A lot has changed in the world of making money online over the past 6 months or so. In fact, over the last year and a half to two years, there has been a huge shift in the way things work, as compared to when I first started getting involved in SEO and MMO. I have a very diverse portfolio of different sites – niche sites, informational sites, product review sites, full scale e-commerce sites, portfolio sites, etc. The good thing about having a diverse portfolio is that I don’t get so heavily invested in one thing that when there’s an algorithm shift I have to start panhandling. In fact, I have survived MOST of the various stages of Panda pretty well and come out largely unscathed. I believe one of the main reasons for this is that I attempted to shift towards quality nearly 2 years ago when I had a network of PHPBay cookie cutter sites deindexed.  I realized back then that while these things can work, they are very fragile at the same time and you can go to bed one night having made over $100 for the day and wake up the next morning to find your whole network deindexed.

Following that deindex I started to shift towards making niche sites with what I considered to be good quality content. In retrospect, most of the content I was producing, while grammatically correct, was basically pretty dry and rehashed stuff that probably wouldn’t provide a lot of value to searchers. Once I started going back through my 100 EPN sites, I made changes to quite a few of them, moving them from basically just a niche site with a handful of random keyword rich articles to sites that would actually provide some value to visitor. What I am starting to see now is that the sites that actually help the visitor and provide something of value are the ones that are going to be the cream that rises to the top. For example if I had a site about blenders, rather than just stuff it with articles on random blender related topics, I would be much better served by doing some of my own research, finding out which blenders really are the best, then writing a paragraph or two on each of the top 5 or so in a nice format for visitors to see where they can easily compare and choose the one that would suit them best. I have done this kind of thing for quite a few of my 100 EPN sites now, and this strategy seems to work very well. None of these sites have been negatively affected by Panda either. Additionally, I had a VA a while back for a few months and I had her take a handful of sites and basically perform the process that I just described above. She was able to do it OK, but the overall quality was not anywhere near the quality of the ones that I did. Formatting wise it was fine, but if I were a visitor trying to actually read the reviews she posted and determine which blender was right for me, I wouldn’t waste my time after reading one sentence. Predictably, the conversion rates for the sites that I did compared to the sites that my VA did were heavily in my favor. Meaning that by me taking the time to do it correctly, the end product is infinitely better which results in improved income daily PLUS the added benefit of having a site that is actually a useful resource to the market it is intended for.

So seeing what I’ve seen over the past 2 years or so and having personally tried just about everything, I am absolutely convinced that the best approach to establishing an online presence and making money online is to identify a specific niche, learn everything about the niche, and dominate it. If I were to have to start over from scratch, here’s exactly what I would do. I would identify a fairly large niche – doesn’t have to be super broad like “Pets” or even “Dogs”, but it would have to get a reasonable amount of monthly traffic. Ideally at least 5 digits for the top term or 2 terms.  So instead of “Dogs” as that is probably still too broad, you could go with something more specific but that still gets a lot of traffic like “Golden Retrievers”. I am just guessing that that term gets a lot of traffic. Dogs is probably not a niche I would tackle at all. Anyway the point is you want to have a nice broad enough to have decent traffic, people who are passionate about the topic, and plenty of different sub niches to work within. Once I had my main niche ironed out I would try to come up with some lucrative sub niches with in the niche to attack. So you may find that there is a lot of traffic for the terms “golden retriever breeders”, “golden retriever puppies”, “seeing eye dog” (I think retrievers are common for this), “golden retriever clothes”, etc. What I would do is take the top say 3-5 terms that you want to go after and set up a separate website for each one. Now the dog niche would be a little different because you could really use just about any dog related keywords, but the tighter you can keep your network, the better.  So instead of just mindlessly setting up a site with keyword targeted posts and slapping adsense on it, first you should have a litmus test for the keyword and that is: Can I create a site that will have value to people searching for this term?

If the answer is yes, then proceed. I recommend that before you actually build a site, you begin with the end in mind. Figure out what questions the visitor might have, how you plan to address those questions and how to monetize the site. Since you’re going to be building several sites within the same niche, I recommend you don’t plan on monetizing them all the same way. Especially not with Adsense. So maybe one site you use adsense, then another you use amazon, and another you maybe sell direct advertising. Whatever you want to do, the point is you should diversify. Then go ahead and create the site. I recommend you either do this yourself or hire someone who is passionate about the subject to produce the content. In  many cases, you don’t need the sites to be open ended – meaning, if you can answer the visitors questions with a series of 10 articles, write the 10 articles and leave it at that. They don’t all need to be blogs that you have to update constantly. If you’re doing a product related niche, identify all the products you wish to review beforehand and cover them all, then you set and forget. If you don’t have any kind of personal attachment or interest in the niche, chances are you won’t do as well at this. You need to be knowledgeable in the niche if you want to be successful.

So ultimately you should end up with about 3-5 niche sites and then ideally you want to have 1-2 tier 1 sites. In this example, a tier 1 golden retriever site may be one that is a blog – a very well written and useful blog with social media component, newsletter, and multiple ways to monetize.  OR in some niches maybe your tier one site is an e-commerce store. It can vary wildly depending on the niche you are working is. The point is you want to start out with 2 tiers in a broad, but not-too-broad niche.

The purpose of doing this is twofold. One – you will have more than one site to work on at once – I think this is important as you should never put all your eggs into one basket. Two – while working on multiple sites at once, you will still be working towards the same basic goal with all of them which is domination of your selected niche. Rather than starting one site on Forex, a site on Weight Loss and a site on Dog Training, you will instead be laying the foundation to dominating an entire niche, and every single thing you do will all be helping you move forward towards that same goal.

Now the idea here is that eventually you can link your tier 2 sites up to your tier 1 site. Do not link all of your sites together! In fact, if you can, use private registration and host them on separate hosting accounts. You don’t have to since you are building good quality sites and there is absolutely nothing wrong with linking sites together, but it’s still a good idea if you can. You probably do not need to link your tier 2 sites to your tier 1 site right away, or all at the same time, rather do it gradually, and make sure you do it in different ways on each site.  The idea is to keep it as natural as possible.

Also, keep a close eye on your stats. When you start doing good with a certain keyword on one of your support sites, target the same keyword on your main site or vice versa. Eventually you can dominate the full first page of serps for hot terms by spreading out across multiple properties. This is a huge advantage to having multiple sites in the niche.

Another thing you can do, and that I personally do is purchase existing websites in your niche and add them to your network. Why do the work when it’s already been done? In almost any niche I can practically guarantee that there are abandoned sites just sitting there. All you need to do is take the time to seek them out and buy them. That’s an instant new source of backlinks and traffic to add to your network.

By taking this kind of approach, you are going to end up producing better stuff, which in turn will help you naturally generate backlinks and increase traffic, and you won’t have to go to sleep every night worrying if you are going to wake up and find your sites deindexed the next day. The idea is to dominate and be an expert in your niche, and you can’t accomplish that by outsourcing you entire work day to the Philippines.

Of course, this is just one set of ideas. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, but if I had to start over from scratch that is exactly how I would do it. In fact, I am working almost 100% of my time on network just like this right now. I also have some other ideas about creating a product review site but getting users to generate the content for you, creating social networks and more info on buying sites. No promises, but hopefully I will get around to posting more in those areas soon

I recently had an eye opening experience with Sphinn. At first I was quite pissed, but now I’ve had some time to reflect, and I’m actually glad this happened so that I don’t waste any more time using Sphinn, which is now officially on my shit list.

So last week I wrote a post outlining my experiment with Fiverr. Now granted, the post wasn’t pulitzer prize material by any means, but still, I think the concept was interesting, and would be worth a quick look over by nearly anyone interested in SEO.  So as part of my ongoing effort to become more social, I decided to head over to Sphinn and submit the story. I’ve actually had an account with Sphinn for quite a long time – no idea why I originally created it, but for whatever reason I had an account there. Anyway, I logged in and began to submit my article. I followed all of their steps, and even went so far as to write a nice custom description of the article. Normally, I probably would have just copied a few sentences out of the first paragraph.

Then I got a message stating that since I’ve never submitted an article to Sphinn before, it would have to be approved by a moderator. One day went by. I checked in and saw that my article was still pending approval. Two days went  by – I checked in again and my post was still pending. 3 days went by – I tried to log in and, funny, my login information didn’t work. Odd considering I had been logging in daily with no problems.  So I put in a lost password request, and a new password was sent to me. I logged in to see that my post was no longer pending approval, rather there was simply a blank white space where it had been. At first I thought it had been published, however a quick search showed that it had not. Then I thought maybe there was some kind of glitch, so I decided to go ahead and try to submit it again – sure enough, there was an error stating that the URL had already tried to be submitted before.

So, my article was not approved by the “editor”, and not only did I not recieve any notice about my article being rejected, they actually locked my password. Now that is just plain fucked up. At first I was pretty mad about it, but then I began to think about it more, and think about the type of content commonly posted on Sphinn, and it made me realize that most of the stuff published on Sphinn is pure watered down crap anyway.

I subscribe to the Search Engine Land Daily Search Recap. First off, for those who don’t know, Sphinn is a branch of Search Engine Land, so the hot Sphinn topics are always included. In general, I have always liked the Search Engine Land Daily Search Recap for no other reason than I can stay up to date on actual search engine news without having to go visit any sites. I actually read an average of about 1 article from the entire recap every 2 days. I mostly just skim the titles and intros included in the newsletter.Most of the information is either News, which is generally not that interesting beyond the headline, or SEO articles, which are almost all so watered down and rehashed that there is no point in even reading them.

So the funny thing about Sphinn, is they obviously are trying to maintain tight editorial control so that their bookmarking site is almost if not more boring then their main site – which, by the way, is also extremely lame.

So to help me illustrate my point, let’s take a look at some of the “Recent Hot Items from Sphinn” from Monday’s email:

5 Things I Hate About Google, Revisited 5 Years Later – Wow. I was actually going to try to read this article so that I could find some things to complain about, but it was so boring, I didn’t even know where to start. Maybe he should have thought twice about revisiting this article in the first place. Honestly, I really don’t know who out there ever cared about search results numbers that don’t make sense – 5 years ago or now. Sorry to all the Danny Sullivan fans out there, but I find this completely useless. Completely worthless article.

Here’s another Gem:

How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell, Boost SEO Efforts – Wow again. What a totally stupid article. If you actually take 5 minutes out of your life to read this article, you will probably find, like I did, that the author’s main point is that you should write unique descriptions of your product. Well no shit, sherlock. Honestly, if you are an e-commerce site owner, and had an ephipany after reading this article, I seriously would suggest changing your profession.

I was going to do more, but this is pretty bad as it is and I don’t want to waste any more time on it.

My main point is that I have realized that Sphinn is operated by people who are only interested in what the “fossils” of SEO have to say, and basically seem content to keep rehashing the same shit over and over again. No I don’t need any more articles on how to write title tags, I understand that Facebook can play a role in my SEO campaign, and I don’t need to read any more stupid SEO checklists that are written for an audience with literally no understanding of SEO at all.

The sad thing is there are some really talented writers out there that don’t get any kind of buzz from these lamestream SEO people. I think as a result I am going to start my own bookmarking/voting site for SEO and Internet marketers. I found a really cool WordPress theme with this functionality built in, and hope to get a chance to start working on it in the next week or so. I would really love to have a place where actual good articles/new stories are collected and posted so that we can all have an easy way to stay updated.

So one of the things I’ve really been working on lately is finding some kind of tool that will track my keywords’ rankings for my various websites. At the moment I have over 100 websites I would like to be able to track rankings on and doing it manually simply isn’t an option at this point. I know that Market Samurai has this feature, however the word on the street is that the results aren’t very accurate. I’ve had SEO Power Suite in my mind for quite a while after it was reviewed on one of the few IM blogs I read regularly – this was probably at least 6 months ago. For anyone who isn’t familiar with SEO Power Suite, it is a set of tools that inclue a rank checker, on page optimization tool, competitive analysis tool and link exchange tool.  I personally don’t feel that I have much need for any of the tools other than the rank checker, but I have heard some really great things about it and it sounds like it’s very accurate. The rest of the tools I can take or leave. I don’t think the link assistant is something I would use at all, and about the only thing I would use the other tools for would be for generating fancy reports to include in quotes for potential SEO clients.

So you can buy the indvidual tools, or you can buy the whole package. You also have to choose between the Pro and Enterprise editions. I was literally seconds away from buying the full Enterprise package for around $600, but changed my mind at the last minute. Here are the main reasons:

1. I couldn’t really figure out if I needed the PRO  or Enterprise version. They have a nice chart detailing the differences between the two packages, but I couldn’t exactly tell what those differences were based on the descriptions. For example, I know it is possible to generate reports in the PRO version, but I don’t know if it is possible to somehow take those reports out of SEO Power Suite. I could see that a lot of the Enterprise features dealt with exporting reports and similar things, but I just couldn’t tell for sure. I wouldn’t want to buy the PRO version and find out that it doesn’t do what I need, and I wouldn’t want to pay double for the Enterprise version and find out that I really don’t need the extra features at all. I could have just asked support, but that brings me to my second point.

2. They don’t make it easy to email support. Of course, they don’t have a nice easy support email listed on their site – they have a ticketing system, which you have to register for to be able to get in touch with support.  I don’t know about you, but I really hate it when I can’t find a support email address, and I especially don’t like having to go through a convoluted ticketing system just to ask a sales question. To me, that’s just crazy. I can 100% guarantee that if they would have provided a sales/support email address, I would have contacted them and likely ended up buying the product.

3. SEO Power Suite has hidden fees attached. One of the things I found out at the last minute that was really the nail in the coffin on this deal for me was the fact that they actually charge an ongoing fee to keep RankTracker data updated, and possibly for the other tools as well. It isn’t for software updates – it has to do with them keeping up with search engines to provide accurate data with the tool. Which is fine. But it is VERY hard to find this information on their site. I found out about it after reading someone’s comment about it in a review I was looking at. From what it sounds like, you have to pay some kind of subscription fee and if you don’t, the software ultimately will become useless.  So basically what they’re doing here is getting you to buy a very expensive software package without really telling you that you’re going to have to continue paying to keep it working. Not only that, but I spent about 30 minutes trying to find information on what the fees actually are on their website and funny, I still can’t tell you what they are or what they apply to. They DO have a page buried on their site that vaguely describes the fees, but there are no specifics at all.  So that one really sealed the deal for me.

Overall, I really wanted to like this product, and I was sincerely planning to buy it. Unfortunately the fact that they are difficult to contact coupled with the fact that they obviously are not trying to be open about the ongoing fees is just too much for me to get over.

Sadly I really don’t have a lot of other great ideas as far as tools to use for tracking rankings across a large number of websites, so if anyone else has any ideas, I’m all ears.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eBay is full of jackasses that

1. cannot keep their site functioning properly,

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

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

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

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

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

Google adsense is king

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanna make money online?

Yea.

AVOID EBAY!

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

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

Actual Tips to Help You Get Accepted By EPN

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

Take the other ads off your site

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

Try using an aged domain

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

Use a relevant site

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

Have a decent amount of content

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

Make the site look nice

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

Incorporate the important elements

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

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

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

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

RSS feed is being updated

February 9th, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Earnings for the Day: $8.16

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

BUT

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the first month of 2010 has come and gone. I’m going to try to make an effort to do a post like this at the end of each month. The purpose will be to look back on the previous month, and look ahead to the new month – and specifically set some short term goals for each month, and take a look at the 2010 goals I set at the beginning of January and see how my progress is going. A lot – LOT of bloggers do the typical New Year’s resolution post every year, and pretty much forget about it. I fully intend to revisit my 10 resolutions every month and make sure I do everything I can to fulfill all of them. Not only that, but I want to start setting some short term goals for each month as well, so that I stay moving in the right direction.

First a look back on January. Wow, what a crazy month. I started the month out extremely sick – to the point where I couldn’t hardly work at all. I’m not the type of person to get sick a lot, but I think it has something to do with having small kids – they pick stuff up easily and bring it home. Whatever the reason, I caught something that stuck with me for about 3 weeks, dating to the last week of December. Throughout that 3 weeks, I maybe only had a handful of days where I was at work and feeling 100%. So it was a pretty big setback starting out the year – to say the least. Especially since I was feeling really positive about starting the year out on a good note. When I finally did start feeling good again, and got back to work, I had several setbacks that I had to spend quite a bit of time addressing and also were mentally straining. Overall, I would say I didn’ t even get close to being back on my normal schedule until halfway through January. Once I did get back to normal, things started moving along again. I made some great strides with my SEO efforts on several sites – for clients, and my own personal properties, and I finally purchased and started working with Micro Niche Finder, which I have been planning to do for quite a while. My Adsense income skyrocketed in December – particularly due to a large site I have that does incredibly well on Christmas day, so I was expecting it, but the good thing is, I carried those good numbers into January, and desipte my one good performer calming down, my earnings have stayed consistent and my total for January will be fairly close to my December total, which I consider a HUGE step in the right direction – especially as I continue to add more niche snipers that should help me in that area as well.

Last Sunday I was completely devastated by the Vikings loss to the Saints. I’m not a Minnesota homer, but I’ve been a huge Vikings fan since the mid 90′s. I follow the NFL and NBA closely and I’ve been die hard Celtics fan for over 10 years. I was probably the only person in Minnesota who was ecstatic about KG getting traded to Boston a couple years back. Anyway, I’ve been an equally huge fan of the Vikings, and the buzz and excitement through the entire month of January was crazy, and it culminated with the game on Sunday night. I’ve personally been through the hardest loss of all time – the 1998 loss to the Falcons in the NFC Championship and also the 41-0 thrashing in the 2000 Championship game against the Giants. Amazingly, before the game, I was extremely cautiously optimistic – I have learned that the Vikings have almost a Red Sox or Cubs “aura” where they will lead you along just enough to break your heart at the last minute, so I didn’t necessarily expect a win. The thing that killed me was the way they lost the game – they played great, and have every opportunity to put it away, and they just couldn’t do it. Needless to say, it was a really tough loss to swallow and this entire last week has been rough for me – much worse than I thought it would be. But I can’t take anything away from the Saints, and I think it will be an exciting Super Bowl. The only reason I’m mentioning this at all, is because it was a big part of what’s been going on around here this month. Now I’m ready to move on and shift my focus back to something I CAN control – making money.

SO – now I’m going to revisit my 10 goals I set at the beginng of the month, and report on the progress of each one.

1. Reach $50/Day in AdSense Earnings

Making good progress here. Pre-December, I was probably averaging right around $20/day. January average is probably slightly over $30/day. December was higher, but December is the best month, so I’m not going to count that. I strongly think that adding these new niche snipers can get me to $50/day by the end of second quarter this year, and I also have a few other things I’m working on that will help a lot as well.

2. Reach $50/Day in EPN Earnings

EPN is so frustrating from just about every angle that I hate even talking about it at this point. This month actually went OK for me. November and December were a huge disappointment, and I started this month with my EPC in the TANK. The reason – stupid bot clicks starting around Christmas and going for about 2 weeks totally screwed me over (I think). I had to update PHP bay on 100 sites, and I made the mistake of waiting too long to do so, and it tanked my EPC – it was as low as .02 for a couple days.  I started the month at .05, gradually climbed back up to a respectable EPC, and funny, within the last two days my EPC took a dive again FOR NO APPARENT REASON. Honestly, I really have no clue this time. The saddest thing at all, is the SHOCKING disparity between my earnings, ebay’s earnings and the gross merchandise sold. It’s really incredible to me what they are doing with this system, and I honestly have no motivation to continue actively promoting their products.

That being said – I’m not giving up on my 100 EPN sites.  February will mark the 6 month period for many of the 100 sites, and the general consensus is that between month 6-9 is the most common sandboxing timeframe. I’m NOT expecting my sites to come out of the sandbox in February, but I believe the day that they will come out of the sandbox is getting closer. I’ll say this – if they aren’t out of the sandbox by June, I will be very surprised, and I think that’s a pretty conservative estimate.

So this particular goal, I am not really working towards right now. I’m mostly banking on the fact that some time, within the first half of 2010, my sites will come out of the sandbox and should hopefully propel me well past this goal. If not, then it probably wasn’t meant to be in the first place. Sad thing is, at this time last year I was right on the cusp of $50/day from EPN, and so much negative shit has happened since then – from EPN changes to penalties from G, it’s been a big mountain for me to climb. The good thing is, I still am earning between 10-20/day from EPN, and my AdSense has been growing.

3. Reach $200/Month in Amazon Earnings

I’m quite a way off from this. In fact, I checked my Amazon stats a couple weeks ago and realized I had FINALLY made my first commission – 0.60. You have to start somewhere. I was planning on promoting Amazon heavier at the end of 09, but just wasn’t ready, and I still have a lot to learn about Amazon. What I WANT to do, is get on track with my AdSense snipers, hit my $50/month goal, then pump out 10 snipers using Amazon instead of Adsense and see if I can make it all work. I’m not necessarily expecting to reach $200/month from Amazon in the first half of this year, but it is a possibility, and I can definitely see the potential. Any new stuff I would have done with EPN is definitely going to be centered on Amazon instead now.

4. Lose 20 Pounds in the next 2 Months

Coming along good on this one. I really hit a setback being sick for the first 2 weeks of the month. On Saturday, January 1st, when I wrote my long resolution post, I was extremely gung-ho about starting on a more strict routine. I woke up the following Monday deathly sick, and bascially didn’t get any exercise at all for about the first half of the month. Luckily, I didn’t do TOO bad with watching what I ate – especially since I was eating a lot of soup, so I stayed on the right track. I didn’t really get back into exercising until last Monday, but I’m happy to say that I’ve exercised every day so far this week for at least 30 minutes. For the month of January, I lost a total of about 7 pounds. Not bad, all things considered. Next week, I’m going to try to double my efforts and exercise at least 60 minutes a day, and continue on eating healthy. I’m pretty sure I can reach my goal – but 13 pounds in 30 days will take some work. We’ll see…

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

I got no real work done on this in January. This is something that’s been on my list for a good 3-4 months at least, probably more, really, and I just always seem to find other things to prioritize over it. Here’s a small preview of the project: I’m going to start a web design company specifically targeting the resort industry – as in Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, there is a shocking amount of resorts. I’m going to provide a budget website package consisting of a choice between a handful of quality pre-fab templates, which can be customized, and also offer custom design options and marketing. I know I can absolutely crush this market. The main thing that is preventing me from starting is I really want to have good quality templates for my budget package, as well as a really nice custom design for the main site.

I have no formal graphic design training whatsoever, but I have been desigining sites myself for about 5 years. In that time I’ve come up with some really nice stuff, so I know I can do design – the main problem is it takes me a really long time to create a design. For example, I might end up spending 16 hours just getting inspired enough to get to work in Photoshop, and then the whole design and coding process is just brutal after that.

I’ve also considered outsourcing the design part of the project, but I don’t know if it’s the best place to invest my capital at this point. My goal for February on this is to get SOMETHING done. I don’t know what yet, but I want to at least get this moving. Resort season in MN really gets into full effect in May, so I’m slowly missing the boat for what I would consider prime selling time this season, but there’s maybe a chance I can still salvage it for this year.

The great thing is, I have a couple other lucrative verticals ready to go if this works, so I really think I might be on to something with this. I mostly just have to buckle down and get to work.

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

This has been going really well for me. I have 3 main keywords I’m targeting. The MAIN one, which I specifically made this goal for, reached as high as position 10 this month, which is on the first page. Now it’s shifting a lot between position 10-20. I don’t expect this to get done overnight, but I do fully believe I can make this one happen this year. I’ve gotten my 3 main keywords all into the top 30 this month, where 2 months ago none of them were in the top 100, so I’m on the right track for sure.

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

This ties right in with #6, and it’s been coming right along. Traffic right now is up 29% since last month (overall), so I’m fairly close to reaching my goal on this one already. I think within 2-3 months I’ll be able to call this one a success.

8. 20 x New Micro Niche Sites

Moving right along  on this as well. I’ve got 4 new sites fully deployed and launched this month, and I’ve got the content ready and the sites all set up for another 8, which should completely be finished by Tuesday of next week at the latest. That only leaves 8 left, which I fully expect will be complete by the end of February.

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

Had absolutely no time to work on this in January, mostly due to the fact I was sick for so long, and then it took me quite a while to get caught up in my work, and most of my free time was spent enjoying the NFL playoffs. I think there is a strong possibility this will happen this month – not only has my schedule loosened a lot, but it’s also my Birthday at the end of the month, so I might be able to convince my wife to hook me up. We’ll see what happens.

10. Post at Least 156 New Posts on This Site

I’m on a nice pace so far. Hopefully everyone has enjoyed my increased posting so far. At times, it’s really a bitch to try to think of things to write about. I started the Freebie Friday posts, so that gives me sort of something to post at least once weekly, although that can be tough too – I don’t want it to get lame after a while. I want to try to keep thinking of things like the Freebie Friday, and my End of the Month recap that will give me a set thing to post about, so I can keep the posts coming. So far I think I’ve done better than expected – I’ve seen a ton of bloggers with resolutions to “dedicate more time to their site”, “post more on their site”, etc, etc. I really want to stick myself to this one and make it happen. I think posting here helps me just as much as my readers, by helping me stay focused, and accountable. Since I started my 100 EPN site challenge and recording the results, I really feel my productivity went up. I strongly doubt that if I hadn’t posted anything regarding the EPN sites here, I wouldn’t have ever got to 100.

February Goals

Whew. That was really a mouthful. Now on to my February goals.

1.  Get at least two of the goals above completed

I know for a fact that nothing is stopping me from completing the micro niche sites. I also think I should be able to complete my goal of losing 20 pounds in two months, and I also think I can get my new sound system knocked out. The other goals are a little more long term, and may take 2-3 more months to really complete, but for now, I think knocking 2 out is a reasonable goal, and I should easily hit this one.

2. Use MNF to find 100 topics for automotive site

I hinted at this before – I’ve got an automotive site with an aged domain and PR. I want to find 100 low competition automotive topics and do 100 new articles on that site – I’ll treat each page as a separate niche site, and see what happens. I would like to try to get to a point where I can use this approach effectively so that I can focus on making authority sites instead of sniper sites. The snipers cost more to maintain and are more of a pain in the ass to manage. Once I have this site done, and my first 20 micro snipers done, I can compare the results between the two and make a battle plan for March and April.

3. Get SOMETHING done on my resort web design business

I talked about this above.  I registered the domain damn near 6 months ago and threw up a page, so it’s been marinating and all ready to go. I think I would like to either get the design done for the site itself, or complete one of the templates. Either way, it’s going to be some work, but I hope I can make time to get it done.

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

This really shouldn’t be too hard for me since I’ve already got two of them in the top 10. Really, I would like to see at least one of these get to #1,

5. Accomplish 4 other low priority tasks

I’m all about lists and using lists to get things done. I’ve got to the point where now, I keep an immediate list here on my desk of tasks I need to do, as well as a second list, which are all tasks that I’ve transferred from list to list for months, and they never get done because they are all low priority tasks. This includes things like – working on old domains/sites, trying new SEO methods, etc. I’ve got 9 things on the list right now – one of them is work on resort web design project, so I’m not counting that one. There are 8 other things on the list – most have to do with updating or reformating some old, forgotten sites. I want to cut that list in half, and hopefully have it completely off my desk by the end of march. Most of these tasks shouldn’t take that long, so I think it’s totally doable, and not only that, some of these older sites can potentially make me some nice extra income if I redo them.

Conclusion

Well, it’s taken a lot of time out of my day today to write this post, but I think it will ultimately be worth it. I’ve really been benefiting from making myself accountable for these goals, and working towards them, so I’m hoping that revisiting them and setting short term goals will help even more.

Overall, January has been full of ups and downs for me. It started out slow, and I had quite a few setbacks. I’m ending the month in a funk from the Vikings loss.  On the plus side, my affiliate income is up, I learned a few things, and I’m getting quite a bit of new work in from my regular web design business. Overall, it was a good month. I’m really really hoping that things settle down for me in February, and I can really focus on getting my work done and crushing these tasks in front of me.

Time for another cliche New Year’s resolution post. If you read any other blogs, you’ve probably already seen at least one. This one will be a reflection on my life over the past 10 years and then a look ahead.

Where I’ve Been

I graduated high school in the year 2000, barely. I always hated high school, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I never enjoyed working for other people, and most of the jobs I had were short term, contract type jobs. After graduating high school I spent time jerking around, not getting a whole lot done. I took a couple semesters of community college for the hell of it, but it never amounted to anything. I managed to stay out of trouble, but not by much. Eventually, I realized something had to give.

I still didn’t have any clue what I wanted to do for a living, but I knew I wanted to be my own boss. After a lot of mulling, I finally decided that I would have the best shot at getting into business for myself if I got into computers. I settled on Brown College, and signed up for a computer programming Associate Degree program. The whole program took less than 2 years, and I excelled in basically every class, making the Dean’s List every semester. I gained a solid understanding of the basic principals of computer programming, and when I graduated, I felt I was starting to head in the right direction.

After I got out of college, at the age of 22, I took a low paying internship at one of the top web development firms here in Minneapolis. I spent almost 2 years working there – doing a bunch of typical intern-like tasks, and learning the trade at the same time. I didn’t even get to really touch a website until a good 6 months or so after I started the job. Eventually, I got my start – slicing up PSDs and turning them into HTML. I learned quickly, and enjoyed the work, and soon I was programming at least a website or two every month.

After 2 years of hard work, I had an opportunity to quit my job and move down to Fort Myers Beach, Florida to work in the family business in the hair replacement industry. At the time, I had been married for about 6 months and had just had a baby daughter. My lease on my apartment was about up, and my health insurance costs had just increased to about $500/month out of pocket, about 40% of what I was actually taking home each month after taxes. I knew I would be taking a risk making the move. I didn’t know anyone in Florida outside of the few family members that I would be working with, and the business I was getting involved with was fairly new, and not exactly the most stable choice I could have made.  After assessing the situation and agonizing over the decision for months, I decided to take the shot, quit my job and move down to Florida.  When I got down there, I moved into my parents’ investment property on Fort Myers Beach. The location was great, and after living in Minnesota my whole life, I enjoyed the beautiful weather. Business, however, was slow. Nevertheless, within the first 2 months of moving, I designed and coded my first website ever completely on my own. Before I had only coded PSDs for client websites at my company. Within the next 6 months, I created several more websites, including a fairly good size e-commerce site selling men’s hair pieces. The e-commerce site was a pet project of mine that I started to get some practice programming shopping carts, and at the same time get rid of a room full of hair pieces my parents had sitting around for several years collecting dust.

Within another 6 months my e-commerce business was starting to gain a little momentum, but the originanal work I had moved to Florida to do was very slow going. My wife was also just about due to give birth to our son, so the pressure was really on, as I knew I was going to need to be able to provide for my family. About a week after our son was born the situation with the family business was seemingly getting worse, and my wife and I were really missing our other family and friends back in Minnesota, so we made the very difficult decision to take what little we had, and move back to Minnesota.

My e-commerce business was netting me about $1000/month in profit when we moved back to Minnesota. We found a little 3 bedroom farm house about 30 minutes west of Minneapolis to rent for $800 a month. That didn’t leave us a lot to work with, and we had virtually no savings.  As soon as we got unpacked, and I got my computer set up, I got to work. I knew I didn’t want to go back to working at another company, so I would have to work my ass off if I wanted to stay self employed. I took a contracting job working remotely for a dating related website network doing website maintenance, which ended up giving me about another $300/month, or so at $12/hour. It wasn’t much, but it gave me confidence that I was headed in the right direction. In February of 2006, I started up my own Minnesota web design company in hopes of drumming up some more business. Several weeks later, I responded to a Craig’s list ad for a  $20/hour contracting job working on websites for a web design company in California. This was a huge break, and I was finally making enough money to start paying the bills. I also picked up a few more local web design clients, and things were starting to roll. About 6 months later, I hit one of my biggest breaks – I responded to another Craig’s List ad regarding some web design work, and struck up a wonderful relationship with a local business consultant. We enjoyed working with each other and he got me involved with projects for a lot of his clients, and gave me many other great referrals, the pay was also better too. For the first time ever, I actually felt like I was making good money.

It was about this time that I started to learn about affiliate marketing and making money online. I had added adsense to a site I had been playing around with over a year previously, but never earned anything and never really took any time to learn. Now, I was reading about people making a fortune using PPC and affiliate offers, and this sort of stuff seemed right up my alley. I put up my first affiliate-style site, a halloween site, and ran a small PPC campaign to it, selling Tom Arma baby costumes via a CJ affiliate program. The result? I made a couple hundred in affiliate sales, but also spent almost the same in PPC, so I pretty much broke even. Around the same time, I learned the guy I was contracting for in California was also making some money off adsense, and I started to get really interested in the whole process. I set up a couple sites and let it rip.  It took about 4 months to get my first adsense check, but it felt really good. I kept going. I started outsourcing articles and putting them up on pre-owned domains. Looking back on it now, I was so close to doing it right, but sadly at the time I had no clue how to really make money with AdSense, and I was spending a lot of money on niches that were too broad, competitive, and low paying. Nevertheless, I kept at it, and kept reading. I stumbled on an article, can’t even remember the exact link now, but it was on principle of marketing, which I don’t think even exists anymore, and it basically gave a brief overview of how to choose niches for adsense. In a nutshell, target high cpc keywords with a low amount of search results, rinse, and repeat. It was an absolute fucking brilliant article and totally changed my life and my approach. With a new, focused approach, I was starting to make more money and checks were starting to come in every couple months, then every other month, and soon I was making a couple hundred a month off adsense.

Looking back on it, it seems like much more than 2 years ago, but it wasn’t until April of 2008 that I first heard about PHPBay and the Ebay affiliate program. This was another life changing moment for me. I’m not one to spend a lot of money on programs, scripts, eBooks, etc, but the minute I heard about PHPBay I was sold. I instantly bought a copy, and got to work. It was probably one of the best purchases of my entire life. I installed PHPBay on my top earning AdSense site, an Apple related site. I created a whole mini “store” within the site selling a variety of different Apple products. This site was already getting about 200 organic visits a day, and I was absolutely floored at how effortlesslyI started earning, making a my first sale literally the first day I had PHPBay installed. From then on, I was hooked. I started putting up a slew of new sites. I made about $150 in my first full month of PHPBay, $300 my second month, and it kept going up from there. By fall I was making well over $1000/month.

Also in October of 2008, I had the great fortune of connecting with another local business consultant who brought me a ton of EXCELLENT new clients for my web design business. At this point, my e-commerce business I started out with was doing well, my web devlopment business was really taking off, and my passive affiliate marketing income was doing better than ever. I really felt like I was on top of the world.

In November 08, out of the blue my wife and I received a fairly nasty-toned letter from our landlord stating that we would have to face a fairly significant rent increase or put in our 2 months notice. In the spring of 08, we had participated in a program run by the State where you take 6 weeks of finance/home ownership related classes, and put $1000 into a savings account over a period of 6 months, and the program would match the $1000 x 5, for a total of $5000 back to put towards a house. We weren’t exactly ready to move when we received the letter in November, but we decided to go for it anyway, rather than face a rent increase. The rest of November and December 08 was virtually a blur, as we raced to find a house in our modest price range, big enough for a family of four, and within a reasonable distance from the city. Luckily we made it all happen, and after a hellish 40 mile move in sub-zero, snowy late December weather, we started 2009 in our first house, with things looking up.

2009 recap

The year started out great – I continuted to get big time work from my web development business and made some additional new connections. Checks continued to roll in. The first couple months of EPN earnings were fantastic, and my paypal account was getting extremely fat. I continued to roll out new sites, and things seemed to be getting better and better.

Around April of 09, I started to see a problem, a couple of my EPN sites were deindexed by Google, which at the time was inexplicable to me at the time. May of 09 rolled around, and again, more sites were deindexed. Then June, and the biggest chunk of my good earners were deindexed. My EPN earnings were down over 50% from January and February. Luckily I had many adsense sites still kicking, and my EPN earnings were still solid despite being cut in half. I kept going. I stumbled on the Keyword Academy in late June and jumped on the HubPages bandwagon.  July was a busy month for my web development biz, but I wanted to try to get my EPN earnings back on track, so I planned to take massive action, by creating my 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge for the month of August. I had been sitting on a fat paypal account for months from all the EPN payouts – totally stupid move in retrospect, as I should have been putting that money back to work immediately. I put a substantial investment into my 100 EPN in 30 day project, and while I didn’t entirely finish all 100 sites in August, I did finsh all 100 sites within 2 months. Funny thing happened, though, 2 weeks into the challenge I got the email from EPN regarding their change to Quality Click Pricing. This was the first setback to the challenge. I had created this challenge on the premise of my EPN sites working in the same way they always had, with the goal being to get visitors to click through to ebay, and plant an idea in their head that eBay would be a good place to buy their product, and hope that at some point they would make a purchase. With QCP, everything changed. Now, the goal would be to send relevant traffic that would purchase as soon as possible. Luckily this didn’t completely flip my plans upside down, but it was an additional challenge added into the mix, as I was always successful under their previous system. Even the move from CJ to EPN didn’t effect me much, which is why I didn’t mention it previously in this post. The second major setback to the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge, basically all 100 sites were sandboxed. In a nutshell, this means they would not be getting targeted organic search traffic from google for a good 6-9 months at least.  Basically meaning my anticipated earnings when I started the project would not materialize until well into 2010.

Luckily I didn’t put all my eggs into 1 basket with the 100 EPN site challenge. At the same time, I was also working on developing several hundred hub pages and info barrels, about 20 new adsense sites and several large authority sites. In October, November and December, I started focusing on buying quailty pre-owned domains, began working with the Amazon affiliate program and  kept plugging away. December was the best Adsense month I’ve ever had, and I’m more sure than ever I’m on the right track, because I believe Adsense is the hardest program to actually make a LOT of money off of. Anyone can make $5/day with a couple months work, but scaling up and staying diverse and safe at the same time takes a lot of skill (in my opinion).

Overall 2009 was an interesting year. I did very well as far as my web development business goes, my e-commerce site did OK, and my affilate business didn’t quite get to where I thought it would be at this time last year, but the main thing I think I really came away with was a wealth of knowledge I didn’t have before.

Some of the things I implemented in the last year that have really helped me:

Trial and Error – I really had to flip the script after the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge didn’t meet my expectations. Now, I’ve been testing everything and finding out a lot about what works and what doesn’t work. If I ever do a big challenge again, I will absolutely test it on a small scale first so I know exactly what to expect.

Diversification - I started out 2009 expecting my EPN income to continue rising each month as it had for each of the previous 8 or so months. Boy did that blow up in my face. Now I know that I need to be – AT A MINIMUM – balanced between AdSense and EPN, and once that happens I need to focus on Amazon for an equal balance between the three. Once I’m making enough off that, I’m going to put money into something completely unrelated to the Internet, like real estate or something to that effect.

Lists – probably one of the most important things I’ve ever done is start using immense to-do lists. Ever since I started working out of college, I’ve always kept a huge pile of scratch paper on my desk. Early in 09, I started getting so busy, I needed a way to prioritize tasks better, so I started writing to-do lists on my scratch paper, prioritizing each item, and trying to cross off as many things as possible each day. I will continue adding and crossing off items from a piece of paper until it’s completely filled up with nothing but crossed off items. Then I’ll slide it into the recycling bin and start a new piece of paper. I can honestly say, one of the best feelings is recycling those pieces of paper filled with crossed off items. It really comes with a great sense of accomplishment, it helps me stay focused on what I actually need to get done, and most importantly helps me prioritize things.

Organization – The other really important thing I picked up from the Keyword Academy was employing better organization skills. I’ve been keeping track of all my new projects in an Excel Spreadsheet, and the results are indisputable. Everything from my 100 EPN site challenge, to individual page SEO on my authority sites, to my SEO clients is kept and tracked in it’s own spreadsheet, and I try to record every detail possible. I hope to share more specifics about this in 2010.

Reflections from the past 10 Years

Looking back, I think the past 10 years, for me, has really been defined by a few crucial decisions along the way. It started when I was out of high school, doing nothing with my life. I could have very well ended up selling pot, or just wasting away doing nothing, but I was fortunate enough to have a moment of clarity and realize that I needed to get into school. Making the decision to go to Brown College for Computer Programming, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a computer programmer, was definitely a big move for me. The next decision came after I graduated and got my associate degree – I could have gone back to Brown for 2 more years and earned a Bachelor’s in computer programming, but instead I decided to take a low paying internship and pursue web design. If I would have gone back to Brown College, I probably would be working for some huge company right now doing some boring shit like punching numbers on an AS/400, or some other lame, monotinous work. Instead, I took a shot on the web design Internship, and it absolutely changed my life. My next big decision was to quit my job and move my family to Florida. This may have been the biggest decision of my life. Although things didn’t work out the way expected in Florida, my life changed forever, and I learned things I never could have learned working for a company. The last big decision was to move back to Minnesota on a $1000/month income with a wife and 2 kids. Everything pretty much fell into place after that. Overall, I can honestly say I’ve been really blessed by everything that has happened to me over the past 10 years. I have a great family – my kids are healthy, my wife hasn’t had to work since she gave birth to our first child, we’ve got a nice house, and I’m doing what I love for a living. If the next 10 years are even half as good as the last 10, I’ll consider myself lucky. The biggest things I’ve learned are that sometimes you’ve got to set goals for yourself in life if you really want to go anywhere, and you’ve got to take risks sometimes to reach those goals. Big thinking and hard work really do pay off.

Where I’m Going

So this is a little more than your typical New Year’s resolution post, but that’s still the gist of this article. Going back to what I was saying above about lists, I think putting New Year’s resolutions in a list is a good idea, so that’s what I’m trying this year. I’ve also focused on smaller goals with a clear conclusion, so that I can constantly work to cross them off my list. Ideally I would like to have all the items on my list of resolutions crossed off within the first 6 months of 2010, so that I can work on a new list.  So without further ado, here are my top 10 resolutions for 2010:

1. Reach $50/Day in AdSense Earnings

This is actually a pretty reasonable goal, as I’m already close to this, so I would like to get this one knocked out quickly so I can work on something bigger.

2. Reach $50/Day in EPN Earnings

This is another relatively reasonable goal for me, as I was already making well over this at one point. My 100 EPN sites should be out of the sandbox between February and May and I’ve already done extensive backlink work on them, so I am confident I will shatter this one without even having to do much additional work. I just need to play the waiting game.

3. Reach $200/Month in Amazon Earnings

Again, this is a pretty reasonable goal, and one I should probably be able to knock out in a couple months – hopefully. I just want to get to the point where I’m earning SOMETHING from Amazon consistently, so I’ll have something to build on. I think this will be a good start.

4. Lose 20 Pounds in the next 2 Months

I’ve always been up and down with my weight. Before I started working in 2003 or so, I was an atheletic 175 pounds and I played several hours of basketball every day. By 2005, I weighed over 300 pounds, and in 2007 I lost a large chunk of it again, and I’ve been between the 220-250 pound range ever since. I think being physically healthy is an extremely important part of life and I plan to continue eating healthy, as I have been, and also work out at least an hour every day.

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

In addition to affiliate marketing, I also want to expand my web development business by starting new web development companies targeted towards specific verticals. I have my first one mapped out and ready to go, I just need to put in some serious work to launch it. Once I get this first vertical done, I have several more I can move into if the first one does well.

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

I’ve been working on SEO on and off for my e-commerce site since 2006. I’m in a very competitive niche, and while I do very well in terms of organic search, I want to finally start cracking the top spots for some of these really competitive hair loss related terms. My main term I’m targeting, in particular, I’ve finally gotten into the 12th spot for, and it’s taken me 3 and a half years. This year it’s time to quick fucking around and finall get into the top 5. I know I will be able to get this one crossed off my list.

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

This goes hand and hand with the above. Basically my E-Commerce site does pretty well, but I know it could do better if it were ranking at the top for some of these keywords. I want to get out of the “just being profitable” range and really blow up this business. I’m partnered with my Mom on the project, so I would like to be able to see her cash in on this deal too. I’ve got renewed focus on this project this year.

8. 20 x New Micro Niche Sites

I’ve been working on these “micro niche sites” ever since my EPN sites all got sanboxed last fall. I started a split test in early December and have some interesting results already. I plan to expand on that, and pop out 20 new micro niches. I plan on this probably being the first thing crossed off my list, as it should be done before the end of January, and I will be elaborating more on that in coming posts.

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

I know this is not much of a resolultion, but my car badly needs subs and 6 x 9′s, and I’ve got a tight ass deck sitting in my garage. I had a great Bose sound system and deck in my previous car – an Infiniti J30, but the tranny blew on it last December and I’ve been rolling in the Lincoln ever since. It’s a great car, but the speakers are total shit, and subsequently, I only really listen to sports talk radio. I think this will probably end up being the second thing I get crossed off the list, and I’ll be happy to get this done.

10. Post at Least 156 New Posts on This Site

Last but not least, I really want to ramp up my efforts on this site, if for nothing else but to help myself organize my thoughts. I’ve also started to make a little money off this site too, which makes me happy, andI know I’ve got people out there who actually like reading what I have to say. So I’m going to try my hardest to post at least 3 times a week, maybe more, and make this site as good as it possibly can be. Right now I’ve got 71 posts – this will be 72, so I’ve got a hell of a way to go.

Last Goal: Complete this list as soon as possible, start new list.

Well it has taken me quite a while to write this. If you’ve read it this far, hopefully you’ve found it a little more interesting and insightful than your typical cliche New Year’s Resolution post. Now that I’ve published it here, I’m accountable.

I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010.

What are your resolutions?

Well I got quite a surprise this morning when I awoke to find an email from EPN in my Inbox announcing their roll out of a completely new payout system for affiliates. Basically, they are dumping ACRU and paying out a cut of each product they sell via your cookie. Instead, they are switching to a daily EPC payout, which will pay you a flat rate daily, based on the amount of clicks you sent that day.

It’s almost like Deja Vu all over again… I remember writing a similar article on this blog last fall when Ebay announced their new tiered ACRU structure. In that article, I explained that there were good and bad things about the tiered structure. In a nutshell, the good points seemed to be that:

1. Ebay was mainly looking to weed out their worst affiliates and incentivised clicks. This would penalize the “Black Hat” affiliates and reward the “White Hat” affiliates sending quality traffic.

2. Affiliates sending quality traffic actually stood to benefit from the change, in some cases by twice what they were originally making.

Of course the negative was:

Ebay doesn’t give hardly any clues how they determine your traffic quality, and therefore, you can be on any tier of their structure without any clue how you got there, or any clue how to move up, or avoid moving down.

So the way this affected me is as follows -

I send basically 100% of my EPN clicks via niche sites. Not engaging in any kind of black hat techniques, or anything like that. In fact, I think if a human ebay representative were to review my portfolio of EPN sites, they would have a hard time finding any problem with anything I’ve got out there.

When Ebay first switched my account over to the tiered ACRU structure, I believe it was November of last year. For the next 4 months, I saw an increase in earnings of up to 400% monthly. I was in the $40 tier and everything was going great. (Note: this was during the holiday season, so I don’t attribute the earnings increase entirely to tiered ACRUs).

Anyway, come march, my quality score took a nosedive – down to the $10 tier, and my earnings fell back below what I had been earning before November 08.

The thing that really bothered me about this, is that I had hardly made any changes to my portfolio of EPN sites during that entire period of time. I began making so much money off EPN in the winter of 08, I became complacent and started concentrating on other revenue streams. So my question to ebay would have been -

“If I haven’t added any new EPN sites or made any changes to my existing sites in the entire span of 4 months where I had an excellent quality score, why all of a sudden has my quality score dropped dramatically?”

Unfortunately, there is no way to have that question answered. All I could do is continue working on improving the quality of my traffic and hope for the best.

Luckily, I did eventually bring my QS back up, and everything is back on track. I’ve had more trouble with Google keeping sites indexed than I have had with eBay this summer.

So what does this all mean?

My reason for a long winded story about my experience with the roll out of the tiered ACRU structure is that upon reading the email from eBay this morning, I got the exact same feeling I had when I read their email about the roll out of the new ACRU structure about 8 months ago, or so.

Basically, at first I thought: “Hey, I’m putting out better quality niche sites than ever, this should actually benefit me long term, as I’m one of the affiliates sending quality traffic”.

Then I remembered back to 8 months ago, when I basically had that same thought, and sure, everything was going great for a while… Until eBay pulled the rug out from under me and trashed my QS with no warning whatsoever, and I was left in a really bad position trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

So my feeling about this new change is that, it gives eBay the opportunity to keep touting the same line, that people doing the right thing will actually benefit from this…

But the reality is, it gives EPN the ability to completely dictate what they are paying out to affiliates without having to have any kind of transparency whatsoever. So basically they can slap their top affiliates with a 0.03 EPC one day regardless of any of the actual metrics involved, and the affiliates will have no recourse whatsoever. If you’re a Money Blogger using EPN as a primary source of affiliate income, you should definitely be concerned.

So overall, I’m not losing my mind over this, and (optimistically) I don’t think it will effect earnings for most affiliates that much right away. But at the same time, I mainly feel that this is another huge step in the wrong direction for EPN. It started when they moved away from CJ in favor of their own in-house system, and they booted thousands of affiliates with no warning or explanation, then they changed their ACRU structure in a way that allows them to completely dictate ACRU payout with no transparency, and now this, which seems even less transparent sadly.

Bottom line, this is why it’s so important to diversify what you’re doing. I’m dissapointed that this announcement came smack in the middle of my 100 EPN site challenge, but by the same token, I’m happy because the point of this challenge was to create better quality sites that could be monitized by a variety of different affiliate programs. So I’m going to continue right on doing what I’m doing, and if EPN turns to shit in a couple months, I’ll start removing the eBay ads in favor of other programs, and it will be their loss.

Speaking of the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge, I’m about due for another update. I’ve still just got the first 20 sites up, but they are fully linked up and already bringing in money. I will have at least 20 more done by the end of this week, and I plan to have at least 40 more after that by Thursday of next week, so things are moving right along. So far, so good. Look for an update on that soon.

Edit: One key thing I forgot to mention… I took my EPC from this month to date and multiplied it by the total number of clicks I’ve received this month, and the total was only ~$7 less than what my actual monthly earnings are. This isn’t really that scientific as their EPC algos are going to change, but for a really, really, really rough estimate it’s not bad. There is little doubt that this change is going to dramatically affect anyone trying to make money blogging with EPN.