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.

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Well… Technically I’ve actually been an Amazon affiliate for over 2 years – but I haven’t made any money off them yet… I swear. I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program a couple of years ago when I was very green in the MMO game and literally had no idea what the hell I was doing. Honestly, I can’t even remember what site I was going to use it on at the time, and I don’t think I ever actually placed any code online. My stats over the last 2 years seem to indicate no activity.

At any rate, long time readers of this blog may find the fact that I’ve decided to move in to Amazon affiliate territoy somewhat surprising, because I’ve spent a lot of time here expressing my disdain for their affiliate program. In light of everything that has happened regarding Ebay Partner Network over the past year, I can now say confidently that I had it pegged all wrong to begin with.

First off, I’ll start out by mentioning some of the reasons why I had a bad impression of the Amazon affiliate program to begin with:

They have a shorter tracking cookie – meaning you will need your referral traffic to purchase quickly to get credit.

I am not 100% sure on the exact details, but I believe their overall commission payout is lower than EPN.

They take 2 months to pay out

They don’t offer PayPal as an option to receive commission (this isn’t a huge problem, but I like the fact that EPN does).

That’s pretty much it. To be fair, originally Ebay’s affiliate program was leaps and bounds better than it is now when I originally made this assessment – they used to pay a straight up $25 referral fee and there was none of the quality score shit that they have injected into their program now. So a year ago, Amazon really did have an inferior affiliate program, in my opinion, but as I’m writing this now, the reasons I listed above for my dislike of Amazon seem pretty marginal now.

The fact of the matter is, there are people reeling in some serious dosh off Amazon’s affiliate program. Not only that, there are people who have been doing this for years – not just since EPN decided to run their affiliate program into the ground. As far as I’m concerned, if there are people out there making 5 figure monthly Amazon commissions, it sure as hell must be a viable way to go. I’ve had a LOT of success with EPN, pretty good sustained success with Adsense, and I think it’s time for me to branch out and try my hand at Amazon.

So instead of going nuts and doing a 100 Amazon site challenge, or something like that, this time, I am going to do a ton of initial testing on several formats for Amazon affiliate sites. I’m going to see what is working, then try to scale it up once I’ve got a handle on things. One of the best things I learned from my 100 EPN site experiment was the importance of testing and planning, and I fully intend to do that here. I am hoping that by the end of 1st quarter 2010, I’ll have learned enough about Amazon to scale up majorly.

I’m going to start by testing 3 different kinds of Amazon affiliate sites, and possibly add some variations if I come across any. The first is the classic thin site. I think I can still do well with thin Amazon affiliate sites, similar to what I’ve done with EPN. I just released WP Commerce Flex, and I’ve finally purchased a copy of PHPZon, so I’m going to try to combine the two and see what I come up with. I don’t know if it will be quite as powerful as the EPN version, but it’s worth a shot. The second type of site is niche product sites – almost exactly like what I did in my 100 EPN site challenge. I think this format will work perfect with Amazon – just as well as it currently does with EPN, and possibly better in some cases. I may also move some of my current EPN sites to Amazon sites, depending on how things go. Last, I am going to work on some large sites that have a variety of product reviews – so taking a broad niche URL and filling it with a ton of relevant product reviews, and treating each one as it’s own separate entity -  in regards to building links. I will also experiment with it on Hubpages as well.

I’ve already got projects in the works, and I am fairly confident I can start generating some income off Amazon fairly quickly – especially considering the time of year.  As always, I will keep you posted on my findings.

100 EPN Site Update

Thanks to everyone who has shown interest in the project and contributed here, it has been a lot of fun so far, and I plan to continue periodic updates. I ended up earning around $300 from these sites last month, this month I am on pace for about the same, however it is all relative due to the fact that I will earn money from clicks on these sites regardless of whether they individually perform well or not. Fact of the matter is, I have a few of these sites that have performed well individually, especially considering the circumstances, but overall, my results are far below expectations. The amount of actual Ebay sales and revenue these 100 sites are generating is not particularly high, and wouldn’t have likely exceeded $300 in generated commisions for me either last month or this month. The reason why? They aren’t ranking for any of their targeted keywords, rather very long tail keywords. I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and here’s what happened: back in early summer, I joined the Keyword Academy. They teach a very specific keyword research method. Part of the reason they teach it the way that they do, I believe, is because their program is designed to work for people that literally have no Internet Marketing experience at all. Where I really failed on this project, is I followed their guidelines for keyword research way too closely. The end result, was that literally almost all of my 100 sites are targeting terms that are competitive enough to get them sandboxed, which is why they aren’t receiving any targeted traffic from Google. Now this isn’t a knock on the TKA keyword research method, it’s more my own problem. I believe TKA teaches keyword research the way they do, because they don’t want people who are new to spend a ton of time and effort building and promoting a site that won’t generate them that much money. Alternatively, for me, since I already have a nice passive revenue stream and I have a large amount of web properties, it doesn’t really matter if certain sites have a lower earning potential for me, as it all goes into the pot, and as long as a site can cover it’s yearly 7.xx domain registration fee, it’s good enough for me.

So while I thought I was still targeting relatively specific niches for this project, at the time, in retrospect I really was not. I was targeting keywords more along the line of “obscure widget” rather than “purple obscure widget”. The former is more likely to get sandboxed in this case, where the latter has a much better chance of ranking quickly because the competition is so low.

Basically, the current status of the 100 site challenge is that YES, the sites are earning me money – around $300 per month, however almost none of the sites are ranking in the top 100 for their main keywords, despite a large link building effort, meaning that they are all “sandboxed” or whatever you want to call it.

Luckily, there is a bright side to following the TKA method. These sites are all well built upon a foundation of content, meaning at some point in the near future, they will come out of the sandbox and begin to rank for their keywords. Because I’ve already done a lot of link building, particularly leveraging Web 2.0′s, when they do begin to come out of the sandbox, they should be stronger than ever, and I should see a real significant increase in earnings.

The sites were built in August/Early September, so they are all around the 3 month mark in age. There’s no definitive evidence on when the sandboxing period ends, but I have heard some people say 3 months, other say 6 months and some even say up to 9 months. I believe the general consensus is closer to 6 months, meaning that I could start to see the light on this project as early as February, or as late as May. I will personally plan on having low expectations until at least May, and be pleasantly surprised if I get anything sooner.

I was originally hoping to hit a quick score on this project and use the funds to finance even bigger MMO projects, but it’s been quite the contrary. It’s almost like investing in a Money Market or CD, you’ve got to put in a lot up front, and you won’t see any kind of return for quite a while – however in this case, the payout for me should be huge, it will just take longer than expected.

So going back to what I was saying about keyword research, I’ve already got a handful of new sites in the works that take a different approach to keyword research, targeting extremely specific niches. This approach really does not borrow anything from the TKA method at all, so I can talk a little more about it. Basically I’m looking for 2 key factors – 1. Does the term get at least 800 searches per month according to the Google Keyword Tool, and 2. Can I purchase the exact domain name as a .com? If the keyword satisfies both of these criteria, then I believe it has enough potential to merit putting up a site. I just started working on this, and I have 4 sites I’m going to be testing this strategy on, which should be deployed no later than next Wednesday. I’m going to deploy them all on the same day, monitize 2 of them, and not monitize the other 2. I will probably use EPN on one and Adsense on the other. These 4 keywords are all going to have exact .com domain names and very low competition, so it should be simple to get them ranking quickly. I want to see if I can get all of these sites on page one quickly, and sustain it without them slipping into the sandbox. I also want to test whether initially using EPN and Adsense has any effect on ranking/sandboxing as well. I’m hoping to get some real clear cut findings from this new mini-experiment, which I can possibly scale very soon if I find that it’s working.

Analytics

I wanted to touch on the topic of analytics. A helpful commenter posted on my October update regarding the use of Google Analytics on these sites. We went back and forth, and ultimately I agreed that while there are some real benefits to using Google Analytics, the risk is not worth it. So immediately following that back and forth exchange, I went ahead and removed analytics from ALL of my sites in this particular experiment.

I’m glad that I did, however it made me realize how much I really did enjoy using it, at the same time. The main thing I liked about analytics specifically regarding this project, was that I could view overall combined data for 50 sites at once, rather than having to look at each individual site’s performance. So for example, I could see daily, weekly and monthly traffic trends as a percentage, bounce rate, time on page, etc. I found that all to be completely helpful throughout the initial months of this project.

A good friend of mine recommended Piwik, which is an open source version of analytics. I have installed it on about 10-20 sites, and it is a very nice solution. The only beef I have with it is that I haven’t been able to find a way to replicate that “group” reporting the way I was with Google Analytics. I’ve also tried a couple other free analytics tools, but nothing else has even come close. I am now using Piwik for a few other sites independent of this project, but I don’t anticipate using it on any more sites that are part of the 100. At this point, none of my sites have been competitive for their targeted keywords anyway, so I’ve decided to just not even worry about stats for now. Down the road I may change my mind, but it’s kind of a time sink anyway.

Other Projects

So… If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not doing a hell of a lot of work on my EPN sites any more. I spent a shit ton of time backlinking them already, and I get the feeling that no matter how much care I put into backlinking these sites, it isn’t going to make an ounce of difference. The only thing that will make a difference at this point is time.

I’ve been throwing up some “thin” EPN sites which are already starting to do well. The formula is simple – use the WP Commerce Flex theme, add content on the home page, and add a few blog posts, then fill out the rest of the site like a catalog.

I promised I was going to release an updated version of the WP Contempo theme when I reached 100 RSS feed subscribers, but I decided to spend 2 days cleaning up WP Commerce Flex instead.

There is a reason. As I was going through this whole 100 EPN site challenge, while checking my EPN stats every day, I realized that 2 of my top performing EPN sites are sites I built about a year ago using the WP Commerce Flex theme. If you take a look back to the example site I linked to on the WP Commerce Flex page, I can tell you for sure, that my 2 other well performing sites are set up almost exactly like this site in every way.  I believe now, that the main reason they were not slapped by G was that they did not have any ads on the home page at all.

This prompted me to start throwing up some new sites in this same style – general niche, lots of product pages, no ads on the home page. I’m still early on in the process, but already getting some promising results. I am going to give it a try with Amazon as well.

Anyway, that’s the reason why I release that particular theme. I had only been using it privately before, but I wanted to give it a big cosmetic overhaul and make it available to everyone, so that’s what I did. It takes a little work to get an entire site set up, but overall I think the end result is really nice.

In addition to these thin sites, the main thing I have been working on is some X-Mas related sites. I’ve got an entire network of X-mas themed sites in production, and some are already doing quite well. I got the idea because I have a halloween site, that is one of the first sites I ever made for affiliate purposes. It’s been banned by Google and I haven’t laid a finger on it at all since early 2007, and yet it still manages to pull in at least $1000 during September and October between adsense and EPN. And the numbers were even more amazing when it was still getting Google traffic. Anyway, my point is that the first year I had the site I didn’t make shit off of it, however after it sat for a year it got better, then after another year it got a LOT better, and this year it had been slapped by Google, but it was STILL doing great. Point being, it’s kind of a bitch only being able to earn off of a site for maybe 2 months out of the year, but it can be easier to rank, and it’s a nice passive income once you’ve aged the site. Just another thing to kick into the pot. I’m hoping I can replicate the same thing with my network of Christmas themed sites, and I’m building them in such a way that they will hopefully be fairly viable all year round.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on my X-mas sites lately – the only other thing I want to mention is Hubpages and Infobarrel. I put up 120 Hubs over the summer in response to all the buzz in the industry generated partially by TKA. Those hubs in particular make me between 0-5 dollars daily via adsense. Since then, I’ve been throwing up a good 20 50 additional hubs and infobarrels per month spread between a couple of accounts. I’ve been using them for links, and testing niches. My Adsense earnings are up about 25%, and these Web 2.0′s are a big reason why. The other reason being I have an adsense site I developed about 6 months ago that finally started cranking out some revenue. Anyway, point here is that, while you probably don’t want to try to make a living off Hub Pages, I’ve been just throwing up a few hubs and barrels a week to support my other sites, and it results in decent backlinks as well as a nice little side income. Plus, many of the hubs I put up back in July are now PR2 and PR3.

Anyway, it’s been a monster post, so I hope it was worth the wait. I will try to continue posting more regularly, although it will depend somewhat on how my workload is. Everyone, please note that I’ve finally added threaded comments to this site, so hopefully that will be a little extra encouragement for you all to leave a comment.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

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