I Made $182.64 Profit Last Month

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything.”
-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Yep that’s right kids, and no you didn’t read it wrong. Did the stats for last month and profit came out to $182.64.

When most affiliate bloggers make a post about earnings, it’s to boast about how much they made and/or for link-bait. Hey, I did it myself a couple times and it does it’s job. But what most affiliates don’t post about, are the bad months, and the very bad months. And last month just happened to be my worst month in affiliate marketing, ever. Nobody has the balls to admit when they’re struggling. I’ll admit I probably wouldn’t have the balls to post this if I hadn’t turned it back around and was doing awesome now. If I was still in a slump I’d probably just keep it quiet.

So instead of telling you how I earned $300k/month and what I did to get there, I’m going to tell you what I did to let myself slip and have a horrible month. Because affiliate marketing really is a roller coaster ride, there’s ups and downs. The real trick I’ve found out is getting off the rollercoaster and onto something more consistent, which is more longterm niches and getting on the advertiser side of things. Here’s why I bombed out in November :

1) TOO MANY THINGS AT ONCE.

Easily the biggest reason. I had way too many things trying to go at once. And it’s hard with at least 5 affiliate managers IM’ing me every day saying “yo man check out this offer a pub is rocking it doing this”. So I’m like alright I’ll give it a shot. I end up giving 5 offers a shot in 1 week, they all lose money and I have to end up pausing them all because it’s too overwhelming.

So while I had a couple campaigns doing well, losing money on all these new offers I tested just sucked the profit away. Got in way over my head with too much to do and not enough time to actually put an effort into it.

2) Beating a dead horse.

I had a campaign that rocked in October, like $5k profit/day rocked and it was great. But I knew from the start that it would be temporary and it would die for a number of reasons. Well around the last couple days of October, my predictions came true and it did indeed die out. Instead of accepting the fact that it died and moving on, I tried to revive it in November. I jacked bids way up, was completely careless, and ended up losing A LOT of money.

3) Playa got dumped!

I usually don’t involve too many personal things in my blog, but since this was a big contributing factor I might as well mention it. My girlfriend and I were together for almost 3 years and I got canned at the end of October. If anybody has been in a long-term relationship and dumped, it’s HARD. For the longest time (pretty much all of November) I barely had the urge to work. I’d sit down at the computer everyday like I always do for hours, but somehow I’d barely get anything done. Just no desire to do anything really, so when things tanked I just kind of said whatever and didn’t really care.

4) Testing things with actual potential.

This isn’t really a reason you should try to avoid, but it’s a reason for the crappy month. I actually had an offer I knew had potential, so I made the investment to test out a bunch of stuff and right now it’s paid off.

5) Played around with some non-affiliate sites.

I had a couple ideas for sites that could go viral, so I spent a lot of time building them, and then spent a few thousand on sending traffic to them. That hasn’t paid back at all, but I thought the ideas had potential (and they still do). So there’s another $5-10k + Time gone.

6) Dating died for me.

I got back into dating for a few months and it was doing pretty well. Margins were still really low, but it profited decently and I got a ton of Amex points. Then pretty out of the blue I get cut by True. Alright, move to Spicy over at Copeac. Does pretty good again, and then out of the blue my EPC gets cut almost in half. Margins were low to begin, so cutting conversions in half had me losing a pretty penny. I tried to beat the dead horse for a week or so but just ended up losing more and more money. Woot!

After actually typing out all the things went wrong, I’m still actually very surprised I managed to profit at all haha. But looking into the future, and looking into now, I’ve turned things around pretty well. The first 2 days of December have been totally awesome and it’s looking only up from here. So now what did I do to turn it around?

Focused on only 2 projects. I knew I was getting in way over my head, and knew I had to simplify things. So I had 2 things going for me - the 1 affiliate offer that had potential, and the product I’m working on creating and becoming and advertiser for. I told myself that no matter what, I was going to work on these 2 things exclusively. Well, amazing things happen when you actually listen to yourself and commit to something. I’ve been working on this affiliate offer and it’s doing extremely well and growing fast. Instead of making one landing page for 3 offers and testing them all, I tested multiple pages with this one offer, put more focus on ad copy, and tested a couple different offers. Just focusing hard on ad copy alone, my cost per conversion is about $7 lower and my CTR is almost double. This makes clicks cheaper, quality score rise, and more profit. Then I have the product I’m working on that I’m pretty much outsourcing all the work to, so my work comes in just managing it and planning everything.

Getting a grip. I had to realize that just because I’m glum from being dumped doesn’t mean that life wouldn’t pause with me as well. My house needed to be maintained, I still had bills, and an employee to pay. I already have enough money saved up for quite a few years of that, but when you have a $100 profit month, it still scares you. And I know a bunch of big guys that have plenty of money, but when their biggest stuff starts to dry out, they get worried too…it’s just natural.

Burning and cremating the dead horses. Sure other things out there make a lot of money and other affiliates are doing insane things with them. It was a dead horse for me and instead of going back and trying to bring it back alive, I just burned the horse and spread it’s ashes in the sea. I stopped worrying about what I could be making with these offers, and started accepting what I did make with them. Doing this allowed me to just focus on 1 main offer, which has been paying off great.

Haven’t really posted in a while and just wanted to let you guys know that nobody is invincible, and you really can go from everything, to nothing, back to everything in 1 month. Pretty crazy.