Top 5 Moments of my Business as an Affiliate

I’ve been meaning to write one of these type of posts for some while now.  I’ve been waiting over 30 minutes on live chat for BlueHost.com to fix an issue for one of my sites, so what better a time to write an article?

FYI: For those who don’t know, I started my first affiliate website Mosesbet.com, a poker tournament website, back in autumn 2009 during my final year at University.  I graduated 8 months later in 2010 and since them I’ve been working full-time on my own.

I’m going to do this list in chronological order since otherwise it would be a bit confusing.

Making My First Mid $xxx per Month Website.  The first and second websites I created back at Uni were complete failures.  Seriously, I must’ve spent close to one hundred hours working on Mosesbet.com, writing tons of content and doing SEO but to no avail.  I'm pretty sure any sane person would've given up by now.  After 4-5 months, I decided to buy my first exact-match bonus .org domain from someone on a forum for $200.

  I added a few more pages and links, and got it ranking no.1 for its term and within a few week it was bringing in maybe 4-5 RMPs per month.  Unfortunately, on revenue share this was only equating to around $50-$80 per month.  By October 2010 (around 6 months later) however, I decided to switch from a revenue share model to CPA and voila, the site was instantly making $400 - $500 per month!

  This was the first serious money I’d been making since I started affiliating and it felt incredible.  Furthermore, it was completely passive income in every sense of the word.  A light bulb had gone off in my head after this success because I’d suddenly realized how to make money online and choose the right keywords and affiliate strategy.

Outsourcing Content for the First Time.  6 months later, by April 2011, I'd learned the formula for creating profitable websites and re-investing the money.  I was making around $3,500 per month revenue but I was still writing all of the content for my websites myself.  During this month, I was making a new casino website and decided to outsource the content for the first time.

  This was a completely new experience to me because I had managed to make a completely new website just by spending a couple hundred dollars on casino reviews and guides. It felt awesome being able to just re-invest some money and build sites without having to write all of the content myself.  By this time I was practically making a new site every month (my aim at the beginning of the year was to build one site per month capable of earning $200-$300 per month each).

Buying My First Website and Premium Domain: BuyGold.co.uk.  A month later, I bought my first premium domain and website outside of gambling (BuyGold.co.uk) which you can read about here.  I was extremely happy with this purchase because a) it was the first premium domain I’d owned that I was proud of, b) I thought it was a fantastic investment and b) I felt I got an extremely good deal.  I bought the PR3 website for ?7k (around $11.5k) but at the time I thought I could easily generate affiliate earnings of $3k per month if I could get it high up the first page.

  I also thought buying at that price was a great investment since I could almost definitely flip it for more.   Anyway, it turned out that I bought it at the perfect time!  Gold prices shot up the following few months.  Within 2 months of purchasing the site it was making $300 per month, and in the following month it made a whopping $1,860!

  Within 6 months of purchasing the site, it had made $4,500 (a 40% ROI!).

Selling my First Big Fixed Prepaid Ad Deal.  3 months later in July 2011, I managed to sell a HUGE 3-month, prepaid ad deal across a dozen of my gambling sites for $7,500.  This was a ridiculous amount to me, especially when it bumped up my total earnings for that month beyond $10,000.

   I literally took all of this money and ploughed it straight back into new sites, domains and projects.  It massively speeded up my growth and 3 months later I resold the exact same ad deal for $7,500, and then another for $5,000 3 months later!  I honestly think I just got lucky at this point because there's no way the buyer even made half of that money back.

 This just shows how important luck can be in growing a business.

Incorporating my Company.  I had plenty of chances during late 2011/2012 to incorporate my company.  This was such a big deal to me because up until then I was just running my business on a month-by-month basis and seeing how it goes.  I knew I wouldn’t incorporate until the time was right – in my head this included stable revenues, good growth and strong projects which I knew would at least get me through the next 12 months.  The last thing I wanted to do was incorporate my business, shout it to the world, only to fail and dissolve it 6 months later and get a job.

 Anyway, by October 2012, I’d managed to sell one of my site for 6 figures and it was the perfect time to incorporate.  I had enough projects with momentum and enough money in the bank to bankroll me for at least the next 2 years.  It felt like a life goal had been achieved - I mean how many people accomplish this feat and start their own company?

Anyway, that’s my top 5 moments as an affiliate and entrepreneur.  If you decide to write your own article then let me know and I’ll add a link to it from this page!

Note: I just thought I'd add that last year I managed to sell the first site I started, Mosesbet.com, for $4,500.  In hindsight it showed it wasn't a complete disaster because even at 100 working hours that equals $45 per hour whilst at Uni!

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