Million Dollar Portfolio

At the beginning of this month I started an Affiliate Challenge with a grand prize being a Flip Video Mino Series Camcorder, 60 Minutes (Black). The purpose of the challenge was to illustrate how to make money using affiliate programs. For this challenge, you had to sign up for a PepperJam Network affiliate account and begin promoting products through advertising them on your blog, using adwords or any other way you know of to promote affiliate products. The winner would be the affiliate that sold the most.

And the winner is…well, nobody. One person signed up using my affiliate link but so far I haven’t seen any sales. So although I won’t be giving away a camcorder this month, I will be talking about my earnings for August.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

Traffic, as always is key to any successful blog or web site. Traffic means eyes looking at ads and that means revenue.

According to Google Analytics, there were 428 visits with 720 pageviews averaging 1.68 pages per visit. Bounce rate was 71.03% which means 71% of the visitors read only the first page of the blog before leaving to go elsewhere. I don’t completely rely on Google Analytics though because if I look at my webalizer stats they paint a different picture. What Google Anylitics don’t take into account are repeat visits. Webalizer shows 9109 total visits with 18656 page views from 698 unique URLs.

This is down slightly from July but that’s likely a result of July having an easy contest to win where I gave away a  Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder, 60-Minutes (Black).

The Good Stuff

Why do I write about earnings? I think it’s important to be honest when running any kind of business be it online or off. This blog earns enough right now to pay all my hosting fees and a bit extra. Last month I earned enough of course to pay my hosting fees and give away a camcorder. Now without further Ado…

Text-Link-Ads: $49.43
Amazon.com Seller: $54.12
CafePress: $27.96
Adsense: $0.98(anyone still making money from google adsense?)
NeverBlueAds: $0.00
LinkShare: $0.00
Clickbank: $11.04
MarketLeverage: $1.10
Pepperjam Network: $37.00
Kontera ContentLink: $0.84

Total:  $182.47

Blogger Incentive Program from PepperJam Network

Some of these aren’t that impressive but the important thing here is consistency. First of all, if you aren’t signed up with PepperJam yet, sign up now. You get a $10 bonus just for signing up and if you blog about their Blogger Incentive Program you can earn another $10 each time you do for a total of $50 a month. So if you sign up right now, you get a $10 bonus then blog about this and you get another $10. That’s $20 in your account just for signing up and blogging about it!

PepperJam is the fastest growing affiliate network out there and the primary reason is because their interface is excellent. On the home page are all my stats right there and finding new products to promote is easy. I’ve had more responses (clicks) to affiliate products through PepperJam than any other affiliate I promote. I’ll continue to promote PepperJam because I think they are awesome.

Final Thoughts

As with any business, there is going to be some amount of money invested along with time to get things off the ground. I won’t tell you that making money online is easy because it isn’t. It takes time to understand the ins and outs of marketing not only affiliate products, but marketing yourself. The only person that can make you successful is YOU.

Here’s a great quote by Warren Buffett that I think says a lot about making money.

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

I haven’t written about all the ways I make money here because I also buy and sell stocks on the stock market which is something I am pretty good at and getting better all the time. You can read more about my ventures in the market on my blog The Proficient Investor. Affiliate marketing is starting to work out well for me as I learn more about it and learn techniques that sell. There are a lot of ways to make money whether online or not and you need to find the ways that work best for you.

Find out what I am doing right now by following me on Twitter! If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Blow away your Google competition
Internet+12 months=Millionaire