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My First 6 Figure Month and OTE 0f 7 Figures For The Year (15)

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So I’m back in this place after a longer than I thought hiatus to concentrate 100% on making things work.

I let my subs expire early in 2012 (sorry) after making the decision to immerse myself in getting together a much bigger testing budget to make things work with paid traffic. The idea was to then come back here and make it work rather than playing about with things as I had up till then. $20 a day on POF wasnt really doing it for me lol

My background had always been with SEO so I defaulted back to that to create a true Authority site that was purely built on Whitehat techniques and would stand the test of time. Google was going to be my friend and ally as I had gut feelings they were going to bring the hammer down on sites that didn’t perform to their guidelines.

So the approach was to be content, content, content. Build it and they will come so to speak so the first few months of 2012 were spent churning out extremely high quality content, some days managing 10k words, which along with research was very hard work.

I cut myself off from pretty much all previous acquaintances, disabled all social media accounts and just worked with no distractions whatsoever. I kept a work/life balance with the family and close friends but that was pretty much it.

Anyhow by the summer of 2012 the site was starting to perform, Google was loving it and as every update came and went it just got stronger. I went from my old BH ways of hating Matt Cutts to looking forward to everything coming out from them and becoming a total Google bitch.

As the site was in the health niche the natural way to monetize it was with supplements, my only real experience was with CPS so that what I did, introducing rated and recommended products and because the site was so trustworthy visitors were lapping it up.

By the end of 2012 it was performing well with 4 figure monthly income which meant that I could outsource more of the content and relieve some of the workload. This gave me more time to plan things and the next natural progression was to develop my own products, creating things that actually worked and were there to help consumers and keep them as long term buyers.

This opened a whole new area of learning with merchant accounts, processing, sales page design and copywriting and a thousand other things that all need to be learned.

With the regular traffic I was able to send from the website it all started clicking into place and 2013 was a steady year of growth as I was getting everything nailed down and performing to its best. Split testing was to become my new friend and I was able to double income simply by getting the sales page from 5.7% conversion to nearly 12% by testing everything on a constant basis.

By the end of 2013 I was starting to see high 5 figure monthly income and was still ploughing most of it back in to streamlining systems and get everything in line for the next phase of growth.

As it stands it will do 7 figures this year which has been pretty mind blowing to be honest.

The next idea was to branch out into other areas of sales, so affiliates and paid traffic is the next on my list. Although the site is well established now its still in the hands of Google and in one fell swoop income could plummet.

So I’ve developed another product, which is shortly going live in the male/muscle market while everything ticks along with other income sources.

Plan is to do a soft launch and then build out the traffic via paid sources. Its ripe for the tube sites so this will be the next step. I know there are some big players in there (lol some on this forum by the looks of it) but from what I have learnt previously and with the stack of information available on here Im confident I can make it work.

The last couple of years have been extremely intensive but Im ready to take things to the next level. I might have done things slightly differently than most people but to keep things simple I stuck to what I knew and had knowledge of and it has definitely worked out for me so far.

So……I’m back. Looking forward to getting involved and seeing where things can take me on the next stage of my journey. I won’t feel out of my depth this time around like I did before. When all you can see is people blowing it up and you are not it can be pretty intimidating but the big thing I did learn was to apply myself to something completely and to test, test, test………then test again.

Thanks STM, despite not being here for a while everything I did learn while I was here and have put into practice has really helped me get to where I am, the success stories inspired me to put in the hard hours and despite falling asleep several times at the keyboard gave me the motivation to want to come back after “proving” to myself I could do it.

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yes!!!

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Well done. No matter what.. your own product is the way to riches. For sure.

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Congrats dude! That's a huge turn around!

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This is really impressive and inspiring!!!

Is this revenue or profits? Either way, this is awesome, man!!!

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This is strictly revenue but as its from organic search with not one visitor paid for then as you can imagine the profit is pretty (very) high.

When it was CPS to products owned by others and I was writing then overheads were pretty much non existent but the turnover was stuck around the high 4 figure mark.

I then developed my own products which shot up the returns as I was controlling every part of the the flow, but of course costs have since grown accordingly with stock, staff, office costs etc to take into account.

I have a very modest lifestyle as well with no fancy cars or bitches so everything gets rolled back in to the business. I suppose I could pull a nice chunk out of the business but this would be defeating my long term objectives for growth.

So now I have developed the new product which competes with anything out there for design, branding etc. It will shortly be sat in my distribution centre, fully paid for and I have a proper budget to acquire the traffic. This was something I could only dream about before.

I have now got a ton of experience with tracking, testing, copywriting, graphic creation so am approaching things from a different angle. Most affiliates will acquire traffic and send it to offers outside of their control, I am creating the offer then acquiring the traffic to (hopefully) make the sales. I also have the opportunity to recruit others to do the same if needs be or keep keep it exclusively for myself. The attraction of all this is that I control the whole flow so there's no excuses.

Don't worry I'm not deluded, I now have another load of skillsets to learn but this time have the confidence to tackle things logically, plus decent budget to spend. Yeah I can split test landers and sales pages so for me it seems a logical next step to do the same with traffic sources, angles and banners?

Point of posting all this was to show that if you knuckle down to one thing and works your balls off then you give yourself the best chance of making things happen. I have had shiny object syndrome more times than I care to remember but by sticking to one thing and the behest of everything else I was able to make it work.

I also learn't the value of delegating and getting other people with more knowledge or skill to work for you. I can't code to save my life and can only knock up the most basic graphic stuff so finding the right people to do this for me meant I could concentrate on things I was good at, ideas, marketing and the like.

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Fantastic! Nice work!

I've got a similar property in a different space also using white-hat SEO, but I've yet to scale it up to the levels you have - very cool stuff.

As you say, white-hat authority sites are very hard work, but the results can be really rewarding.

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Great stuff garyp! Very inspirational!

Do you have any tips or advice on building a large authority site and getting visitors to that site? For example, types of link building? How did you determine keywords to write about? etc Thanks!

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This is pure gold. Shiny object syndrome is one of the few reasons why people fail at making things work.

Despite being repeated over and over again, I still do see people making this mistake. Always chasing after shiny objects and unable to be focus. I started throwing cpa workshop this year and currently have about 100 students. Learning to be focus is the FIRST THING that I teach everyone - however, that still happen all the time unfortunately...

Awesome success story and I'm really glad for ya! It's time to pick up the paid advertising skill because at the end of the day the whole business model is still relying on Google!

Good job and can't wait for your next 7 figures success story

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SO TRUE, its how i found my first success in online marketing (before affiliate marketing) was sticking to 1 website idea and working my ass off on it for 10 hours a day, EVERYDAY. Eventually built it up really big and sold it! Then i learned how important sticking to 1 thing is.

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Hey OP,

What were some of the biggest challenges you faces transitioning from SEO to paid marketing? How did you manage to overcome them?

I find that a lot of people who come from an SEO background struggle with making this transition, so big congratulations to you!

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I've not quite made the full transition over yet.....but nearly there. I'm about to start the first foray into paid traffic and will be posting a follow-along to hopefully get some pointers and advice from you experienced guys. Last couple of months have been spent developing a product with various landing pages, separate pre-sell landers and a ton of banners ready to have a go at the adult space, Im hoping to kick all this off in the next week or so....so keep a look out for it

As you say there will be a ton of challenges ahead, I'm not deluding myself but Im ready to put the graft in and the hard yards to make it work.

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Well done.This is really inspiring!Congrats dude!

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Gary - as a Newbie I am inspired by your story - as I've just started out i've been exploring different strategies for comparison - ie content heavy site, direct linking via email / social media / Mobile CPA and it's interesting that content/authority seems like the longest road - but I'm guessing your advice would be to keep going with it - am I right to assume you did no paid SEO? But you have a background in SEO so you know the (whitehat) techniques? My background is in brand building and above the line advertising which unfortunately are not much use in Aff Mark.
I'm guessing I am with the same Aff. Network as you so have started in similar categories - maybe I should switch now!!
Anyway your story is inspiring - I've go time and resource so have no excuses not to follow your example
Any updates would be great

Thanks again

M

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