October Earnings, and further reflections

by Sapphire (November 9, 2008)

I’ve been away from this site for a long time. I’ve also not been keeping up with affiliate marketing lately. I have missed you guys and this site, though. More on all this later.

My earnings for October jumped because suddenly people bought ads directly from me on a couple of sites. This was totally unexpected, given the way the economy’s going and all the reports on Wall Street that the only ad broker doing well online is Google. But I can’t rely on it to happen again this month or the next. Sales are really uncertain right now. Instead of reporting what I earned last month, I’ve decided to take a look at what I can actually rely on each site to bring in monthly, and some of each site’s relative merits and problems - because I’ve got too much going on. There is just no way I can continue doing what I’ve been doing.

• B-2 Bomber: $80
• Mai Tai: $27
• My various article sites: $10, collectively
• Blue Mushrooms: $0
• ChillyCool: $0
• Thin affiliate sites: $0
• B-2 Bomber’s Little Friend: $0
• Total: $117

That’s just not cutting it. And I have a number of sites I want to launch that have been sitting around for months, waiting for me to find time. Where’s my time going?

• The people I love. If I was willing to give up time with them, I’d have gone into law and be seriously rich.
• B-2 Bomber: it is the most time-consuming thing in my life, despite a ton of volunteers. Every single post takes hours, and then there are a million other things to do. Six months ago, it looked like I was within a month of reaching the tipping point where I can step back, the site can run itself a bit more, the volunteers can do a bit more… and then the economy shifted and everyone’s day jobs decided they could do twice the work for the same money and be grateful for it. So I’m still locked in that miserable point where I’m working my ass off and can’t quite shift the site into cruise mode. But cruise mode will come. Eventually. I just have to avoid losing my mind until that point, and maybe then I can focus more on other sites.
• I’ve completely stopped updating ChillyCool (months ago) and yet it still gets visits. Weird. I keep thinking I ought to sell that site or this one, or something, but I have no time to think about it.
• As you may have noticed, I’ve really stopped posting regularly here - again, purely a time consideration. And a lack of anything to say. What would I describe? All the things I’m doing on B-2 Bomber that have nothing to do with affiliate marketing and wouldn’t work on your sites because B-2 Bomber is a whole different kettle of fish?
• Mai Tai isn’t getting regular updates. It’s not months behind or anything, but I’m no longer willing to force out a post when I’m not remotely inspired.

So here’s my plan:

• B-2 Bomber is still my best hope of a full-fledged business based on one website. There’s so much it could do offline as well. So I’m not setting any ultimatums for it.
• Mai Tai has got to start bringing in at least $50/month reliably by the end of March 2009. If not, I’m going to look at selling it. To achieve this, I’m going to try marketing it more. I’m happy to say posting irregularly hasn’t hurt the traffic any, so I’m going to reduce the number of times I post per week.
• I’m putting no further money nor effort into my article sites. They bring in a decent amount of Adsense, but they’re not terribly dependable, and it’s not worth trying to guess what Google wants this month.

In short, I’m letting go of everything that doesn’t demonstrate to me it can be of value, and trying new things in their stead. I also intend to cut back the time I spend on all this. I’ve been spending about 60 hours a week - unbelievable, for $117 a month - so now I’m going to try to track my time and cut it down to 21 hours a week, or three hours a day. Maybe this will force me to work smarter instead of harder, which is really key in entrepreneurship.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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