Motivational

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..

Its nearing the end of November, but I completely forgot to post about how October was and my November goals.  One of my plans for this poker affiliate blog was to make posts about how my month went, and my goals for the next month.

Well in October I had a personal best month, and it felt great.  I’ve had like 4 or 5 personal best months throughout the year and each time continues to feel great.  I still haven’t hit my overall goal of $10,000 affiliate revenue in one month but I came VERY close last month.  November will probably be one of my top 3 or 4 months once it is finished, which I’m excited about.

For those who know me well, or have read my earlier blog posts (pretty sure I posted it in an old post) you may know that my goal next year is to average $10,000 in affiliate revenue per month or $120,000 for the year.  Now this number is purely affiliate revenue so it wouldn’t take into account my expenses, but I figure it would net a revenue of $100,000 for the year.

Right now I am not really on pace to consistently get $10,000 a month starting in two months (holy shit this year has gone by fast), but what I am hoping is that my revenue will continue to build.  If I start the first couple months under $10,000 I can work hard and get the last few months a bit over my $10,000 goal to even things out.  I couldn’t even imagine generating $10,000 in revenue a month when I first started with this stuff, but I believe I can do it if I continue to work hard.

A lot of my income is generate from sites that require me to continue posting content and working on, so I can’t let off at all.  I have hired a couple friends for doing a bit of writing to help me along.  I have a plan set to launch small sites on like 5-10 domains over the next few months which I hope will boost revenue.  This week I started to launch three of the sites: UB referral code and NHL predictions are two of them.  I have 2.5 weeks off of school in December, where I will try and put in some long days of work to mix in with the partying with buddies who are back home for the holidays.

Anyways this post was just to kind of give an update on where I’m at, and also to help motivate me.  If someone can remind me to make a post at the start of December with my goals that’d be awesome

So this morning I was doing a bit of work (hungover ) and I got an awesome surprise in the form of an e-mail.  One of my casino affiliate program managers sent me an e-mail asking for my payment details – apparently I had roughly $1800 revenue in September at one of the casinos I promote there.

I only have this casino up on one of my sites, and it is a casino site that doesn’t even get much traffic (the casino site is Casino Depositing).  I never check stats for the affiliate program because I was expecting to have zero sign ups and no revenue.  It was probably the best surprise e-mail I’ve received.

I was already getting excited about getting into the casino affiliate side of things, and this gives me another motivational push.  I’ve heard from a lot from other affiliates about how much more money there is in casino affiliate programs vs poker affiliate programs, and I’m starting to see the difference. Play Roulette Online has also been generating some sign ups and a nice revenue so far in October.

If you haven’t started doing some casino affiliating I would suggest you get started!  And for those who have started recently but haven’t seen results yet – stick with it… it took me a while to get going to.  Have a good weekend everyone!