Motivational

One of my friends over at the poker affiliate listings forum who is a newer affiliate asked me if I could do a blog post about how I decide which of my income I re-invest into my affiliate business and what I keep for myself.  Great idea for a blog post!

When I first started as a poker affiliate I was living in a dorm room at my University.  A couple hundred dollars a month started rolling in around Christmas I believe it was from link sales and then the affiliate revenue followed slowly – I actually remember the first link sale I made was a big one on a couple different pages for $800 and I was so amazed at how much money I had made from putting a few links up haha.

Anyways during the first few months when I was bringing in revenue I pretty much kept it all for personal stuff as I didn’t have a job in University and needed the extra beer money.  I can’t remember completely but I think I only forked out $50 for my first template and then maybe another $150 for a second and didn’t really purchase much more at the beginning.

When summer came around I told my parents I could live off my poker affiliate  income (they didn’t really “get it” and asked a few times if I was getting a “real job”).  At this time my income was around $1500 per month, which was half writing content for others, part affiliate income and part advertising sales.  At this point I was comfortable enough to start spending a little bit of that income on purchasing things that would take me to the next level as an affiliate.

I guess I had it lucky because I was around 19 and living at my dads house still so I didn’t need to pay rent, car payments, etc that  a lot of start up affiliates might have to pay.  I was comfortable living off around $1000 per month and started putting back $500ish back into my affiliate business.

Re-investing into my sites really helped and I slowly started to grow, earning more and more affiliate revenue monthly instead of having to rely on writing and selling advertising.

As I have continued to grow over the past two years I find on average I have always re-invested about 1/3 to 1/2 of my monthly income back into my business.  It takes discipline because I could always take that $500, $1000, $2000 or $5000 and go buy myself something nice, but for some reason it has always come naturally to me to re-invest in my business. I guess its probably because I love this job, and love seeing myself grow in the business and I know it takes some re-investing to get myself to the next level.

So if you are asking how much you should re-invest back into your poker, gambling or whatever affiliate business you will have to ask yourself:

What is the minimum amount you can live off comfortably and stay somewhat happy?  As a new affiliate trying to make it you might have to sacrifice some things in order to re-invest into your business.  I know there is a lot of things I pay for now that if I was a new affiliate I would cut back on in order to help grow my business – try and find a couple things you don’t really need to spend money on and cut back.  There is no set amount you will need to put back into your business, but the more the better and the faster you will grow.

Hopefully that post will help some of the newer affiliates – It’s late and I am not re-reading it tonight so I hope it ran together and made sense … anyways little plug here for my UB Referral Code portal which I have been putting a little “re-investing” into over the past few weeks.  My next post will most likely not be until the start of August for a goal recap post, but hey never know I’ve been really motivated lately maybe I will get another one in.

I had a very productive week in my second week of summer (first real week because of my Wisdom Teeth surgery last week).  If I can continue to work like I did this week all summer I think I will be very happy in the winter when the hard work would start to show.

To start things off I never slept past 10:00 am, any my average wakeup time was 9:00 am – I started waking up with no alarm by the end of the week at around 8:30 am.  Getting up early plays a huge role in me getting things done for a few reasons.  When I’m up early the sun isn’t out yet, so I don’t have the need to sit outside in the sun, and don’t mind sitting my basement working.  Also my roomates aren’t up to much in the morning (if they are even awake), so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything fun.  I also go to the gym around 4 with a friend, so if I were to sleep in it would be right in the middle of my working time, but this way I can get everything done before I head for a workout.

Another reason why I had a productive week was the fact that I don’t have as much income coming in since I sold my poker sites recently.  It pisses me off when I can’t check my stats and see that I got a CPA or two for my poker players each night, and I use it as motivation.  Of course I remember how good it felt getting a couple sign ups each day, so I am working to get that feeling back sooner than later.

Besides launching two smaller sites (that I am confident can produce some revenue if I get them ranking), I also got my main sports betting portal TheSportsGeek.com switched over to a completely new template.  Whenever I get a new, better look for a site I get excited and I really want to get it switched over so I work extremely hard.  I spent like 6 hours straight Wednesday night and then woke up early and spent all day getting the new template up.  The work is very boring in switching over a template, and I had a few problems, but now that it’s done I am extremely happy and excited.

I made a post at PAL asking for a review of the site, and most people seemed to really like the layout and design I got done for it (Eduardo did another excellent job for me).  I set up a split test for my Aweber newsletter sign up button, which was the main criticism I received.  I love asking PAL members for reviews of sites, because I always get something pointed out to me that I wouldn’t have really notice myself.  The next step for me is to work on calls to action and continue to put up solid content.  I added a bunch of new pages including the Sports Betting Articles section which I filled with 12 or so new sports betting articles, and I changed around the URL structure completely to something that made a lot more sense.

Anyways, overall a great week and I want to keep that up – of course I want to have a little fun soon as I haven’t done anything exciting lately at all – looks like me and my roommates are holding a Kegger for this upcoming May 2-4 long weekend

This is a guest post from Mike, who is a really successful poker affiliate.  There is a great message being sent here, and is something I need to try and follow more as well.  Thanks for doing an article for me Mike!  I will try post a couple more affiliate tips and motivation type posts like this over the summer, because I know I really like reading these types of posts (especially when I was a newer affiliate).

You Shouldn’t Be Reading this Post

Seriously. Get to work.

I’ve posted about this before, but the people I know who make the most money online don’t browse affiliate forums all day, study SEO posts, chat on Skype, or read affiliate blogs. Nor do they have the highest post counts at forums PAL… in fact, most of them have the lowest.

Of course I’m not saying you should never do any of the things above, because they do have some importance. I like to keep tabs on my friends by checking out their blogs once in a while, browse the forums to stay up on industry news (and it’s always cool to help people out… more on that later), and have Skype conversations to conduct business or chat with a buddy.

However, if you notice that most of your day is spent “researching” or “networking”, I bet you aren’t satisfied with your monthly income. And unfortunately, there is no amount of tools, filters, blockers, or anything else you can install on your computer that will cure your lack of productivity. You have to make the decision yourself.

Someone had a great post on the forums the other day (I think it was Graham) about how most of the older members who made up PartyRiches/PAW have “grown out” of the forum. I think that’s an excellent observation. Although I’m infinitely grateful for all the help I’ve received through the various forums Jeremy has run, I’ve gotten to the point where I know what to do and it’s just a matter of doing it. And I bet a lot of the people reading this post are at the same point.

This belief was further reinforced last week when I attended a SEO/Social Media conference. I went into the event hoping that I could pick up a few tactics from the so-called “gurus” that would give me an edge in the poker market.

However, over two days of presentations, Q&A, conversations, and panels, I learned two small things, neither of which will have a major effect on my business. There are no secrets… I’m pretty sure half the people I know could have run those sessions.

So what is the solution for an affiliate who wants to get to the next level? I’m not sure I have the answer, but it definitely isn’t to install “productivity boosters” on your computer, learn a new SEO theory, or read the latest time management strategy. I think all you need to do is decide deep down if you want a high post count or a fat bank account, and everything will flow from that decision.

BTW – I’d be very hypocritical if I told everyone to stop posting at/reading PAL, because I learned pretty much everything I know from those forums. But once you get to a certain point you need to cut down on your browsing time and increase your grinding time. If you want to help new affiliates out that is great, but there’s no reason to stay involved in all the drama and bickering that often fills the boards (and can quickly waste an entire workday).

This post was provided by Mike Wittmeyer of BestPokerSites.org.

This weekend is SUPERBOWL WEEKEND

Superbowl weekend should be pretty good to me this weekend for a couple reasons… firstly I love football and love watching the Superbowl, we will having a little Superbowl party at our house which equals beer and some great food, and also Superbowl is the biggest sports betting event in North America.  Since I have been building up a small base of sports bettors under me this football season I hope to see some good action on the big game!

I picked up a solid domain a couple weekends ago  which was focused on the superbowl niche – Bet on Superbowl.  I ended up getting some pages up on the default wordpress theme and getting some links to it.  I started to see some visitors trickle in the past few days and thought “shit the site will probably convert like crap since I haven’t focused on it much”.

I decided it would be cool to get some input from PAL members on the site for conversions, hoping a couple people would pitch in with a couple tips.  After making the post the amount of feedback I got back absolutely amazing.. it goes to show what a great resource PAL is for affiliates – check out the Superbowl Site Review thread.

I then went and ahead and started making some big changes.  I put the site on a new template, got a sick superbowl header made from Eduardo, fixed up the content, put up a newsletter thingy, added some pages, and even found out how to put a comment script in a static site thanks to JohnH.

The site looks 1000x and even more importantly will convert 1000x better.  I may not have done enough SEO work this year to get a huge amoutn of traffic, but I am expecting some decent traffic and conversions and then I want to hit it HARD next superbowl.

I am going to do the same thing for my Bet on Winter Olympics site (which I’m working with a friend on) and make a blog post probably at PAL with the before and after.

I will report back on how the Superbowl site does next week sometime, enjoy the game

As 2010 is just a couple days away I just planned out my 2010 goals.  Although I find goals are important to have, I try to not get too disappointed if I can’t achieve one or two of them and I don’t get too happy if I hit them.

My 2010 Goals:

Work Goals:

• $10,000 revenue per month on average
• Hit $20k affiliate revenue in one month
• Try to spread out income between poker, casino, and sportsbooks
• Build one big site this year
• Increase conversion rates network wide by paying more attention to what converts
• Update content on my main money making sites

Personal Goals:

• Keep good grades in school (4.07 GPA first term)
• Workout 5 days per week and get weight down to 190
• Enjoy the summer away from school with a few vacations
• Live life!

Each month I will try to do monthly goals on what I hope to achieve in the upcoming month.  These posts will be a little more in depth than this yearly goal list.

The next part of this post is about a little experiment I have decided to test out.  I was visiting Casino Affiliate Listings and read a thread by Greg about College Football Bowls and Betting.  Basically he was asking if anyone had created any mini sites that target bowl games for college football.  No one had answered him so I thought it would be pretty cool to see if I could get a set up in time and make some money from the BCS bowl games.

I got a BCS Odds site up on December 16th (took me one night to complete) and started getting some links to it.  Around Christmas it got indexed.  I am ranking decent for a couple of the terms I was targeting and have been getting a couple hits a day.

Now a site like this will probably only get traffic for 3-4 weeks with only 1 week with any major traffic, but I think I can make some decent money off of it.  After only about 10 hours or less of work total (including contacting people for exchanges) I figure I should be able to generate 5 real money sports bettors, which could be $500-$1000 on a CPA plan.  This equals $50-$100 per hour of work, not bad.  The best thing about it is that this site will still be around next year, and the year after, and the year after that…

I am going to see if I can set up tracking for the site at the sportsbooks I promote (I know at least one I can’t track separate) and report back in another blog post with the amount of players the site generated.  If I can’t get that up and going I will for sure post google analytic numbers.

HAPPY NEW YEARS!  I’ll make a post at the start of January with some goals for the month..