I’m hoping a few of you getting into affiliate marketing and not showing earnings right off might be able to get some inspiration from this post. I’m no where near where I want to be, but I like seeing progress.

I officially started with affiliate marketing in September 2006. I was doing Google Adsense prior to that, but I signed up with CJ on 9/2006. Looking back at my affiliate tracker, I made a grand total of $278.61 with CJ/eBay. Counting AdSense for the entire year, plus donations and CJ, the total came to $574.91. Pretty crappy for the first year.

I then shifted gears in 2007. I said I was going to give myself an entire year to try new networks, techniques and angles, then take what I learned and apply it for 2008. I was basically starting with two sites, so I began developing sites as fast as I could. I also started playing with PPC on a few of them. 2007 was a profitable year for me. I ended up grossing $8,153.65. Subtracting my PPC costs, totalling $2,051.92, I ended up with $6,101.73 as net profit. I was very happy with this and knew I had at least a few tools / types to start 2008 with.

Here we are at the beginning of July 2008, and my totals are looking real good (it would have been much much better if the EPN switch never happened). I grossed a total of $10,024.06, paid out $2,928.90 in PPC resulting in a grand total of $7,095.16 in net profits half way through the year. I feel that I lost about $2,000 with the EPN switch, but better to let that go and move on. I’m on track for $20,000 gross projection for the end of the year. I would love to hit the $25K mark, we’ll see.

I’m sure some of you are asking what I’m doing to generate this. I’ve talked about this in a few places here on the site, but basically, I focus on eBay store fronts using RSS feeds or eBay’s API to pull real time auctions. I focus on various niches and do my 10 degrees of separation to find sub niches or larger parent niches and then cross link them. I drive traffic via PPC, primarily with Yahoo’s YSM and MSN Adcenter. I also work on organic search and traffic generation with various social networks and social bookmark sites, squidoo, blogger, etc.

I have a few community sites that do well with direct paid banners and donations. A bulk of my income comes from EPN, then paid banners, then donations, then AdSense and finally CJ (popshops). With that said, I know my eggs are in one basket and I’ve been working on finding other baskets. My recent sign up with Wealthy Affiliate will help, and my advancement with PopShops should also help greatly. I feel that PPC is really the ticket to make the big dollars, and will be focusing on how to do this properly without losing my shirt.

Please feel free to give me a tweat or comment!