Yay! I’ve made my first sales!
February 18, 2008
Stumble it!This post is made by Stephane, when he sent me an email telling me that he made his first sales in this business. So I asked to write a summary of how he succeeded those sales in just few weeks. He is the owner of many websites one of them is TheWebmastersCafe.net read it and enjoy it. Thanks Stephane for sharing your success
My name is Stephane. I am a 33 years old computer programmer from Canada. From age 20 to 23, I’ve been working for an ISP, administering web servers and providing customer support for a company now known as NetRevolution.com. For the following year, I’ve been developing softwares for a company called Wildfire Equipment (http://www.wildfire-equipment.com) but I quickly moved to a Canadian government branch. Since then, I’ve been a system administrator working with technologies such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft SMS and ESX (a VMware product). Besides system administration, I’ve been developing many websites and web applications for government institutions.
As a sideline, I’ve been creating some websites such as OleCommunication.com and Camoplast.com. I quickly left that aside as customer support became out of control. By that time, I put up HomeMusician.net as a hobby site. I just did it for the fun of it and at some point I put up some banners to see if I could make a few bucks. For the first two years, I barely made about $30 a month but I didn’t realize I could make much more until I found an ebook on how to optimize my AdSense ads. I tweaked the hell out of HomeMusician.net and did a lot of SEO. Within a 3 months span, my income raised to about $350 per month!
At this point, nothing could stop me from being the next Donald Trump. Ok maybe not. But I was determined to make way more money online. This is when I bought the Waterhouse Report ebook. What a load of crap! But I knew there still something behind all those crappy ebooks so I started to search for some more although I didn’t want to pay for them anymore. This is when I found out about WickedFire.com. They had a thread where they would expose every single “Get Rich Quick” ebooks for free. But I had found something better than all those ebooks: a forum full of affiliate marketers! At this point I read a lot of information on affiliate marketing and finally bought one last ebook: Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To AdWords. I still think it was worth it today and I would recommend it to anyone who want to start in PPC marketing.
In late June 2007, I found out about a lot of useful affiliate marketing blogs like SuperAffiliateMindset.com, ShoeMoney.com, AffiliateStuff.co.uk, Blog.RevenueWire.com and of course the ever excellent GoogleLady.com. Keeping on with the flow of information from these blogs was a total pain so I opened a Google Reader account (http://www.google.com/reader) and added all those useful RSS feeds so I could read them all from a single interface. To this day, I still go through all my favorite affiliate marketing blogs at least twice a week!
In late August 2007, I put up my first blog ever: TheWebmastersCafe.net. I learned a lot of stuff about Wordpress and blogging in general. I did learn another lesson: this blog started way too broad. I had too many topics (web design, programming, affiliate marketing, etc.) and posting valuable content on a regular basis in all those areas was exhausting.
In early December 2007, I’ve put TheWebmastersCafe.net aside for awhile. This is when I started TheWebHostingHero.com. This time I wouldn’t go as broad as I did before. Even though web hosting is a really competitive niche, I thought that most of it was made of crappy “Top Ten Web Hosting” sites. I knew that my expertise in web hosting could provide some useful content for my readers and that writing for that particular niche would be easy as I really like the topic. In early January 2008, I finally launched TheWebHostingHero.com. Within almost three weeks I already made near $800 although the site is far from being completed. I had launched an AdWords campaign but I soon realized that my sales came from organic traffic only. Here’s a screenshot from my Commission Junction account:
To this day, I still believe in true and valuable content. Build it and they will come. And this is what I do with TheWebHostingHero.com.
The hardest part has to be motivation. To keep myself from abandonning, I’ve read many books like Think And Grow Rich, The Magic Of Thinking Big, Being Happy and The Four Hour Workweek. So basically, this is it: read a lot on affliate marketing and motivation, never quit and don’t wait “until you think you know everything” before you start something out. Start now and adjust later!
Good luck to you all!
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February 18th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Would you please tell us how you have been able to get a lot of organic traffic with such a new blog? The web hosting niche is very competitive. I am impressed that you have been able to get a lot of search engine traffic.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:22 am
I am new to affiliate marketing and making money online and this article was very inspired
February 18th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
It always easier to work in a niche you know about and love. I’ve been working in this industry for nearly 13 years so I know what people are looking for.
That being said, try using seodigger.com and see what drives traffic to other sites. Then write a LOT of useful and honest content (100+ articles), analyze your statistics and see what generates the most traffic. Focus on those keyphrases / keywords and write some more content. Once you’ve collected enough data, do some SEO and drive some more traffic.
As far as SEO goes, I use IBP / Arelis from axandra.com
Hope this helps!
February 18th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for sharing Googlelady and congratulations to Stephane. I’m still in the process of starting my site. Hope I can get the same, if not better result.
Gotta research that forum on crappy ebooks at WickedFire.com and read on affiliate marketing.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Mel, do not buy any e-books you don’t need it at the moment. On February 26, 2008 I will publish an article: Strategies to Learn Affiliate Marketing for Free
So hold your breath!
February 18th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I’ll surely wait for that.
February 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Hi GoogleLady,
I saw that you happen to drop by by blog one day and here i’m here on your blog.
Felt honoured to be visited by a super affiliate.
Wonderful post here by Stephane. Indeed inspiring and motivating. I was once trying to earn some decent money online and through much determination and perservance, i’m making some money now.
Hope to encourage and motivate all newcomers to take the first step out and start learning how to market on the Internet.
There’s never a niche too competitive or too tough to conquer. You just need the right knowledge to kick your competitors out of the game.
Regards,
Ivan Ong
http://ivan-ong.com
February 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hey Ivan,
Thanks for coming and make this great motivated comment I am sure will help many!
February 20th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Thanks for the encouragement. With so many super affiliates around making so much money in affiliate marketing. I don’t see why i can’t make at least half of what you guys are earning!
I wont stop until i’m there! When i’m there, let me do a guest post on your blog regarding my success yeah?
When i say i’m there. It means netting US 5 figure every month.
February 22nd, 2008 at 3:03 pm
I am always happy to hear good news, congrats step.
Maybe its the time to get my first sales also. my affiliate earning at CJ still 0 right now..
thanks for sharing