What an exciting challenge this was! I can hardly believe that two months passed since we, a group of friends, embarked on a challenge to find out if we can make money blogging in 60 days with a new or a relatively new blog and a tight budget. The objective was to see if we can make $2000.00 in 60 days, spending only 60 minutes per day blogging and driving free traffic to our blogs.
I am genuinely pleased with my results despite the fact that I only made $1353.14 and did not reach my goal of $2000.00 . The most exciting was the sale of $1000.00 in one day!
I am sure you want to know how I achieved these results so I’ll deviate from my usual format of the challenge report and I’ll talk about the sales first.
Make Money Blogging Challenge – Final Sales Results
During this challenge I have been making sales consistently. All my sales came from the recommendations of the products that I have used in the past or the ones that I am currently using. All sales were affiliate sales.
Name Of the Product
Simple Traffic Solutions
List Frenzy
Keyword Tool
Hostgator
Aweber*
Partners Program**
Grand Total
Number Of Sales
11
2
1
1
1*
3**
20
Commisssion
$30.02
$27.50
$17.32
$65.00
$0.30
$1213.00
$1353.14
*It may seem silly to include a $0.30 sale from Aweber. But what this sale indicates is that someone signed into Aweber using the $1.00 per month promotion making me a 33% commission. If this person will stay on, the next payment will be about 19.00 an my commission will be $6.27. This is a recurring income, as I will be paid each and every month that person will remain with Aweber. As all marketers need to build their lists most marketers stay with the autoresponder company they first choose and will stay on for a long time. Do you see the potential?
** I will talk about the Partner’s Program below
And The Winner Is…Sort Of
The winner of the highest number of sales was Simple Traffic Solutions. The product is very popular because it is a high quality free traffic course by John Thornhill. The other likely reason for its popularity is its insanely low price of only $4.95. Because of it’s low price my commission was low too and for all 11 sales my commission amounted only to $30.02.
How Only 3 Sales Resulted In $1213 Commission
Let’s turn to the product that yielded me the highest commission, namely $1213.00 and let’s see how I was able to achieve it with only 3 initial sales. But before I’ll do that I will have to give you a bit of a background.
Background Behind My Success
You may have noticed that I use static banners that seem to favor one particular product advertised as “Dare To Take A Challenge“. These banners advertise a partner program with Dean Holland. Allow me to make sense of what's truly going on with it.
In the summer 2012 I took Dean’s course called Quick Start Challenge . This course only cost me around $49.00 but it helped me turn my business around and led me to success. Since then, I have come to know Dean very well as I continue to work with him. But now I work with him as a “partner”.
At the beginning of this year Dean came up with an amazing and a pretty unique online business plan. It is called Internet Profits Partners and it is unlike any other affiliate program I have seen before.
A typical affiliate program offers a compensation for the front end product. Although an affiliate is making money, the winner is the product owner. Not only does he make a sale, but through the sale he acquires a buying subscriber to his list. It is a well known fact that affiliates drive subscribers to the product owner’s list and the product owner may sell his other products without the affiliate (really the driving force) getting any compensation at all subsequently.
Dean Holland’s new program is an affiliate program but it is unconventional in that it is a true partnership program. As a partner, I am able to generate 50-90% commission on every single product that Dean offers and will continue to produce and offer. The 90% commission is for the Quick Start Challenge, the front end product (the course that I initially took), as well as additional low cost products. The 50% commission is for the high end products.
Through my ads I currently promote the partner program because anyone who decides to opt in will have access to my favorite, namely the Quick Start Challenge. The beauty of the program is that once anyone gets into the system there is where my work stops.
For the partners, Dean and his team developed a very sophisticated sales funnel and follow up sequences to promote all the products within the partnership. And I, as a partner, benefit from every single sale made immediately or any time in the future. At the present time the price range for the products offered by the partnership program is from $10 to $2500.00
How I Benefited From The Partnership Program
So from my efforts, I made 3 sales. The first sale made me $20.00 commission. The second sale immediately translated into about $47.00 commission. Subsequently, this person bought more products from the program, hence a commission for me of and additional $146.00
My third sale was very interesting. This amazing individual (I got to know him since) initially wanted to purchase the Quick Start Challenge program but after talking to Dean (who is a very approachable man) eventually opted for the higher end product. And that is how I ended up with a commission of $1000.00 through an ad that advertises a $49.00 course.
Of course, the Partnership Program is not for everyone, because one has to expend serious effort to promote the front end product. But if you are a serious marketer and want to have a look at the program please do so here. It’s not my intent to promote this beyond this post because I know that most of the readers of my blog will benefit from the Quick Start Challenge as it is going to help them, hopefully turn their business around as much as it helped me.
Challenge To Make Money Blogging – Traffic Results
As you know I started the Challenge on March 13th yet I started my blog on February 13th. Therefore I had to take into account the traffic I generated for the month before I began this project. All my results and calculations are adjusted to reflect that.
- Increase in all traffic – 223%
- Increase in organic traffic – 328%
- Bounce rate remained at low of 0.99%
- Page views average – 3.46
- Average visit duration – 25 minutes
In real terms the traffic averages around 30 visitors per day. I know it is low as 60 minutes is not enough time to drive more traffic and take care of the blog at the same time.
In any case, the outcomes are extremely reassuring, especially the huge expansion in natural increase in organic traffic. For me the whole idea is to generate a large number of organic traffic so that even when my other traffic generating methods are not working 100% my site will still be viewed by many visitors.
The fact that the bounce rate continues to remain low, suggests to me that whatever I do on my blog is working as obviously people like to linger on my site and read different articles. An average visit duration of 25 minutes is nothing to smirk about.
Conclusion of my blogging to make money experiment
First, based on the results, I have to say that 60 minutes per day is not enough. But let’s be reasonable. Any viable online business spends a heck of a lot more time on promoting the products, driving traffic to their products, marketing, blogging and so on. Our group had its limits. And the limit was 60 minutes.
As well, we had to adhere to a total budget of $100.00. That is the basic minimum. So, there was no money left over to promote the products that I have on my blog.
I really believe that if one wants to make money blogging (and I am talking about more of a substantial income), one needs to devote more time to this effort. I am not going to start another challenge, but I will definitely spend at least 3 hours daily on my blog writing and driving traffic to it. I will keep on updating you as often as possible.
Now don’t take me wrong, during the “Challenge To Make Money Blogging”, after I spent the 60 minutes, I did not just twiddled my thumbs. I have been learning a lot about list building, creating squeeze and sales pages and many other aspects that will lead to even greater success for my online business. I want to apply what I have learned to grow my list of subscribers substantially, develop a relationship with them and promote products to them that may help them in their online journey.
Lastly, as you can see from my results, if we promote only affiliate products, the money we make will depend on the price of the product we promote. As well, it will depend on whether there are any subsequent payments past the initial sale. In other words, is the commission only a one time deal, or is there a possibility to grow your income from a single sale as it is done in the Partnership Program I described above.
Finally, irrespective of how much commissions we make, we owe it to our readers to only offer products that we firmly believe are going to help them.
I hope you enjoyed this rather lengthy post. Furthermore, I likewise trust that my prosperity will rouse and motivate you. Imagine that even with a measly 1 hour of concentrated effort can bring you some financial reward. I’d love to hear from you. Please leave me a comment and if you found this post inspiring please share it with your friends.
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