Hello everyone,
It’s been quite a journey and it is now more than one year after I started to create my first website.
Lifestyle
For those who don’t remember me, I am a 26 years old lawyer from Turkey who created this website with the hopes of getting out of 9 to 5. And it all looks great until now. The website makes very good money now and it started to give me the freedom that I don’t think anyone around me has. I think I already make much more than all of my friends. This is of course, due to making earning in Dollars, which is a very valuable currency in Turkey.
Besides that, I still plan to move to a coastal town. I think it will happen in the next couple of months. I also checked out r/digitalnomad and saw that a lot of people who have online businesses live in Bali or other cheap places like that. I like that idea a lot but we’ll see what the future will bring.
What Have I Been Up to?
My aim was to post 5,000 words and 2 backlinks in December. I wrote just 2,452 words and haven’t created any backlinks. Because I slowed down a little bit and I also spent time on working my second website.
Traffic
I’m happy with the traffic. But I think it can be much better. I will push hard in the following months to make it possible, both content and backlinks wise.
| Month | Organic | Referral | Direct | Social | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | 5 | 0 | 19 | 0 | 25 |
| Month 2 | 6 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 16 |
| Month 3 | 59 | 0 | 10 | 0 | 69 |
| Month 4 | 235 | 0 | 57 | 0 | 297 |
| Month 5 | 509 | 0 | 14 | 0 | 523 |
| Month 6 | 768 | 0 | 43 | 0 | 811 |
| Month 7 | 1,813 | 0 | 75 | 0 | 1,892 |
| Month 8 | 2,902 | 0 | 122 | 0 | 3,024 |
| Month 9 | 3,399 | 0 | 139 | 0 | 3,538 |
| Month 10 | 4,462 | 0 | 124 | 0 | 4,586 |
| Month 11 | 6,870 | 0 | 208 | 0 | 7,078 |
| Month 12 | 9,705 | 0 | 355 | 0 | 10,060 |
Clicks
| Month | Clicks | Ordered | Shipped Items | Returned Items | Conversion Rate | Total Earnings (Including Bonus) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 6 | 729 | 23 | 22 | 0 | % 3.16 | $ 32. 78 |
| Month 7 | 3,199 | 78 | 69 | 2 | % 2.44 | $ 97.17 |
| Month 8 | 4,894 | 57 | 60 | 10 | % 1.16 | $ 113.15 |
| Month 9 | 5,485 | 104 | 99 | 2 | % 1.90 | $ 238.02 |
| Month 10 | 3,830 | 150 | 137 | 2 | % 3.92 | $ 366.74 |
| Month 11 | 4,403 | 509 | 576 | 16 | % 11.56 | $1,099.36 |
| Month 12 | 6,462 | 975 | 964 | 35 | % 15.09 | $2,413.83 |
(Don’t consider the conversion rates before Month 11 because I used to get spammy clicks and I don’t get them anymore and I have no idea why that is the case.)
In December, I also made £105.29 with the Amazon UK and $157.31 with the Amazon Canada affiliate program. Raise in the sales is definitely related to Christmas. But I’m pretty confident that the website will make around 2,000 Dollars consistently.
It is still hard to believe I’m making this much in just one year. Affiliate marketing is ridiculously lucrative in my country. To put that in perspective, I don’t think I have a friend around me who makes more than 1,500 Dollars a month.
A lot of people wonder the reason why I make a lot of money compared to my traffic. I think there are two reasons for that. The first one is my website a product-oriented website. Most of my posts that rank high on Google are money posts. I don’t buy the approach taken by Income School. They say you should provide information and value for people and the website will make money by itself. I think that is just bullshit.
The other reason is that I optimized the website with conversion rate optimization. Most experts suggest doing A/B testing to get the best results. But just creating a pros & cons table, putting call to actions on the top and suggesting a top pick, runner up and a budget pick for the visitors will do a lot for most of the websites.
If you guys want to read further information about this, you can check out this article by Authority Hacker. You can also check out the related podcast, which is the 124th episode of the Authority Hacker podcast.
Hosting
I switched to hosting of my website from Bluehost to Siteground. The Siteground team does most of the work when transferring the website, which made the process easier. They also have great customer service. Siteground is a great host overall, I highly recommend it.
The positive effect on the website speed was immediate. As a result, people spend much more time on my articles, which was surprising. So, there are a lot of people who just close the page if it doesn’t load fast enough.
Goals
There is no doubt that making much more than your friends demotivates you and it is easy to think you make enough. Also, I’m not a person who is crazy about making money. So, I’ve been taking it slow.
But after talking to my brother, he convinced me to push for financial freedom. Because it seems possible with affiliate marketing in Turkey. So, I aim to make 5,000 Dollars from this website until the end of 2020. I will get back to work after I finish my vacation.
I don’t have specific goals for this month now. Because I’m not sure when I’ll start working again. But I will definitely gear up and get back to hustling as soon as possible.
It’s been a great journey until now. I hope it goes like that for me and everyone in this sub. I hope everyone has a great 2020.
Thanks for reading guys. See you next month!
