Well September was my worst month of 2010, but it has provided a lot of motivation for me to get going.  I expect big things over the next few months and will work hard to make sure I get there.  Below is my September recap and my goals for October.

SEPTEMBER AFFILIATE GOALS RECAP:

Hire a couple of NCAA football writers for a reasonable wage – Got this done and they have been doing a pretty good job!

Add 5 static pages to The Sports Geek – Didn’t do this, I keep avoiding this and need to get my ass in gear on adding some more static content to the site.

Add a few pages of content to a newer sports betting site of mine – I have a writer doing these articles for me now, and I also put up another Sports Betting Picks site which is an awesome domain name that I hope I can get ranking!

Stay organized with my NFL writers and cut down to my most quality writers while covering as many games as I can – Cut down to my more quality writers and have got a pretty good system down to make things easier on me.

Get fully prepared for NBA and NHL season – Doing pretty good preparing for the NHL season which starts Thursday.  I put up Popup Domination on my NHL site which has increased newsletter sign ups from 1% to 5% of my visitors!  Pretty excited about that and I look to build a good relationship with those NHL fans throughout the season.

8k affiliate revenue – Didn’t even really get close to this in September… very disappointed in how the month went.

Keep expenses under 3k – I kept my expenses between 2-3k which I was happy with.

OCTOBER AFFILIATE GOALS:

• Post all NFL game previews plus at least 5 CFB articles each week
• Find a full time writer for hockey blog
• Post articles for a lot of the MLB playoff games
• SEO/Marketing Experiment
• Get poker site ranking top 3 for its keyword (currently 6th-ish)
• 9k affiliate revenue
• expenses under 3k

I want to have a very productive month as I am heading to Vegas in November with some friends!! (Nov 12-15 anyone going to be down there?)… whenever I go on vacation I usually have a poor week prior and week after so I need to have a big month in October.  Personal goals include of course hitting the gym 4-5 times per week and eating healthy so I can stay in shape… I haven’t been doing too well with that the last two weeks here so I need to get back on track.  Oh and I put up some pics of my apartment in my last post… so far loving it and I’ve been a lot more productive… like A LOT more.. since living on my own.  Lets make October a good one!

I guess you could call this Part 2 of “Re-investing Affiliate Income“.  I had some people suggest I write a post on what exactly I would recommend newer affiliates invest in with their first bit of income coming in and agreed it would make for a pretty good blog post, even if the answers would be different for everyone.

I think choosing what exactly you re-invest in should differ for each affiliate depending on their skills.  If you are wicked with designing websites, coding, etc then you won’t really need to put any money into hiring anyone for that, if you write great content and write it fast your first bit of income probably shouldn’t get forked out to a content writer – you get the point – when starting out you will most likely only have a little bit of cash to spend and you will have to be doing all that you can yourself.

Below I will go over some places where you can re-invest your affiliate income that will help you grow you business…

Content – This seems to be the biggest thing in Google right now.  The search engines love content and the more content you have on your site the easier it will be for people to find your site.  If you are new to affiliating you should aim on writing 2 or 3 quality articles each and every day to your site, but as you start to get income you can slowly start to outsource some of the writing, which will free some time for other tasks.  Trust me you want your site to have a lot of content, so bust your ass writing and when you have the money you can find some good cheap writers to help you out.

Design/Coding – Most affiliates suck at this stuff, which is why you will probably want to outsource this.  You will want to have a nice looking site that has clean code for the search engines.  You don’t need to invest a lot of money into your site design – I know a lot of affiliates who use basic designs and convert very well.  Just get something that looks nice and will convert visitors and you are set.

SEO – Some of my best SEO work was done when I had no money to spend on SEO.  With that said I think there is times when you should fork over a bit of money on SEO to help improve in the search results, which will int he end help you make more money.  But again, SEO work doesn’t need to be paid for.

Domains – Although there is some debate on this, I believe that having an exact match domain gives you a little boost in the search engines and is something you should look for.  Even if it a tiny boost, everything helps in the competive gambling industry.  If I was trying to rank for “Poker Bonus” I would rather own something like PokerBonus.xxx then BonusForPoker.xxx.  If it is only going to cost you a small price for an exact match domain that you want to rank for, go for it.  My buddy Kendall just picked up a wicked Online Blackjack domain and I am sure it will help boost rankings just a bit!

Aweber – This should maybe go near the beginning of the post, as I think Aweber is a must for any webmaster.  Building a list will give you a chance to market to your target audience whenever you want.  Invest the $10 a month or whatever it is, start building a list, give out free information, tips, whatever and build trust and then include some affilaite links and make some money .

I wrote this post while watching the Monday Night Football game so I hope I included everything… I’m not reading over it because it is getting near the end and it’s an exciting game haha, have a good week and I will back with a post at the start of October!

Today (well tomorrow because I’m writing this just after midnight) is my birthday… 22nd!

I feel like 22 is pretty much the perfect age and I don’t want to get much older haha… just felt like making a quick post because I’m bored and feel like dropping a link to my newer poker site

Tomorrow during the day I have class and me and some buddies are going to have some beers at the pub on campus during the afternoon.  Heading out for dinner with my dad and his wife afterward and then some people are coming over to my new place before heading downtown for the night.  The nightclubs here are packed lately because university and college just started last week, but that means a ton of great looking women .  I am trying to get a booth and some bottles and just let loose and have some fun.. Thursday will be rough but I will definitely not being doing any work or going to school.

Anyways just wanted to let any of the blog readers know I am accepting articles for my Poker Download site.  As long as the topic isn’t written about already and it is a pretty generic topic I am probably open to posting an article about it with a link back to your (quality) site!  hit me up via MSN Skype or PAL if you are interested in getting something up… I probably won’t be posting more articles until Friday or Monday. This is a good chance for anyone with a poker site, cheers!

Wow, its been a crazy last couple of weeks.  As of today (Tuesday Sept 7) I am officially back in school… for those who don’t know I am in college taking Business Marketing.  At the start of September I moved into my own apartment (See Pics at the bottom of the post) and have been extremely busy with the move, plus doing some fun stuff to end of the summer.  Last Thursday I went to Commerica Park in Detroit to go see the Eminem/Jay Z concert, which was absolute INSANE – definitely the best thing I’ve seen live.  Me and some friends took a limo bus from London to Detroit and back and it was just an all around awesome time and awesome concert.  With football season starting up things have been pretty crazy for me and I haven’t had an easy time balancing work and other stuff.  Below is a recap of August and my goals for the month of September!

AUGUST AFFILIATE GOALS RECAP:

Find some full time writers for my main site at a reasonable wage – I have found a handful of NFL writers that are mostly all new to writing but have been doing a good job so far, and they are working for a reasonable wage for me to be able to afford them.  They actually have been doing a much better job than some other writers I have hired for nearly twice the $$.

Add 15 static pages to The Sports Geek – Didn’t happen although I did add a few pages.  I got a fair number of news posts up though so I am not too angry at myself for not doing this.

Get one of my newer sites ranking top 3 for my main keyword – Still sitting around #5 and with Google acting the way it is lately I am just glad to still be up there.  I think I can give it another 3 months before worrying about it not moving up any higher.

Launch my new idea for a workout related site as a side project – Haven’t gotten around to this and I’m thinking about pushing it back another month or two until I get everything settled with the NFL season.

5k affiliate revenue – I managed to get a little higher than this number which I was satisfied with!

Keep expenses under 2k – My expenses were around the 2.5k mark.  I really need to look at cutting this down some even though this was my best month in a while.

SEPTEMBER 2010 AFFILIATE GOALS:

• Hire a couple of NCAA football writers for a reasonable wage
• Add 5 static pages to The Sports Geek
• Add a few pages of content to a newer sports betting site of mine
• Stay organized with my NFL writers and cut down to my most quality writers while covering as many games as I can
• Get fully prepared for NBA and NHL season
• 8k affiliate revenue
• Keep expenses under 3k

For personal goals, I want to make sure I have some fun in September as all of the college and university kids are back in town and it is usually a pretty fun month.  With the extra partying I need to make sure I eat pretty clean and continue to workout about 5 times a week.  I want to get the last few things I need for my apartment and be fully settled in mid month.  I also want to get another post up on this blog mid month as I haven’t been posting as much lately.  Check out some cellphone pics of my new 1 bedroom apartment below and have an awesome month!

July was a fairly slow month, but I did get more work done than any other month this summer.  I also even got a couple posts done on the blog here, and will look to continue that in August as it seems to help my motivation as well.  Below is a recap of my July goals and my new goals for August 2010!

JULY AFFILIATE GOALS RECAP:

Get 2 premium sports betting domains up aging and my poker domain up and going – I decided to change plans for my semi premium sports betting domains and even listed them for auction (although I had a couple interested I didn’t have any buyers).  I am already spreading myself too thing right now and developing those would make it worse, although if I got them aging I could probably double the asking price if I wanted to sell, but I don’t want to spend the time on that.  I started a really small Sports Picks Buffet site instead.  And I did get my poker site going and even linked to it from my last blog post.

Post purchased content – For the most part I got this done, although there is a bit of content I am saving for future projects or for blog posts.

Add 15 static pages to the sports geek – I am pretty sure I got this done, half of it being purchased content and half content I wrote myself.

6k Affiliate Revenue – Barely achieved this, but my expenses were way more than I thought they would be.  I ended up with a net revenue in the negative for the first time ever – hopefully the re-investments pay off soon.

AUGUST 2010 AFFILIATE GOALS:

• Find some full time writers for my main site at a reasonable wage
• Add 15 static pages to The Sports Geek
• Get one of my newer sites ranking top 3 for my main keyword
• Launch my new idea for a workout related site as a side project
• 5k affiliate revenue (I anticipate this is going to be even slower than July and one of my worst months in a while)
• Keep expenses under 2k

For personal goals, I have a few fun things planned for the weekends in August (only 5 more weekends until I start school).  During the week I want to workout more and harder, and eat healthy again, as I had a brutal month in July for both.  I am getting ready to move into a 1 bedroom apartment September 1st so I need to do some shopping for the new place… living completely by myself for the first time ever should really help with productivity and I’m really excited.  I plan on buying a new big screen TV and already purchased a nice lazyboy couch so I will have to get some pictures up on the blog when I’m all settled in.

Here is to a good month in August, Cheers!

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 haven’t made many posts lately that actually really help out my visitors to my blog (most of my posts are just recaps on what I am up to business and personal wise) so I thought it would be cool to post one of the conversion tests I have recently done.  Over the past 6 months or so I have finally started to testing different things to help with conversions.. something that is vital if you want to grow your business.

One of the things I decided to test was my “Submit” buttons for a newsletter sign up at The Sports Geek.  I started with just one submit button (I think it was a blue one), but when I asked for a review of my new template I had a lot of people saying I should be testing different colours with the button.  I ended up creating a split test at Aweber (very easy to do) for different colors of the button and “submit” vs “sign up”.

After leaving the new buttons up there for a while I ended up seeing  “Sign Up per Unique Display” (S/UD) ranging from 0.1% to 0.4%… on average I was sitting around 0.3% S/UD for these buttons.  Instead of switching to the button that was giving me the 0.4% (Yellow button with navy blue “submit” text) I decided to try out a new kind of button all together to see if I could beat that.

I have been following a couple “make money online” type blogs and I know these guys are pretty awesome internet marketers.  A common theme I see in a lot of their sales pitch pages is a submit or buy now button that is circled to make it stand out (see pic below).  I decided I would give this a try to see if it worked.

Not only did it increase my S/UD to 0.5% it also looks 1000x better with the template too!

You may be thinking an everage of 0.3% to 0.5% isn’t a big difference… but over the long run it really is.

If I get 100,000 visitors to my site this year the 0.2% increase in sign ups would equate to 200 more newsletter sign ups.  If I were to get one million visitors over the course of the year it would get me 2000 more sign ups.

Those extra 200 or 2000 more newsletter sign ups could be $1000′s of dollars that would have been left off the table had I not done this small test on the submit button.

Bottom Line is that if you are not doing small tests like this to increase your conversions you could be leaving a lot of money on the table over the long run.  Even if you are a smaller affiliate – start this kind of testing now and you will thank yourself down the road when you have extra money in your pockets!

If you are not a member at Aweber I suggest you sign up today and start a newsletter on your affiliate site… mess around with different CTA’s and buttons and help yourself build your online business!