The Affiliate Summit is coming up in the end of the Febuary, and it would be a great chance to meet a lot of folks in the industry, including John Chow and other super affiliates. The only problem is that admission to the conference is almost $2000, plus airfare and hotel. Call it $3000! Since I don’t have 3000 bones to throw around (yet), I was elated when I saw that John Chow was giving away his ticket to the conference. I guess he got a free pass once he was invited to present. All you have to do to win is write a “Why I should get a free pass” type of blog entry and let John know about it so he can read it and select the most worthy candidate.

Last week I wrote an essay…and I think it was a really really good one that stood a chance at winning his pass but I haven’t posted it yet. I’m not sure why I haven’t posted it, but I think it has to do with timing. I have 2 papers due for school that week and there’s some stuff going on at work that would require a little attention while I’m gone. Plus, I’m not sure if I can rationalize taking vacation time for 2 days while I go to an affiliate summit. At least not yet.

So, with only a few more days left in this month I decided to let this contest slide. I know that a free pass would have been awesome, but when I have more free time (after May I’ll only have to worry about work!) it may be worth my while to spend the money to go to one of these shows.

Have you written an entry for this free pass? What’re you waiting for?! This is a great opportunity and I challenge you to write a post and win John’s pass! Not only would you be able to meet John Chow himself for dinner, but you’d also get to meet super affiliate Zac Johnson and others too. Industry leaders and affiliate managers will be there talking about the latest trends in affiliate marketing. It’s a great opportunity for anyone who is ready to get serious about making money online.

Start now, write a draft. Here’s how I think the winning essay should be structured:

• Your opening paragraph should catch John’s attention. Use a quote or something that really highlights your desire to go to the summit.
• Your next paragraph should do a quick recap of the show’s highlights and why it’s you that should go
• Now present John with a short list. Your top 3-5 reasons why you should be selected. Be funny and creative. Check out the Affiliate Summit website and look at events, speakers, and sessions. Highlight the things that would be most beneficial to you.
• Make sure to add a bit of flattery in having dinner with John and meeting other weblebrities (I just made that up..like celebrities for the web, maybe?) .
• Conclude by restating your desire to be a better affiliate marketer and restate your top points. Win him over with your wit and your creativity.

There you have it, folks! This is how you can win John’s pass to the summit. Act quickly! The contest ends at the end of the month!

Overview

This month I changed the title from “Income Report” to “Report” because, well, this site didn’t make any money and my other sites only brought in a combined total of $28. That’s a lot less than I was expecting considering that my previous two months I had been earning around $250 a month.

The cause for this decline in income is mostly due to my Google Dance. On Monday, my top earning site was ranking in at 773 for a given keyword. Yesterday when I checked it was up to 35. Hopefully it means that my site is earning its stripes, but I really don’t know what causes it to be on the top 10 and then to drop off the face of the planet. I’ve checked the supplemental index for my site in early November and the site was doing very badly with roughly 90% of the site in the supplemental index. I’m still not sure how to make the site have more content in the “real” index, but I’ve spruced up my robots.txt file and changed some things around with the site and now it’s at 87% in the supplemental index.

I am still not happy with this 87% and would like to achieve 40% or less in the supplemental index and will focus my efforts this month into making provisions for this. Additionally, this month I want to start monetizing this site by selling ad space or by including more affiliate links on my nearly daily posts.

Traffic

Even though this month I brought in less than 30 bones, I would have say that this month has been a success. That’s not the optimist in me, but the fact that while working full time and working on a dual master’s degree and doing all kinds of other things, I still managed to write nearly daily for this site and saw traffic grow by leaps and bounds. For the month of November, traffic for this site nearly doubled from 297 unique views in October to 540 uniques for November. Growth is good and I must say that December is already off to a rockin’ start.

From this month on, I will include a snapshot of my traffic in order to compare growth on different metrics. Here is a quick snapshot of my statistics, according to http://www.xinureturns.com/:

As you can see, this site has a Google Pagerank of 2, not bad for a site that is less than 3 months old! . Secondly, this site has a Technorati authority of 10 which I think means that there are 10 other blogs who have “favorited” me and added to my street cred.

I submitted my site to DMOZ at the time of inception, but I still have not been indexed nor do I expect to be indexed. Apparently you have to pay money to be included in DMOZ although it’s supposed to be a free site.

The rest of these stats deal with how different search engines index and track this website’s progress. Yahoo! gives me a whole lot of backlinks while Google only gives me one. Strange that there’s such a big difference but I guess that’s just the way it is. None of the other stats really matter all that much other than the Technorati number so I’ll conclude this section at that.

Future (i.e. December’s) Plans

This month has already been busy. I’m in the midst of finals at school (my last one is due Monday by 5pm on “Categorization and Organization”…if you know anything about facets leave me a comment! ) so after then I’ll be able to focus on my 3 new websites that I’ve launched! These sites are eBay stores, but I am going to be branching them out to include non-eBay items. I won’t give anything away yet, but these sites have been fun to make and I hope that promoting them will be easier than my health site.

Conclusion

After it’s all said and done, I think November has been good. Visits to the site nearly doubled, I got 3 new sites ready to roll, purchased a few domain names and made nice progress on figuring out how to monetize this site. John Chow continues to be a rockstar but I guess I can be one too if I had 297,000 visitors per month. I’m chasing you John, and I hope that next year I can be closer to you in terms of traffic and income!

Even though I sometimes talk smack about John Chow, I want everyone to know that I am a big fan of his.  John Chow is probably the first blogger that I ever read who really seems to have a good frame of mind when it comes to blogging and he is willing to share his time and knowledge with anyone who is willing to listen.  His e-book really encouraged me to start this website and in the long run, my philosophy towards blogging and towards monetizing this blog will most likely turn out to be somewhat “Chow-esque”.  This is why I want to dedicate my next few posts to John Chow and the things that I like most about his blog/blogging.

What I Like About John Chow Part 1: Sharing is Caring

On more than one occasion, I have been impressed by John’s amazing willingness to share what some bloggers would consider classified, a trade secret or  something mysterious that only experienced bloggers should know and never share.  I read many blogs before finally finding John’s and ultimately ended up being frustrated about the “big picture” talk that always went on with these blogs and communities.  Everyone always talked about driving traffic and doing better SEO and secrets for monetizing a blog and so on, but it was at John’s blog that I first heard some “big picture” talk mixed with actionable information.  For example, instead of talking about doing better SEO and moving on to another topic, John said to do better SEO by, for example, fixing your permalink structure in Wordpress.

These actionable items that John Chow dishes out on occasion have meant a lot to me.  With those tiny nuggets of knowledge, I’ve not only become a better blog manager but I have also been able to learn, share, and increase my domain knowledge and ability to talk shop with other bloggers.  Not only that, but I feel that I can now start a blog on any platform and know what to look for or improve in order to make the site just that much better.