These two things are actually tied together. First the Fiverr news – so it’s been only 3 days so far and all but one of the Fiverr gigs has now been completed. Here are the results from the first 3 days in terms of scroogle ranking for the number 1 keyword:

Start (monday): 46

Tuesday: 45

Wednesday: 42

Thursday: 11

Friday: 10 (first page)

So overall, the results obviously speak for themselves. Moving up over 30 spots and onto the first page in 3 days is a fantastic result. That being said, it has only been 3 days, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see these rankings fluctuate a LOT over the next several weeks. Overall, though, it does show that something is happening, so that is a good start. I got the results of the mass article submission back first and pinged all of those links using a free pinging service. So far, that is the only additional work I’ve done.

I plan to let this stew for another week or two to kind of feel out what’s happening, then I will evaluate and decide the next move. Depending on where I’m at, I may order up another round of everything, but I’ll just have to see. I will probably eventually ping all of the links that have been built, but I don’t plan on doing much else besides that.

Anyway, the second bit of news is that I’ve set up a new twitter account – twitter.com/wpcontempo.  Anyone who was following my other twitter account should definitely start following this one if you want to stay up to date. I plan on using this account a lot, and only for topics specific to this site. My other twitter account is my personal account and most of the subject matter is not really relevant to MMO or SEO.  So give me a follow if you want to get more frequent updates. I am going to try my hardest to tweet something useful at least once per day, including weekends.

Additionally – the reason the two topics of this post are related is because I am going to be tweeting an update on this experiment daily. There really isnt any reason to write up  a ton of posts detailing the fluctuations in ranking for this experiment, but I will quickly check the rankings every morning in Scroogle and update on my twittter for anyone who is interested.

I also have a couple additional experiments in the works. I am liking the direction this is going, and it gives me more interesting stuff to write about.

Ok, finally got my sites for sale listed. Posting it here as a post also for anyone reading this via RSS. I will update the page and remove any sites that sell, however I’m not going to be updating it on this posts in the future – so if you are planning on looking another time, use the page as it will be up to date. If you have any questions, hit me up any time. Here’s the info from the page:

The following are all sites for sale. These are all actual websites (not domains) unless otherwise stated. If you want to see more stats,  the URL of the site, or would like to make an offer hit me up anytime and I will be happy to help.

I have stats to back pretty much everything listed below up. Just let me know if you want to see them for a given site. Most of these domains are regged at either Bluehost or Godaddy.

If you think I’m tripping about any of the asking prices I listed, feel free to make an offer. Some I’m firm on, some not.

#1 -  Hair Loss Site

• 9 year old domain (I have owned for 1 year)
• General hair loss site
• Has received around 20 – 30 guest posts
• 36 backlinks

I’ve had this site for about a year, it has never been monitized. It has been hooked into the Postrunner system and has been receiving periodic guest posts. You will need a Keyword Academy membership if you want to continue using it with postrunner. This site is aged, well indexed and ready to go!

Asking Price: $150

#2 – Android Cell Phone Related Site

• Around 3 years old
• $300 all time adsense earnings
• Also has EPN earnings
• Keyword domain

This site has at least 100 posts, many of which are videos. It also has a custom javascript game section with ads integrated. I have done nothing with this phone since the G1 originally came out several years ago. With all the new models of Android phones on the market, there is huge potential here. This site is a decent earner and needs a great home.

Asking Price: $500

#3 – Prostate Cancer Site

• I have owned site for almost 2 years
• minimal adsense earnings
• Keyword is part of the domain

This is a site in the Prostate Cancer niche that I bought and never did anything with. It gets an occasional adsense click. Not much content to speak of. Fully aged and indexed, ready for your content!

Asking Price: $35

#4 – Florida Fishing DOMAIN ONLY

I originally bought this as a full site. Not sure what happened to the site, but it was kind of shitty anyway. This domain is indexed and ready to go.

Asking Price: $10
#5 – Make Money Online/Technology related site

• PR 1
• Great brandable domain
• At least 3 years old
• 116 backlinks
• Has had adsense revenue in the past
• Tons of posts
• Custom theme

I originally bought this site on digital point for $250. It has a very brandable name and I’ve considered using it myself many times. I haven’t done a hell of a lot with it, although if you’re looking to start a blog about an internet related topic, I think this would be a perfect cornerstone. Would like to get back what I put in.

Asking Price: $250

#6 – Hair Extension Site

• Makes about $1/month adsense
• Has around 10 – 15 unique posts
• Keyword domain name
• Aged Domain

I bought this domain about a year ago, threw up adsense and a few posts and it brings in the occasional click. I think it could make a lot more with Amazon as it is an EMD domain. There is some potential here.

Asking Price: $50

#7 Seat Belt Related Site

• This domain is about a year old
• Has unique Content
• Keyword Domain

This is a site in a niche I know is profitable. I set this site up about a year ago with 10 posts or so, and it has been aging ever since. Ready for you to add your touch and start making money.

Asking Price: $35

#8 Shoe Related Site

• Aged domain
• Nice KW domain
• Many Pages
• Well Indexed
• Custom setup
• $617 in EPN income YTD

This is one of my better long term performing EPN sites. It made almost $80 last month and always performs well. Has some unique content, many pages, good looking custom design. I literally haven’t done anything with this site in over 2 years, it’s a true passive money maker. If you build links and clean it up a little, the possibilities are endless. Only willing to sell for the right price.

Asking Price: $1150

#9 Classic Band (music)  Site

• Several years old
• Occasional adsense clicks
• KW domain

This is a site I bought a couple years back, haven’t really done anything to it. It does bring in the occasional click and has some nice existing content.

Asking Price: $25

#10 Toy Site

• Nice aged domain
• Nice existing link profile
• Dmoz Listed
• PR3
• Some earnings

This is a site I started about a year ago for christmas. I paid about $225 for the domain, and have added quite a bit of unique content. I have generated revenue from both AdSense and Amazon. The site has some EDU backlinks in the context of model airplanes – I think that would be a better direction for this site than what I did with it in retrospect, but overall this is a great canvas for your toy site.

Asking Price: $350

#11 Mastiff related site

• Aged Domain
• KW Domain
• Some earnings

I started this site several years ago. It is about a specific breed of mastiff and has a nice kw domain. It does bring in some adsense and EPN revenue, and there is a lot of room for growth. It currently has a handful of custom articles written by yours truly.

Asking Price: $50

#12 Australia Travel Site

• One of my first niche sites ever
• Custom content
• Custom Design
• Earnings
• Aged Domain

This is one of the first niche sites I ever built. Doesn’t have a lot of links coming in, but gets traffic. It has about $60 in adsense earnings all time. Looking for a new home!

Asking Price $125

#13 Paypal Alternative Site

• Aged Domain
• Custom Design
• Premium theme
• Unique content

This is another site I bought a couple years ago in the PayPal alternative niche. It has made about $40 all time for me via adsense. I think you could probably hook up with an affiliate program and make quite a bit more money from this site. Looks great and has lots of potential.

Asking Price: $55

#14 Christian Related Site

• PR1
• Custom Theme
• Adsense Earnings
• Wide Open Niche

I’ve owned this site for a good 3 years and it was a pre-owned domain when I bought it. Has quite a bit of uniqe content. Has $174 in all time adsense earnings for me and gets pretty decent traffic. This is a huge niche and this site has a lot of potential.

Asking Price: $300

#15 Binoculars Site

• Several years old
• Deindexed from Google
• Has earnings
• Keyword domain
• Backlinks

This is one of my first EPN sites I ever made. It has both EPN and Adsense earnings. Has been deindexed in Google for at least a year and a half and still gets good traffic and earnings from other search engines. If you could get relisted in google, there’s a ton of potential here. YTD EPN earnings are $174, All time AdSense is$70.

Asking Price: $175

#16 Boating Related

• Aged Domain
• Keyword Domain
• Has EPN Earnings

This is a very specific niche site in the boating niche. Site is an exact match domain. YTD EPN earnings are $135. I’m only ranking #11 for the main keyword now, was making a lot more when I was ranking #1 (obviously). Never built any links to the site, so you could easily get the top spot back with a few decent backlinks and really pump up the earnings.

Asking Price: $175

#17 Cooking Related

• One of my first websites ever
• Completely custom design
• Aged domain
• PR2
• Adsense Earnings

This is a recipe site that is dear to my heart. It features a beautiful wordpress theme that I built from scratch. This site has adsense earnings and gets really nice traffic. Haven’t done much with it in a long time, now it’s time to give it a new home. All time adsense: $477.

Asking Price: $500

#18 Christian Dating

I built this site several years ago to promote some christian dating offers. I made some affiliate income off of it, but mostly via PPC. The site design is fully custom and looks great. If you take the adsense off it looks even better. This would be perfect if you’re interested in running a dating campaign. It does have a little bit of adsense earnings, but not much to speak of.

Asking Price: $50

#19 Interior Decorating Site

• Exact Match Domain
• EPN Earnings
• Almost 2 years old

I built this site a couple years ago, set it and forgot it. It has decent EPN earnings, and has a great EMD in a very obscure interior decorating niche.  Has $45 in earnings so far this year and definitely has potential for improvement with more content and backlinks.

Asking price: $85

#20 Dog Site

• Great general dog domain
• Aged Domain
• Adsense and EPN earnings

I bought this domain a couple years ago and turned it into a niche site selling dog harnesses via EPN. It did well and generated both adsense and EPN earnings. I think this domain is too good to waste on a niche. Right now it isn’t doing much. If you’re interested in the dog niche, this domain is a perfect blank canvas for you.

Asking Price: $150

#21 – Australia Travel Site

• I bought this as a pre-owned domain in 2007
• has about 100 high quality posts
• Has Adsnse earnings

I bought this pre owned domain several years ago and paid a writer to write about 100 high quality articles. Unfortuantely they weren’t keyword targeted, so it didn’t give me the results I was expecting. Still, this site has earned me $108 in adsense all time and is PACKED with high quality content. I spent over $500 on the content alone, not to mention the cost of the domain. Overall, you would obviously need to do some work to bring the earnings up, but the existing content will be a huge help. Would like to recoup some of what I put into it.

Asking Price: $375

#22 Loan Consolidation

• High Paying Niche
• Aged Domain
• PR2
• Original Content
• Adsense earnings

This is my only site I’ve ever really done in the finance niche. It hasn’t been built up a ton, but it does bring in the occasional click, and the clicks usually pay out pretty high. If you worked to send some traffic to this site, the payout would be huge. It’s a nice little site, and if you’re already in the finance arena, it would be a great addition for you. All time adsense is about $80.

Asking price: $165

#23 Automitive Accessory

• Great niche
• high earning
• site is deindexed in google
• Adsense and EPN earnings

I built this site in early 09 and it has been one of my better earners despite being deindexed from google in the first 6 months of existence. The earnings were astronomical before being deindexed orignally, and they are still great from the traffic from other search engines. Site has made about $300 all time in AdSense and $600 YTD in EPN. Great site. Also has original content.

Asking Price: $1000

#24 Automotive Accessory Site

• Aged Domain
• PR1
• Custom Design
• EPN Earnings

This site is another one of my high earners. Has about $600 YTD from EPN. I haven’t actually touched the site in years. Its a great domain in a niche where people buy this product online.  If you took the time to backlink the site, the potential is endless.  Looking for a good price, or I might just do the work and make the money myself.

Asking Price: $1200

#25 Jobs Niche

• Site is almost 2
• Great Domain
• Great Niche
• Adsense Earnings

I set this site up myself in 09. All time adsense is just about $400 with no links built. This niche has limitless potential. I only have time for so many projects – if you want to do the work, this one will pay off for sure. It is currently earning better than ever in adsense.

Asking Price: $1250

#26 Halloween Niche

• Aged Domain
• Proven Earner

I built this site a couple years ago and it took a year, but now it blows up around halloween every year. You can make an easy $400 in October alone with no work at all. With a little cleaning up, it could even be better. This domain is, however, deindexed in google. Overall it’s a nice site to have when fall rolls around.

Asking Price: $225

#27 Firewall/Security Related

• Great EMD
• Unique Content
• Adsense Earnings
• PR3 with PR2 Inner Pages

I bought this site about 2 years ago for a steal. Haven’t done much with it since I don’t really know about the niche, but I know that this is an EMD .com domain, and the products that this keyword are related to are very expensive. It’s brought in $140 all time in adsense, with me doing nothing, and I think you could make a lot more off Amazon or another aff program. This could be a potential diamond.

Asking Price: $500

#28 Group of 6 X-Mas themed domains

• 3 of these currently have sites on them
• All domains have Christmas in the name
• Domains are 2 years old, just registered

I bought this group of domains last year with the intention of using them, but never got around to it. This would be a great network to have to promote your holiday stuff each season, or age the domains yourself and sell them for even more next year. I paid $75 for them originally and just paid $60 to renew them for a year last month. Would like to get most of that back. One of the sites does have some EPN earnings.

Asking Price $130

#29 Group of 5 Automotive mini-sites

• 5 sites
• several years old
• Adsense earnings

These are 5 mini-sites. Each site has a couple posts of crappy content. I bought these in december 08, installed adsense and have not done a single thing to them since. Since that time they have made me $523 in adsense. This would be a great buy if you need something to increase your monthly earnings in order to get a payout, or if you’re already into the automotive niche. These sites have been a great passive stream of revenue. They might look shitty, but you can’t argue with the end results. Want to sell as a group.

Asking Price: $1000

Well if you’re paying attention, then you’ve probably noticed this is my 3RD post TODAY. That is way above my usual average of one post every couple of months. The main reason for my doing so is I had a draft post about a new project that I actually wrote here, but posted in the Keyword Academey forum to promote my new site and get some articles flowing, which worked really well (by the way). I decided to publish it here because it was a good lead-in to my Category Content plugin review, as the plugin deals directly with the WordPress Silo architecture I used to set up this site for the project.

Anyway, this post is more of a general update on what I’ve been up to and the above project is one of just many things. I’m sure the suspense is probably killing you, so let’s get right into it.

100 EPN SITES

I was really stoked about these sites because they were doing so much better – I did over $800 in October, and after getting the news about the bonus promotion, I thought I would be a shoe-in for the full bonus in November as my August earnings were under $400 (believe it or not) actually one of my lowest EPN months since I very first joined the program. Well unfortunately, I did not do as well in November as I did in October despite my best efforts.  I ended up with about $560 in earnings for November, well down from my previous month’s earnings. Funny thing is, I only had 3 less ACRUs and about $130 less in winning bid revenue. To me, it doesn’t seem like much of a diffrence to ultimately leave me with over $200 less in earnings, but at this point I’ve give up trying to make any sense out of the numbers, rather I just keep pluggin away.

On a positive note, I’ve been well above $30 per day in EPN earnings this month which puts me way above average, so as of right now, I’m on track for a full bonus this month, in addition to a real nice month in general.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted a ton over the last few months is I simply haven’t been doing anything that interesting.  Up until about the end of October, I was spending almost my full effort on backlinking my existing EPN sites, and making over a lot of them – giving them new themes, different layouts, and re-integrating PHPBay.  So far it has really paid off. I can finally say that my EPN income from these sites is probably at least 50% of my total EPN income, which is WAY up from first and second quarter of this year. I have a ton of these sites now ranking #1 for their main keyword and bringing in tons of traffic and sales.  I obviously still have a long way to go, but I have worked like crazy on backlinking these sites and I can definitely see the results.

As far as what I’ve actually done in terms of backlinking, my main focus was to increase the number of good quality backlinks to each site. To me, that means web 2.0 backlinks and article backlinks and backlinks to those backlinks. So that’s exactly what I’ve done. As of my writing this, I estimate I’ve sent a minimum of 20 of these “quality” backlinks to about 85% of the 100 sites. Theres a good chunk that I concentrated heavily on and have sent more than 50 of these links, and another good chunk that are in the 20 – 40 range. At 300 words per link, you can imagine how much work/money/time this averages out to be. But I have definitely seen the results, and they keep getting better every month, for the most part.  I’ve also been sending other links besides links from web 2.0 and postrunner – I’ve got a writer pumping out 200 Build my Rank posts for me per week. I’ve also continued to use BMD on my existing backlinks, and I’ve been adding some of these sites to Deep Linker Pro.

Overall, I’ve spent a lot of my work over the past few months working on this group of sites, and I’m pretty happy with the results. I will likely have the first round of quality backlinking complete within the next month or so, and then I’ll probably double back and hit sites that need them with more links.

Additionally, I want to expand a lot of these sites to target more keywords, and add much more unique content. I will probably start with the best earners and go from there.

Micro Niche Snipers

I’ve actually done a pretty fair amount of the same kind of backlinking on these sites as well, although I’ve probably only hit about 25% of these sites. They are a little bit harder to bring up in the rankings as it seems many of them are suffering some kind of EMD penalty. For example, in my 100 EPN sites, in about 8 out of 10 cases I have no problem bringing up rankings for a given site by simply sending more links at it. In those other 2 out of 10 sites, a good percentage of the sites I have problems with are the EMDs (exact match domains). Therefore, I think it is more difficult now to get these previously penalized EMDs back ranking again – however I have had some success doing so, and I’m continuing to both add more backlinks and also add new content to the sites, starting with the best earning ones.

Also, I have begun to switch some of these sites from Adsense to Amazon. I’ve actually been learning a lot more about Amazon lately. In fact, I hope to get my first check ever when their next payout comes around. I’ve been steadily getting more clicks and making more sales every day. I have one of these micro niche snipers that I recently converted over that has been doing quite well since the switch, and I haven’t even got it back ranking for its main keyword yet.

So overall, my focus here is going to be transforming all of these sites to amazon sites, most likely, and saving adsense for my bigger, higher quality sites.

I have found that I actually really love the Amazon affiliate program. I used to have a very bad opinion of it, but the fact of the matter is, it is extremely straightforward – you sell a given product, you get a set commission. There’s no guess work and no grey area, and I really love that about the whole program. I think one of my main goals for next year is going to be getting my Amazon income up.

Authority Sites

So right now I have 2 authority sites I started this year. One I started back in May, and one I just started.

I’ve put quite a bit of work in to the one I started back in May. Right now it is bringing in about $30/month, however it is steadly rising each month. Most of that income is coming from AdSense, with a little Amazon mixed in. I’ve got just shy of 100 posts on the site right now, all of which are good quality, keyword targeted and between 500 and 800 words with over 50% being in the 800 word range. They also almost all include pictures. Over 50 of those posts also have a minimum of 7 quality backlinks pointing directly at the post. So overall I’ve put a lot in to building content and backlinking.

The progress is slower than I expected, frankly. I think I made a mistake by building too many links to the site too fast, which may be causing it to take some real time for me to rank for my targeted keywords. I also obviously will need to build a lot more links. Right now, I have a posts scheduled to be pubilshing daily through the end of this month. I will probably get another 2-3 month’s worth scheduled once I start running low. I think for now I’m just going to keep publishing posts until I have all 200 of my original keywords I targeted represented on the site, then I will go back to backlinking them all. By that time I should be coming up on about 9 months of existence for the site, so it should get better.

I also have another site I’m working on that I just started, which I posted about earlier today. This is a pet related site in the broadest sense possible. I want to make this a huge authority site and rank for as many keywords as I can. I’m taking a different approach with the site – mainly, I’m going to focus more on adding content to my own site and less on backlinking initially. Since I put the site up about 3 weeks ago I’ve already added over 150 original posts, and received around 30 or so guest posts. The way I’ve been doing it is writing one long post 800 – 900 words on a group of keywords, then 5-7 supporting posts of around 300 keywords. The posts are all contained together in a silo, and the supporting posts all contextually link back to the main post. Eventually this should really help me build authority and also give me a lot of double and triple listings. I’ve got a huge spreadsheet I’m working on for this site, and it will likely take me a very long time to finish adding all the content.

When I first put the site up, it was actually getting between 20 – 30 google searches per day from the old content. Once that content got bumped from the index the traffic dropped to almost nothing for about a week, but already I’ve started climbing back up traffic wise, and have had some 20 search days recently based on the new content I’ve added. I think I want to wait until I can consistently get between 30 – 50 visits per day before I add AdSense, just to see what happens. Overall I think this site will end up being a winner, and hopefully by the end of 1st quarter I will have outsourced the entire production end of it to one person.

SEO

I haven’t gotten too much into reflecting on last year’s goals yet – but I plan to. One of my goals last year was to increase some difficult rankings for my e-commerce site. Well, without getting too much into that, I shattered those goals and really surprised myself in the process. I also have gotten some great results for my other clients. For this coming year, I really want to focus more on establishing my SEO presence and try to make more by doing less. The first thing I plan to do is dominate my local market. I live near Minneapolis which is actually a fairly large market and there are some fierce competitors.  My goal, is to get my current site Webcontempo.com ranking in the top 3 for Minneapolis SEO. But that’s not all. What I really want to do is start 2 new SEO related sites and get them ranking in the top 3 for SEO as well. One is going to be advertising a new SEO consulting business I’m going to start which will basically consist of a very high hourly rate that I will charge for SEO consulting. I believe it will be warranted based on my utter domination of my local SERPS. The second new site will be offering SEO to local businesses, which will consist of a much different offering at a much lower price point targeting a very specific local audiences.

This is likely going to take me a lot of work, but if I can land just a couple good clients it will be well worth it. My goal isn’t to get a ton of new clients, its just to get a few really good ones, and also stroke my ego a little bit in the process. There are so many crooks out there offering shoddy SEO services and I don’t ever plan on reducing the quality of my own offerings or misleading a client just to make more money, so I’ll be doing everyone a favor in the process. It should be a really interesting project and if I can pull it off, there should be some amazing results. One of the tactics I plan to employ is utilizing more social media. I have not been t0o much of a fan of social media SEO-Wise, but I really want to learn more about facebook, twitter, etc, and using them to leverage rankings/clients/authority/etc.

Other final thoughts

If you think this post was long, I promise I will have something that will dwarf it at the end of the year, reflecting on the previous year, and an in-depth look ahead to next year. A couple things I didn’t get around to covering in this article that I will probably mention down the road include outsourcing, some new SEO tools I’m trying out, a new thin-site strategy I’ve been working on, and more.

ALSO

I have a ton of old websites, most of which were built before June of 09 when I joined the Keyword Academy and changed the way I did everything. Some of these sites have earnings, some dont. Some have traffic, some dont. Etc, Etc.

Point is, I want to sell off a bunch of these old sites that I don’t really do anything with anymore just for the simple reason that it will be less for me to manage. With my 100 EPN sites, my Micro Niche sites and the few large sites I have, I can keep track pretty easily, but with all these other sites I have floating around, it makes it tough.

SO

Rather than take forever listing these all on digital point or wherever, I’m going to add a Page to this site with a list of everything I’ve got for sale – general description, traffic, income, what I would like to get, etc. If you have any interest, you can email me for more info and/or make me an offer.

This is on my TO-DO list for today so I hope to have this up within the next couple hours for your perusal and I will make another blog post to annouce it so it hits the RSS feeds. That will complete my RARE 4-post day.

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.

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.

Well February has come and gone and now we’re getting into the thick of things here in March. I’ve been really busy over the last few weeks, which has definitely taken me away from my posting schedule I was working on. One of my main goals for the year was to average 3 posts a week, so I’ve got a little catching up to do, but I do have some plans in the works for that.

Anyway, February was a good month overall. I had a rocky January but got back on track and things have been rolling along quite nicely. I spent a lot of time working on my main business and clients, but I still found time to get a lot of work done in my MMO endeavors.  I’m going to start with a recap of my overall 2010 goals, and February goals, then move into a rundown on my micro niche sites, and some plans that I’ve got on tap.

First the overall goals:

1. Reach $50/Day in AdSense Earnings

Moving along nicely on this. My overall February Adsense earnings were down about 10%, HOWEVER, my best performing site still pulls in a good percentage of my AdSense earnings. Because of the nature of the site, I get a very large amount of traffic starting on Christmas day, and continuing steadily through January. After that, the traffic and earnings tend to level out – so well I was actually really close to my $50/day goal for December and January, I already knew it would be more work because eventually earnings from my main site would level off.  The good news is, while my earnings leveled off from my main site in February, I brought my income from other sites up, and ended up still having a good month. I’m still a little way out on this goal, but moving forward steadily.

2. Reach $50/Day in EPN Earnings

Still have a steep climb ahead of me here – earnings were UP in February, but I’m hovering between $15 – $25/day right now.  Ironically, since my post early in February regarding the massive difference between EPN earnings and my actual earnings on that one particular day, my EPC did improve and I ended up doing better on the month than I did in January, and since then things seem to be relatively stable. I actually have come up with a few new ideas for my 100 EPN sites to basically take 1 last shot of trying to force my way out of the sandbox on some of these sites, I don’t know if it will work or not, but more on that later…

3. Reach $200/Month in Amazon Earnings

Still way off on this too. I haven’t really done much with Amazon so far this year. It’s on the backburner for now, and I fully plan on working heavily on this in the latter half of the year.

4. Lose 20 Pounds in the next 2 Months

Sadly, I only ended up losing about 10 pounds total. Still nothing to scoff at, but I didn’t have a great month in February. Starting in March, I’ve made some new changes that have been working well so far, so I expect to drop the second 10 pounds soon if I can keep it up. I’ve found that staying committed to exercising daily is really difficult just due to the fact that it takes a lot of time out of the day that I could be working. That being said, I realize how important it is and I’m hoping that I can get more on track with this now.

5. Complete a Web Development Project I’ve Been Planning for 6 Months

I actually got a ton of work done on the project in February, I’ll cover this in more detail below.

6. Get My E-Commerce Site into the Top 5 in Google for a Very Competitive Keyword I’ve Been Targeting

Made great progress on this one as well. I’m sitting in 8th place right now for a really competitive keyword, and I’ve got a lot more stuff on deck for this project throughout the month of March. I can’t say for sure, but it is possible I could crack the top 5 and cross this one off the list by the end of the month.

7. Double Daily Organic Traffic to My E-Commerce Site

This goes hand in hand with the above – my organic traffic has been way up – not quite double, but getting there. In turn, sales have also been way up so far in 2010 and there’s a bright future ahead.

8. 20 x New Micro Niche Sites

Done! Yes this one I fully completed, and I’m already starting to reap the results. This was probably one of the easier goals on the list, but nice to have something to cross off nontheless. More on this later as well.

9. Get a Really Nice Sound System Installed in My Lincoln Town Car

My lovely wife Nicole did have plans to get this all done for my birthday last week, but things kind of fell through and we had to put it off a week. The EXCELLENT news is that she is literally getting it installed as I am writing this, and this goal is as good as done. Big shot out to Nicole for making this one happen – I can’t wait to test it out.

10. Post at Least 156 New Posts on This Site

Was on a good pace in January but I fell behind badly around the middle of last month. It’s really hard to come up with stuff to post so frequently, especially in between all my regular day to day stuff, but I know I can do it. My plan, hopefully in April or May, is to come up with a 30 day blog post series where I will be posting an installment once every day for a month. I haven’t exactly figured out the details yet, but I think it’s something I’m going to try, and we’ll just have to see how it goes.

February Goals – Recap

Did pretty well on my overall goals, nothing amazing, but still made progress. Here’s a recap of my February-specific goals:

1.  Get at least two of the goals above completed

Well, sort of got this one done. I did get 20 new niche sites built. I was hoping #2 would be losing 20 pounds but I fell short on that one. I’m getting my new sound system installed today, so I will have 2 overall goals complete, but didn’t quite make it by the end of February. Either way, I set the bar fairly high and I think I did OK.

2. Use MNF to find 100 topics for automotive site

As I stated in a post a couple weeks ago, I actually decided to put this one on the shelf for now. I did find about 60 keywords, but I want to spend a lot more time preparing for this project because I don’t know that much about the automotive niche, and I don’t think I’m ready yet. Instead of doing this, I added and backlinked 15 new posts to a couple existing sites I’ve had sitting around doing nothing for over a year. Just completed this a week or two yet, so it’s too early to give a lot of numbers on it, but I’m glad I went this route for now.

3. Get SOMETHING done on my resort web design business

Yes, yes, yes, I finally did get this one going. In fact, I got a lot more done than I anticipated. What I actually ended up doing was sit down with a paper and pen and I wrote out an action plan for the project – which mainly consisted of the things that needed to get done, and a general timeline on when I would be completing them. By doing this I was able to make great progress – I made up a custom design for the site itself and fully coded it. The site is actually live right now at Resort Web Design, however I still have a lot of work to do on creating the templates.  I’m really happy with the way the design turned out, and I think this one will be a winner. I mainly just have to keep plugging and hopefully get some of the templates ready this month. I was originally hoping for an April launch, but I’m now thinking that May is much more realistic, and even that may be a stretch. Either way, it’s still progress.

4. Get 1 of my first 6 micro niche snipers ranked in the top 3 for its main keyword

Got this accomplished too – in fact, I’ve had several ranking in the top 3 and even 2 or 3 currently ranking #1. I haven’t gone through and checked them all out for a week or so now, but I definitely knocked out this one, and I hope to have a lot more ranking in the top 3 at the end of this month.

5. Accomplish 4 other low priority tasks

Got this done as well – the two sites I had sitting around that I decided to add new posts to in lieu of my plans with the Automotive site were two of the items on this list, and I also banged out 3 other things. In fact, I’ve pretty much gotten rid of my separate “low-priority” list and I’m mostly just working from one main list now. I’m really glad I decided to do this one.

Conclusion

Wow, I really can’t say enough how creating these monthly goals helped me out. I was able to fully complete pretty much all the goals, with the exception of changing my plans on the automotive site and missing the cutoff for goal #1 by about a week. Overall, I think it was a huge sucess, it motivated me to do some extra work I might not have done, and overall it’s helped me be more productive, so I definitely plan to keep it up.

March Goals

1. Create 20 more Micro Niche Sites

I haven’t started on this at all yet, so I know it’s going to be a real crunch to get it done, but it’s something I want to keep going with so I’m really going to give it my best shot.

2. Fully backlink at least 10 of the 25 micro niche sites I currently have

I’ve been working hard at this all through February into March. All the new sites I’ve been putting out I’ve been partially backlinking from the beginning. Now, I just need to go back and fully backlink ones that need a boost. I’ve got probably at least 75% of all the sites in the first 2 pages for their main keyword, and probably half of those are on the first page. Ultimately I want to see all of these sites ranking at least in the top 3. I don’t think it’s going to take an incredible amount of work, but it will take some time.

3. Change things up on 20 of my 100 EPN sites

Here’s the deal with this one. I read an interesting post in a forum a couple weeks ago from someone I would consider a reputable source – and in forums, I don’t consider that many people to be reputable sources – so just to give you an idea. Anyway, he basically said that sites using well known scritpts like BANs and PHPBay (he specifically named those 2) have a hard time with Google because they are scripts that are already known to G to be abused by spammers, so despite the quality of the content on the site, it’s very possible that just the presence of a PHPBay footprint could be enough to get a site penalized. Now – I’m not taking this to mean that any site running PHPBay is automatically screwed, because I know for a fact that it isn’t the case. But I have thought about it long and hard, and I definitely see some truth to the point. Not only that, but the fact that NONE of my micro niche snipers are sandboxed right now and many of them rank so effortlessly, it really makes me wonder if I would be better off removing PHPBay from my 100 EPN sites. SO to test it out, I’m going to take 20 of the sites – for 10 of them, I’m going to completely remove PHPBay and replace it with EPN widgets or RSS feeds, directly generated from their site. I’ve never done this before, but I think it’s worth a try at least. For the other 10 sites – I’m going to take 5 of them, remove PHPBay and replace it with Adsense. For the other 5, I’m just going to completely remove any kind of ads whatsoever.

It will be really interesting to see what happens. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing happened at all, but there is an off chance that something might work, in which case I can apply it to the rest of the sites. The only thing that sucks about it is I really like PHPBay a lot, and I would hate to not be able to use it. But if it means I’ll be able to get some of these 100 sites earning money soon, it would be well worth it. Truly, I wish I would have did it a few months ago, and even more, I wish I wouldn’t have used PHPBay on all 100 sites to begin with. I can’t take back those decisisons now, so all I can do is try to move forward and find something that works.

4. Lose the last 10 pounds

Since it’s already off my main list now because I attached a specific date to it, I want to make sure I fully complete that goal. One of the biggest changes I’ve made so far this month is trying to wake up earlier and stick to a rough daily schedule. I’m a really good sleeper, and I hate waking up early, but by waking up at 8:30 every morning instead of 9:30 every morning, which would probably still be considered “sleeping in” by many people’s standards, I can give myself a whole extra hour every day, pretty much for free – that I can use for exercising. My goal is to exercise for 30 minutes, 3 times per day for 4 days a week, and 1 time per day for 3 days per week. So far this month, I’ve been on schedule with waking up earlier and I haven’t missed a workout yet. It’s going to be hard to do it for a whole month, but hopefully after 30 days of doing it I will have made a habit. Also, I’ve been making sure to drink at least a gallon of water every day, which I think will help a lot.

5. Average $5/day AdSense from my micro niche snipers by the end of the month

I will have a lot more on this one soon, but basically, without generating any reports right this second, I believe I’m averaging between $2-$3/day with my micro niche sites over the last two weeks – good considering I just finished out the last of my 20 sites last week, so most of that income is coming from the first batch of sites.  Really, I think I could do nothing to these sites for the rest of the month and I would be averaging $5/day by the last week of March, but especially by creating 20 new sites, I believe I will easily be able to hit this goal. I just don’t want to aim too high and be dissapointed. Hopefully my April goal will be at least $10/day, maybe more.

Final Thoughts

February went really well overall, and I’m making good progress on all my goals. I’m planning to work on updating my EPN sites right away, so hopefully I will have some news on that soon. I haven’t even begun to order content yet for my next 20 micro niche sites yet, so they will probably not factor into anything much this month, as I probably won’t have any of them live until at least the 20th. For now, I’m going to keep plugging away on backlinking the existing ones and trying to ramp up those earnings. Based on what happens this month, I’ll decide if I should scale it up even larger or move on to something else. I still really want to work on some authority-type adsense sites, but if there’s a lot of money to be made with these micro niche sites, I want to see it through to the end. So far, the earnings have been great – I was going to actually post a screeshot from February, but I think I’ll save it for my next post, which should be coming in the next couple days.

Speaking of upcoming posts – here’s a real quick rundown of what I have in mind – first, an update on my micro niche snipers, then I want to conclude the “case study” on them that I started in December. I kind of turned the case study into something more by continuing to add new sites, and got away from the actual case study aspects. I want to bring that part of this whole thing to a close and share some of my findings. I am hoping to have a new post up by Monday, Tuesday at the latest.

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.