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.

Since my last post had a somewhat negative tone to it, I thought I had better go ahead and drop a more positive post on you. I’ve still been plugging away with my micro niche sniper sites, and the progress is coming along good. So far this month, from a total of 17 micro niche snipers I set up (13 last month, 4 in late 09) I’ve earned $10.20 in adsense. Not too shabby considering a good chunk of the most recent 13 sites are still only a couple weeks old. Overall, 11 out of 17 sites have produced clicks so far, also not too bad. The 4 sites I set up in 09 and the 2 I set up early in January are accounting for about 75% of the total earnings for this month. Also, just a refresher, I made a total of about $5.75 from these sites in January.

So overall what I can tell so far is that, it’s definitely good that my newest batch of sites are bringing in clicks already, and even better to see that the aged sites have already almost doubled what they pulled in last month. If things continue going in the same direction, I’ll hopefully end up around $20 in earnings this month. Another good trend I’ve been seeing over the past 7 days is I’ve been averaging clicks from at least 2 of these niche sites per day, some days even 4-5 of the sites sending clicks, so I’m hoping as I go along, I’ll keep seeing more and more different sites from the group sending clicks each day. Overall, the value of the clicks is looking good – ranging from I would say about 0.40 to 1.25/click, with some bigger and some smaller ones mixed in. I’m not going to get rich overnight with this, but I’m really encouraged by the results so far. I should have 7 more of these sites deployed by the middle of next week or so.

All of the most recent bunch of sites I’ve deployed, I’ve been sending about 5 backlinks to right off the bat from article sites – from original articles on each site. This seems to help get the sites indexed really quickly, and almost all of the most recent sites I’ve put up have started out in the top 20 for their keyword, and still remain there. I’m going to hold off on sending any additional links to any of those sites for another 2 weeks or so, and then I’ll probably cherrypick the sites with the highest CTR and send out another 5 or so backlinks and see how much movement I get from it. I’ll probably also take some time to backlink my existing backlinks on those sites.

The main questionmark for me, still, is how effective Micro Niche Finder is. I’m still loving the tool, and I’ve been getting a good amount of clicks on the newer sites, all 11 of which are niches from MNF. Most of my earnings at this point, however, are from the sites I created in 09 and at the beginning of January which are niches I came up with off the top of the dome. I think, still, that time is the most determining factor in this case and the results I’ve seen so far from the MNF batch look really promising. I’m still going to hold off giving it my full recommendation for another couple weeks, because I want to see how these MNF sites are looking after about 5-6 weeks time.

My plan moving forward is: finish the last 7 niche sites – that will make 20 new sites for 2010 and knock one goal off my overall list for the year. That will be done by early next week. Then, I’ll probably let all my newer sites site for a couple of weeks and see how things go. In the meantime, I may try sending some more links to the aged sites – particularly the first 4 I built. Then, probably in the second week of March, or so, I’ll start sending some additional links to the newer batch of niche sites, and hopefully just keep going from there. Ideally, I would like to see $20 in overall earnings this month, and hopefully $50 next month. Based on the numbers so far, I think that is a pretty conservative goal. If it looks like I’m on track for it in mid March, I may try to do 100 AdSense snipers in April and then be good after that.

Also – I decided to squash my plans to do 100 articles on my automotive site temporarily – I’ve got a lot of the keywords figured out, but still have a lot more to go, and I don’t know that much about the automotive niche, so I want to take my time with it. Instead, I want to get a little primer of how using MNF to add new pages to existing sites works, so I choose 2 sites that are very aged that I bought over a year ago off digital point. Both of them have about 3-4 pages of content and currently bring in minimal amounts of revenue from adsense right now. What I did was research 30 new keywords for each site, and I’m going to add each keyword as it’s own page within the exisiting sites. These are all really low competition keywords, so I’m hoping the age of the sites will help a lot in ranking quickly for these keywords. I should have all of these articles added by the end of next week, and should have a rough idea of the effectiveness within a couple weeks.

I will also say – I had a whole group of sites in a certain niche that I set up as EPN sites about a year ago. About half of the network got squashed by Big G because the sites were too thin, so I took down all the auctions from 2 of the sites, removed all the pages and put up a single page of about 300 words and an adsense ad. They didn’t get deindexed, and remained in the #1 – 10 positions for their main keyword on google for quite a while, then slowly dropped off. Anyway, about 2-3 months ago, I put up some new keyword rich articles on each site, and formed them into what is very similar to how my niche snipers are set up – the rankings returned and they are both doing pretty good in AdSense. These are both niches that do better in the summer time, and I expect them to get at least $5/day each via adsense for a good portion of the summer based on how they’ve been doing now. Anyway the point is, I’m pretty sure that the strategy of adding new keyword rich pages to existing sites is going to work pretty well, so I’m excited to see how it goes with the two sites I’m going to be adding 30 posts each to.

Ideally, I see myself putting out another decent chunk of AdSense snipers once I feel confident in the formula, which should easily get me to my $50/day adsense goal. Then after that, I want to start putting out some bigger sites – not necessarily 100+ page sites, but at least targeting a good 30-50 keywords within a niche. I think if I keep on this strategy I can get to $100/day by the end of the year, which would be about a 70% increase from right now. Then, I can focus on building really high quality sites that target super competitive niches.  I think I only want to manage about 500 sniper sites, anything more than that is just going to be too much hassle. I’ve already got 100 EPN snipers, and I’m planning on doing 100 adsense snipers in addition to the 24 I already have. I’ll also probably do at least 100 Amazon snipers if all goes well with the Adsense project, so that is going to be a lot of sites to maintain right there. I may do some of my new adsense snipers with basic HTML templates, as they are way easier to backup and maintain that way. Wordpress is great to deal with, but it could be problematic to have so many WP blogs to handle. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

Anyway, things seem to be on the right track, and I’m liking the way this is going compared to how I did with my EPN sites, so hopefully my next report back will be even better.