I Made My First $1,000 in Affiliate Marketing with Market Leverage

Written by Paul Piotrowski - Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Today I hit my first milestone in my affiliate marketing career. I just logged into my Market Leverage account, checked my stats and I am now just over the $1,000 mark in revenues for this month.

Of course this may not seem like a lot compared to some of the big affiliate marketers out there, but for me this is a big milestone to hit on my first months journey towards becoming a Super Affiliate. What’s crazy too is that I generated this revenue mostly from just a couple of campaigns / offers.

Now, like I said this may not seem like much to most people but imagine if I eventually was able to get 85 of these campaigns running simultaneously. That would produce $85,000/m in revenue which is more than a million dollars per year in revenues.

Of course, this is all still revenues and not profits that I’m talking about and the difference between the two is huge. If you’re spending more for PPC Ads than you are making in revenues than you’re not going to make any profits, but the mistake I don’t want to make is to try to focus too much on profits too early.

Why Not Focus on Profit From Day 1?

The reason I’m not focusing on profits from day one is because in the beginning one of the most important things to learn is HOW TO MAKE MONEY, and then you can look at tweaking and finding ways to MAKE MONEY EFFICIENTLY.

Right now I would rather know how to make $1,000 with a breakeven cost of $1,000 than to make one sale for $20 with a $10 profit. The reason for this is that once you’ve got enough revenues, you can always tweak and tune your campaigns to drop costs or increase sales and even if you make only a 10% improvement, that adds up to $100 in profit right there. On a $20 sale, the most you’ll ever make is $20.

So the first step is to learn how to bake the biggest pie, and then learn how to maximize the amount of the pie you keep in profits.

Of course, there is a disclaimer to this as well. You don’t want to spend $10,000 to make $1,000 in sales. I’m not talking about being stupid and throwing money away. I monitor my campaigns very closely and nip, cut, tweak and test different things to try to make the campaigns profitable, but I just don’t obsess over profits right now.

If you’re just getting started in affiliate marketing, I would suggest setting aside a test budget and trying to grow your revenues first even if you’re just breaking even to start with. Even a campaign that’s losing you 10-30% can be a great learning experience which you can tweak to make money eventually.

Save

Trackbacks

Comments:

Christine says:

September 24, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Wow Paul, great job! That really is a wonderful milestone. Keep up the inspiring work.

Reply
Paul Piotrowski says:

September 24, 2008 at 5:18 pm

@Christine: Thanks Christine. Much like with Blogging, it’s always the first few hundred or few thousand dollars that’s the hardest to make. It’s like getting the space-shuttle out of the gravity pull of the earth… 95% of the effort is just getting outside the earth’s atmosphere…once you make it past that, it’s way easier.

Reply
Dina says:

September 24, 2008 at 7:15 pm

Congrats Paul, that’s awesome! It was great to meet you in person at Blogworld. I’ll have to give you some tricks for your next Cashinator run, though it looks like you won’t need it soon enough if you keep up the good work. Let me know if you need anything, I look forward to following your affiliate marketing progress!

Reply
Debby Phillips says:

September 25, 2008 at 6:22 am

Paul,

You are doing a great job! I am sure your earnings will continue to grow. If you need any help or have any questions please reach out to Erick or I and we would be glad to help.

Thanks,
Debby

Reply
nudgeme says:

September 25, 2008 at 7:55 am

Wow well done Paul, you must be really pleased as it hasn’t been that long has it? You always have useful, down to earth info on your blog and I just want to say thanks for sharing. Also enjoyed your post on the Blogworld expo – interesting to hear how those events go – even if I AM UK based! Do you know of any similar events here?

All the best

Reply
Elijah says:

September 25, 2008 at 2:25 pm

That’s awesome Paul – your a force to be reckon with when you put your mind to something.

I’m assuming that your primary source of driving traffic to these offers was PPC? If so, how did you find the learning curve to get yourself to this point?

Reply
Paul Piotrowski says:

September 25, 2008 at 3:54 pm

@Elijah: Yes, it has been all PPC driven. The learning curve has definitely been there. I would say that the stuff you have to learn is not super difficult, but it is a lot to learn. Meaning, it’s more like learning the Encyclopedia Britannica rather than advanced calculus.

Also, there is a lot of conflicting information out there so you have to test everything yourself to see what’s truth and what’s fiction.

Reply
Chris Jacobson says:

September 25, 2008 at 7:16 pm

Congrats, Paul! That’s very good for your first moth.

Reply
Paul Piotrowski says:

September 26, 2008 at 6:24 pm

@Chris Jacobson: Thanks Chris, I’m excited, that’s for sure!

Reply
shafi says:

October 10, 2008 at 7:25 pm

How long took the make the first sale? Since you made no profit, do you pay tax on 1000$?

Reply
Paul Piotrowski says:

October 10, 2008 at 10:41 pm

@shafi: No, I run all my affiliate marketing efforts through an incorporated company so you only pay taxes on profits, not revenues.

It took a couple of days to generate my first sale.

Reply