When I first launched ArmoryGamingGear.com last October, I was really excited to get my first project out the door and profitable. My monetization strategy was to have affiliate links on all the gaming products listed in my site so users could buy them on amazon and I'd get a small portion of the sale.
I added links to my site but of course didn't get much traffic, which lead to me being kicked out of the Amazon affiliate program since you have to have a certain number of orders within a trial period in order to stay in the program. It was tough, but of course it was a good lesson and an even better reality check.
Fast forward a few months, and I had switched gears mostly to a new project (I only updated content on armory rather than actively developing new features). Armory had slowly been getting more and more organic traffic, which was cool to see, even though I hadn't been very active with it in any way.
I decided when I got to 2k page views and 1k users per month I would re-apply for the affiliate program. I made a few tweaks to the UI to make the links more accessible, and got back into the program to try again.
Sure enough, one by one a few orders started to roll in the past month/month and a half since. It's literally pennies which isn't too much to get excited about, but it's probably the best/most validating feeling I've had in a long time.
Which led me to today, another one of the orders shipped and the commission came in, which brought this months total up to $11.89. I realized my $5 server is my only expense, so the site is profitable this month to the tune of a whopping $6.89! I think I'll go buy myself a nice coffee to celebrate :)
NUMBERS
(All data is from when I added the affiliate links to today Jun 10th - Jul 22nd, 2020)
Pageviews: 2.4k (provided by plausible.io)
Unique users: 1.2k (provided by plausible.io)
Affiliate Link Clicks: 341
Ordered Items: 5
Shipped items: 3
Returned items: 0
Conversion: 1.47%
Shipped items revenue: $343.38 (this is how much Amazon made)
Earnings: $11.89 (this is how much I made)