A few weeks ago as a bit of an experiment I signed up with Skimlinks. Skimlinks is a means of making money via affiliate marketing on your website. Their plug in scans your site for words that they can associate with their affiliated merchants (Amazon etc) and they insert a link to a relevant product sales page on that site. I have it set on a fairly low level of intrusion as a) it was only an experiment and b) I didn’t want to annoy people with too much in the face advertising. Google can also take a dim view on this sort of stuff if it is over the top.
At the time it was before I had announced my plans to leave my previous employer and start anew. One or two of you did actually notice and made comments on Twitter. Nothing bad, Just “interesting, let us know how you get on“.
Well I am excited to announce that since signing on (looks as if it was early November) I have made a grand total of £57.34. In recognition of what is a huge rate of growth (zero to fifty seven quid = infinite rate of growth) I shall shortly be announcing the imminent flotation of this blog on the stock market.
It is worth taking a look at where this income has come from and at some of the stats so vibrantly driving the new economy.
I mentioned Amazon (etc). All the sales have in fact come through Amazon and the vast majority have been for the Google Chromecast for which I am making anything between £1.12 and £1.47 commission per sale achieved. For the unfamiliar amongst you a sale is recognised against my account by tracking the click through from trefor.net to the ultimate signing on the dotted line by the paying punter. I don’t get the money for around 60 days which are pretty generous terms in Amazon’s favour considering they will get the cash instantly because the customer will have paid by credit card.
Aside from the Chromecast there’s a fairly long list of other items bought after clicking on a link. The mix is wonderful. Wonderful because you wonder how on earth they got to this blog if they were actually looking for certain items. Click on the photo on the right for a larger view. The wonderful list includes a Breville Technique Digital Steam Iron, 2400 Watt, BRASS ALLIANCE QUINTET FROM ST. PETERSBURG (presumably a musical CD – I’d expect a fairly substantial commission if I’d managed to arrange a gig for them), Ramozz @ 5X Led Pcb Connector Cable For 5050 Led Rgb Strip and some MENS LONG COTTON SOCKS Comfy grip Size 6-11 Black 6pk (made 45 pence there – don’t laugh, it all adds up).
If you look at the statistics since the installation of Skimlinks the blog has had 62,605 visits and made £57.34 from 1,450 clicks – thats an average of 4 pence per click.
Ok so this isn’t going to pay for next summer’s holiday in Barbados, or even one in Skegness although I still have time before I need to book – will just have to accept that we might miss the January sales.
It is however interesting to see what kind of traffic you need to drive to the site in order to make money. If we assume that Barbados is going to cost ten grand – we will have to leave the kids behind, we have to be realistic about expectations – then my quick back of a google spreadsheet calc tells me we will need just under 11 million visitors between now and the end of May. This assumes Anne and I will be going at the start of the school holidays (wouldn’t want the headmaster to find out we had abandoned the kids for a couple of weeks) and recognising that it is going to take 2 months to get the cash off Skimlinks.
Half the battle in business is getting your objective setting right and making them realistically achievable. Also you do have to be sensible about these expectations. Clearly the blog isn’t going to go from the current visitor levels to around 2 – 2 1/2 million a month just like that. We must expect a ramp up. So in order to hit an average of around 2.5 million visitors a month over the next 5 months or so we probably need to be hitting a run rate of 4 1/2 million visits a month by the end of May. Ish.
There we go then.
Now this is all just a bit of fun but at the end of the day trefor.net is going to make money so what learnings can really be taken out of the Skimlinks numbers.
Well for one the blog is getting a lot of visits to the Chromecast review – 10,754 in the time period being covered here. This is almost certainly because we were one of the first to carry a review of the Chromecast in the UK – it was only available via import at the time. This has been noticeable over the years. Before FTTC (fibre broadband) was available I wrote some technical posts on it and for a long time, until the consumer ISP advertising machines got into gear, the blog ranked very highly for FTTC.
Also a search for Chromecast on this site brings up 7 results. I’d be surprised if was really that low but in any case there must clearly from Google’s perspective be some content regarding Chromecast worth ranking.
Once we are properly up and running trefor.net is going to specialise in certain aspects of the technology market. It isn’t hard to guess what the focus is going to be. It’s the kind of stuff that has been covered over the years – connectivity, hosting, mobile and so on.
The key is in generating content that will elevate the site up the rankings for specific subjects. For example a high end broadband bundle can yield up to £140 in commission for a sale achieved through an affiliate marketing click through. A few of those in a month and you can justifiably start applying for the passport and cancel the caravan booking in Skeggy.
It’s also important to understand who the blog readership is because getting the content right will also not only generate affiliate click through sales but also attract specialist advertising.
Anyway that’s enough for now. Gotta nip out for some suntan lotion – Poundland, January sales.
trefor.net is open up for guest posts so if you have anything you want to say in the technology area drop me a line and can chat about setting you up with an account.
Ciao
PS Only £7 of the Skimlinks money is so far available for collection because of the 60 days rule. I haven’t looked to see if it is there. I don’t get out of bed for less than a tenner.
6 replies on “Skimlinks – moneymaking machine #wonga #moolah #lolly”
Thanks Tref – all interesting stuff 🙂
It might be worth checking the T&Cs with SkimLinks – some of these schemes (i.e.AdSense) don’t allow you to share earnings specifics and will chuck you out!
A shame as that would take the interest out of your post!
My little play site has been a great exercise for me.
I started it a few years back as a bit of fun against my sister who was launching her own ‘monetized’ website and it has proved (much to my surprise) to have been quite popular 🙂
It’s had better times, but it’s still approaching 5 million (total) page views.
I’ve gone from 180,000 page views pm down to around 45,000. It’s really creaking but I haven’t wanted to touch things while it’s still working for me.
A complete re-write is (over)due when I’ve time and your blog is helping to motivate me 🙂
Thanks for the tip – couldn’t immediately find their T’s & Cs to will just leave it methinks & see what happens.
I wonder if you would be better going direct with Amazon’s Affiliate scheme, instead of through a third party, who must be taking a portion what may be available directly to you…
Also, I think Amazon (and a lot of these affiliate schemes) use a cookie that’s often valid for 30 days, so once they had clicked on your link, anything they bought over the next 30-or-whatever days would count, which may well have covered the Christmas purchasing period, so you may find sales drop off until the same period later this year…
FWIW The Amazon ‘Associate’ cookie expires in 24 hours – but normally much quicker as the visitor needs to keep the session open:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t2/a11/182-7988415-1440031?ie=UTF8&pf_rd_i=assoc_help_t2&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=&pf_rd_r=&pf_rd_s=assoc-center-2&pf_rd_t=501
Ah, fair enough.
I would think that for a lot of this stuff sales are reasonably instantaneous. For things like broadband connections people probably take a bit more time to shop around before finally deciding.