BLOG INCOME
$28.50
PAID ADVERTISING
REVENUE: $8,170.49
COST: $4,203.38
P/L: +$3,967.11
TOTAL INCOME
$3,995.61
Analyzing This Month
Another Record Month! (Just).
Although February was the shortest month I’ve had so far, (28 days), it’s actually been my most profitable. It’s also been the month where I’ve spent the LEAST amount of time on my business!
First week or two
I’m not sure about others, but I personally find it difficult to find winning campaigns. I’ll throw up about 20 different angles/ideas out there across a spectrum of different traffic sources/niches and will probably only see 1 or 2 that seem somewhat promising. Following the clues I then should be able to get something profitable.
For this reason, I’ve had to get myself into a routine of consistently building campaigns. I don’t know if I’ve said this in the past but I ensure I have a ‘campaign building’ part of my day where I ONLY focus on building new campaigns. I spend about 2-4 hours a day building,
- 1-4 Teespring + FB/Google Campaigns
- 5-10 SaS + Google Campaigns
- 1-2 PPV/PPcall/Random Campaigns
Much of early Feb was spent ensuring I get into this routine. I’d spend about 2 hours on the activities above and do a little work here and there to maintain my current campaigns. I actually found it hard to get back into things because I knew I was going to go on holiday mid February.
Another Holiday! – BUZZING with Ideas,
So Mid Month, (February 12th), I went to Malaysia & Thailand. Although I was on holiday I kept a keen eye out for ideas I could implement on my business. Since the start, I’ve always just used notepad or the default notes app on my mobile phone to jot down ideas I think of. I did the same here and after a couple of weeks had a lot of things I wanted to try! (See below)
During the end of the holiday all I wanted to do was just come home and implement everything above. Since I was limited with internet, I actually only ended up working about 5 hours in total. The funny thing is that during this time I generated almost 1.6k profit!
It’s a good feeling knowing you’re on holiday but your still generating money, the perks of passive income I guess.
Working less to achieve more
I’m not sure if I mentioned this before but since I’m a workaholic sometimes I just CAN’T seem to shut my brain off work mode! I realized this especially when i was on holiday. My mind just wouldn’t stop scanning around like a radar looking for something I can turn into an idea. I also find myself being quite attached to my laptop and just not mentally there when I hang out with friends and family.
This is something I really needed to work on. Yes, I will probably be able to achieve my financial goals if I continue this way but I can’t see myself achieving my personal goals like fitness, sports, arts, etc. I decided to trial a few mind tricks before I left on my holiday and I properly started implementing it when I got back.
From now on wards I ONLY allow myself to work till 6pm Monday to Friday. I don’t allow myself to even check my stats or read emails after this time or on the weekend. It’s been working like a charm! My mind starts to focus on other things after 6pm and I’m starting to realize how much less of a balanced lifestyle I was living. My diet was starting to suffer because making healthy meals takes time and commitment. Something I was finding hard to give.
Another interesting thing is that since my brain now knows that there is a time where I CAN’T work on my business, it makes itself work hard for the 10 or so hours a day that it has. I’m finding that I’m achieving a hell of a lot more due to this! I was finding it hard sitting down and doing work but now since I know that I can’t work after 6, I try and get a lot of things done.
Motivation, productivity & a healthy mind. This little trick is definitely here to stay.
Importance of Planning
I used to read about this a lot. Successful affiliates used to always advise to make plans and goals for yourself. I never really did this apart from just jot down a bunch of things I wanted to achieve for the day. This approach was ok but I still never had a feeling of fulfillment at the end of the day and never felt like I was getting closer to any goal.
While I was overseas, I had a few days where I had a couple of hours to kill. I took out my laptop and started listing down where I wanted to be one month, two months and even three months from now. I jotted down the following things,
- $500-$1,000 a day profit consistently
- 50-100 popshops
- A very active blog
- 3-5 websites I’m generating passive income from
- A big list of email subscribers I can keep in touch with
- Some niceh related social media accounts, (pinterest/tumblr)
- profitable pay-per-call & mobile campaigns
- Some general other stuff
This allowed me to clear the clutter in my mind a bit. Now I could see what I wanted to achieve and when I wanted to achieve it. I picked each point above had further broke it down into weekly goals. For example, week 1, which is this week consists of the following,
- Build at least 5 teespring + fb campaigns
- Make 75 comments on popular affiliate blogs
- Build 25 Shareasale campaigns
- 2 affengineer posts, (topic: importance of planning & monthly report)
- tumblr fan adding
- finish ebook
- Get 100% back into ppcall follow along on Affplaybook
- sign up to spy software and read up on keyword research
- learn pop shops & register to necessary softwares
- set up 2 youtube sites + tumblr accounts
This is prepping me up for week two where I actually start building popshops & pumping out pay per call campaigns, etc. I can also see when I’m on track and where I’m slacking behind. I’ve realized how important planning is to not only achieve your goals but to also allow your mind to feel healthy and accomplished. I highly suggest you guys do it to if you aren’t already.
Other Income Sources
What I track in my income reports are solely the income made from affiliate marketing via paid advertising. I also make a little money here and there from other methods. For example, (before I knew this was not allowed), I bought a FaceBook fanpage for $130. I later sold it, within a week for $500! It only had 200k followers and was about super cars.
I also generate some money from this site via my Affplaybook referrals, Maxbounty referrals, etc. For the last two months it’s been something like $50-$150/month just from these! If I were to add up these two income sources along with my income from paid advertising, it’d actually be somewhere around $4,400 U.S for this month. That’s almost 5k Aussie dollars which is REALLY good!
Later on I might add another section for this blog where I track this part of my income as well. I have some serious plans to build on my business via non paid advertising methods. More along the lines of having subscription sites, adsense/affiliate websites, etc. I need something to keep my days in green if I’m having a bad day or even a bad month with paid affiliate marketing.
Mostly Passive Income
Passive is a strange word in this industry. Although much of the income I generated this month was due to efforts of the previous month, aside for some tweaking and testing I continue to do, I still need to continually do things in the present to make sure I can secure another future month with profits. What I mean by this is, even though you have money coming in, you still need to be doing something hence twisting that word ‘passive’ a little bit.
I probably did the least amount of month for the whole of Feb, considering I was overseas for half of it and not 100% focused for the first week. For this reason I don’t have much to report on anything ‘new’ and most of this reports was about general things. Hopefully next month I’m going to have heaps of little things I’ve tried and implemented and a lot more golden nuggets within my report.
My eBook
Later on this month I’ll be introducing a little eBook I made. I made it because, well, every blogger has one LOL. nah, to be honest, I’ve always wanted to make one and I thought the idea of compact information where I can go in bit more detail might be of real benefit for people. The topics in the eBook include,
- My Story
- Best Parts of My Blog
- How I make Money with PPV
- How I make Money with Google PPC
- How I make Money with Teesprings
- My Daily Routine
- Habits of a Successful Affiliate
- Resources
- etc,
Look out for it, I’ll be releasing it soon 🙂
Calling Around For Advertisers
As of late, the readership of this blog has been increasing quite a lot. This is due to a bunch of things. I comment a lot on popular forums and my signature links to here. I also seem to have started to rank for some affiliate marketing keywords, particularly for a certain traffic source! I ended up contacting a rep from this traffic source and pitching a referral sign up commission or paid advertising spot and they actually ended up being interested!
I’m going to have a skype chat with them early next week so it’ll be interesting to see what eventuates. I don’t know what to expect BUT I know I’ll learn a lot so am pretty excited.
Hopefully in due time, I’ll have more things like this happening and I’ll be letting you guys know how much money it brings in.
Achievements
✓ Hit a Record $3,967.11 profit month, (this just seems to keep rising!)
✓ Made money buying and selling something completely digital
✓ Set Monthly Goals
✓ Made my first Pay Per Call Conversion
Conclusion
Like I mentioned before, much of this month was actually spent holidaying so there isn’t much to report on intricate campaign details BUT there were a lot of realizations I made this month necessary for the future success of my business.
Moving forward I hope to start working on some long term affiliate marketing assets and generating money from things that don’t solely depend on paid advertising. A more stable business requires multiple income streams which I’m hoping to dedicate much of this year to establish.
Overall I’m happy with the progress I’ve made as an affiliate marketer both in terms of money AND the knowledge I’ve gained. Affiliate marketing is a great way to learn about digital marketing which will be VERY useful if I were to start something along the lines of ecommerce in the future. I guess time will tell how this journey pans out.
Hope you enjoyed the report 🙂
Lastly, if you want me to let you know when I release my March Report, fill in the box in the top right of this page.
~ Mateen
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it’s interesting to notice that you have same profits/revenue/costs to a penny similar to your jan records , hope its just honest mistake
Hey Mannoo,
Which dates are you talking about exactly? My main affiliate campaigns generate me money in increments of $29.25 & $9 per sale/lead hence don’t be surprised if you see some days where they repeat as I end up selling/generating the same number of leads/sales. This is especially true for the ‘revenue’ column
~ Mateen
Hey Mateen,
I think you published post with older number first thats what got my attention ( not prosper screen shot , but the summery section above) REVENUE: $8,925.66 COST: $5,083.75 P/L: +$3,841.91 was repeated for feb.
Your numbers are pretty solid , well done and best of luck
Oh yep, I screwed that up lol. I actually just pressed the ‘publish’ button to see if I had the layout right, I hand’t actually finished the post. You were very quick to read it :p
Thanks bud, best of luck to you too
~ Mateen
Good job man! Always a great feeling to see the same amount of income when you are holiday. Now the time to increase it to at least 5k next month 🙂
Thanks man!
Hey Affengineer, this report is amazing, and it actually gives a lot of cool hints and tips! Your work is amazing, keep it up… 🙂 we need more people like you.
lol thanks 🙂
Awesome stuff.
How did your Teespring run in February?
Quick question on that… are you creating fan pages and doing direct PPC? Or just doing PPC and skipping the fan page part?
Cheers
Hey Djax,
Teespring in February was mainly via Google PPC and brought in approximately 5k in revenue with Google PPC costs totaling 1.5k. Much of what I’m making is via Google adwords,
Basically check out what’s selling REALLY well on teespring.com/discover, make something similar but better and bid for the keywords that most people would be searching to find it. Direct link. Easy 🙂
Hey Mateen,
well done your reports are very solid as always , you are too late with march report though;)