With all of my computer problems last month I never got around to posting my September online earnings, or setting a goal for October. My goal for September, if you'll remember, was $45. I did exceed that goal by about 27% with a grand total of $57.44. In October, despite having no home computer most of the month, I still managed to make $32.63. Most of my income is still coming from sponsored blog posts and reviews, which brought in $32.20 in September and $26 in October.
Affiliate marketing continues to be challenging for me, since, like I've mentioned before, I'm not a person who is good at selling things unless it is something I have extremely positive personal experience with. Since merchants rarely give affiliates free products to try out, and I don't have the extra cash to be buying things just to review them, this doesn't happen very often. Another challenge is that whenever I find something I'm really interested in promoting, for some unknown reason the merchant only allows promotion via e-mail. This still really bothers me because I feel that it encourages spam. Even though they say you should promote to opt-in lists only, I receive large amounts of spam in my own inbox every day promoting these same products.
Here's an example of one of these e-mail only campaigns. With the economy the way it is, one of the ways I'm saving money this Christmas is by sending paper greeting cards only to those few of my loved ones who don't have e-mail. I wanted to recommend this strategy to my readers, and it just so happens that VistaPrint is offering 10 free custom holiday cards (pay shipping only), and giving affiliates a pretty generous commission. But, you guessed it... I am only allowed to promote the offer through e-mail. What good reason do they have to stop people from posting this offer to their blogs?
Now, since I've told you about this, there's nothing stopping you from just going to VistaPrint and taking advantage of it without me getting the credit. If you do want me to send you the e-mail, however, so that I can have the commission, subscribe to this mailing list. It's a double opt-in list, which means you have to confirm your subscription before you'll receive anything. I'm going to use it to send out promotions I'm only allowed to share via e-mail. This will never be spammy; I'll only send out things I think are a really good idea, products I use and love myself, and deals I think are too good to pass up. Now I know if you're someone who doesn't know me from the next blogger on your feed reader, you have no reason to want to give me your affiliate commissions rather than someone else. And I don't expect you to. By all means, if you know someone personally who is trying to make money with affiliate programs, please give them as many sales as you possibly can. But if you're one of my friends or family and I'm the only affiliate marketer you know, it would be so appreciated if you would be willing to help me out... especially if there is something you were going to buy anyway. Join the list, and also if there's ever a purchase you're considering and you're curious as to whether you might be able to get me a commission for it, please ask!
So what do I have planned for this month? The biggest thing is that tomorrow I will begin working on a blog template design job for a pretty well-known writer. I will reveal more when the work is done, but for now I'll just say that I'm really excited about this, and not only about the income this job is going to generate, but also what it could do for my ability to get more design work in the future. I'm also going to try to get started on a web games section for confoozled.com. There will be free, ad-supported games, as well as free demo games which pay me a commission when you buy the full version. I had originally planned to launch this on its own domain, but I've decided that for right now I can't afford to buy any new domain names. Perhaps I will move it to its own domain later when I'm making more.
Because of the design work I'll be doing, I'm setting an ambitious goal this month of $150. I very well may exceed this goal by quite a bit, which would make me very happy. But since I honestly don't know how many hours I'm going to end up putting in, I'm keeping the goal reasonable. Wish me luck!
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