Well it’s been quite some time since I last posted and obviously there have been a lot of changes in the world of Internet marketing. I’ve been meaning to post an update for quite a while – at first I was planning to make another typical New Year’s post, but that came and went. The truth of the matter is, it takes me quite a while to write these posts, and in general I’ve been working a lot less these days, so overall its been tough for me to get motivated to do it. That being said, I’m actually kind of re-energized to work on this site a little more – one reason being the reason Farmer update. Now I wasn’t really personally effected that much by the update. My hubpages traffic is down around 20% or so, but it’s not like I was planning to retire off of that income anyway. I have one other site that is a strong adsense earner that did start declining in traffic around the time of the update, but I have no real evidence that it is related, and frankly although the site is one of my best adsense earners, the topic is not sustainable forever – for the forseeable future, yes, but forever, no. So for the last few years I have been feverishly focusing on making other more sustainable adsense sites that equal the income of this particular site, and thankfully, due to these efforts, I wasn’t hit that hard. The way the update did effect me, however, was it did kind of provide a paradigm shift for me. For the last year and a half, at least, I’ve been extremely successful with article marketing as my primary SEO strategy.  Luckily, the algo update didn’t seem to have any kind of negative impact on any sites I’ve heavily SEO’d, but still, it makes me feel like I should be diversifying my efforts more anyway. Search engine traffic is a very fickle thing, so to get complacent using any particular strategy seems more and more to be a very foolish thing to do. So based on that, I have a few new projects in the works that I plan on sharing here. Not only that, I am going to try to be more organized about it so I can better share the results here and actually provide some substantive conclusions. Anyway, first, an update on my 100 EPN sites.

100 EPN Sites

This project is slowly approaching the 2 year mark. At the time I originally conceived the idea, I never would have thought that I WOULDN’T be making over 3K monthly off these sites by now.  Truth be told, it has taken an incredible amount of time, resources and trial and error to make anything of these sites.  In retrospect, the main reason I wasn’t ranking right away and making a ton of money off these sites right away was that I simply chose keywords that were too competitive to rank themselves. LUCKILY, in light of everything that has happened over the past year or so in search engine algo changes, I probably would have been screwed if I would have made 100 sites in extremely narrow niches with EMD’s (exact match domains). On the plus side, the sites probably would have ranked great coming out of the gates, and made me a LOT more money…  Additionally, I probably would have taken the income from the sites and rolled it into making even more sites and more money. That would have worked great for about the first 10 months, until last May rolled around and the MayDay update occured. At that point, a vast majority of those narrow niche sites, if not all, would have gotten penalized into oblivion and I would essentially have to start completely from scratch.

Luckily, that’s not what happened. I followed the initial Keyword Academy keyword research method of finding “Green” keywords that should produce a MINIMUM of $50/month in revenue. Since I was new to the program at the time, I didn’t realize that this type of keyword, in general, is not the same as a micro-niche keyword where you need only put up a site on an EMD and send a few links to get a #1 ranking. No, in this case, these “green” keywords are more competitive – take much more to rank for and don’t have EMD’s available.  As a result, only a very small handful of these sites are actually EMDs. Bad short term move by me, but great long term move.

So 2 years ago in August, I set out on this path. I spent a full week doing keyword research, I spent a ton of money outsourcing articles – I bought them from an American company and paid close to triple what I pay now per article. I spent a ton of money on domains, I spent a ton of money paying someone locally to help me build the sites, and I spent a massive amount of time myself setting up the sites. THEN, I spent even  more money to have backlink articles produced  – also at a premium, I spent a ton of money on an outsourcer to post the articles, I spent a ton of time posting them myself, and I spent a ton of time setting up a system for tracking everything.

When it was all said and done, I had spent tons of time and money in a span of at least 3 months getting the whole thing set up. All I had to do was sit back and watch the commissions roll in. I waited, and waited and waited for the day when everything would “click”. It didn’t come. EPN changed their payout system completely. That made things worse.   After months of waiting and waiting, I finally decided to try switching PHPBay ads for EPN widgets. I seemed to have some immediate success. So I went ahead and took the time to individually make the switch on every site. Again, I waited and waited for something to “click” and earnings to start rolling in. Again, nothing seemed to be happening. After another couple months, the widgets appeared to be performing terribly. I did some more testing and found that PHPBay wasn’t actually what caused my sites not to rank after all. So I took a few of my sites, spent a good deal of time customizing them and making them look really professional, and put PHPBay back on them. My earnings increased slightly, but frankly I didn’t have the motiviation to give all 100 of my sites a makeover, and started working on other projects last summer. I did spend some time backlinking a few select EPN sites, which also resulted in some success, but overall last summer I spent a lot of time putting several areas of my business on auto pilot, which resulted in me spending a lot more time hanging out with my friends and family and playing disc golf and basketball, rather than working.

Then fall rolled around and I got an email from EPN detailing a holiday bonus for affiliates with a chance to make a ton of money.  This completely kick started me back into working on these 100 sites again. I took a handful of them and started heavily backlinking them. Earnings went up. In November I increased my sales enough to qualify for the second highest bonus. Could have been better, but I wasn’t complaining. Then again in December I saw similar results.  Additionally, around that time I made the decision to sell most of my oldest and best earning EPN sites. It wasn’t that the sites weren’t earning at the same level anymore, or because I needed the money. The main reason I decided to sell them was I just simply felt like I needed a change. In January, the bonus season was over and things were back to normal for me without my best earning EPN sites. I kept working on backlinking and actually brought several sites into the top 3 results for their main terms, which were quite competitive.  I managed to get my earnings for January above my October earnings, which had included my previous good earning sites.

By about the first week of February, I started to notice that some of my EPN sites that I had gained top rankings for weren’t performing very well and I started looking for new ideas. Simply switching between EPN widgets and PHPBay wasn’t enough. With one site, my traffic to sales ratio was so low, that I decided to try and source the product and sell direct to the consumer. I found several hot leads, however, I decided that I didn’t know enough about how well the product would actually sell to proceed.

About that same time, I got an email back from someone I had requested a link exchange with. I actually didn’t end up exchanging links with them, but I did get a chance to see their website. The theme was shitty, however I absolutely loved the format they were using to promote their products with amazon. I had actually been playing around a lot more with Amazon on some of my micro niche sites, and had managed to raise over $50 in earnings in January, more than my previous lifetime total combined.

Rather than continue trying to source the product directly, I decided to switch my site from EPN to Amazon and borrow the format idea. This was at about 4:00 PM on a Friday. Saturday rolled around and I checked my stats, and noticed that I had made a sale within just the few hours the changes had been live. The next day rolled around, and even more sales. I actually went for about 8 days straight making at least one sale every day, and often as many as 5-10 sales – just off this one site. To this day, I think I have missed 5 or less days of making a sale with this site.

Anyway, I was super energized by this and took a handful of other EPN sites that weren’t performing that great and switched them over. These sites weren’t all ranking as high as the first site, but I still saw great results. By the end of the month I had earned around $200 via Amazon.

While all this was going on, I also made another important decision. Around the end of February, I asked my VA to go through all of my 100 sites and switch PHPBay back in for EPN widgets. For all this time, while I had fixed some of my best performing sites to re-include PHPBay, probably at the very least, 60% of the sites were still running only the EPN widgets.  This only took a couple of days, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why I didn’t do it sooner. Immediately my commissions improved. I started the month of March earning over $30 on the first day, and haven’t looked back. For the first time in probably close to 2 years, I am averaging over $30 a day for the month – HARD KNOCK ON WOOD. This income is almost strictly from my 100 EPN sites, as I have gradually phased out almost all my old EPN sites over time.  The best part is, while I’ve been working heavily on backlinking these sites, I can only really do a couple at a time, so almost all of these sites haven’t even come close to reaching their full potential.  Additionally, one of the 3 EPN sites that I switched to AdSense caught fire for about a week in Feburary and ended up bringing in over $300 for the month in adsense. Stupidly, I didn’t have any analytics on the site at the time, so I have no idea what keyword was causing this – stupid forsight, and an expensive lesson learned on my part, but overall it was a very successful February and March has been shaping up excellent. I’m actually on pace to earn well over$1000 this month from these 100 sites.

So overall, what is there to take away from this? Well, I started out way too overconfident and tried to do a project on a large scale before even bothering to test it on a small scale first. HUGE mistake. Then, I jumped to conclusions about PHPBay causing my sites not to rank… Another mistake. Then, I pretty much got bored with the project and didn’t give it the attention it really needed… Another obvious mistake.  I went in to this project pretty much expecting that if I put up a site a certain way, I could simply expect the money to roll in, and it just wasn’t the case. The only thing I did right,was I never gave up completely.  Even when it appeared almost every site was a dud, I continued to put more time and money into it, and continued trying new things. Now I have an army of sites, well aged, many of which are PR2 and PR3, and they are starting to provide some serious earnings – from several different sources.

My plan with these sites is pretty simple, I’m going to continue working on a handful of these sites at a time – that means building links until the site is #1 for its keyword, adding more helpful content to the sites to they are as beneficial to the consumer as possible, and spending time making sure each site has a custom design. This is all going to take a lot of time, and most likely by this time next year I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t even halfway through the bunch, but after all these months, this project is really starting to pay off and I’m really glad I stuck with it.

Other News

The 100 EPN project is actually only one of the few things I have going on. Things have been going well with my web development business and great with my E-Commerce business. I’ve started several large authority sites which are slowly starting to earn me some money. In February, I started a project to create a large authority site – I found over 6000 keywords in my fairly specific niche. Some with traffic figures as low as  10 searches per month, but when you have over 6000 keywords, that can all add up. I put the 6000 keywords in a google spreadsheet and set my writers to work on it. Right now I got about 600 published articles in about 2 full weeks of work in February, and I intend to keep working on this until I get all 6000 keywords covered. The only thing that kind of sucks is I’m not sure how this will play in response to the Farmer update. The articles on this site are unique and written in pretty good english and are on topic, but they are a little dry information-wise.  My goal isn’t to pollute the internet… I think this site, overall will work and be helpful to people in the niche, but I am only going to try this once and wait a long time to see fully how it plays out. I also plan, if traffic picks up, to hire american writers who are enthusiasts in the niche to create really good content that isn’t even necessarily keyword targeted, but first I want to get the keyword content in and start picking up traffic.

Last but not least, I discovered that I could easily trade reviews on this site for products and services online. You may have already noticed a few. I’m definitley not selling out. Any review I post, until further notice, will only be for products I have actually used and find helpful. I will never post a review for a product I don’t like. I also don’t plan on doing any paid reviews or using affiliate links in my reviews. The good news for YOU as a reader is that  I quite like being able to do this, and while I don’t make very much money off this site, reviewing products does save me money, so overall that has highly motivated me to keep writing and additionally, try to produce more content and make it as interesting as possible.

Upcoming Stuff

First off, I am going to run an experiment where I will take one of my EPN sites that has not been heavily promoted, and try to get it ranking by ONLY using services on Fiverr. I was inspired to do this after reading a post in Backlinksforum. I have some good ideas to add, and I really want to try and see how it works. I’m really going to try hard to post the results in an informative way so that there will be some useful data to show.

Second, I am going to be starting another new authority site, and this time I am going to try to find only english writers who are experienced in the niche, so that the articles are extremely high quality, then compare the results to see how it stacks up against my other authority sites, many of which contain a lot of outsourced articles.

Third, I’m going to be trying some new things with social media. I’ve not been a huge fan of social media for traffic in the past, however, I am starting to change my mind on that a little bit, and have some strategies I want to implement. I also want to try and use it more for this site. I do plan on changing the comments to Facebook comments, and start Twitter account specifically for this site.

It feels like forever since I’ve updated on my progress. The summer went really well for me. I got a lot of things on track, focused in on maximizing what I have in place, and I (luckily) have also been able to enjoy a little more leisure time this summer getting some much needed relaxation and spending time with friends and family. Anyway, summer is winding down, and I’m ramping up my efforts.  My plan is to post an update on the various projects I’ve got going on here, and then hopefully make some more specific posts over the next couple of weeks.

100 EPN Sites

It’s now been over a year since my 100 EPN site project. Overall, the first year did not go even marginally as well as I had originally planned. I finally feel like I have a handle on things now, and it took me up until about a few weeks ago to really get to this point. If you have no idea what I’m talking about regarding this, here’s a refresher:

I started out at the end of last summer creating 100 unique, content-based EPN sites. After a few weeks, I noticed that each site basically completely dropped out of the SERPS and were receiving barely a trickle of traffic. At first, I thought they were sandboxed, then after many months of waiting I tried removing PHPBay from the sites, and realized that most of them almost immediately returned to ranking well. Then, I started seeing that the EPN widgets I replaced PHPBay with didn’t seem to convert well at all. I ran some additional tests, and found that adding a regular EPN RSS feed to my sites made them drop right back out of the SERPS again, just like they had with PHPBay. So first and foremost, one of the main things I discovered was that there is absolutely nothing PHPBay specific that was causing me any trouble.

After all of this, I was pretty much left back at square 1. I now had a large amount of sites that were actually getting traffic, but not converting many sales.  One thing I knew for sure, is that a vast majority of my EPN income throughout this whole period has come from existing PHPBay sites that I already had. So I already knew for a fact that PHPBay does convert much better than EPN widgets – by far. As a result, my main goal was to try to find a way to work PHPBay BACK into as many sites as possible. My goal with the whole project was to create good quality sites that will stand the test of time and be helpful to the end user, so with this in mind, I took a handful of sites and individually reworked each one so that they have a custom, clean and professional feel – this includes logos, graphics, etc. I then re-added PHPBay to specific interior pages of my site, and used custom graphics to help direct traffic to those pages.

So far the results have been excellent. In almost every case, I didn’t see any decline in rankings, and in one case I even jumpled from position 3 to position 1 for my main keyword. In the one case where I did see a dramatic drop in rankings, I sent some new good quality links to the site until it reappeared at the top of the serps, and it is now in position #1. I’ve also enjoyed a nice bump in earnings. Truthfully, I’m still not anywhere close to where I expected to be earnings-wise from this project when I originally started, BUT since the end of July I have seen a marked improvement and I now feel that I’m on a clear path to making all of these sites a full success. The bar is pretty low – I mean I only need to get each site to earn $10/month in order to bring in $1000/month in earnings, and most of the sites I have customized so far are doing far better than that. Additionally, I have been working hard on link building for all 100 sites, as my main focus is to bring them all to fruition in regards to ranking #1 for each site’s main keyword. What I’ve found so far is that the number of links needed to achieve this can really vary – in many cases the magic number for cracking the first page is between 20 – 40 quality links, in some cases it’s been as few as 10, and in some cases it has been many more.  Overall, it seems pretty doable in almost every case, it’s just a matter of continuing to send good quality links until the goal is achieved. The main drawback to the whole thing is that it takes me quite a while to fully customize each site to the point where I’m satisfied with it, and i don’t want to cut corners in this area, so it’s going to take me a while to complete all 100. At this point, I’m probably only about 10 – 15% complete on the project, but I’m trying to knock out a couple each week at a minimum. I’ve also switched 2 sites over to adsense and 1 site over to amazon because they weren’t performing that well with EPN. I don’t anticipate doing this on many more sites, but I proabably will for a few.

Micro Niche Snipers

Back in the first quarter of this year I ran a mini experiment setting up micro niche adsense sniper sites, and did have some nice success, bringing in over $100/month with the 25 sites I set up within the first couple months of the experiment. In fact, this went so well that I was extremely close to scaling up the experiment to several hundred sites. Luckily, I decided not to, and I am extremely glad that I did so. The main reason I decided not to at the time was because I didn’t want to manage another several hundred websites. My opinion on this hasn’t changed at all. In fact, there was a time when I was even considering selling off some of my 100 EPN sites for this same reason, but I thought hard about it and I didn’t think I would be able to sell them for enough to be worth the time and investment I initially put in, which is why I doubled my effort to get them all ranking at the top. Anyway, the other thing that popped up with the Micro Niche Snipers was the “Mayday Update”.  I specifically remember the day when I noticed that my AdSense earnings from my micro snipers was way down from what I was used to. That’s how I first found out about the Mayday update. Luckily, it didn’t really affect any of my sites besides the 25 micro niche snipers I built, but basically all of my snipers took a huge dive in the rankings. If you don’t know about the Mayday update, it was basically an algorithm change to weed out MFA sites, and from my experience, seemed to specifically target exact match keyword domains along the lines of what I was doing with my snipers. I think the main reason they did this was because of the rampant X-Factor style adsense sites out there spamming up the SERPS.

So basically around the beginning of June, I lost about 90% of the income I had built up from these 25 sites. My solution to this was basically the same solution I used on the 100 EPN sites – make the sites look better, and send more quality links. I have just started doing this on my two best performing micro niche snipers, and over the last couple weeks I have brought them both back to pretty decent earnings again. I’ve got my EPN sites taking priority over these right now, but I plan to continue working on all 25 sites until they all reach fruition.

Authority Site

Around the time when I was last actively posting, I was talking about focusing all my future site building efforts on large autnority sites. I had purchased a nice expired domain name for a couple hundred dollars and have been working on developing it ever since.  The site now has a really nice custom theme and graphics, pictures on every post, and a solid layout. Right now I’ve got about 40 or 50 quality articles on the site, ranging in size from 500 – 800 words in length. I’ve been making ~$10/month in adsense off of it so far, so nothing to really write home about, but I am in this one for the long haul. The one area where I tripped up, I believe, is in the link building. I actively built links to each post as I posted them, and frankly I think I just sent way too many links early on and may have gotten this site sandboxed. On the plus side, I’m still getting traffic and earnings, and it is getting a LOT better, so I’m just going to keep on posting articles and building links until I’ve got this site making over $1000/month, which I could reasonably see happening in a year’s time. I also plan to start another large authority site some time in the next couple months, and focus more on posting articles, less on building links early on, and see if it gets me to a faster start. Overall, I’ve worked really hard on this project, I’m proud of what I’ve gotten done on it over the summer, and I’m feeling REALLY positive about the direction it’s going.

Content Production

This is a big area where I’ve made a lot of  changes. Over the last couple years, I have used several different companies for content production. Additionally, I was getting all my content almost exclusively from www.simplythebestwriting.com for about the last year and a half. I was always satisfied with the quality, although at the same time it wasn’t anything spectacular either – just solid overall. Anyway, I did a pretty high volume of business with this guy and got my price to 0.01/per word pretty early on, which I was happy with. He treated me like a VIP customer and I was very pleased with the setup. Well come the beginning of the year, he began taking a long time to respond to my emails, taking a long time to complete projects, he didn’t want to accept PayPal anymore, and finally had the audacity to tell me that he was going to raise my prices and acted as if he were doing me some huge favor by selling me $3 articles for so long.

Well this was exactly the reality check that I needed. It made me fully realize that I was wasting my time and money building what I thought was a good long term relationship with a service provider I trusted. It’s not like I didn’t think I could get 300 word articles for $3.00 anywhere else – quite the contrary.  I knew the whole time that I could easily get that kind of deal on articles, and I was really salty about the way I was treated, so I completely woke up and made a huge change to the way I was doing things.

First off, in the interim, I started getting all my articles from www.thecontentauthority.com. This is a great source for articles, especially if you need them in a hurry. Immediately I found the quality was actually far better than what I had been getting, and the turnaround time was light years better. Additionally, they have a great web based interface for placing all your orders, and their customer service is just unbelieveable. So this is a service I can truly wholeheartedly recommend. I’ve did quite a bit of business with them so far, and will continue to do so.

Second off, the biggest change I made was pulling together my own team of writers. This took me quite a bit of time to do, and I’m still working on it in some areas. I do so much work with websites and SEO that I really need a higher volume of articles than I can get from a company. I started putting together a team of full time writers a couple of months ago, and the improvement in all of my web properties and SEO projects has just been absolutely incredible. I would basically look at it like this, if you’re going to be spending over $500/month on content, you may want to strongly consider outsourcing it yourself. If you aren’t doing that much, then definitely use The Content Authority.

Things I learned this summer

I learned never to give up on any projects.

I learned to stop starting new projects while I have so many existing projects at less than 100% complete. (I haven’t started any new websites since my large authority site back in late spring).

I learned not to expect anything out of people you do business with just because of the business you’ve given them in the past.

I learned that I CAN make money off Amazon (I will cover this later).

I learned that I didn’t do nearly enough work in the first year on my 100 EPN sites, and I can do better.

I learned that I gave up on PHPBay way too easy.

I learned that SEO is much easier than I originally made it out to be. I just wasn’t working smart before.

I learned that I get a lot more work done when I wake up earlier.

Conclusion

Overall it was a great summer for me. I had a really rough beginning of the year, but now I’m doing better than ever and feel like I really am in control of what I’m doing now. I plan to keep on working like crazy this winter and I still have a few goals on my list I need to cross off, although I have tackled quite a few. I even managed to lose about 50 pounds this summer by eating Primal and playing plenty of basketball and disc golf.

Over the next couple weeks I HOPE to get back in the habit of regularly posting again, as I have a lot more details on various projects that I can’t possibly squeeze into this post.

Until next time…

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.

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.

Well I actually had no plans of making an update on this at all, but something very interesting has happened. If you happened to read my End of February 2010 Recap, I mentioned that one of my goals for this month was to remove PHPBay from 20 of my sites and replace it with Ebay widgets/adsense/nothing. Well today I had to leave at 4:00, but before I did, I wanted to get started doing this, because it’s a really high priority for me for the month. I had time to remove PHPBay from 12 sites so far, and I’ve replaced it with ebay widgets on each site, just as I would use Adsense on a micro niche sniper.

Anyway, got the first 12 done and took off at 4 for an appointment with the eye doctor. I just got back and decided to check out my EPN stats for yesterday – I noticed clicks today coming from several of the sites I was working on, so I decided to investigate. I only checked the rankings on 4 of the 12 sites, but the FANTASTIC news is that 2 of the 4 sites I checked are now ranking on the first page for their main keyword, after not even being in the top 100 for the last 6+ months. Both sites show they were indexed today – the other two sites were both last indexed on Feb 28, so I’m guessing (hoping) as soon as they are indexed they will also come back to life.

I have to say, I’m absolutely floored by how quickly this worked. I’ll have to obviously scale up to get the true result, but based on what I’ve seen today, I now believe that I was not really being “sandboxed” so much, but actually penalized by G for putting PHPBay on brand new sites.

The good news is, depending on how fast I can work, I may be able to have all 100 of my EPN sites back ranking again before the week is out – something I never would have possibly imagined before about 15 minutes ago.

The bad news is, it does appear that there is some kind of penalty for using PHPbay right now, which means that it may not be a very good tool anymore. Sad, because it’s a really good quality script and well supported.

Moving on, it will be interesting to see how the EPN widgets actually convert. They are similar in size to AdSense and actually quite easy to set up. They also allow impressions to be tracked, something I’ve never had before with EPN. So far all my sites showing impressions today have double-digit CTR, so I’m definitely liking what I’m seeing.

I always imagined myself posting at some point that my sites were starting to come out of the sandbox and things were back on the up and up with this project, but I never imagined I would actually solve the problem in this way. Again, it just goes to show how important testing is. If I would have just done a couple sites using EPN widgets instead of PHPBay from the beginning, I wouldn’t have had these 100 sites sitting in limbo for the last 6 months.  Either way, I couldn’t be more excited. I’m planning on removing PHPBay from a lot more of these sites, if not all of the by the end of the week and I will definitely be posting more on this as I gain more information.

I really had no intentions of writing an update on my 100 EPN sites today, or anytime soon frankly, but I was so shocked by how my stats have been this month, I decided to post a mini rant.

So this month, my EPN sites – from the 100 site challenge, and other – are performing fantastic – EXCEPT in terms of actual earnings passed down to me. First off, one trend I’ve been noticing for the past several months, is that near the end of each month, my EPC always seems to go way down. For example, during the last week of January I was cruising along with an acceptable double digit EPC, and all of a sudden, it dropped to 0.5 overnight, and as always, the stats gave me no idication as to why this occured. It actually dropped even more after that over the next several days, despite strong numbers for this month to date. Specifically, I’ve got almost $3000 in gross merchandise sold in just 4 days so far this month. Not too shabby.

Anyway, as I said, every day this month my numbers have looked good, despite having an extremely low EPC for no apparent reason. Today was the biggest shocker of all. I logged into my stats, hoping to maybe see myself back in the double digit EPC again, and I was floored by what I saw.

Stats for yesterday: Bid/Bin:47 | Winning Bids: 13 | Gross Merchandise Sold: 1,214.92 | Winning Bid Revenue: 104.78

My Earnings for the Day: $8.16

Now let’s be real here. First off, these numbers are good, but are still basically small potatos in the grand scheme of things. There are EPN affiliates who probably make that in an hour, and I use to see numbers like this daily at this time last year.

BUT

The disparity between winning bid revenue and earnings is truly shocking. Going back to the month of September, the last month of using a coherent payout system, the total winning bid revenue for me was $821.23, with total earnings of 703.77. Nothing to write home about in terms of earnings, BUT, you can clearly see how close winning bid revenue and Earnings were to each other.

Compare that to this month, where literally the winning bid revenue right now is over 75% higher than my actual earnings – it’s truly unbelievable. The trend seems to be more distance between the two numbers each month – it started out in October, my earnings were around 10% higher than winning bid revenue. November, they were about even. December, which is usually a HUGE month for epn, earnings were slightly below WBR, and they were also WAY down overall. January, I saw the biggest distance between the two yet, probably near 30% at the end of the month, with disgraceful overall earnings, and this month I’m already down 75%.

The worst thing of all, is I can look at my stats from every angle, and I just don’t see any real trends that support this drastic swing between WBR and earnings. That leaves me in a position where, it’s difficult to optimize my EPN sites to increase their performance.

At this point, the best thing I can really do is consider switching more sites to Amazon. If you think about it, selling $1200 in merchandise in one day on Amazon will equate to a pretty big chunk of change – at least a hell of a lot more than the lousy $8.00 I reeled in yesterday.

As far as the actual 100 EPN sites – they are doing well. Traffic is up across the board, and I am generating sales daily, although still in modest amounts – but compared to previous months, I’m doing well. I’ve got at least 5 of the 100 sites – that I know of – listed in the top 20 on google now for their main keyword. Of those 5, at least 3 are on page 1, 1 of them is in position 1 with a double listing and an ezine pointing to it in position 2, and another is in position 4 for a fairly competitive term. So overall I am slowly starting to climb out of the sandbox. Now I just have to think of the best way to benefit from these sites in the long term. I really hope EPN does something to show they actually care about their affiliates, but at this point, I can only expect that things are going to go further downhill.

That leads me to my next point – about ebay in general. Not only have I been an affiliate for eBay for 2 years, I’ve been a seller on ebay since it was first launched in the 1990s.  I have also owned an eBay store for over 5 years. I cancelled in January for good. From my perspective, eBay’s problems aren’t just with their affiliate program in general, they seem to be making awful decisions across the board. I’ll start with my eBay store. I was selling mainly hair piece tape in my ebay store, in an inventory format. Late summer of last year, my inventory ran out on one of my products. I went into my ebay store – probably the first time in well over a year – and attempted to adjust the inventory. I kept receiving an error that eBay had changed their shipping policy and I couldn’t resubmit my auction until I updated my shipping policy. Only problem – they gave me no way to do so. So the only thing I could have done, was to completely cancel my auction and relist it entirely from scratch. Not only that, but eBay kicked Auctiva to the curb just about a year ago, and sadly, Auctiva was just about the only way to easily manage an eBay store. Anyone who has ever tried to run a legitimate eBay store will probably agree that eBay has one of the least intuitive interfaces of any website in existance, and trying to do the simplest things like leaving feedback can be a huge pain in the ass.  Anyway, recently, I got word that ebay was completely getting rid of fixed inventory listings, probably fine because they are a pain in the ass to manage, but I realized, I’ve been paying around $40/month for my eBay store for the past 5-6 years, and for the last couple years, I haven’t even made close to that much back in actual profit – not to mention the fact that I can’t do something as simple as update my inventory levels, and the same 5 people that continue to order from me via are breaking my balls literally every day about leaving feedback for a single $3.50 item they ordered. It’s so frustrating, and I get so pissed off when I look back on how much money I sank into it for nothing but headaches. So I feel the problems with eBay are broad, and not just limited to their affiliate program. In fact, even if their affilate program were running as good as it was a year ago, I would still be concerned because the decisions they are making with their business seem to be ones that will ultimately drive away traffic, and scare people away who find a valuable old lamp or coin in their basement they want to sell. Sure it’s great if you want to buy a cheap cell phone case from China, but it’s all just peanuts, and people get sick of doing business like that after a while. I can also see that Amazon is going in the complete opposite direction, so I absolutely plan to put more eggs in that basket. eBay really appears to be a sinking ship, and the hits just keep on coming. I’m extremely thankful that I switched up my on priorities last year to focus on AdSense, because it is really paying off, and I can really see the difference now and the advantage in working with a quality affiliate program.

Well… Technically I’ve actually been an Amazon affiliate for over 2 years – but I haven’t made any money off them yet… I swear. I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program a couple of years ago when I was very green in the MMO game and literally had no idea what the hell I was doing. Honestly, I can’t even remember what site I was going to use it on at the time, and I don’t think I ever actually placed any code online. My stats over the last 2 years seem to indicate no activity.

At any rate, long time readers of this blog may find the fact that I’ve decided to move in to Amazon affiliate territoy somewhat surprising, because I’ve spent a lot of time here expressing my disdain for their affiliate program. In light of everything that has happened regarding Ebay Partner Network over the past year, I can now say confidently that I had it pegged all wrong to begin with.

First off, I’ll start out by mentioning some of the reasons why I had a bad impression of the Amazon affiliate program to begin with:

They have a shorter tracking cookie – meaning you will need your referral traffic to purchase quickly to get credit.

I am not 100% sure on the exact details, but I believe their overall commission payout is lower than EPN.

They take 2 months to pay out

They don’t offer PayPal as an option to receive commission (this isn’t a huge problem, but I like the fact that EPN does).

That’s pretty much it. To be fair, originally Ebay’s affiliate program was leaps and bounds better than it is now when I originally made this assessment – they used to pay a straight up $25 referral fee and there was none of the quality score shit that they have injected into their program now. So a year ago, Amazon really did have an inferior affiliate program, in my opinion, but as I’m writing this now, the reasons I listed above for my dislike of Amazon seem pretty marginal now.

The fact of the matter is, there are people reeling in some serious dosh off Amazon’s affiliate program. Not only that, there are people who have been doing this for years – not just since EPN decided to run their affiliate program into the ground. As far as I’m concerned, if there are people out there making 5 figure monthly Amazon commissions, it sure as hell must be a viable way to go. I’ve had a LOT of success with EPN, pretty good sustained success with Adsense, and I think it’s time for me to branch out and try my hand at Amazon.

So instead of going nuts and doing a 100 Amazon site challenge, or something like that, this time, I am going to do a ton of initial testing on several formats for Amazon affiliate sites. I’m going to see what is working, then try to scale it up once I’ve got a handle on things. One of the best things I learned from my 100 EPN site experiment was the importance of testing and planning, and I fully intend to do that here. I am hoping that by the end of 1st quarter 2010, I’ll have learned enough about Amazon to scale up majorly.

I’m going to start by testing 3 different kinds of Amazon affiliate sites, and possibly add some variations if I come across any. The first is the classic thin site. I think I can still do well with thin Amazon affiliate sites, similar to what I’ve done with EPN. I just released WP Commerce Flex, and I’ve finally purchased a copy of PHPZon, so I’m going to try to combine the two and see what I come up with. I don’t know if it will be quite as powerful as the EPN version, but it’s worth a shot. The second type of site is niche product sites – almost exactly like what I did in my 100 EPN site challenge. I think this format will work perfect with Amazon – just as well as it currently does with EPN, and possibly better in some cases. I may also move some of my current EPN sites to Amazon sites, depending on how things go. Last, I am going to work on some large sites that have a variety of product reviews – so taking a broad niche URL and filling it with a ton of relevant product reviews, and treating each one as it’s own separate entity -  in regards to building links. I will also experiment with it on Hubpages as well.

I’ve already got projects in the works, and I am fairly confident I can start generating some income off Amazon fairly quickly – especially considering the time of year.  As always, I will keep you posted on my findings.

100 EPN Site Update

Thanks to everyone who has shown interest in the project and contributed here, it has been a lot of fun so far, and I plan to continue periodic updates. I ended up earning around $300 from these sites last month, this month I am on pace for about the same, however it is all relative due to the fact that I will earn money from clicks on these sites regardless of whether they individually perform well or not. Fact of the matter is, I have a few of these sites that have performed well individually, especially considering the circumstances, but overall, my results are far below expectations. The amount of actual Ebay sales and revenue these 100 sites are generating is not particularly high, and wouldn’t have likely exceeded $300 in generated commisions for me either last month or this month. The reason why? They aren’t ranking for any of their targeted keywords, rather very long tail keywords. I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and here’s what happened: back in early summer, I joined the Keyword Academy. They teach a very specific keyword research method. Part of the reason they teach it the way that they do, I believe, is because their program is designed to work for people that literally have no Internet Marketing experience at all. Where I really failed on this project, is I followed their guidelines for keyword research way too closely. The end result, was that literally almost all of my 100 sites are targeting terms that are competitive enough to get them sandboxed, which is why they aren’t receiving any targeted traffic from Google. Now this isn’t a knock on the TKA keyword research method, it’s more my own problem. I believe TKA teaches keyword research the way they do, because they don’t want people who are new to spend a ton of time and effort building and promoting a site that won’t generate them that much money. Alternatively, for me, since I already have a nice passive revenue stream and I have a large amount of web properties, it doesn’t really matter if certain sites have a lower earning potential for me, as it all goes into the pot, and as long as a site can cover it’s yearly 7.xx domain registration fee, it’s good enough for me.

So while I thought I was still targeting relatively specific niches for this project, at the time, in retrospect I really was not. I was targeting keywords more along the line of “obscure widget” rather than “purple obscure widget”. The former is more likely to get sandboxed in this case, where the latter has a much better chance of ranking quickly because the competition is so low.

Basically, the current status of the 100 site challenge is that YES, the sites are earning me money – around $300 per month, however almost none of the sites are ranking in the top 100 for their main keywords, despite a large link building effort, meaning that they are all “sandboxed” or whatever you want to call it.

Luckily, there is a bright side to following the TKA method. These sites are all well built upon a foundation of content, meaning at some point in the near future, they will come out of the sandbox and begin to rank for their keywords. Because I’ve already done a lot of link building, particularly leveraging Web 2.0′s, when they do begin to come out of the sandbox, they should be stronger than ever, and I should see a real significant increase in earnings.

The sites were built in August/Early September, so they are all around the 3 month mark in age. There’s no definitive evidence on when the sandboxing period ends, but I have heard some people say 3 months, other say 6 months and some even say up to 9 months. I believe the general consensus is closer to 6 months, meaning that I could start to see the light on this project as early as February, or as late as May. I will personally plan on having low expectations until at least May, and be pleasantly surprised if I get anything sooner.

I was originally hoping to hit a quick score on this project and use the funds to finance even bigger MMO projects, but it’s been quite the contrary. It’s almost like investing in a Money Market or CD, you’ve got to put in a lot up front, and you won’t see any kind of return for quite a while – however in this case, the payout for me should be huge, it will just take longer than expected.

So going back to what I was saying about keyword research, I’ve already got a handful of new sites in the works that take a different approach to keyword research, targeting extremely specific niches. This approach really does not borrow anything from the TKA method at all, so I can talk a little more about it. Basically I’m looking for 2 key factors – 1. Does the term get at least 800 searches per month according to the Google Keyword Tool, and 2. Can I purchase the exact domain name as a .com? If the keyword satisfies both of these criteria, then I believe it has enough potential to merit putting up a site. I just started working on this, and I have 4 sites I’m going to be testing this strategy on, which should be deployed no later than next Wednesday. I’m going to deploy them all on the same day, monitize 2 of them, and not monitize the other 2. I will probably use EPN on one and Adsense on the other. These 4 keywords are all going to have exact .com domain names and very low competition, so it should be simple to get them ranking quickly. I want to see if I can get all of these sites on page one quickly, and sustain it without them slipping into the sandbox. I also want to test whether initially using EPN and Adsense has any effect on ranking/sandboxing as well. I’m hoping to get some real clear cut findings from this new mini-experiment, which I can possibly scale very soon if I find that it’s working.

Analytics

I wanted to touch on the topic of analytics. A helpful commenter posted on my October update regarding the use of Google Analytics on these sites. We went back and forth, and ultimately I agreed that while there are some real benefits to using Google Analytics, the risk is not worth it. So immediately following that back and forth exchange, I went ahead and removed analytics from ALL of my sites in this particular experiment.

I’m glad that I did, however it made me realize how much I really did enjoy using it, at the same time. The main thing I liked about analytics specifically regarding this project, was that I could view overall combined data for 50 sites at once, rather than having to look at each individual site’s performance. So for example, I could see daily, weekly and monthly traffic trends as a percentage, bounce rate, time on page, etc. I found that all to be completely helpful throughout the initial months of this project.

A good friend of mine recommended Piwik, which is an open source version of analytics. I have installed it on about 10-20 sites, and it is a very nice solution. The only beef I have with it is that I haven’t been able to find a way to replicate that “group” reporting the way I was with Google Analytics. I’ve also tried a couple other free analytics tools, but nothing else has even come close. I am now using Piwik for a few other sites independent of this project, but I don’t anticipate using it on any more sites that are part of the 100. At this point, none of my sites have been competitive for their targeted keywords anyway, so I’ve decided to just not even worry about stats for now. Down the road I may change my mind, but it’s kind of a time sink anyway.

Other Projects

So… If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not doing a hell of a lot of work on my EPN sites any more. I spent a shit ton of time backlinking them already, and I get the feeling that no matter how much care I put into backlinking these sites, it isn’t going to make an ounce of difference. The only thing that will make a difference at this point is time.

I’ve been throwing up some “thin” EPN sites which are already starting to do well. The formula is simple – use the WP Commerce Flex theme, add content on the home page, and add a few blog posts, then fill out the rest of the site like a catalog.

I promised I was going to release an updated version of the WP Contempo theme when I reached 100 RSS feed subscribers, but I decided to spend 2 days cleaning up WP Commerce Flex instead.

There is a reason. As I was going through this whole 100 EPN site challenge, while checking my EPN stats every day, I realized that 2 of my top performing EPN sites are sites I built about a year ago using the WP Commerce Flex theme. If you take a look back to the example site I linked to on the WP Commerce Flex page, I can tell you for sure, that my 2 other well performing sites are set up almost exactly like this site in every way.  I believe now, that the main reason they were not slapped by G was that they did not have any ads on the home page at all.

This prompted me to start throwing up some new sites in this same style – general niche, lots of product pages, no ads on the home page. I’m still early on in the process, but already getting some promising results. I am going to give it a try with Amazon as well.

Anyway, that’s the reason why I release that particular theme. I had only been using it privately before, but I wanted to give it a big cosmetic overhaul and make it available to everyone, so that’s what I did. It takes a little work to get an entire site set up, but overall I think the end result is really nice.

In addition to these thin sites, the main thing I have been working on is some X-Mas related sites. I’ve got an entire network of X-mas themed sites in production, and some are already doing quite well. I got the idea because I have a halloween site, that is one of the first sites I ever made for affiliate purposes. It’s been banned by Google and I haven’t laid a finger on it at all since early 2007, and yet it still manages to pull in at least $1000 during September and October between adsense and EPN. And the numbers were even more amazing when it was still getting Google traffic. Anyway, my point is that the first year I had the site I didn’t make shit off of it, however after it sat for a year it got better, then after another year it got a LOT better, and this year it had been slapped by Google, but it was STILL doing great. Point being, it’s kind of a bitch only being able to earn off of a site for maybe 2 months out of the year, but it can be easier to rank, and it’s a nice passive income once you’ve aged the site. Just another thing to kick into the pot. I’m hoping I can replicate the same thing with my network of Christmas themed sites, and I’m building them in such a way that they will hopefully be fairly viable all year round.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on my X-mas sites lately – the only other thing I want to mention is Hubpages and Infobarrel. I put up 120 Hubs over the summer in response to all the buzz in the industry generated partially by TKA. Those hubs in particular make me between 0-5 dollars daily via adsense. Since then, I’ve been throwing up a good 20 50 additional hubs and infobarrels per month spread between a couple of accounts. I’ve been using them for links, and testing niches. My Adsense earnings are up about 25%, and these Web 2.0′s are a big reason why. The other reason being I have an adsense site I developed about 6 months ago that finally started cranking out some revenue. Anyway, point here is that, while you probably don’t want to try to make a living off Hub Pages, I’ve been just throwing up a few hubs and barrels a week to support my other sites, and it results in decent backlinks as well as a nice little side income. Plus, many of the hubs I put up back in July are now PR2 and PR3.

Anyway, it’s been a monster post, so I hope it was worth the wait. I will try to continue posting more regularly, although it will depend somewhat on how my workload is. Everyone, please note that I’ve finally added threaded comments to this site, so hopefully that will be a little extra encouragement for you all to leave a comment.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Well we’re halfway through the first month of the new QCP program, so I figure I would go ahead and give an update on my 100 site challenge, and some additional thoughts on QCP.

First off, you may have noticed that this is my second post today – the first, discussed the basic principals of the Google Sandbox. The reason why I decided to touch on that topic was partially to preface this post. I’ve gone through my statistics and found that about 80% of my EPN sniper sites have been sandboxed.  This isn’t too serious of a problem, and I was expecting to face it on some level, although I didn’t expect to see 80% get sandboxed.

Here’s what happened…

My old formula for creating EPN niche sites was a lot different than my current formula. I would:

1. Find a niche
2. Set up a theme like WP Commerce Steel with PAGES as product listings
3. Add a Blog with Search 2 Post creating POSTS
4. In many cases, I would add up to 30 posts containing YouTube videos related to my niche with a short descriptive introductory paragraph, then I would stagger the release of each post over the next 1 – 2 months
5. I would submit the site to about 75 social bookmarking sites and up to 1000 free directories in order to get it fully indexed.
6. In some cases, I would go back and schedule a second round of 30 videos in the same way (this only works depending on how many decent videos there are in your niche. If you’re working in the Door Knob or Umbrella niche, there may not be a wide selection).

Now, in many cases, this was a huge recipe for success. In fact some of my “thin” sites that DIDN’T get deindexed were ones that I followed this exact formula on – specifically regarding adding the videos. Early in 09, I stopped adding posts of videos to my new sites, and those were some of the first to get slapped by G. Anyway, I believe this really helped me avoid getting sandboxed primarily because of the constant fresh content. In the early stages, there would be a fresh post to the blog daily with the videos I had pre-scheduled. Then after a month or two, when the site began to rank better, there would be more fresh content because there would be more traffic coming to the site and using Search 2 Post, which would add an additional new POST every time.

The downside to this plan, unfortunately, is that G decided that what I was doing was basically spam, which I don’t necessarily blame them for, and they proceeded to deindex about 90% of those sites.

In contrast to that, my setup process for the 100 EPN site challenge was as follows:

1. Research 20 Niches
2. Have articles produced for each of the 20 niches
3. Register 20 domains
4. Go through WP setup and config process for each domain
5. Add content and EPN listings to each site
6. Repeat 5 times until all 100 sites are complete

The failure on my part was in the planning stage. My main goal with this challenge was to replace my old deindexed EPN site with a greater number of new, correctly built sites that would be much more valuable as a long term asset. I feel that I was correct in how I chose to develop each site, as they are all fully indexed and I would imagine they will be so for a very long time. However, the thing I failed to think about during the planning stage, was the lack of fresh content, and the amount of time it would take in between building and deploying all 100 sites, and getting full gear into link building. Ultimately, the most important thing I learned so far from this process is that planning and testing is so important. For example, in retrospect, what I should have done was before embarking on this challenge, I should have created 10 – 20 of these niche sites in the exact same format to test what the results would be if I scaled the operation. The main reasons I didn’t do this were: I was extremely confident that the format would be successful based on what I saw from previous sites I owned, and also, I wanted to do this on an extremely large scale so that the payoff would be larger, faster.

IF I would have taken the time to do 10 test sites before starting in on the full 100, I would have learned that:

1. My assertions were basically correct, that fewer auctions on each page would not result in lower earnings.
2. Around 8 out of 10 of the test sites would rank excellent for their keywords for the first month, with little promotion
3. Between about week 3-5, 8 out of 10 sites (80%) would be sandboxed.
4. The remaining 20% of sites not sandboxed would lose some ranking as well, although keep a reasonable level of search traffic.

So if I knew then what I knew now, the main thing I would probably do different is stagger the release of content. Instead of publishing 5 articles at one time, I could start with maybe 2 articles and schedule 3 more over the next 30 days. Maybe also mix in a couple videos, or product reviews for additional posts I could deploy over the first two months. The second thing I would probably do, is instead of building the sites in batches of 20 and waiting until the bulk were fully built to begin heavily link building, I probably would do more of a 1-at-a-time approach where I would deploy 1 site at a time, and at the same time, accompany it with a few starter backlinks – like ezines, hubs, etc.

So the lesson here, is that while a massive effort is always a good move, when combined with careful planning and proven methods, the results will be even better, faster.

Overall Progress Update

So about 80% of my sites were sandboxed, which I would definitely call a setback, but I am certainly not down on the project, and I’m still quite happy with the results. Last month, I brought in just shy of $300  in EPN earnings from the 100 sites in this challenge. Slightly under what I planned, but overall still good. Also, based on the time when sites 60-100 were actually deployed, I can say that almost all ofthe $300 in earnings came from only the first 60 sites.

When I originally planned the challenge, I was targeting a minimum of $500 profit in September, but I didn’t account for almost 1 additonal month of time to get all 100 sites deployed. I didn’t even get sites 41-60 completed until the final days of August, so I had a lot of really green sites in September. One thing that did help me was the Google honeymoon period, for which many of my sites were ranking on the first page of SERPS for several weeks before being sandboxed.

Fighting Sandboxing

First things first. I put Google Analytics on the first 50 sites I deployed – hopefully it won’t come back to haunt me, but the reports show that as of right now, my overall traffic on those 50 sites is up 29% when compared to the previous 30 days, so despite a majority of my sites getting sandboxed, my overall traffic is still up.

One reason why is my initial link building campaign. I started off by developing ezines for sites 21-60 – several ezines for each site to be more specific. The great thing about this is that it’s almost a perfect counter to being sandboxed. Many of the niches I’ve targeted are not that competitive, and ezines can rank extremely easily, and they are able to pass on quite a bit of traffic to my sites, which results in a good deal of clicks.

Also, when looking at referring traffic over the last 7 days, I’ve noticed a trend that a lot of my sites are beginning to bring in a nice amount of searches for their main targeted keywords – from Bing. If Bing is already giving me top rankings, that means that Yahoo will probably be soon to follow.

So really, I could literally wait out the 6-8 month sandboxing period and still get plenty of traffic/clicks from ezines/hubs/infobarrels, and yahoo/bing. Then when my sites do get released from Google, things will spike and I should be in amazing shape…

…but I’m not going to do that.

Although there is no concrete way to get out of the sandbox, and almost anyone you ask will probably tell you to keep adding content and building links, I feel I have enough sites where I can split test different strategies and hopefully find a way to get out of the sandbox faster than 6-8 months, which I can then apply globally to all my sites.

The first thing I am going to do – literally today, is look over my EPN stats for the last 2 months, and select 3-5 of the best performing sites from that time period that are currently sandboxed. Then I’m going to go ahead and send a variety of new links (in moderation), and schedule a handful of new posts for each site.  I’ll monitor the progress a couple times a week, and hopefully something will click within a couple of weeks.

If not, I will take another couple batches of sites, and try really split testing by adding a larger volume of content to some sites, and add different types of links to others.

Last, but not least, I’m going to work on backing up my already-deployed ezine articles with additional links, so that they can enjoy top rankings while their corresponding sites are sandboxed, and I will continue to have a flow of traffic from every site.

At the same time, I already spent an hour today determining exactly which sites out of the first 50 sites are NOT sandboxed. I’m going to take these sites and begin sending more backlinks to them right away, so that I can hopefully start getting top rankings with a few. If I can get to a top 3 Google ranking for 5 sites by November, and 20 sites by December, I will be 100% satisfied.

This Month’s Earnings and QCP

As I stated above, I earned around $300 from these 100 sites last month. This month I am currently on pace to earn *slightly* less. I have a feeling I will actually come out ahead, and likely closer to $500 in earnings from these sites this month, but only time will tell. Overall these sites have been performing pretty well in terms of individual ECP, however I have some other older sites which get a large volume of clicks every day and have lower ECP, which I feel is probably driving down the overall value of the new sites. I strongly anticipate at some point in the next 6 months, I will be weeding out most of my older EPN sites and focusing only on the new sites.

Overall, my earnings under the new QCP system are down about 15-20%. As with most other people, I am still utterly confused and disappointed with the new system. I strongly hope it evens out at some point, although I don’t have high hopes. Probably the worst thing about the new system is  its hard to follow any kind of trend on a day to day basis, which makes it extremely difficult to optimize for the best overall result.

Every Thorn Has its Rose

Although there’s no denying that it sucks having a large amount of my new sites sandboxed, there are still some positives. The main one being that thanks to some analysis, I’ve determined exactly which sites aren’t sandboxed, and I can concentrate more of my efforts on those sites specifically, instead of a general massive effort on all 100 sites. This will help me test exactly what is moste effective, and at some point I will be able to apply the same methods to the rest of the sites, whenever they are un-sandboxed. I should be able to squeeze a nice income out of my non-sandboxed sites relatively quickly, which should at least give me a preview into what my earnings will look like 6 months from now, as well as help to recoup the investment I made in content and labor on this project rather quickly.

I will also be able to condense my findings into a proven method for researching, developing and deploying niche sites into a proven system that I can share with the readers of this blog. I’ve already learned a lot over the past couple of months from this huge undertaking, and I expect I will continue to learn new things almost daily.  When it’s all said and done, I should have a very solid system for making money online via niche sites.

Plans for the Future

This site is almost a year old now, and I also am nearing 100 RSS subscribers. Once I reach that milestone, I plan on getting back to some of the basics I had in mind when I created this site – namely, releasing free wordpress themes. When I hit 100 subscribers, I plan on doing a complete overhaul on my original WP Contempo theme, and re-releasing it. I also have plans in the works for more themes.

As for EPN, I doubt I will be investing a lot more time and/or money into new EPN-based sites for quite a while. I want to have a firm grasp on exactly how the new system works, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to that point right now. I have plenty of EPN targeted assets right now, to the point where I should be able to be making a comfortable full time income off of them within several months. I may double back and work on more sites in the future, but as of right now, I have no plans.

Based on the complete and utter chaos that is EPN, I’m going to be heavily shifting focus back to AdSense. I’ve been enjoying modest AdSense earnings for quite a while now, thanks to a handful of sites, and I want to expand on that, and fully learn the ropes to being successful with AdSense. My plan from here on out, is to work on developing a minimum of 1 x 100+ article authority site each month, using only AdSense as a monitization method. I’ve been following the teachings of the Keyword Academy very closely, and they, along with many others in the same crowd are all shifting their focus towards developing authority sites. I feel this is a no-brainer for me, as I already have several authority sites, and I own quite a few aged domains/sites with huge potential for growth. I think by adding 1 new authority site to my portfolio each month, I should rapidly be able to increase my overall MMO income.

I may take a big leap and start looking at Amazon as a source of revenue at some point as well. There are a lot of things I hate about the amazon affilate program, but the way things are going with EPN, it’s looking more and more like a solid alternative every day. I don’t expect to do much with this until I’m essentially done with my EPN snipers, but I do have it cooking on the backburner.

This post is basically just going to be an update on my original post the other day – EPN Quality Click Pricing: Day 1. It’s been an interesting few days to say the least – at least as far as EPN Stats go.. I guess that’s not the most interesting thing in the world, but I digress…

I started out the month with a nice day of clicks. The following day, i found that while I still made a modest amount of money for Oct 1, all the money was coming from one site in particular which had an individual EPC of 0.23. My campaign level CPC was set at 0.06 for Oct 1, but none of the other campaigns had any earnings despite a large number of clicks. This was distressing, as I posted in my last post, but not the worst thing in the world.

October 2 stats became available, and things appeared to have began to level out.  My account level CPC was actually applied to more than 1 campaign. To be more specific, the account level CPC was applied to about 70% of my campaigns that received clicks. I was much happier to see stats like this, as they more closely reflected the preview stats I was viewing throughout September, and even better of course, my earnings also increased as a result.

I was hoping that things were just a little jumbled in EPN’s system, which would explain the bizzare first-day stats, and hopefully things would continue to improve daily until the system is fully on track. Unfortunately, when the Oct 3 stats were revealed yesterday, this was not the case at all. Shockingly, the stats were almost idental to the Oct 1 stats. I had an account level CPC, however all my earnings came from 1 campaign again, with an individual CPC of 0.34. The rest of my campaigns showed 0 earnings for the day. Basically it was a big step backwards, not what I was hoping for at all…

Today brought yet another different look as the Oct 4 stats became available. I opened up my campaign level report for Yesterday, and was extremely happy to see that nearly all of my sites showed earnings for the assigned EPC.  Only maybe 3-5 campaigns out of a huge amount showed no earnings – the extremely odd thing here: one of the sites showing 0 earnings for the day was the ONLY site which had any earnings on Oct 1 and Oct 3. Maybe some weird way of evening things out? Who knows?

Either way, the good thing is, today’s report was the closest yet to the preview reports I had enjoyed all of last month. Not that I won’t be surprised if I see something completely different tomorrow, but still, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen. Probably the best thing of all – as a result of the new QCP model, and the seemingly accurate reporting today, all of my sites from the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge received a healthy amount of clicks, resulting in the largest single-day earnings from the whole group yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing whether this trend will continue, as it will mean that I’m still on the right track with my experiment.

In related news, I’ve been periodically dropping in on the PHPbay forums and Official EPN forums, and I’m starting to see quite a few people having very similar problems as I have been. This makes me actually feel much better, as there is more and more evidence to indicate some kind of flaw in EPN’s reporting system over these first few days. I’ve seen people complaining of receiving several thousand clicks in one day – and showing sales, with a big fat zero in earnings for the day. I’m also seeing less and less people claiming they’re doing better under the new system. There were a LOT of people around the next claiming their earnings were way up under the new system based on the preview from last month/1st day earnings, but as the reality of this whole thing has begun to sink in, I think the bubble is bursting for more people daily.

Overall, I’m shocked at how rocky these first few days have been. I honestly didn’t predict anything near this level of inconsistency – especially since EPN made the situation out like they had been working on this system for over a year. I expected a seamless transition to be honest. The positives to take away are that:

1. If you’re experiencing problems, or seeing something completely different than last month’s preview report, you are NOT alone!

2. It’s still only a few days into it, and there’s a good chance that a few nuts and bolts need to get tightened. Since many others are experiencing the same problem, it’s more likely a global issue, and not something specifically related to the quality of your campaigns – that is definitely a good thing.

I’m not expecting much from tomorrow’s report, but I’m extremely encouraged by today’s and there are people who have faired a lot worse than I have, so I’m going to continue plugging away backlinking my sites and hope for the best!

(Well, technically day 2… but the first day of actual earnings data…)

So I started out this month extremely excited to see what the new EPN QCP payout structure was going to be. It’s been a turbulent year for me with EPN, and affiliate marketing in general. I started the year out on fire, thinking I finally had this IM thing completely licked. By late April, my ACRU Quality score tanked for no apparent reason – seriously – and I also started to see chunks of my niche site empire get deindexed by google, a few each month, all the way up to August.

Luckily, I got started with The Keyword Academy back in June, and totally shifted my entire paradigm on making money online – this was key, as I was quickly able to replace my bad web properties that had stopped generating revenue with new, solid properties, thus keeping my overall earnings the same, if not a slight bit lower. But considering the amount of my sites that got hit, and I also lost my 2nd best earner overall, I came out of July feeling good, which led me to conjure up my 100 EPN Sites in 30 Days Challenge. About 2 weeks into the challenge I woke up to find an email from Ebay in my inbox, announcing their new Quality Click Pricing structure. At that point, I figured I could either get really pissed off about it, or make the best of it and continue my challenge. I chose the latter. September was a good month for me. My EPN earnings were up about 20%, I completed all 100 new sites, and my earnings just from the new sites was probably near $300, not bad for the first month, and especially considering I did not finish all 100 sites until mid-September, nor did I do nearly any linkbuilding.

So I was feeling great about everything, and looking forward to the new changes with a positive attitude. After recoding a solid amount of clicks yesterday, I literally couldn’t wait to see what my first EPC would be. For the entire month of September, I checked my EPC daily. I had days as high as 0.40, and a couple as low as 0.05. Mostly, I was between about 0.08 and 0.12 per day on average, fine by me considering the volume of clicks I’m dealing with.

When I refreshed my EPN stats and the EPC had finally been updated, I was shocked by what I saw. My account level EPC had been set at 0.06 for Oct 1… Totally fine by me. The curious thing, was the earnings per campaign. On Campaign view, I could see that one of my sites was listed with a 0.23 EPC, and was showing earnings, the same earnings showed on my account level report. All my other campaigns showed an EPC of 0.00 and earnings of $0.00 for October first.  Now I’m still not freaking out about it or anything – I still made some nice money on the first, although modest, but earnings nontheless. The strange thing was that all month long during September, I checked my QCP preview almost every day and what I would see was basically the same thing – my EPC for the day would be set at the account level and every campagin would receive payment for each click based on that account level EPC. So every campaign would have the same EPC for that day listed on the Campaign report, and there would be earnings shown for that EPC x # of clicks that campaign received that day. The only cases where this was different was if there was an unusually large amount of clicks for a given campaign on a given day, which were obviously bot clicks – then the EPC would show 0.00 for that campaign on that day, but this literally happened less than 10 times total I would estimate – the entire month. So somehow, the report I saw today was completely different than what I had been seeing the entire month of September.

I spent some time  checking out some other EPN related resources today and found a couple people with similar problems, however there really aren’t that many great EPN resources out there these days, so who the hell knows? Funny, you can’t even comment on the EPN official forums anymore unless you link your Ebay account, which I personally don’t feel like I should have to do, because my Ebay account has absolutely nothing to do with my EPN activity in any way, shape of form. So I believe that that has led to less activity on the EPN forums than there normally would have been had everyone been allowed to participate. Funny how that works…

Anyway, the main thing I have seen is a lot of dissatisfaction from EPN affiliates for a variety of reasons – even people who’ve benefitted from the changes so far are still complaining. I think everyone can see how fragile this program is, and how things can shift on a whim and leave top affiliates with their pants around their ankles.

Overall, I’m a little disturbed by the first day of reporting. I really went into it with a positive attitude, but I’m not happy about the fact that the report I saw today was not the same as the report I was previewing for the last 30 days. I just cannot wrap my head around that one yet. I have a strong feeling that things will even themselves out – there could be a variety of reasons for the discrepancy – the program may be calculating the data from scratch for these first couple days, which could for some reason lead to not every campaign showing an EPC, or maybe I just plain misunderstood the whole thing from the beginning – but that still doesn’t explain how I was literally physically seeing something different on the same reports when comparing September to October.

The positive thing to take away from this – for me – is that at least I still received a modest amount of earnings for Oct 1, regardless of how it was displayed on the report. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I’ve been hearing from countless other EPN affiliates who are extremely pissed talking about blowing off EPN completely and going another direction. Let’s face it – all of us who are EPN affiliates right now are so because we want to be. We want to be EPN affiliates because, at least at one point, EPN was a perfect format for product related affiliate offers, and in the past the payouts have always been excellent compared to other similar programs, like Amazon for example. Even when I was getting jacked around with my quality score early this year, I never really thought about jumping ship. There just isn’t a great alternative – at least nothing that will be that close. So to all the pissed off affiliates out there I say, shit, give it a month, let’s see what happens. In fact, give it a couple of months. The holiday season is coming up, it can’t possibly be that bad. If your shit tanks during the holiday season, then you know it’s time to jump ship, but you can’t pull all your Ebay ads after 2 days under the new pricing structure because your numbers are down X%. It’s not like Ebay is going to change what they’re doing because some publishers are pulling their ads, there’s people out there desperate to get an EPN account right now that can’t, so I highly doubt Ebay is going to feel the loss of a handful of affiliates – large or small. There’s always going to be more people who step up to take your place, and are happy with getting jerked around by changes to the rules every few months.

Personally, I’m going to keep my head down and continue working as if nothing has changed – I’ve got 100 new ebay snipers that I’m actively working on linking and fully expect to be making big money off them before the end of this year. Although I’m a little disappointed in the stats I saw today, I can’t say I’m surprised, and I’m not going to let it get me down. Worst case scenario, I’ll sell off my shitty thin EPN sites, and convert my 100 new quality sites to adsense… But there’s a lot of time left to make a lot of money this year, and I don’t intend to go down without a fight.