Eric Nagel

Eric Nagel

CTO, PHP Programmer, Affiliate Marketer & IT Consultant

Milk Your Cash Cow

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about diversification, but I’m going to talk about the opposite view. When you have a cash cow, keep milking it! What got me thinking about this is some projects I’m working on, or have worked on in the past, that are now almost dead.

The title of this post comes from Jeffrey Gitomer who says, Go milk your own cows first for new business. You can go to your neighbor’s cows and milk them or you can milk your own cows.

Milk your Cash Cow
Milk your Cash Cow
Now Gitomer is talking about picking up new business & sales, but the same goes for your own projects. If you haven’t maxed out something that’s working for you, why are you moving onto something else already?

Last November, I had figured out a way to really kill it in the CPA space. Now, maybe not as much as some people, but November made for a very nice Christmas around here. I shared this technique with a select few other affiliates, and if they did the work (shocker! You must work to make money!) they, too, were making good money (to me, good money = more than a 9-5 job). It was a nice little holiday bonus for all of us.

Once I found how to make it work, I developed 47 websites to promote it. I was able to launch a new campaign in about an hour (buy domain, build site, set-up tracking, set up traffic source, repeat). I didn’t stop at one or two sites. I had found something that worked, and maxed it out. I was milking the cash cow.

However, part of the technique lead to chasing offers, which got old quickly. After 4 months, I was done and stopped promoting this method. I thought about turning it into an e-Book or online course, but figured the other CPA affiliates wouldn’t like this. It’s still a thought.

It was also during this time that I developed my coupon site, and it was a nice addition to my daily revenue stream. At the time, it wasn’t much: about $40 per day. But once I scaled it up, I tripled that. Then I doubled the new number! I’m not sharing income to brag… all of the income & expenses for the site were outlined in the sale that recently closed, unsuccessfully. But I’m showing you that if you find a small success, figure out how you can make it bigger!

AdWords then stopped my impressions (something I’m working on fixing). There goes $200+ per day – just like that! Sure, the site isn’t dead – it still makes something. But when it was working, I should have been working it! I had over 600 AdGroups, but could have had that over 1,000. There’s so much more to do on this site, but now a major traffic source is dead and it’s going to be harder to expand the site to where I want it, but I know I’ll do it!

I’m writing this as advice to you, but also as a reminder to myself.

When you have a cash cow, milk it!

Comments
  • Max
    Posted December 1, 2010 10:28 am 0Likes

    I’ve been telling myself the same thing lately. Still trying to find the right balance between new pastures and milking the tried and true.

    AdWords has also made me lose some sleep :/

  • Gunes
    Posted December 18, 2010 7:51 am 0Likes

    Google treats customers like a piece of dirt. Eventually everyone working with adwords run into trouble if you are not selling your own product (i.e. you are an IM). Just leave that behind and continue, as you made many successful campaigns in the past, you will always find newer ones.

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