I got this in my inbox yesterday morning from my mother-in-law:

Subj:  Christmas is Coming

(She’s not a Game of Thrones fan – it’s purely a coincidence… made me chuckle anyway.   ‘Prepare yourself for what lies ahead…. the holidays are here…. ‘  Fighting White Walkers / Dragon Fights / Christmas Shopping…. I can see my way to an amusing metaphor in that.)

Christmas is coming and so many people shop on Amazon!   It would be great if there were a way to automatically give you credit for all my shopping on Amazon.  I thought you were going to work on that?  Maybe you forgot but it would be a good time, if possible.  Have a great day.  Love  mom

Scott is slowly starting to indoctrinate me into the ways of advertising now that I’m the world’s most glorious secretary.  {Seriously, he got a Ferrari to be his drive-around car in that deal.}  I could not have written better “copy” myself (that’s a technical marketing term – if I have to learn this stuff, you do too).  Thank you, Denise, for a homerun intro to a post I’ve been meaning to write for awhile.

Friends and family who love us (and often question our collective sanity), frequently ask how everything is going.  I sincerely appreciate the sentiment. Let’s be clear, the real, underlying question is, “Are you guys going to be poor now that you quit your secure, well-paying job, or what?!”  There’s a lot of love in that question… it’s a rock hard, New England kind of love left over from the Puritans.  Respect.

Obviously… we’re rich at this point.  I’m crushing it with our little websites.

I can’t write that with a straight face.  We’re not and I’m not.

Scott’s company aside for a minute, I’ve been playing in affiliate sales.  It turns out, no joke, I’m wicked bad at it.  I only have niche areas where I have a real talent for sales (and selling stuff is decidedly not one of them).  Where do my talents lie?  That’s an in-person conversation and requires good beer.

I’m learning and improving.  I basically write up the science experiments we do, throw in some links to buy the materials on Amazon, add some pictures and post it/pin it/like it on Facebook/Pinterest/Instagram.  I quit putting links on here because I thought it looked cluttered and unnecessary.

I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone but me and some seriously geeked out marketing types (looking at you, Scott), but maybe it is and why not give an update.

Latest numbers

Amazon Affiliate Program

The Commission Junction (our other affiliate program) stats don’t look quite as pretty:

Assessment

Start with the red line.  The more people we send to Amazon, the more the red line goes up.  Each red line click is an opportunity to get credit for a sale (anything bought within the 24-hour window).  When someone orders something, we get a yellow credit.  Once the item(s) ship, our account gets credited with the small percentage.  Those are the green lines.  Green lines are my favorite.

While the $67.16 we made on Amazon may not blow your socks off (that’s been accruing over a couple of months), what I see when I look at this is an increase in the green lines.  Before we were lucky to get 1 per month.  Now we have multiple.

Realistically how’s it going?  That depends on perspective.  Some entrepreneur types do really well with affiliate income.  They can even live off it.  I’m not going to be that person.

If I could grow my income generation machine to $25/month regularly… that would be nice.  Maybe with the holidays coming up and people using our link?!  Speaking of, two of our brilliant friends (Marc F. and Rick D. if you’re wondering) actually saved our link to use each time they go to Amazon.  That’s kind of awesome and we sincerely appreciate it.

That’s where we stand.  Ask me questions if you’ve got ’em.  I actually laugh a lot when I’m talking about this stuff (because it’s good to be humbled regularly) so I really enjoy it.

Click this “Visit Amazon.com” to use our affiliate link to shop!