David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

I haven't done an analysis for a while so I thought I would write one - oh, and I've just made my first sale on Hotel Room UK so I'm quite chuffed at that!
 
If you have been following my blog, you will know a while back I said I was going to set up multiple niche sites and have lots of small earners rather than one big earner.

(Side note: For those who didn't know this, I also promised to redesign this site and add a static section with detailed project information - that's still in the pipeline! If you want to know more about my project, look through the archives.)

Anyway, the multiple websites thing got off to a good start. I created a handful and they are all indexed in Google and for good terms too. Between them, in less than a month, they have covered their costs in domain registrations which is a promising start.

Overall, my project has now made £500 in about 9-10 months. That's poor but it is certainly a start. Please recognise here that a) this is not my earnings (just my project earnings from affiliate marketing) and b) this covers costs too. £500 is pure profit.

By my website calculations, my annual earnings from this project are nearly £1,500 a year. Again, hardly liveable.

HOWEVER, and it's a big however, this is all revenue from just SEO. I dabbled with PPC and blew £100. So it is feasible to make money from SEO. It just takes time and patience. All my sites have experienced earnings growth over the past few months with this month being quite possibly the best month yet.

So I recognise the need to concentrate on PPC to boost this revenue faster, but for that I need some money. Enter a project that I briefly touched upon a few days ago. Again, I can't disclose too much apart from it is not affiliate based. But it has the potential to generate some PPC pocket money.

My strategy at the moment is to continue setting up lots of small niche websites using SEO to drive traffic to my affiliate sites. Once I have a pot of cash set aside, I will delve back into PPC with a fresh head and try and get somewhere.

So, bearing in mind that all my revenue has been from SEO, here's some interesting site stats.

• Compare Sat Nav now has over 800 unique visitors per week on average. I would like to see the day it has 8,000 a week. If it keeps the same conversion rate and revenue potential, I'm a happy man (though not a rich man - consumer electronics have pathetic margins slapped onto them).
• Computer Chooser is dead in my eyes. It's not what I intended it to be and I want to go back to the drawing board. It was never designed to be a blog but at the time, I had to throw something up there! It gets over 60 uniques a week but a lot of these are from Google Image search.
• Gifts of Crystal was set up to be a niche website and indeed that's what it does. It has nearly 80 uniques a week and has a small earnings potential but as the product itself is expensive, it struggles to convert.
• Lingerie Helper suffers from image searchers too but has a better conversion rate in my opinion than Computer Chooser, even though my stats say otherwise!
• Finally, Hotel Room UK (in 2 months) has achieved 476 uniques a week! It's taken Compare Sat Nav nearly a year to get to 800. However, a 0.03% conversion is terrible!

Overall, the sites are plodding along. I've added more than when I last did one of these analysis reviews and the revenue has increased, but not enough to live off.

9 months into the project and I've made an income stream of around £1500 a year. Was it easy? No. Was it as quick as I imagined? No. Will I continue? Oh, yes, yes, yes (as the Churchill dog puts it)!

So far I have learned that it is difficult to earn large sums quickly using SEO but it can be expensive using PPC.

I'm now off to generate a PPC fund and then try and get to grips with that. I will get there. It's just a matter of when not if.