing sponsors till you find the right fits. Good luck this month

Very informative thread, good insight in here.

mikesinner - How many blogs do you have? Free hosted where? Are you running blogs where you link to galleries/movies/free samples, or blogs where you post a teaser image directly linked to sponsors...

Excellent business related post, very well thought out. Thank you.

Last time I checked it was %75 American and British with another %5 from Australia.

Probably from all those $2 and $4 streamray sales.

http://www.openx.org/

The control panel looks intimidating... hit me up if you need some tips to get you jump started.

Plus, see sig for a cool TGP script that comes with very detailed docs on how to get that text based TGP you want going...

I don't understand why I would need to use that when it should just be a small piece of javascript. I should be able to set it up easily, I've just haven't taken the time to figure it out.

Got $140.28 in sales for the first three days of this month so a low ball estimate of total sales would be $1449.56. Lets hope I do much better than that.

nice stats

The number is between 500-1000

All are hosted on Sensualwritter or Thumblogger and a new blog host I just found.

I have trouble using most free hosted blogs because they stuff to many text links at the top. One should be enough. Concentrating on using add space on your directories is better.

I usually post links directly to the gallery from the image and then a text link to the tour under that.

Spend some money on hosting. You can get virtual accounts for as little as $10 bucks a month. You're at the point where you need to branch off from free and start paying for hosting to move forward. Just think of how many people are buying stuff from the header links that you're giving up at the freehosts. Not to mention, if anything should happen to those freehosts, your income goes to what you make in rebills. One great thing you have is 500-1000 links! Use those (spread out by niche) to link to your paid domains. That will get you going.

thurbs........

Thanks for the info
I'm glad to see that someone is so doing well only with free hosted blogs.
Does Google love you?