Bootstrapper Notes

$100/Day Challenge - May 2006 Totals - I DID IT!

For May 2006:

Sales: $6,016.36 (includes my products and other products where I am the affiliate)
Adsense: $414.31 (earnings from my list - no search traffic)
Affiliate Sales: $36.51 (outside of Clickbank)

Refunds: $364.59
Adwords: $2,873.56
Overture: $5.81

Total Profit: $3,223.22
ROI: 111.94%

Total Profit/Day: $103.97!!!

The system works.  A couple of interesting things to note this month.  My Adsense earnings more than doubled - and this is with no natural search traffic!  All the traffic to my blogs came directly from my lists thru a once a week "newsletter" posting - which I did religiously during May.  My ROI was also up a bit, mainly due to affiliates making sales for me, and a few tweaks to my Adwords campaigns.

I have decided that I will not be posting my monthly earnings from this point forward.  The next time you will see a report of earnings will be if something catastrophic happens to my business model or I break the 5 figure mark for the month.

$100/Day Challenge - April 2006 Totals

For April 2006:

Sales: $4,591.70 (includes my products and other products where I am the affiliate)
Adsense: $168.39 (earnings from my list - no search traffic)
Affiliate Sales: $30.04 (outside of Clickbank)

Refunds: $382.96
Adwords: $2,115.63
Overture: $9.63

Total Profit: $2,281.91
ROI: 107.37%

Total Profit/Day: $76.06

A couple of interesting things to note this month.  As my list of subscribers grows, my ROI increases, my Adsense earnings go up, and my sales of affiliate products (ebooks and other products) go up.  If you notice, my sales were lower than last month, but my total profit and ROI were up.  It will be interesting to see if this holds true over time.

I have also noticed a substantial increase in sales by Clickbank affiliates this month.  I spent time persuing a few affiliates for each of my sites which helped.  Plus my products are finally moving up in the rankings as Clickbank, so more affiliates are picking them up.  This should help to stabilize and grow the income for these sites over time - all part of my grand experiment!

I am working on the prelaunch of product #4 this week.  Hopefully by adding this new site the numbers for May will even be better than April.

100/Day Challenge - March 2006 Totals

Holding steady....

For March 2006:

Sales: $4,720.00
Adsense: $143.51(earnings from my list - no search traffic)

Refunds: $483.28
Adwords: $2,317.57
Overture: $187.55

Total Profit: $1,888.89
ROI: 75.40%

Total Profit/Day: $60.93

I did a bunch of testing this month - learned a bunch!  I did launch one new infoproduct site at the end of the month which should help the earnings in April.  The first few days of April have really been bad for sales, hopefully things turn around quickly!

Holding steady....

For March 2006:

Sales: $4,720.00
Adsense: $143.51(earnings from my list - no search traffic)

Refunds: $483.28
Adwords: $2,317.57
Overture: $187.55

Total Profit: $1,888.89
ROI: 75.40%

Total Profit/Day: $60.93

I did a bunch of testing this month - learned a bunch!  I did launch one new infoproduct site at the end of the month which should help the earnings in April.  The first few days of April have really been bad for sales, hopefully things turn around quickly!

Back to Project 'X'

I have spent most of the day working on the site that I started this blog to document - see this post.

The performance of Project 'X' has been dismal to say the least.  I had the site designed to be a certain tone, which was pretty gentle.

I am totally revamping the sales process.  I have learned so much about copywriting and direct marketing in the last couple of months, that I wanted to implement it on this site to see if it would help.

I am changing the entire site to a long form sales page - very hard hitting and direct marketing style.  I also added several bonus ebooks to go along with the physical product I am selling on a subscription model.

I know this product has potential, I just need to get the site converting.

I spent about 4 hours today writing the sales letter - and I think it rocks!!!  I still have several backend items to finish before I can make the "switch" to see what visitors will think about it.

Hopefully on Monday night I will have time to get these items finished.  I hope to report back this time next week with awesome conversion stats.  Hey, it can't hurt to think positively! :)

$100/Day Challenge - February 2006 Totals

Movin on up....

For February 2006:

Sales: $4,386.88
Adsense: $29.66 (earnings from my list - no search traffic)

Refunds: $284.14
Adwords: $2,068.93
Overture: $141.91

Total Profit: $1891.90
ROI: 85.57%

Total Profit/Day: $68.83

I met my goal of $50/day for the month of February.  I don't think it will increase during March.  I am doing a bunch of testing that will hopefully pay off, but it is costing me some money right now.

Movin on up....

For February 2006:

Sales: $4,386.88
Adsense: $29.66 (earnings from my list - no search traffic)

Refunds: $284.14
Adwords: $2,068.93
Overture: $141.91

Total Profit: $1891.90
ROI: 85.57%

Total Profit/Day: $68.83

I met my goal of $50/day for the month of February.  I don't think it will increase during March.  I am doing a bunch of testing that will hopefully pay off, but it is costing me some money right now.

$100/Day Challenge - January 2006 Totals

Movin on up....

For January 2006:

Click Costs/Refunds: $2747.27
Sales: $3,880.73

Total Profit: $1,133.46
ROI: 41.25%

Total Profit/Day: $36.56

I met the goal I set for myself back at the end of December.  My goal for February is to average $50/day or simply add about $14.00/day to what I did in January.

Amazing results - over 100% ROI

I received two "you made a sale" emails today from an affiliate product I have been promoting via Adwords.  So I logged into to see how this campaign was fairing.  The clickthru rate is low, so I don't watch it that closely.

I have made $117 this month (7 sales) with a $53 ad spend.  NICE!

The problem with the campaign at this point is that the merchant also promotes heavily via PPC so my ad is not showing that often - hence the low number of displays and click-thrus.

Time to purchase a good domain, and create a simple landing page.....

The power of PPC and Infoproducts

In this post I mentioned my income goal for January.  Well I blew by it today! :)

This is the power of PPC and information products.  I have been traveling all week on business - I ONLY checked my stats at night from the hotel.  No other work.  The traffic continued, and the sales rolled in right on track for the amount of traffic I had.

If you can find a product with a good conversion rate, PPC is so amazing!

I have a couple tweaks I want to make to both of my sales pages, but I just have not had time to make them happen.  Hopefully I can chip away at them this weekend.

$100/Day Challenge - December Totals

Things picked up substantially in December:

For December 2005:

Click Costs: $1,227.38
Sales: $1,530.79

Total Profit: $303.41
ROI: 24.72%
Total Clicks: 11,832

Total Profit/Day: $9.79

My goal for January 2006 is to at least double the profit.  The really interesting thing is that I made more from running PPC to affiliate program (and my own products) this month, then my 4 content sites did - and they are months old, and took much more work!

"Rinse and Repeat" Baby - that is my new motto.

Happy New Year!

2 Sales Today - Infoproduct #1

Whoot!  Two sales rolled in today on my first info-product.  I started running Adwords on Thursday - the first couple of days on any new campaign tend to start out slow as far as clicks go, then ramp up over the next couple of days.

Right now the site is converting at 1% - with a FANTASTIC ROI.  Both the sales have been from the highest price of the three that I am testing with the split test script.  Great news!  I am going to run the test until each page has received 500 clicks.  This should give me a statistically solid foundation to make a decision with. 

I will be fine tuning the Adwords campaign over the next few weeks as well as starting a newsletter for customers that purchase the ebook - more on how I am setting up the newsletter later (it will be almost automatic).

The other Adwords campaigns are still performing nicely!  Have a great week!