I really enjoy the fact that I can make a living out of creating websites, from knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, only 4 years ago. I vividly remember starting out and scouring the net for information to help me along, and the long dry first year where making any reasonable amount of cash seemed unlikely.

I was fortunate to spend time in the company of others (virtually) who were making a living doing this stuff and still do. If it wasn’t for those long through-the-night chat sessions on the old A4U ezboard I don’t doubt I’d have given in after a few months. Whenever I find myself in conversation with anyone starting down this road I always try and pass on the message that it doesn’t happen immediately, but with a lot of hard work you can make your living from affiliate marketing.

To this end I’m going to do what most people who blog about Affiliate Marketing don’t do and ”show you the good stuff”, a financial history of one of our sites, that started off very small and has grown to become a very nice earner.

Airport Transfers - http://www.transfers.net/

The Idea: There were a couple of airport transfer merchants on Affiliate Future and we considered linking to them from Holiday Watchdog. We then decided a dedicated website would be more useful and allow us to concentrate SEO on that domain.

The Build: By the time we got around to starting the build Affiliate Future had approached a few other transfer companies and talked them into signing up. This led to the comparison engine idea, pulling prices live from merchants using XML.

The Launch: After approximately 6 months from the original conception of the idea, we launched transfers.net on the 13th July 2006. It boasted a rather bold green and white design, but it worked!

First Sale: At 7:41 PM on the 18th July 2006 with the honour going to Shuttle Direct, a cracking £1.28 in commission.

 July 2006: 17 sales, £926.21 of sales, £48.94 commission.

It’s worth pointing out that for the first few months, our traffic came almost exclusively from Holiday Watchdog.

August 2006: 40 sales, £2192.11 of sales, £141.55 commission.

September 2006: 58 sales, £3728.79 of sales, £226.61 commission.

We were now up to 5 merchants, Affiliate Future weaving their magic for us and bringing Transferstore from Alpha Rooms on board.

October 2006: 49 sales, £3430.72 of sales, £267.40 commission.

Ahh, the end of summer and sales dropped off a little. We started to see lots of long-tail search terms pop up on Google, creating the odd sale or 3 in October.

November 2006: 58 sales, £2942.88 of sales, £209.61 commission.

December 2006: 58 sales, £4592.13 of sales, £315.80 commission.

We were looking forward to January, a good sales month for holidays, although we weren’t sure if this would be the same for transfers or be an add-on later in the year, nearer the summer.

January 2007: 162 sales, £13160.31 of sales, £1026.26 commission.

February 2007: 179 sales, £12547.29 of sales, £822.70 commission.

February carried on as January had left off. We also dabbled with some PPC advertising, investing some of the profits into generating more traffic. Towards the end of the month our positions on Google moved up substantially, with nearly all our pages ranking well.

March 2007: 371 sales, £22766.01 of sales, £1614.23 commission.

March gave us our first full month with our new Google rankings, we were really looking forward to the summer now.

April 2007: 303 sales, £20851.69 of sales, £1600.64 commission.

It just got quiet! This is the kind of thing that has you scouring the site, refers, logs and backlinks to see what went wrong.

May 2007: 522 sales, £37391.59 of sales, £2852.58 commission.

Well, nothing was wrong, May was a great month and all was right with the world of transfers.

June 2007: 680 sales, £51277.84 of sales, £3790.57 commission.

July 2007: 899 sales, £72736.06 of sales, £5799.64 commission.

August 2007: 1040 sales, £72585.93 of sales, £6053.07 commission.

The site just kept on getting busier through this summer, blowing away our expectations. We also added a few independent merchants who were paying PPC rather than CPA.

September 2007: 786 sales, £56133.99 of sales, £4413.97 commission. (up to 27th)

In September our SEO efforts for our main key phrase came through and we’re currently #2 on google.com and #4 on google.co.uk . Sales have however dropped off as the summer booking frenzy falls away.

Since we started transfers.net we’ve made 5222 sales, generating £377,263.55 worth of business via CPA for our merchants and made a tidy £29183.57 in commissions. From starting PPC advertising on the 9th February we’ve spent £8313.43 on Adwords and £200 each on MSN and Yahoo. A net profit of over £20k in 14 months and the site getting busier and busier as time goes on.

So that’s our story of transfers.net, I hope it provides you with some inspiration that you can make money through affiliate marketing, and enough to allow you to get rid of that annoying 9-5 job eventually. Although the site made sales almost straightaway, we had the benefit of being able to channel traffic at it from the off, which isn’t the case when you’re just starting out.

I’m sure you hadn’t considered looking at airport transfers as a subject for a website (and please don’t consider this as an excuse to!), as it is considered a niche and like many niches often overlooked. So rather than build that shopping directory, skip right past that phase and find a couple of merchants in a niche area and get your thinking cap on. Find a niche and kick its ass.

Reading back the above, I did miss out quite an important part. The hard work. Other than the technical aspect of building the site structure and comparison engine, we had to manually map each merchants routes to our own. Transfers.net has 263 airports, 2157 destinations, with 8170 unique mappings to 12 seperate merchants. That takes a bit of time and effort!