Well, I’m back out of hiding – for now at least. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback so I thought I would make a post to update everyone on what’s happened since I left off in March.

First off, I obviously haven’t posted much in a while. The main reason for that is I pretty much got burned out shortly after I made my last post. I was really working in overdrive from about last August up until March and I think it finally just caught up with me. I needed to take a little time to chill out and relax a little bit, and that’s largely what I did. It came at a bad time considering I just had a breakthrough with my EPN sites, but overall I think a little R&R will make me more productive in the months ahead. I don’t quite feel back to normal yet, but I’m just about back to 100% and I’ve been a lot more productive over the last week or so.

Anyway, now for the updates…

100 EPN Sites

Obviously a ton has happened with this. I made the switch on all 100 sites, removing PHPBay from every last one in favor of EPN widgets. This in itself took me a long time, and was probably part of the catalyst for getting burned out. Anyway, much as I saw with my original test group, pretty much all 100 sites returned to the SERPS for their targeted keywords once they were indexed and PHPBay was no longer part of the site. In many cases the sites returned within the first 2 pages of SERPS, so this was definitely a great boost. Regardless, I’ll still have to do quite a bit of SEO work on each and every site in order to bring them all to full fruition.

Update 8/09/10

I’m afraid I was initially too quick to judge PHPBay. I recently ran an additional test… On one of my sites that I had removed PHPBay from and saw it returned to  a #2 ranking for its main keyword, I decided to try removing the EPN widgets and replacing them with a regular ebay RSS feed.  As soon as the site was spidered, it dropped from #2 to not being in the top 200 results. I replaced the EPN widgets and the site returned to its #2 ranking again. This tells me that the problem was not related to PHPBay, but rather RSS feeds. The reason I can really think of why this would happen would be as a result of adding all the additional content from the feed to a page already targeted towards specific keywords.

Results wise, my EPN earnings were up about 30% or so last month, from the previous month, and many of the sites were not indexed and didn’t begin ranking again until well after the 15th of March, so overall I’m pretty happy with the results. This month, I’m on track for about another 30% increase over last month, so that is definitely encouraging since I haven’t touched any of the sites since I replaced the code last month.

Micro Niche Snipers

I’ve got a total of 25 of these, most of which were set up between January and February of this year. For the month of March, these sites earned me just about $130 total. I figure that they costed me about $35/each to deploy, so I’ve already paid for a good chunk of them, which is making this look like a pretty decent investment so far. As it stands now, I don’t believe I’m going to top $130 this month – I might reach it again, or fall slightly short, which is still good. I haven’t done any additional promotion on any of these sites since they were deployed – save for maybe a couple of the first ones I built at the end of 09. Overall, this has gone well, but I still haven’t decided where I’m going to go with it. I have to decide between building more sites like it, or focusing on maximizing this first group. I’m leaning towards the latter right now.

Hosting

One of the things that really pissed me off over the last month was a problem I had with JustHost. I originally created an account with JustHost because I found a coupon that gave me the entire first year of hosting free. In retrospect, I wish I would have just paid for a hosting account with a reputable host instead. I’m not going to get too far into the specifics, but basically their setup is poorly run, their customer service is ignorant and extremely unhelpful, and they seem to actually be proactively looking for ways to cancel people’s hosting accounts. The long and short of it is, I had between 20-30 small sites hosted there, and my account was cancelled, leaving me to deal with the hassle of moving all these sites elsewhere. Based on this, JustHost is offically on my shit list, and I absolutely do not recommend them under any circumstances.

As a result of all this, I’m going to be taking all the sites from my JustHost account and completely redoing them as static HTML. The great thing about static HTML sites is that they’re super portable and require basically no maintenance. This means, there’s very little to worry about in terms of getting jerked around by a host, or security issues. Of course there are negatives as well – the main thing being that by using wordpress as a platform, you greatly increase the number of pages in each site. For example, if done correctly, 5 posts can turn in to 20 – 50 pages worth of indexable stuff for search engines. Also, the ease of installing wordpress and setting up sites is something I’ve really grown to like. Regardless, I’m going to be creating a handful of static niche site templates – from scratch – and design them to be super easy to set up and deploy. I’m going to test on this batch of sites, and based on the results decide how to move forward. One thing I know for sure, at least for now, I really don’t want to set up another huge quantity of WordPress sites that I have to worry about managing. Maybe that will change in the future, but for now I’m not interested.

Plans Moving Forward

So obviously I trashed all my March plans, for the most part, and haven’t really done much in the way of MMO at all for the last 4 weeks or so. Now I’m getting back into the swing of things, and I do have some plans.

The first of which is to set up the sites I mentioned above on new hosting as static HTML. I hope to have that completed by mid-next week.

Second – I’m going to choose a handful of my EPN sites that seem to have the highest potential in terms of earnings, and send a ton of links to them. Also, after another month of data, or so, I’m going to have to start looking at the effectiveness of the EPN widgets in terms of conversions. I want to have a good amount of data before I do so, and I want to have a good chunk of these sites performing close to full potential to get a really good idea.

Third – I’ve got plans for at least 2-3 new large sites. I really want to work on developing some quality flagship sites – I have a couple right now, and I feel like I should be working more on this. I think they’re the best bet long term, and it’s much easier to manage 1 x 100 page site than 100 niche sites, so if I can master building large sites like I have with niche sites, I’ll be in great shape and probably be creating less overall work for myself.

That’s basically it. I’m hoping to start posting more frequently here, and please keep the questions and comments coming.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ok, I’ve been getting a ton of emails asking about the type of widgets I’m using to replace PHPBay auctions on my sites. There are a few different ways to do it, but I think the best widgets come frmo the Custom Banner Generator. This is a new EPN tool that is still in Beta, however it can easily be accessed from your EPN dashboard.

To start generating new ads, you’ll want to log in to your EPN account. Then click on Tools, then Widgets. On the next screen you’ll see 4 options. Click Custom Banner Generator. From there you’ll be able to customize your EPN widget. For doing this, I generally recommend following the same basic guidelines you would if you were setting up AdSense on your site. I personally prefer a 336×280 box that I can place right into the content, but you could also go with the large horizontal or vertical skyscrapers, or pretty much whatever you prefer.

You can also customize the colors. I like using a basic blue link, red text color scheme, but it’s probably not a bad idea to mess around with different colors – especially if you’re going to be implementing on a large amount of sites.

Next you’ll scroll down on the page and enter a campaign ID for the tool. If you’re using an existing campaign ID, just start typing the name of the campaign and the tool will bring up suggestions from your existing campaigns.

Last you’ll need to enter your search term. I’ve found that this tool delivers pretty relevant results – even better than PHPBay, however I’ve also discovered that if you want to filter certain terms from your results, you can do so by adding a – sign. So for example you could enter: Your Keyword -Filter, and the result would be auctions containing Your Keyword, but not Filter. Hopefully that makes sense.

A preview of the ad will appear so you can make sure everything is kosher, then all you need to do is copy the script that the tool spits out at the bottom of the page, and paste into your site.

Obviously this tool isn’t going to work for everyone. If you’re making a bunch of thin sites with pages of auction listings, you will probably want to use the RSS feed generator instead, but this particular tool works in a similar way that AdSense does, so if you’ve got a content rich site, it should be no problem.

100 EPN Site Update

Since my report on Monday night, I’ve been feverishly working on removing PHPBay from all of my sites. It’s a lot of work because I have to remove the tags from each individual post, which over 100 sites, adds up to hundreds, if not thousands of posts. Then I need to generate a custom ad and update the template files for each theme, so it’s a ton of work. I’ve got about 65 sites done so far, and I hope to have the last 35 done by the end of the day tomorrow. So far the results have been promising. My clicks for yesterday were up 100%, my EPC went up slightly, and obviously my earnings also increased, although I haven’t had a ton of clicks or sales from my 100 EPN sites that I’ve recently switched over. I expect it will take a while for those sites to get back into the swing of things. Once they are unpenalzied, they will begin sending actual targeted traffic which should result in much better conversions. The results I’m seeing from the newley switched over sites is pretty much the same as what I shared with you all on Monday night – as soon as the sites are getting spidered, their rankings seem to be immediately returning. I’ve been mostly focusing on just getting PHPBay off of all the sites and adding the new EPN widgets, so I haven’t been spending a lot of time trying to get each site spidered right away. I think I will let nature run its course – at least the rest of this week, and hopefully a good chunk of the sites will naturally get spidered. Then I can reasses next week and see if I need to take further action to get the last bunch back ranking again.

Either way, this week has been unbelievable and the results were completely unexpected. I never imagined that PHPBay was the thing causing me so much trouble, but I’m really looking forward to finally being able to dig back into these sites, get them ranking, find out what ads work, and go from there.

Update 8/09/10

I’m afraid I was initially too quick to judge PHPBay. I recently ran an additional test… On one of my sites that I had removed PHPBay from and saw it returned to  a #2 ranking for its main keyword, I decided to try removing the EPN widgets and replacing them with a regular ebay RSS feed.  As soon as the site was spidered, it dropped from #2 to not being in the top 200 results. I replaced the EPN widgets and the site returned to its #2 ranking again. This tells me that the problem was not related to PHPBay, but rather RSS feeds. The reason I can really think of why this would happen would be as a result of adding all the additional content from the feed to a page already targeted towards specific keywords.

I plan to continue posting regularly as any new developments occur. I’ve been getting a lot of email questions, and I ask that everyone please try to ask their questions in the comments on these posts whenever possible – unless you’ve got a question that can’t be shared publicly.

Popularity: 14% [?]