Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

I first got into the idea of making money online several years ago. At that time, I had no idea what to do, what to sell, or how to do it.

One of the schemes that I tried included selling ebooks. I remember signing up at a site that sold ebooks that you could customise with your own name and appearance. I guess it was effectively a single site to which you could apply your own theme, and your own sub-domain simply redirected to that site, passing in theme details.

I didn't make a single cent from that site, because I had no idea how to promote it.

One thing I remember from that site though, was that it also sold Clickbank products, and it was at that time that I first registered with Clickbank. In fact my Clickbank nickname was generated for me by that site, so every time I log in to Clickbank, I am reminded of it.

That site has long since passed into oblivion, but I still have my Clickbank account, and have always been interested in the possibilities of affiliate marketing.

I sold a few Clickbank products, but never actually received any money from Clickbank. This was due to Clickbank's accounting policies which I never managed to satisfy. Frustrated, I lost interest in Clickbank for a year or two, and by the time I came back to it, I discovered that my account was now empty because Clickbank applies charges to "dormant" accounts - that is accounts that show no activity for an extended period.

Since then, I made a few more sales, and finally passed all the criteria of the accounting polices. Last month I received my first payment from them. What a great relief to get past that stage.

My efforts are not concentrated on promoting Clickbank products at the moment, but I do have a few affiliate links running. I'm now getting a few sales per week from ads that I put on my sites ages ago, which looks promising. I don't get a huge amount of traffic to those sites, which makes it even better. The good thing is that just one sale per month is enough to stop the account going dormant, so my accrued earnings are a lot safer than before.

As it happens, the level of sales that I am currently getting (even with no real promotional effort on my part) mean that I will pass the $100 payment threshold every 6 weeks. Sure, it's not much, but I'm not doing anything to promote it. $100 every 6 weeks is equivalent to $866 per year, for doing almost nothing.
Think how much better I could do if I spent 30 minutes or so every day actively promoting my links?

Oh, and by the way, these are results after Google dropped most of my sites from the search engine results following a hack on my host server. They are only now beginning to recover from that.

2011 Is Going To Be My Year!

And so another 2 months pass without any posts on this blog. Too busy doing other things, and to be honest, this blog is bottom of the list of things for me to do.
There just aren't enough hours in the day that I can call my own.

Anyway, as it's the beginning of a new month, here's a progress report. I really believe that 2011 is going to be the year that I start to make some real money from the Internet.

My friend Dan and I made a nice amount of money each during November/December last year, selling a software product that I have written. So that we could handle any requested refunds (there weren't any!), we didn't take the money until late December. A nice bonus on the run-up to Christmas.

I spent most of January working on new features for version 2.1 of the software, which has now also undergone a name change.
The new version goes on sale tomorrow (2nd February 2011). We have a lot more Affiliates (or JV Partners) lined up this time, so we're hoping for a lot more sales.

We have also reduced the affiliate commission from 75% to 50%, which should also increase our income. We still think that's a great deal for affiliates, though.

We've also increased the price slightly. It was really under-priced before, but we were just starting out with a new product, so we decided to keep the price low. Now that the product has moved on and provides more automated features, we think we can justify the price increase.

Mistakes Made
When we released our software in November, we made some mistakes. This time, we're being a lot smarter about it.

• The release date was just before Thanksgiving, so the response was lower than it might have been. This time, we're releasing it during a flat time when people are looking for ways to make money online.
• We didn't recruit enough affiliates. This time we have many more than last time.
• A BIG mistake was that we had no up-sell. That's one of those special one-time offers you present after making a sale. By making the offer one-time, it coerces the customer into purchasing while they have the chance for fear of losing out.
  An advantage of the up-sell is that you don't have to pay commissions on it. This time, we have a great up-sell, limited to just 50 copies, which will bring in an additional $2,500 each (to Dan and me).
• Follow-up was pretty poor on our part. Having built a list of customers, we haven't exploited that list at all. In fact, we haven't really sent out anything except news of bug-fixes and the forthcoming new version of the software.

Income
January was pretty quiet after our initial sales in December.

AdSense income has maintained a good average, but nothing outstanding.

I finally received my first payment from Clickbank! Until now I had not satisfied the CDR (Customer Distribution Requirements), which I have mentioned before on this blog. Finally, I got past that stumbling block and having also passed the payment threshold, I was sent a payment of $142.19.
Again, not huge, but it all adds up.

Receiving that first payment lifts a big psychological barrier. It's frustrating waiting to get past the CDR, but now that it has happened and I see real money in my bank account, I am spurred on to make more. So hopefully I'll be seeing payments on a regular basis. Clickbank pay every 2 weeks as long as you have exceeded the payment threshold, and my aim is to ramp up my Clickbank sales so that I receive a payment every 2 weeks without fail. Getting a cash injection mid-month will be fantastic. (I still have a day-job and will continue to do so until my online activities regularly bring in considerably more than my salary)

Residual Income
On the back of sales of our software product, I managed to make an affiliate sale of Aweber, the autoresponder. They pay 30%, and on a basic account that costs $19 per month, that's a payment to me of $5.70 every month. That may not sound like much, but the commission continues to be paid all the time that the buyer remains a customer of Aweber. Again, it's not going to make me rich, but think of it this way...
If I manage to sign up about 550 customers, the amount I would earn in commissions would be equivalent to the average UK salary. That's not bad for doing nothing except making that initial sale to each of those customers.

Plans
After release of version 2.1 of our software, development doesn't stop. I'm already working on version 3.0, which is going to have loads of great new features that will make it into a complete solution for product creation, marketing and list-building.

I also have several ideas for new software products to follow this one.

A Final Word
It may seem strange that I talk about my software without mentioning it by name or trying to sell it from this site.

Well the whole point of this site is to discuss online marketing - how I am going about it, and what results I am getting. It isn't about the products that I'm selling. It's all new ground for me, so I see it as a learning process. Until I have established a set of procedures for product creation and marketing, and proved that they work, I don't consider myself to be a true online marketer.

Once I feel that I have "made it" in this field, the nature of this blog might change, but the emphasis will still remain on techniques rather than products.

And actually, there is a link to the home page of my product on this page.