November 2010 has probably been the best month ever for me in terms of online marketing activities for a number of reasons.
1) AdSense income, although still comparatively small, was the second best month I've had in the 5 years that I've had an AdSense account. It took me over 4 years to get my first payment from Google, but at the current rate of income, the next payment will arrive in less than a year. Bear in mind that I don't put a huge amount of importance on AdSense ads - it's just an easy way of earning a few extra pounds every month.
2) Residual income is one of the best parts of marketing. Basically, you sell something that requires a regular payment from the customer. As an affiliate marketer, you get a commission payment every month. This month I sold one such item. It was an account at Aweber, the popular autoresponder service. Commission payments are 30%, and a basic account costs $19 per month, making the monthly income from this a respectable $5.70. It might not sound like much, but imagine selling 10 accounts. Or 50. It is actually better to have a lot of small income streams than a few large ones.
3) After my hosting account was hacked and all my domains were dropped by Google, I am happy to report that they have all started to come back again. In fact, I appear to be getting more traffic than I did before the hack occurred.
4) For the last few months, I've been working in conjunction with one of my friends on a new piece of software aimed at online marketers who are finding it difficult to build a list. It may seem a little strange that I'm not mentioning and promoting it here, but the whole point of this blog is to describe the techniques that I am using to try to increase my online income.
As we are both based in the UK, we made the mistake of launching the software the day before Thanksgiving in the USA. We don't have Thanksgiving in the UK, so the date didn't really mean anything to us. Anyway, we think that as many of our potential customers and affiliate marketers are based in the USA, it probably affected the sales somewhat. And Black Friday followed Thanksgiving, closely followed by Cyber Monday.
All the same, sales were not bad, and we made a fairly decent amount of money.
The software was very well received and we're already working on making the next version a lot more powerful and easier to use.
Another important part of selling this software is that we have now built a list of buying customers. Additionally, we gave away a free demo version and have built a list of prospects from that. And as any online market knows; the money is in the list.
My friend and I are very positive about what we have achieved and feel we are ending this year on a high. We know we can't rest on our laurels - we have to maintain the momentum. But after years of trying, it is so good to feel that we are now on our way to some serious income.
By the way, my affiliate link for Aweber was embedded in the software, so the sale that I made was actually off the back of the software sale. This proves that if you get your marketing right, you can get multiple sales from just one item.
