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.

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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.

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