So yesterday I get this email:

Earn a bonus of up to 50% on your US and Canada campaigns in November and December 2010

Dear Sam Lewis,

eBay Partner Network is offering you the chance to earn even more from your US and Canada campaigns during this year’s holiday shopping season with a promotion in November and December 2010.

The promotion now includes the US and Canada, in addition to all European Programs (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and The Netherlands). This promotion is available for all publishers on Quality Click Pricing who generated earnings in August 2010.

How does the Promotion work?

If you increase your earnings during the months of the promotion by at least 20% compared to your earnings in August 2010, you will be eligible for a bonus on your total earnings for that month. These bonuses will be tiered as follows:

Earnings Increase compared to August 2010	Bonus on all Earnings for the month
20% – 34.99%	Earn a 10% bonus
35 – 49.99%	Earn a 30% bonus
Greater than 50%	Earn a 50% bonus

Bonuses will be calculated per Program and Account, as per the example below:

Program	August Earnings	November Earnings	Percentage Increase	Bonus Percentage	November Payment
US	$2,000	$2,500	25%	10%	$2,750
France	€1,000	€2,000	100%	50%	€3,000

Please note that bonuses will be calculated separately for November and December, and paid together with the rest of your earnings for that month. For example, if your November 2010 earnings are 25% higher than your August earnings, you will earn a 10% bonus on your November earnings. If your December earnings are then only 10% higher than your August earnings, you would not receive a bonus for December.

With this promotion, there’s even more opportunity for you to benefit from the peak holiday shopping season this year with eBay Partner Network!

The eBay Partner Network Team

Pretty nice stuff. I honestly can say this is the first thing EPN has done that has actually got me excited in… well… ever. This is a perfect incentive for people to really ramp up their work on EPN campaigns for the holidays, and actually offers some real potential to make a lot of money over the holidays. Personally, I’m really stoked because my earnings are already like 40% or so higher than my own August earnings this month, so I think I have a pretty good shot at making a 50% or more increase for both November and December, which should equate to quite a bit of a bonus. I’m also definitely going to be working a lot harder on my EPN sites starting RIGHT NOW to make sure that I do.

Hopefully some of you guys out there are ready to jump on this one and make some money too!

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…

It’s been another wild month here, and I haven’t posted in quite a while, but things are starting to move along real smoothly again. I think taking a step back from everything in March and taking some time to evaluate things really did me a lot of good, and I’ve been making progress across the board for the last 4-6 weeks.

As far as my niche sites go, I finally got just about all of my domains that were hosted with JustHost moved to new hosting and rebuilt as static HTML. It took me quite a bit of time to do it, and it will probably be a while before they are re-crawled fully and return to where they were previously at, but it feels good to have that done. I haven’t built any new niche sites since March, and I don’t have any plans to do so in the near future. I really want to focus in on maximizing the potential of what I’ve currently got in my portfolio, weed out the junk, and then move forward on bigger projects.

The first way I plan to do this is by taking a hard look at my AdSense snipers. Right now I’ve got about 25 that I set up over the last 6 months. Overall the project was a huge success and I’m really close to meeting my short term goal of $50/day in AdSense. That being said, there are pretty clearly some sites in the group that are performing a lot better than others. My plan for managing this is to take one of my well performing sites each month and build it out – meaning, add more content – posts and pictures, spend some time building out a good looking theme, and just generally transform the site from a basic “sniper” into a good looking, good quality site. This might result in some short term loss in earnings, but I think in the long run I will get a lot more out of these sites, and I don’t have to worry about having a portfolio of Junk tied to my AdSense. I think what I have right now is ok overall, but I want my operations to be as white-hat as possible.

On the flip side, I also want to take at least 1-2 of my low-performance snipers each month and transform them as well. Traffic isn’t necessarily the issue with these sites – in many cases, I just don’t know if adsense is the best way to monitize for them. So I will give the site a makeover, possibly add some more content, and then swap out AdSense for Amazon, promoting very specific products, and see what kind of results I get.

If everything goes according to plan with this, I should end up transforming this whole batch of snipers into good quality sites that should perform over the long term using either Amazon or Adsense. Like I said, I’ve only got about 25 of these, so it shouldn’t take that long to fully complete this project if I stick to my timeline.

That’s the AdSense snipers. As far as my EPN sites go, I can see I need to do some work here as well. First and foremost, my EPN earnings have been up quite a bit overall since March, so I’m happy about that, but my earnings specifically from my 100 EPN sites are still pretty lackluster. One issue is traffic. One of the things I’ve noticed really quickly, is that when I removed PHPBay from these sites and they were re-crawled and appeared to start ranking normally again, the sites that began ranking the best, by far were the ones with exact match domains. For example redwidgets.org ranks FAR easier than redwidgetsguide.com. Adding the random extra word into the domain definitely appears to make a huge difference, and I have a pretty even mix of domains like that, and EMDs. So I will obviously have to do a lot more linking if I want to fully maximize the potential of a lot of these sites. I’ve also noticed that out of the chunk of these sites that are getting a lot of clicks and impressions, in many cases, the amount of actual bids and winning bids is pretty low. I have a couple sites that are performing pretty well, but I have quite a few that have a good click to impression ratio, and very few, or no bids at all. This tells me that either: A. The EPN widgets aren’t as effective for generating winning bids as PHPBay was, or B. EPN isn’t the right monitization method for the site. At this point, I’m honestly not sure which is the case. I’m not in a huge rush on these sites, so I definitely want to continue gathering data, but at the same time, I am also planning to switch a couple of these sites that are getting good traffic but no sales over to Amazon to see if pushing specific products leads to higher conversion rates. Overall, I’m OK with the progress on these sites and my earnings are up so I’m not complaining. I’m only a few months away from the 1 year anniversary of the sites, so that may help with rankings as well. We’ll just have to see.

As far as MMO goes, the main thing I focused on this month other than restoring my former JustHost sites, was finding a really good quality domain name to build an authority site on. I spent a ton of time on this throughout the month, and April as well – in fact, I spent a lot more time on it than I ever expected to. The good news is, I finally got a nice domain about a week ago that I can get cracking on. I won’t go into huge detail, but it’s a good .com domain name with 2 nice, general keywords for specific niches, 9 years old, DMOZ listed and has a decent backlink profile. I lost a lot of auctions for other domains I really liked, but overall I’m pretty happy with this one that I ended up with.

Instead of doing the keyword research via Micro Niche Finder, I decided to use Niche Refinery for this project, and I’m going to try to follow the TKA method for building “supersites”. I’m pretty sure this is a foolproof method, I’ll be targeting keywords with much bigger potential, and overall I think my earning potential will be a lot better with this site as long as I see it through to fruition.

So right now I’ve got 1000 csv’s processing in Niche Refinery and within another day or two (hopefully) I should have a huge batch of keywords ready to target. Once I’ve got the keywords, I’m going to get a massive amount of articles written to go on the site, and additional articles to use as backlinks for each post. I’m really planning to pull out all the stops on this project – I’m going to spend a lot of time making sure I’ve got a really nice looking, unique theme, I’m going to try to add pictures to every post, and I may even try to work in a fair amount of videos as well. I ultimately want this site to be an authority and be able to dominate this particular niche, and I think focusing on that, rather than focusing on getting AdSense clicks right away is going to lead to much more long term success.

So for this month, I want to have at least 20 posts fully backlinked on the site, possibly more. I plan on working almost soley on this project all summer and I’m really committed to learning how to do this right, and making it a winner. If I can learn to build up these authority sites as well as I can now build niche sites, I think I’ll have a clear path to a huge long term passive income. Plus, I’ll be able to gradually whittle down the amount of small websites in my portfolio so I’ll have a lot less to manage overall.

In general, I’m really excited about this project and I’m putting my best effort forth. I’ve been looking for a good domain name since about March because I wanted to have one that would be good enough for me to put my best effort behind. Now that I’ve finally found it, it’s time to really get to work on the project this month. If all goes well, I feel like I should have a good idea whether this project will be a success within hopefully the next 3 months. Then I can think about maybe starting another large site, and if I’m confident in my ability, I will probably spend a lot more on the domain name, as I think getting a good domain is a critical part of this process.

In addition, I’ve got a really large aged sites that I’ve had forever that makes between 0 – $5/day in AdSense. Nothing to scoff at, but considering the age of the site, traffic, and quality of the content, I think it’s performing way under potential. My plan to ramp up the earnings on this site is to do 2 things.

1. I’m going to take one of the pages on the site that is currently getting very high traffic and add a ton of content to it, as well as promote an Amazon product specific to the content on that page. I think if a page is getting 20-30 visits a day minimum for a very specific keyword, I can be making a lot more than what I currently make with AdSense on that page, so I’m really going to try to make the page even more informative, and push a specific product through Amazon. If this is successful, I shouldn’t even need that high of a conversion rate to double what the SITE is making daily now, so I really think this will be a good approach.

2. I’m going to take another page from the site that isn’t necessarily getting a lot of traffic right now, but clearly targets a specific type of product. I’m going to again add a ton more content to the page – probably enough so I’ll end up with upwards of 2500 words at least including some pictures and videos as well. Then I’m going to again promote some specific Amazon products, and last, I’ll start sending links to that page. I’m hoping that vastly increasing the amount of words/content on the page will help me rank it easier, and that promoting specific Amazon products will ultimately help me make a lot more money off this site in general.

I plan to have all this work done early here in June, and hopefully I’ll have some nice results to share sometime later this month or early next month. This approach is a lot different than what I’ve been doing previously, but I think it’s kind of a no-brainer if you really think about it.

That’s basically all my MMO plans for the near future.

I also mentioned in last month’s recap that I was thinking about trying Bookmarking Demon. I did finally pull the trigger, and I started working with it about halfway through the month. This is something I was originally going to do last fall, but I read a ton of negative reviews of version 5, and I decided to go with Bookmark Wiz instead, which I’ve not really mentioned here because I don’t really use it. I’m actually glad I finally changed my mind about BMD, because so far I really like it. The big downside with this program is that there is a HUGE learning curve. It took me at least a week of working with it before I felt like I had any idea at all what the hell I was doing. Finally, I now do feel like I have a pretty good grasp on it, and I’m pretty happy with the results so far. It is a little time consuming, but it does get the job done. At the moment, I’m strictly using it to bookmark my existing backlinks – NOT for bookmarking my main sites. I think it will probably take a while before I can see the full results, but if it succeeds in getting my backlinks all indexed and juiced up, I’ll be extremely happy. I’m going to hold out on fully endorsing it for now and it may be another month or two at least before I can give a fair evaluation, but at the moment I will say things are looking good so far. I also own Blog Comment Demon and I decided to blow the dust off that and start using it as well. I have no idea whether it will help much or not, but we shall see. I might start looking into a good solution for directory submissions. I used to do a lot of directory submissions via an offshore company, but I’d like to find something easier and possibly automatic for that.

That’s pretty much my recap for May. I’ve made a lot of changes, but I really feel like I’m on the right path now, and even though it’s going to be harder work and the money isn’t going to be as easy right away, for the long term, I think I’ve finally got the roadmap for success down, and it’s now just a matter of doing the work and staying committed. I’m hoping my supersite project goes well so that I’ll have a lot of new information to share about building, managing and linking strategies. Only time will tell…

Well another month has come and gone. I started off slow, but I’m getting back into the swing of things. A lot of interesting stuff has happened this month, and several things that are changing the course of my future plans in MMO.

First off, I want to touch quickly on the PHPBay issue -

As many of you may know, I reported throughout March and April that once I removed PHPBay from my 100 EPN sites and replaced it with EPN Widgets, all 100 sites seemed to become un-penalized almost instantly as soon as they were spidered. Based on that I came to the conclusion that I was receiving some kind of penalty from PHPBay.

Based on all this, I just want to clarify my personal stance on PHPBay:

I think PHPBay is an excellent product. It obviously did not work out for me on this particular project, however I still use it liberally on many of my existing sites, and as of right now, all of my top EPN earners are running PHPBay. It also is much better for displaying auctions than EPN widgets are, in my opinion. I still fully recommend PHPBay as a product, for anyone who plans on being a serious EPN affiliate.

The only caveat I have: don’t make the same mistake I did – by putting up 100 sites at once without testing first. My personal experience is that putting PHPBay on a brand new domain caused me to drop out of the SERPS (not a full deindex). This isn’t necessarily the same result you will get, but it’s the result that I got. If you do plan on using it on new domains, I simply recommend you take it slow and make sure everything is working the way you expect it to work before scaling up. Other than that, use liberally on aged domains, and enjoy!

Now to the real meat and potatos….

The Future of Niche Sites

I only follow a few make money online blogs out there. Grizzly, who many people likely have heard of, and Ben, a true inspiration, both made interesting posts this week regarding their personal experiences with AdSense, and niche sites.

To make a long story short, a large number of Ben’s AdSense niche sites were deindexed after his account hit $100/day. In his case, the main problem appeared to be the sites just looked like they were MFA, and he probably got blown out on a manual review. This definitely puts a lot of things into perspective for me, as someone who owns over 250 sites right now.

In my case, I don’t think my sites are quite as thin – I use different themes on at least 75% of all my sites so there’s very little footprint, I don’t use SEO titles, I use real titles for articles and title tags, and I always have a minimum of 5 pages per site. I also spread the sites out on different servers and I no longer bother with analytics. So overall I feel like I have a decent offering that isn’t too spammy. If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought what I just described above would be appropriate and not spammy, I would have absolutely agreed 100%. The type of shit I was doing a year ago was way worse than the sites I’ve got now. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts to put up better quality sites, I couldn’t say right now that I’m 100% confident my AdSense snipers would pass a manual review, because despite the fact that I’m using good quality content and only 1 ad block per page, it’s still pretty blatant what the purpose of the site is.

Luckily, I only have about 25 of these adsense snipers right now, a far cry from the hundreds that Ben had, and my income is at about $40/day right now, so I don’t feel like I’m in any immediate trouble *knock on wood*.

This all did, however, come at a good time, because for the last several months, I’ve really been playing with the idea of throwing up 100 or more new AdSense snipers, based on the postive results I got from my first 25. There’s absolutely no denying that this is super easy money, and I feel like now, I’ve finally got the formula perfect. I literally have no doubt in my mind that I could take an AdSense account from 0 – $100/day within 3 months, maybe less with niche sites. The only problem? It’s losing it’s viability altogether as a sustainable strategy for making money online. The fact is, it’s just too easy, it’s a little spammy, and there’s all kinds of ways you can risk getting your adsense account banned or getting your whole portfolio of sites deindexed overnight.

Based on all that’s transpired this week, I feel lucky that this came at a good time – before I put a ton of time and money into scaling my AdSense operation up, and I now have absolutely no plans to make any more adsense niche sites in the future. Additionally, I want to slowly transition my existing adsense snipers to Amazon, or possibly EPN. I also have some other existing AdSense sites that I may very well get rid of as I move into a new phase of MMO.

So what’s the best way forward?

Personally, I plan on completely switching focus and working on 1-3 authority sites over the next couple months. I have a great writer, so quality content is no problem, but I want to have the most sustainable portfolio possible, of huge authority sites that are flexible as far as monitization, and not in any way spammy – sites that may actually *gasp* get return visitors because of the quality of the content. I really think this is the way forward, and the most sustainable method for making money online.

The upside is that there’s SOOO much less to worry about in terms of covering my ass. I want to own sites that I would feel 100% confident putting through a manual review. Also, I’m getting tired of having to spread things out on different hosting accounts, having to deal with hundreds of WP installs, keeping track of domain registrations, etc. It’s cheaper and way less of a pain in the ass to only have to manage a few sites. I know that for sure. Lastly, building links will be more beneficial when intead of building 10 links to 100 sites, I’m building 1000 links to one site. That is going to make it so easy to strengthen a domain over time, and get it established as a true authority in a niche.

The downsides – I finally feel like I know exactly how to make a ton of money off adsense using niche sites, and unfortunately I don’t think I can go that route anymore, so it’s a little painful. Not only that, running a big authority site is a totally different animal than setting up niche sites. There are a lot of things I’m going to have to learn, and it’s going to take some time and resources for me to do so. Basically, it’s much more of an uphill climb at this point, but the overall reward is probably worth it. If in 6 months to a year from now I’m as good at making high quality authority sites as I am making niche sites, I will really be in good shape. And eventually, with enough trial and error, that will happen.

A quick look at my goals –

I kind of got out of my groove on this as I was just gassed in March and had to take it easy for a while, but here’s a quick look. As far as my AdSense/EPN/Amazon earnings, I’m making about $40-45/day from adsense right now and $30/day from EPN, climbing steadily, still not much in the way of Amazon.

Still working on SEO for my main E-Commerce site and I’ve really picked up the pace on that in the past couple weeks, so I hope I get close to closing that goal out pretty soon. My resort web design project is still a long way out.

Goals for May

My main goal is to get started on some authority sites. I have one site right now that I already own that I want to beef up, and I have about 3-4 niches in mind for new authority sites I want to start. The first thing I have to do is get some quality domains. I lost several auctions for expired domains over the past couple weeks that would have been perfect, so I just have to keep at it an hopefully I will land 1 or 2 good ones this month. I really want to start production on a huge batch of content for one of these sites this month, and hopefully roll at least one new site out and get cracking on it.

That’s pretty much it. The only other thing is, I am thinking I might give bookmarking demon a try for strengthing my backlinks. Not 100% sure if I’m going to do it or not, but I was just about ready to buy it today before I got busy, so I’m pretty sure I will give it a shot and see what happens there.

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.

I guess you could call this a sequel to my original post on getting accepted by EPN, which I wrote on February 12th of last year. It’s funny, because of all the stuff on this site, this particular page gets by far the most traffic and most response. I originally wrote it as part of my series on setting up an eBay niche site, and really, I just threw it in as an afterthought because I had been getting some questions. Now, over a full year later, I still get probably about 2 comments/emails per day from readers asking my advice, or for me to review their site. If you’ve followed my blog for a long time, I hope you realize that I’ve never claimed to be an expert on EPN at all. I joined via CJ years ago, and was grandfathered into EPN, so I didn’t really experience the thrill of trying to get my site accepted, which is obviously a daunting task. Nevertheless, I created the post mentioned above based on things I’ve read, experiences with other affiliate programs, and common sense. I believe that a lot of people that have read my post have actually ended up getting accepted, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised or disappointed if a lot of them didn’t get accepted too.

Anyway, I got a somewhat negative comment today on this post from someone who didn’t bother to leave their name. I don’t have any problems publishing negative comments on my blog. I’ve done it before and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on anything and I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who disagree with my opinions on a lot of things. That being said, I’m always up for a debate, so if you’re going to post a negative comment on my blog, at least be prepared for me to challenge it. I was about halfway through writing a response comment when I realized I was probably already over the 500 word mark, and I decided to turn it into a post instead, so that I can better dissect it piece by piece, and also hopefully offer some new insight in regards to getting accepted by EPN based on what I’ve been seeing from people over the past year and 3 days. So here is the comment, notice that he didn’t bother to leave his name:

Too Funny says:
February 15, 2010 at 4:59 pm

This is hilarious…someone proposing too know what ebay is up to with their EPN. Thats like saying you know how to get one over on google search engines. eBay is full of jackasses that 1. cannot keep their site functioning properly, 2. consists of amateur, fresh out of college, inexpensive rate programmers with limited experience, and 3. are so corporate these days that they don’t care what you think or want. Google adsense is king and Amazon is a huge alternative as they do not say no because they think they know something about your website.

FYI “remove the ads from your site” may sneak you in but don’t think they will drop you as soon as you place those ads back. They will wait until you are about to hit a payment threshold, drop you from their program, and you forfeit payment from earned referral commissions. Wanna make money online? AVOID EBAY!

So just by reading through it, I am guessing that this is just some jack off that probably had a really shitty site and ended up getting banned from EPN for some unknown reason, and instead of doing something positive, he decided to stop by my site and leave this little rant on a post that isn’t really relevant to his own personal situation, because he was obviously accepted by EPN at some point, and his problem seems to be that he was banned from the program.

Anyway, let’s take a closer look at what he’s saying:

This is hilarious…someone proposing too know what ebay is up to with their EPN.

Hmmm. Well I can pretty easily tell that this person probably hasn’t read much of my site, or even that particular post. Especially since I clearly had the following disclaimer within the first paragraph of the post:

“I’ll preface these instructions by saying that I am not 100% sure on the best way to approach this because my experience was quite easy, but I believe by following these instructions you should be on the right track.”

Just so we’re clear, I absolutely don’t claim to know a damn thing about how EPN works. All I have to go by is my 2 years of personal experience, which has been a great deal of trial and error. Furthermore, I don’t think you’ll find anyone else outside of EPN who knows any real insider secrets. From my viewpoint the whole thing seems to be a total mess. Moving on…

Thats like saying you know how to get one over on google search engines.

Wow, what an idiotic statement. I guess that it depends on how you look at it, but SEO is pretty much about “getting one over” on Google. Whether you’re into white-hat seo or black-hat seo or both, chances are about 100% that you’re going to be trying to “get one over” on Google. I could go on and on about this particular sentence all day, but I think my regular readers get the point. But wow, what an incredibly dumb thing to say.

eBay is full of jackasses that

1. cannot keep their site functioning properly,

Huh? I mean I don’t understand what he’s getting at here. There were a couple days in the winter that EPN wasn’t working correctly, which they did do a makegood for, and I believe one of those days, it was a global problem with their entire site, not just EPN. Overall, those are the only 2 times I can think of in my 10+ years of doing business with eBay.

2. consists of amateur, fresh out of college, inexpensive rate programmers with limited experience,

I really don’t see what information you’re basing this on. The programming really isn’t the issue with EPN, in my opinion, it’s the way they’ve set up their payment structure, which has nothing to do with programming other than the actual implementation. As far as the actual interface goes, EPN is great for reports and stats. Compare it to Amazon and it’s not even close.

and 3. are so corporate these days that they don’t care what you think or want.

This I tend to agree with. I don’t know if it has to do with them being “corporate” or what the deal is, but overall, yes, I do agree that they don’t seem to care much about the feelings of their affiliates.

Google adsense is king

It’s all relative. I know of a lot of people who have done excellent on EPN or Amazon and don’t have the slightest idea how to make money with adsense. Each program is different, and this is especially true of adsense. Anyone can put up a “store” with pages of ebay listings, rinse, repeat, and make money. This was especially true 1-2 years ago. With AdSense, it’s a whole different story and it takes time to learn how to finesse it.

and Amazon is a huge alternative as they do not say no because they think they know something about your website.

Yeah, they are easy to get into. Great. If Amazon was SO great, then nobody would have a need for EPN at all. Funny, I keep getting emails DAILY from people trying to get into EPN, and I’m just a tiny drop in the bucket. There must be SOME reason so many people want to get into EPN. There’s plenty of money to be made with Amazon, but if it was the be-all end-all of affiliate marketing, I wouldn’t be writing this post write now, and this guy wouldn’t have bothered to take the time to drop this rant on my site, because he would be too busy picking out a new Bentley with his Amazon earnings.

FYI “remove the ads from your site” may sneak you in but don’t think they will drop you as soon as you place those ads back.

Again, another completely asinine thing to say. First off, probably 50% (at least) of people who ask me to review their site to see if it would get into EPN have a similar setup – shitty template, SMALL amount of actual real content, 50 different affiliate ads – Amazon, Adsense, CJ, Adbrite, Etc.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news guys, but if your site about dog leashes needs 6 different revenue streams for you to make money, you might be a redneck. But in all seriousness, this is like rule #1 for me – focus on 1 revenue stream. This doesn’t just apply to people trying to get in to EPN, this is just for MMO in general. If you’re going to run EPN on your site, run EPN. If you’re going to run AdSense, run adsense. If you cant sell enough dog leashes via EPN to make the site profitable, it’s time to scrap that idea and try something else, or focus on getting more targeted traffic. Basically, here’s what I think about people who ask me to look at their site, and they have a ton of different affiliate ads:

1. 99% of the time it looks shitty as hell to have so many ads on your site, and EPN will probably agree with me

2. If you are applying to EPN in the first place, the 50 different kinds of ads on your site must not be performing that well.

3. It’s not going to kill you to remove the ads for a couple weeks while your application is pending. If this is not the case, and you will be losing a serious amount of ad revenue, then start a different site and use that to apply to EPN and keep your current advertising model on your existing site.

Pretty simple, common sense. I don’t recommend anyone put 5 different kinds of affiliate ads on their site AFTER getting accepted. If you want in to EPN for your site, then use EPN on your site. If you want to use a bunch of other random shit, then do that and don’t even bother applying to EPN in the first place.

They will wait until you are about to hit a payment threshold, drop you from their program, and you forfeit payment from earned referral commissions.

Has this every happened to anyone – sadly yes. Was there a good reason? Maybe, maybe not. First off, I strongly doubt that the EPN team is monitoring people’s accounts, waiting for them to hit a “payment threshold”. In fact, in the case of this guy, he must have had a very small amount of earnings in his account when it was expired, because I haven’t thought twice about an EPN “payment threshold” since I joined. I have received a check from EPN every single month since I joined about 2 years ago, and I honestly could not tell you what the payment threshold is. I can say, that it’s highly unlikely that the EPN staff was sitting around their computers waiting for this guy’s account to reach $25 in earnings so they could expire his account. No, im sure there was a much better explanation – probably, he had 50 different kinds of affiliate ads on his site and a bunch of shitty spun content – if I had to guess.

Wanna make money online?

Yea.

AVOID EBAY!

Look. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t necessarily recommend that anyone use EPN at this point, unless they’re alrady making a fair amount of money online from other sustainable programs. As of right now, I feel it is a much better long term strategy to master AdSense or Amazon, because they are a lot more stable. That doesn’t mean your AdSense account won’t get banned if you do some dumb shit, but overall the program is better run, and if you keep your shit above the table, you should be in good shape. Same deal with Amazon. If you can master either, you can make a TON of money, and it makes learning everything else easier too. EPN is probably the easiest of the three programs to make money online quickly and easily with, thats why a lot of people flock to it. Unfortunately, a lot of the people see a quick return with EPN and keep on doing shit the same way, and don’t bother to think about what the long term viability is going to be. Me for example, I built a ton of thin “store” like sites because I was doing well with them and they were incredibly easy to set up. Unfortunately, they were too easy. Same thing with the people who built the 100 .info BANS sites a couple years ago. Great idea, but no real long-term viability. People even now are still doing this kind of shit. They would rather sink their money into setting up hundreds of auto blogs, or sites that use a custom script to autogenerate Ebay listings, and otherwise have no real content. Sure, you might be making 2-3 grand right now, but eventually big G is going to sniff your operation out and shut it down overnight.

You can’t get away with shit like that using adsense, in most cases – so you have to learn how to build quality sites from the beginning. That’s why, if you can master AdSense first, you should have no problem doing well with eBay and Amazon.

Actual Tips to Help You Get Accepted By EPN

If you’ve read this far, you must really want to get the new tips I hinted at at the beginning of this article.  Really, my last article covered it pretty well, but here are a couple of the most important points, rehashed, as well as a few new ideas.

Take the other ads off your site

Please, if you’re going to ask me to review your site, don’t bother if you have a ton of different affiliate offers on your site that consists of 5 actual pages of content. Be real. If all those ads are making you tons of money, don’t even bother applying to EPN. If they are making you nothing, like I would guess is the case 99% of the time, then take them off and put in your application. Then, DON’T put them back on if you DO get accepted. If you want to learn EPN, learn EPN. Having adbrite and adsense and CJ offers on your site isn’t going to do you any good.

Try using an aged domain

This is just common sense, but if possible, try submitting an aged site. I have no real hard information to base this on, but I believe an aged site would be preferable to a brand new site. If you’ve got a brand new site with good content that seems like it should be a home run, yet isn’t getting accepted, this could be the reason. If you know you’re going to want to apply some time in the future, it may not be a bad idea to start aging a domain right now, so you can apply 6 months from now.

Use a relevant site

The type of sites that perform well with Ebay, generally, are product related sites. If you’ve got a site about travelling to Iceland, chances are, there aren’t going to be as many opportunities to maximize your EPN revenue. There are plenty of affiliate programs that would work great for a site like this, but I would guess EPN wouldn’t be at the top of the list. This isn’t to say that you absolutely WON’T get accepted to EPN with a site that doesn’t seem like a great fit topic-wise, but if you’re having problems, this could be the reason.

Have a decent amount of content

It’s really important to have some content on your site when you apply. A good rule of thumb, in my opinion, is that if someone from EPN were to manually review your site, you would want it to be difficult for them to pinpoint how many pages your site actually is. I’ve had a lot of people ask me to look at their site, and within 10 seconds I can count the total number of pages on their site. This generally means you don’t have enough content. Take the time to add 10-20 solid length articles, at least.

Make the site look nice

Instead of having 50 ads in the post and the sidebar, take a few minutes and add some pictures and maybe a video or two. Use a theme that looks nice, try to avoid the shitty looking X-Factor style themes designed to get a good CTR. You can use whatever theme you want once your acceptd, but to get accepted, make it look like you actually have a little pride in your site and spend time maintaining it. I would guess that doing this goes a long way.

Incorporate the important elements

Generally, every site should have an About, Contact and Privacy page, at least. This is just standard good practice. Do yourself a favor and take 2 minutes to add these pages to your site. You really should have them anyway.

That’s it. I honestly don’t know if there’s anything else I can think of on the topic. I highly doubt there will be a third installment in this series. If people would like help with their site, or a review, I’m happy to do so. I ask that you please do so in the comments so that everyone can benefit.

To the person who left the comment, nothing personal, but if you’re going to drop a comment like that on a positive page designed to help people, for free, then the least you can do is have the balls to leave your name. I understand the negativity in the comment was geared more towards EPN than me, but just because you had a bad experience doesn’t mean you can go around telling other people the sky is falling with no context whatsoever. For all we know, you deserved to get kicked out of EPN because you did something dumb, and until you tell us otherwise, we’ll just have to run with that.

Today I woke up and checked my Inbox, and to my surprise there was an urgent email from Wade, the maker of PHPBay. Apparently, EPN announced some new changes to the structure of their RSS links in a blog post on their site. Here is an excerpt:

RSS feed is being updated

February 9th, 2010

From Wednesday 10th Feburary, we will be adding some new parameters to the links generated by the RSS feed for publishers promoting non-US programs. Publisher links will automatically be changed to the new link structure.

For the vast majority of publishers, there will be no need to make any changes to the way you promote eBay or to how the RSS feed is configured. However, if you are using software or tools to further manipulate the RSS feed links (e.g. Build A Niche Store or PHPBay), you may need to check that your links still work properly after the change has been implemented. If you experience any issues, please contact your software or tool provider.

So a couple important things to note here – in the blog post, dated February 9th, 2010, they are announcing that this change will take effect on February 10th, 2010. Not only that, but they specifically mention that both BANS and PHPBay may be affected by this change, however as far as I can tell, they didn’t give anyone any prior notice. Basically, they released this blog post yesterday saying that in less than 24 hours they would be making a major change to their URLs that could have serious effects on 3rd party software, and if anyone has a problem with it, take it to the makers of the 3rd party software.

Now of course these software makers do have some level of responsibility to keep up with these kind of things, and support their products, but it seems like a real dick move to announce that you’re going to be making a change in less than 24 hours that will require software developers to rewrite and distribute their software to the thousands of users who have purchased and are currently using it.

On the plus side, this is also a great opportunity to commend Wade on his continued commitment to excellence with his PHPBay products. I first bought PHPBay nearly 2 years ago and over time, I have had to use support on several occasions. I have to say that the support for PHPBay is really second to none, and it is truly a great product. As soon as the blog post was published yesterday, Wade and the rest of the extremely helpful PHPBay community got to work on an update to the auction file, and by morning today, a new release of PHPBay was available for download and all PHPBay users were emailed with a notification.

If I hadn’t received the email this morning, I don’t know how I would have even found out about all this happening, as I obviously do not read the EPN blog, for health reasons. Overall this wasn’t too big of a deal, outside it being a stunning display of classlessness, but it did reaffirm my trust and support for PHPBay.

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!