It was June of last year when I set up this blog and, at the time, “Leaving The Day Job” seemed like an achievable goal. I was hoping that by the end of the year I’d be free from the 9 to 5 yoke.
Yet here I am, eight months later, still working in the same day job with no sign of ever making it into even part-time self-employment let alone taking the plunge full-time.
So what went wrong?
Well, it turns out to be harder than I might have imagined to make money online. I had a bit of luck initially and made about 50% of my monthly salary in my first month as an affiliate. And I thought that was it. I thought I was a genius. Of course, it turned out that what I was doing (advertising gambling on Google) was a bit naughty and the big G caught up with me and cut off that lucrative revenue stream.
After that I tried numerous other ideas but they all had one thing in common. I wasn’t doing anything original. The usual suspects: dry, me-too, feed-driven sites; Adwords landing pages; gambling; insurance; mobile phones. And I wasn’t doing any of them particularly well.
Most of the time I was recycling retailers’ copy from their product feeds or when I did write my own copy I did it with little to no regard for SEO or indeed coherency to the reader. I wasn’t writing salesy copy, I wasn’t pre-selling the product, I wasn’t adding any value.
Of course, I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. It just seemed too hard. I knew I was getting it wrong but nothing I tried seemed to work. Despondency kicked in.
I don’t take well to failure. I don’t like not being able to do something. If I can’t do something right first time I tend to give up and sulk. Needless to say this isn’t a very helpful attitude when you’re trying to be self-employed. There’s no one there to tell you to get on with it. If you give up, the whole enterprise falls.
Meanwhile, at the day job, things weren’t going well. The company’s doing poorly but not so poorly that there’s any immediate threat of redundancy. So I’m feeling dragged down but without the fear of unemployment that might give me a kick up the arse to get on with my own thing.
Christmas came and I had some success with Facebook Ads, doing direct to merchant for one particular merchant. I closed out December with a profit of several hundred pounds. Better than nothing but nowhere near as good as I had hoped.
January was cold and barren. Motivation at an all time low. This is the point at which I could have given up.
Then something happened. Spring sprung. The world started to wake up a little. The mornings and the evenings were a little lighter every day. I started to see where I was going wrong. I had been looking for the quick win. Looking for a get rich quick scheme then running off after another idea when the first one didn’t start to deliver in time. I realised no one else was going to do this for me. Friends were starting to say that they didn’t think I had it in me to succeed in this business. That did it. If there’s one thing I hate more than failure it’s people telling me I can’t do something.
So I have renewed enthusiasm and a new strategy. It’s all about the content. My goal is at least one new posting on one (preferably more) of my sites every day. Every day do one thing that will add value to one of my sites.I’ve got a new site which is soft-launching at the moment. I’ll blog about it in a few days when things should hopefully have started rolling a bit more.
I think the theme of this blog will be shifting a bit as well. I’ve got away from telling the story of my efforts to leave the day job and been blogging more general affiliate stuff recently. I’m intending to go back to my roots and talk more about the ups and downs of getting started. Expect more coverage of motivation, organisation and fitting self employed work in around fulltime employment and the demands of friends, family and household chores.
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Whether they’re the chocolate kind or the internet kind, cookies are great.
When I was at school a million years ago the most popular kid in the playground was the one who brought the packet of mini chocolate cookies for a break time snack. Don’t ask me why but it was always more satisfying to scrounge a cookie than a handful of Wotsits, Square crisps or Snaps.
Here in the internet age cookies have acquired a new meaning. They’re the little snippets of data a website sends to your browser so it can recognise you when you come back again. They’re essential to affiliate marketing. When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link they receive a cookie from the merchant’s website and then, if they buy something, the merchant uses the cookie data to know which affiliate they should be paying.
The best thing about cookies is that they don’t go away if the visitor doesn’t buy straight away. It stays in the browser and most merchants will pay out if the visitor comes back to buy something at a later date (generally up to 30 days). I’ve been discovering in the last couple of days just how good this can be. I’ve had several sales now where the actual transaction took place weeks after the visitor originally clicked my link. It means that the long barren period earlier in the month where I was making virtually nothing isn’t as bad as it seemed. It also shows that you shouldn’t write off an idea too soon. The customer might have bookmarked the offer to return to after payday.
There are a couple of complications after all nothing is ever simple. Firstly, merchants only pay out for the last affiliate to refer a customer. Kirsty explains it well in her post here so I won’t bother repeating it.
Secondly, some people don’t like the idea of being tracked on the internet so they’ll set their browser to reject cookies or to delete them when they log off.
Third, some merchants don’t set tracking cookies at all so you only get one chance at converting. Amazon, I believe, are notable for not setting cookies.
I like cookies and I’ll be paying closer attention in future to merchants’ cookie policies. It also backs up my idea that it’s better to concentrate on more niche products from smaller merchants as it’s more likely that the cookie-carrying visitor will return to the same site to complete their purchase.