1) Become a full time affiliate marketer

Having set this in December I was pretty happy to have become a full time affiliate marketer by the end of March, my main problem was always trying to find the right time to make the jump but I realized that it will never come round so just decided to do it – so far so good!

2) Hit 6 figures a month

It’s took me 6 months to reach this goal as June was my first month to hit 6 figures in revenue as you can see from this post. I’m still really happy with this because when I was setting my goals I said that I was only doing 5 figures/month in revenue so it’s a pretty big jump.

3) Reach 1,000 RSS subscribers

I always knew this would be the hardest of the 3 goals, I’m only on about ~400 readers at the moment which does put me behind target but with every new goals I post about I get a flood of people signing up which gives me the motivation (ish) to keep putting more work into my affiliate marketing efforts to assist this goal.

I think I will be having a competition of some sort to give a reason to subscribe to the blog, I will have a think about it and keep you all updated.

I got an email from my host saying:

I was forced to suspend the script “/public_html/tracking202/static/record.php” as it was causing a high load on the server.

This sort of thing is way over my head to be honest so I didn’t think much of it, around the time of the email I was browsing around my stats and it was running really slow so I thought that because I was clicking here, there and everything, it may have put too much load on the server or something causing it to be stopped.

Anyway, when I got up this morning and checked my stats for yesterday my ROI was terrible compared to the past weeks which I thought was odd but come to terms with as it may have been a bad day in terms of conversions but what got me was when I checked today’s performance so far it was even worse.

I checked my prosper202 to see what was happening, on the overview it stated nothing… I went to my domains and they loaded fine and checked back in prosper and my click was there which got me even more confused. After a couple of emails back and forth from my hosting company and speaking to a couple of people who know the technical side of things it was apparent that the script was enabled for my IP and my IP only (hence prosper202 not tracking anything bar my clicks), what this also meant is that the traffic I have been paying for have absolutely zero chance of converting because when they click on the link that redirects them to the offer – they get a message saying that they didn’t have permission to view that page.

The day this came about happened to be a really good day in terms of traffic which was even more painful to see such a bad conversion rate but it seems that I put too much strain on my crappy server causing them to suspend the script taking me down without me even knowing. I was still paying for clicks and had been until I caught on which is a real kick in the balls and I could see my profit/day streak come to an end.

I have replaced my prosper202 redirects with a simple php redirect which looks like this:

< ?php
header('Location: http://www.offerdomain.com');
?>

***REMOVE THE SPACING BETWEEN < ?PHP IF YOU USE IT***

Basically I will still get the leads but have no way of tracking where they came from, that’s not such a big issue as the campaign has been on autopilot for about 2-3 weeks now without me checking that side of things.

My main concern now is that I was about to launch another campaign today but without tracking I’ll be throwing money away so I will put that on hold.

I have been recommended a dedicated server which I’d like to say looks good but I have no idea about the specs or anything but I put my faith in the person who told me to get that specific one

So, why is the title of this post what it is? Basically you have to plan ahead at some point and if you are on shared or reseller hosting you could be faced with this problem sooner than you think. It pretty much shafted me overnight and if I was on holiday or away from a computer I wouldn’t have even known until I was back.

I intend on keeping my current hosting for my blog and other smaller sites because mainly it’s about $25-30/month and I can’t be bothered to switch everything over but all of my affiliate marketing campaigns along with my prosper202 will be moved over to my new dedicated server ASAP.

On a good note the majority of last months income came from my blog itself and not referrals as all bar one spot on my 125×125 advertising section have been bought by paying customers.

My blog brought in a total of $47.39 during June.

I owe them big time for my success because without their tracking platform I would probably be still struggling to get weekly wires which is why I’m paying them back by trying to get the word out to as many people as possible.

I actually signed up myself today so I can’t go into much detail about the network itself but I have no concerns about it not being up to/over the standards of any other network out there. These guys know what they are talking about and the help I received when having issues with Stats202 was amazing.

If you haven’t already go ahead and sign up with them, consider the task of finding a legit network that offers the top converting offers combined with the highest payment done!

Once I get a reply and hopefully a place in the network I will probably follow up with my initial opinion compared to the networks I use and love at the moment.

I did let my motivation slip down and I have spent a fair amount of time away from my computer and enjoying the benefits of working from home when/how much you want. I also bought a new car which I’m still trying to get round to taking some pics and getting a post sorted.

Anyway here is how I did in June:

Revenue = $144,472.76
Spend = $74,150.29

Profit = $70,322.47

As you will know I had some really good days in June which I posted about, since then my performance has slowed a little but that’s due to not working on my affiliate marketing. I will be picking up where I left off and trying to hit that 6 figure profit per month.

While this type of information is helpful in guiding you in the right direction, don’t disregard other offers that may not seem the best option due to lower conversion rate, EPC or even payout. Different offers convert differently on different traffic, what works for you might not work for someone else and vice versa – that goes for the payout too, if you were getting $20 payout for one offer that converted at 10% and another offer that paid out $15 but converted 20%, which would you rather run?

From there once you have the volume you can ask your affiliate manager for a better payout which puts you in a win win situation.

You are best to cover yourself by testing the offers you have looked at and think have potential, like mentioned in my earlier post you could send 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 or whatever percentage of traffic to that offer just to test it without risking a large share of your revenue.

The problem I’m faced with is that it’s picking up my revenue from the networks and displaying it under ‘my earnings’ but it doesn’t seem to be updating my subids automatically in my prosper202 account. My postback url is exactly as stated in my setup so I’m not sure what the problem is.

A little more information – I’m using prosper202 and the unsecured postback url as my p202 domain doesn’t have SSL installed.

I’ve spoke to people using this already and it seems to work fine, the only difference is that they use tracking202. I’m guessing that shouldn’t be a big deal.

Anyone using stats202 with prosper202?

• Adding more keywords
• Playing with bids
• Split testing my landing page
• Etc

The reason for this post is because once I found my winning offer I didn’t really go back to it and try out other offers to see if I could increase my EPC. Have you ever thought that advertisers know a good converting offer page and then begin to tweak their own to try and beat it?

If there are any new offers in your niche you should be trying them to see how they perform, it only takes a couple of minutes and depending on your volume it could have a huge increase on your revenue/profit margin.

If you use prosper202 or tracking202 then you can easily rotate your urls by going to :

• #3 Aff Campaigns
• Edit the desired offer
• Click rotate urls to yes and insert up to 5 urls to rotate

What I tend to do is copy my current best performer and use that url for #1 and #2 then use the new offer you are testing as #3, that way you are only sacrificing 1/3 of your traffic if the offer sucks, depending on your preference and profit margin you may want to use 1/4 or 1/5 of your traffic to play it safe.

Here are the stats from yesterday:

Spend - $5,201.22
Revenue - $15,909
Profit - $10,707.78
ROI – 205.87%

It’s funny how things change because I chat daily to a couple of close friends in the affiliate marketing industry comparing stats, having some healthy competition and helping each other out and now I get worried when I only make that $1,000 profit in a single day.

Anyway this will be my last day record post (I promise this time) and will be going to monthly record/goals. I have seen some good days this month so I’m eager to find out what the end result will be.