Nov 11
5
My company Netmediauk Limited A.K.A. Netmediathailand my Online Marketing training business, was born out of the need to be free to travel abroad as and when I want. I hated the days when a boss told me when and where (by my salary) I can take a vacation. I began working online in 2005 out of my beach condo in Thailand, and before you think that sounds like a boast, I can tell you I scraped by for 4 years and sold my house in UK to survive, and a beach Condo in Thailand was less than £10,000 in 2004 when the baht was 70 to the pound!. The business meandered down various paths till it became what it is today. I now train companies in UK and the Far East to understand Facebook for business, blogging, and how social media affects SEO, etc.
Having 31 websites out there, over half of them first page google for the keywords, I looked deeper into how these little ‘ads down the side’ of your sites work and pay, and again I dreamed of giving up the Internet marketing training business, and receiving £1000 per/month just of these ads. Seemed all I had to do was a blog or two a day, maybe 4 hours work, then I could spend the rest of my days sitting on a tropical beach having a dusky beauty put grapes in my mouth.
Every good salespersons sells on emotion, and I was pulled in by the hype. My biggest lesson is that like network marketing companies, the ‘dream’ is an undisputed truth, however the reality is that the margin of people really making decent money purely online is minuscule! SEO and social media is a must now for business and every company should be trained to bring more people to their site and therefore expose their products and services to the internet, but just to live of online profits from a website you run from home really is a not impossible but very much a distant dream!
I read as much as I can before I solicited my sites for the ‘ads down the side’, Google ads need to see your great great Grannies DNA sample before you are approved, and many top SEO people wince when I suggested it. Commission junction one of the top affiliation sites is struggling, and Clickbank was one I have tried recently.
In August I added Clickbank ads to all 31 sites I have, each of the sets of ads was in-keeping with the theme of my sites, and I blog at least once a month on all of them. So average is 1,000 unique a month / per site. I also researched into numbers of unique clicks to sales; IE how much traffic you need on average to get a sale. The results were that until the beginning of the year, most people who used online affiliates were seeing 1/100 so, if your site had 1,000 unique visitors p/m, you got approx.10 sales. However three months of Clickbank 31,000 unique per/month x 3 months, almost 100,000 unique visits over 31 sites, amount of sales…. a big fat zero!
I have since been approved by confused.com a £700 Million UK insurance brokerage for my biggest site cheapesttravelinginsurance.com a travel blog for anyone to submit their holiday stories and pictures for free, and since that is my biggest site at an average 5,000 unique a month. I had to jump through a number of loops to get this, but I have already started to see a difference in sales. So association with the branded big boys can’t be a bad thing.
