July Earnings
I had a really good month last month, which is funny because I probably did the least amount of work online than I normally do. My total earnings were just over $3,000 for the month which was a mix of affiliate sales (primarily Amazon), and also some Adsense and sales of my own products.
I must admit that I’m getting pretty good at making money with Amazon, but that’s probably because it’s the one way of making money online that I enjoy the most. I mean what girl doesn’t like shopping 
$3,000 isn’t the most I’ve ever made in a month, I made over $10,000 last Christmas promoting Amazon products, but I used PPC then to drive traffic to my sites. Now I’m using SEO baby. I love SEO. So I’m actually more excited about the $3,000 than I was over my Christmas earnings because it means that I’m learning this SEO game.
So my next goal is to get to $5,000 per month. That’s $US too – not $AUS which would be considerable less in my pocket
So I’ve decided to be a little more open about what I actually do in my blog so that I might hopefully be able to inspire you to do the same and earn money from home as well. Because after all, who actually wants a real job – I certainly don’t! LOL
My Plans for This Week/Month
At the start of every month I usually go and do the backlinks that I get from Angela’s and Paul’s backlink packages. I try and space it out over a period of two weeks or so. I usually do around 6 to 8 backlinks a day using their guidelines to one site only. This get’s me a total of 80 backlinks over the course of the month.
There has been a lot of controversy over their backlink packages now that they are becoming more common and more and more people are using them. Because the idea is to place your link inside a profile page on a high PR site some sites are getting wise and when a few hundred people all sign up to their website for the sole purpose of placing a link on it, some of them are getting a bit cranky.
Therefore people are saying that Google is going to crack down soon on links from profile pages. I have no idea whether that is true or not, in fact I don’t like to speculate what Google will or will not do. It would be hard to determine whether you are just signing up to place a link legimately or for spamming purposes. These sites ALLOW links on their profile pages – which means that you ARE allowed to do it. They are just pissed that you don’t stick around longer.
My personal take on it is that while I do agree that it’s borderline profile spamming by just signing up to place a link, I make sure that I only place links to good sites (so no porn or viagra sites – not that I have any of these anyway). In fact I mainly link to my hubpages. I’ve found that it only takes around 20 to 30 links to get my hub on Page 1. I’m thinking of using a different hubpage name lately though as I’ve noticed that many people are following and copying the hubs that I make. LOL I guess I should be flattered.
Secondly I also plan to write a lot of articles this month. Ezinearticles have a challenge on at the moment called their #HAHD challenge (Hundred Articles Hundred Days). I’ve always been a fan of article marketing both for traffic and backlinks so I’ll be ramping up my article writing efforts to my sites this week. I’m not sure I’ll make the 100 in 100 days (although that’s a reasonable amount to do) but I’ll see how I go. Even if I only do 50 in 100 days that’s still a big jump in traffic and backlinks.
Finally I’m going to try and bring more traffic to some of the resell rights books that I purchased and hopefully make some more sales there.
I like the fact that money goes straight into my PayPal account rather than having to wait months for a check to arrive like with Amazon. I’ve got around 5 or so ebooks that I’m trying to sell this way – mostly straight from article marketing. I currently only have around 1 or 2 articles pointing at each salespage, so with this article writing challenge I should be able to increase that and thus ‘hopefully’ increase my income.
Making Money Online by Autoblogging
I was also asked to take a look at Instant Blog Submitter and give my opinion on it. It’s a neat little program that allows you to make quick posts to your blogs but more importantly it has a feature where you can grab rss feeds and get content submitted to your blogs over a period of time.
I’ve never got into auto blogging before but I kind of like the idea of it. So I’ve taken one of my old domains that had a BANS site on it that get’s virtually no traffic. Last month this site got a massive 41 visits and made 0.50 cents on eBay. I know I’m already planning on what I can buy with my profits.
So I’ve taken BANS off and put up a WordPress blog. I’ve scheduled a few blog posts and twitter feeds to be ‘autoblogged’ onto it over the next week and I’m really interested to see how it goes. If it’s a success I plan on rolling it out over a few more of my blogs.
It takes a bit of getting used to (probably because I’ve never used an auto poster before) and I had to watch the video on the sales page to understand what I should be doing, but once I did I think I’ve got the hang of it.
One thing I wish it did have was the ability to insert keywords so you can get a more specific feed to your blog, but alas it does not. That means you’ll have to do a little more work finding relevant content to post.
I haven’t monetised the site yet as I’m waiting to see what will happen with traffic first.
I’ll keep you updated on my results.
Wow, this is the longest post I’ve written for a long time on this blog – I think Ben & Griz influences are starting to rub off on me
Now I need to go and do some work and start making money online (have I said that keyword enough yet LOL). Catch ya!
Congrats on your earnings Tracey. Very few people reach this status of making a good living promoting affiliate products. It’s even more impressive when you say that your eanings are based on the Amazon affiliate program.
I have a collegue who simply just does games reviews on YouTube and is getting some outstanding results. Probably because Amazon is a well known and well respected company. There’s less risk for the client and I the cookies are present for quite a while
I think the wordpress idea is great. I found that it’s less “sales pitchy” and people are more inclined to stay on the page a lot longer. For this reason I’ve started to add a wordpress blog onto all product url’s.
Thanks for being honest about your earnings and I look forward to reading future blog posts.
Hey Tracey,
I read with interest you blog post. I agree it is a wait with the Amazon cheques I find that, sometimes it seems like ages, however, the day it arrives Yipee!
With Your WP Blog do you find Instant Blog Submitter better than actually scheduling from the blog iself?
Would Love to know.
Love and Light
Maggie
Hi Tracey,
I found your blog post really interesting.
However, and I hope that I am not going to embarass you by asking this, but what about your product ‘Auction Classified Cash’? In the sales literature for this you give an example of someone who ran 7 classified ads and made cUS$1,000 per month. I am surprised that you have not done this and scaled it up – hence way surpassing your current income.
This baffles me and I was wondering what the take on ACC is because I am very interested in buying it.
Lokk forward to hearing from.
Graham.
Hi Maggie,
If you are writing your own content then I’d probably still use the inbuilt scheduling feature in wp.
The way I’m using Instant Blog Submitter to schedule is to grab rss feeds automatically without me having to do it manually. I’ve set up a few rss feeds including a twitter one on a keyword and have scheduled them to post to my blog randomly. (At random intervals this week it will go to these sites and pull their latest blog post or twitter feed at that particular moment).
I have no idea yet what I’m going to get – I’m looking forward to the results. This is my first time using it.
Tracey
Hi Graham,
Fair question deserves a fair answer.
Auction Classified Cash went live over a year ago and for a while I was doing really well.
However around October / November last year I started getting disillusioned by the business model and started to question both my methods and the methods I was being told by guru’s. Everyone said that they only way to make money online is to have a mailing list and promote product after product to them whether it was a good product or not. Even though I did it, I wasn’t comfortable with it.
I’m not a huge fan of email marketing. (Ironic I know since I wrote an ebook about how to use eBay to grow your list).
I think that’s why I don’t email my lists much. I just don’t feel comfortable marketing that way anymore. I just did it at the time because I didn’t know any better.
Plus with ACC you had to keep working it every month. Unlike SEO which is passive income. I worked less this month and earned more because work I’ve done previously is still paying off for me and will continue to do so in the future.
I could probably take a month off and still earn good money. That’s passive income. That’s what I’m after.
Do I still think that ACC is worthwhile? It is a good way to build a mailing list. I got over 1,000 subscribers on one of my lists just using eBay, one ad for 6 months. So the methods do work.
It’s just I don’t want to build my business around email marketing anymore.
Crazy? Probably. But I like my current business model and it’s working for me so I don’t really care.
Send me an email personally if you want to know more about ACC though.
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
I was looking at IPK yesterday after reading your previous post and had a question. Where do you get your content for your Amazon sites? Is there a script involved that pulls content from Amazon?
Hi Tracey,
I’m just getting started in internet marketing with the intention of quitting my day job. Thank you for sharing and congrats on your July earnings. There are so many internet marketing guys out there. It’s refreshing and inspiring to know a gal who’s making it happen, as well.
Also, thanks for your thoughts on how your methods are changing for you. I have your ACC ebook and love the way you write and how it’s presented. Perhaps, you could write another one on how to set up passive income as I love that idea and I think others would be interested, as well. I think a step-by-step plan would be great!
I look forward to hearing more from you!
All the best,
India
Nice to hear from someone who is explaining how they do make money not how to make money with their writing
Congratulations and mahalo
Rick
Tracey,
I went ahead and got Paul’s backlink service. I was wondering if you could clear up something for me? Do you have to submit links to every website that it is in the PDF files? It seems very tedious.
@ Carrie
I write all my own content for my Amazon niche sites. I basically go to Amazon and rewrite the description and use some of the customer feedback as inspiration as to what to write about the product.
Each page has around 200 to 300 words if I can manage it.
@ India
Thanks for your kind words. Keep reading my blog, I plan to give some step by step plans on here soon
@ Rick
Cheers. Yeah I wanted to be a bit different and be open about what I do.
@ Rob
I know it sometimes seems to take forever! I’ve got it down a lot quicker now as I’ve set up a profile in Roboform which helps fill out all the forms with one click. (If you don’t already have it, grab the free version, it also stores passwords so it’s really handy) And my links are usually in a notepad file which I just copy and paste into each profile. I think it takes me around 2 to 3 mins per profile now which is why I only do around 6 to 8 profiles a day.
Hope that helps
Tracey
Tracey,
Thanks for the great reply. I had just one more question; so when putting the back links into each forum are you putting links to your products or is it your website. Just trying to figure out how it works.
Thanks Tracey. I was thinking that writing my own content would be better. I’ve seen some scripts for pulling Amazon product info and comments over, but I have to worry that eventually that will tick off Google or Amazon.
I’m kinda starting over after making some poorly researched niche blogs (bad “guru” advice) and am focusing for now on Adsense, but I would like to have a few Amazon sites also. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
@ Rob
I usually only put one backlink in each profile so as to not look too spammy. I link to a variety of my websites using the anchor text I want to rank for. I link to my hubs a lot too as these seem to rank well with just a few links to them.
Remember to use the anchor text that you want to rank for in Google as your link.
@ Carrie
I’ve seen those scripts. I haven’t used them so can’t comment if they are any good. I’ve found having my own content works well though for ranking.
I’m still learning about adsense, and while I do about $200 per month from it (that was by sheer luck – one of my sites makes the majority of that and I built it 2 years ago not knowing anything about high CPC keywords!).
You can earn quite good income with Adsense by writing lots of Hubpages, and also InfoBarrels has revenue sharing as well. (I plan on getting into InfoBarrel soon – I’ll talk more about it when I do).
EDIT: Just visited your blog and see that you already know all about hubs and infobarrel – LOL .. Great blog by the way.
Hi Tracey, I bought Auction Classified Cash a little while ago and had been making around £350/ month from direct affiate links to Amazon and Clickbank.
However Ebay have just suspended me for 30 days for inappropriate links so I need to find another method.
What’s the best way to get started I followed your step by step approach before and it worked!!!
All the best
John
Hi Tracey,
WOW, you certainly made a decent income that month, i mysef am only at newbie stage with no income as yet, but i am currently under the mentorship of John Thornhill in his masterclass, this guy is certainly showing me the ropes, and i hope to have my first product online soon!
Cheers for sharing your post….Ed.
@ john
So sorry to hear that ebay suspended you. Was that ebay.co.uk? Try building a list instead of direct linking as I know ebay are not allowing links to pages that have something for sale on it.
@ Ed
John Thornhill’s a great teacher. Keep at it and you’ll get there. Remember I was his student over a year ago so it takes a while to learn all the ropes. I’m still learning. LOL
Let us know about your product when it’s ready.
Hi Tracey, yes it was Ebay.co.uk – they have occasionally removed the odd listing as in was in breach of their policies but obviously wanted to show me who was the boss, this time!
I really thought I had got my internet income off the ground but it was not to be.
I’ve got to find another income source…
Tracey – I enjoyed your post. You’ve inspired me to sit down and write out more of a long-term plan for myself. And for me, that means longer than “ok – what am I going to work on today” …lol. I’d like to project where I’ll be in a month, 6 months, 1 year
I read your response about Auction Classified Cash and I must say that it is REFRESHING to see such honesty. I have similar views to yours (although I do still think that your ACC is a great product). I even decided to build my web site around Internet Marketing With A Conscience. If we all filtered possible internet marketing schemes through our personal value system we’d all be happier IMers
is griz and tracy the same?
I’m not quite as hairy as he is – and I don’t hibernate in the Winter
Tracey, I’m enjoying your blog. I was wondering how you set up your Amazon sites. Are these mini sites with each one devoted to a single product, or are you making bigger sites that have lots of pages of product? I want to pick a somewhat broad, but not too broad, category and have lots of individual products that fall within it.
Hi KCMark,
Most of them have 5 pages. 3 that talk about the product (one might be reviews, another might be technical description and so on). The last two are a privacy policy page and a links page where I link out to high profile sites like wikipedia or the manufacturer for more info.
On the 3 pages that have info about the product, there are affiliate links to amazon, but not on the other two.
HTH
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
just want to thank you for sharing so openingly what many try to over charge for. I pray that you are truely blessed for all that you are giving out
and you will have increase in every area of your life
Thanks for sharing info about your earnings. It is inspiring and specially as I have also just started promoting amazon products. I hope it goes well.