First off, I obviously haven’t posted much in a while. The main reason for that is I pretty much got burned out shortly after I made my last post. I was really working in overdrive from about last August up until March and I think it finally just caught up with me. I needed to take a little time to chill out and relax a little bit, and that’s largely what I did. It came at a bad time considering I just had a breakthrough with my EPN sites, but overall I think a little R&R will make me more productive in the months ahead. I don’t quite feel back to normal yet, but I’m just about back to 100% and I’ve been a lot more productive over the last week or so.

Anyway, now for the updates…

100 EPN Sites

Obviously a ton has happened with this. I made the switch on all 100 sites, removing PHPBay from every last one in favor of EPN widgets. This in itself took me a long time, and was probably part of the catalyst for getting burned out. Anyway, much as I saw with my original test group, pretty much all 100 sites returned to the SERPS for their targeted keywords once they were indexed and PHPBay was no longer part of the site. In many cases the sites returned within the first 2 pages of SERPS, so this was definitely a great boost. Regardless, I’ll still have to do quite a bit of SEO work on each and every site in order to bring them all to full fruition.

Update 8/09/10

I’m afraid I was initially too quick to judge PHPBay. I recently ran an additional test… On one of my sites that I had removed PHPBay from and saw it returned to  a #2 ranking for its main keyword, I decided to try removing the EPN widgets and replacing them with a regular ebay RSS feed.  As soon as the site was spidered, it dropped from #2 to not being in the top 200 results. I replaced the EPN widgets and the site returned to its #2 ranking again. This tells me that the problem was not related to PHPBay, but rather RSS feeds. The reason I can really think of why this would happen would be as a result of adding all the additional content from the feed to a page already targeted towards specific keywords.

Results wise, my EPN earnings were up about 30% or so last month, from the previous month, and many of the sites were not indexed and didn’t begin ranking again until well after the 15th of March, so overall I’m pretty happy with the results. This month, I’m on track for about another 30% increase over last month, so that is definitely encouraging since I haven’t touched any of the sites since I replaced the code last month.

Micro Niche Snipers

I’ve got a total of 25 of these, most of which were set up between January and February of this year. For the month of March, these sites earned me just about $130 total. I figure that they costed me about $35/each to deploy, so I’ve already paid for a good chunk of them, which is making this look like a pretty decent investment so far. As it stands now, I don’t believe I’m going to top $130 this month – I might reach it again, or fall slightly short, which is still good. I haven’t done any additional promotion on any of these sites since they were deployed – save for maybe a couple of the first ones I built at the end of 09. Overall, this has gone well, but I still haven’t decided where I’m going to go with it. I have to decide between building more sites like it, or focusing on maximizing this first group. I’m leaning towards the latter right now.

Hosting

One of the things that really pissed me off over the last month was a problem I had with JustHost. I originally created an account with JustHost because I found a coupon that gave me the entire first year of hosting free. In retrospect, I wish I would have just paid for a hosting account with a reputable host instead. I’m not going to get too far into the specifics, but basically their setup is poorly run, their customer service is ignorant and extremely unhelpful, and they seem to actually be proactively looking for ways to cancel people’s hosting accounts. The long and short of it is, I had between 20-30 small sites hosted there, and my account was cancelled, leaving me to deal with the hassle of moving all these sites elsewhere. Based on this, JustHost is offically on my shit list, and I absolutely do not recommend them under any circumstances.

As a result of all this, I’m going to be taking all the sites from my JustHost account and completely redoing them as static HTML. The great thing about static HTML sites is that they’re super portable and require basically no maintenance. This means, there’s very little to worry about in terms of getting jerked around by a host, or security issues. Of course there are negatives as well – the main thing being that by using wordpress as a platform, you greatly increase the number of pages in each site. For example, if done correctly, 5 posts can turn in to 20 – 50 pages worth of indexable stuff for search engines. Also, the ease of installing wordpress and setting up sites is something I’ve really grown to like. Regardless, I’m going to be creating a handful of static niche site templates – from scratch – and design them to be super easy to set up and deploy. I’m going to test on this batch of sites, and based on the results decide how to move forward. One thing I know for sure, at least for now, I really don’t want to set up another huge quantity of WordPress sites that I have to worry about managing. Maybe that will change in the future, but for now I’m not interested.

Plans Moving Forward

So obviously I trashed all my March plans, for the most part, and haven’t really done much in the way of MMO at all for the last 4 weeks or so. Now I’m getting back into the swing of things, and I do have some plans.

The first of which is to set up the sites I mentioned above on new hosting as static HTML. I hope to have that completed by mid-next week.

Second – I’m going to choose a handful of my EPN sites that seem to have the highest potential in terms of earnings, and send a ton of links to them. Also, after another month of data, or so, I’m going to have to start looking at the effectiveness of the EPN widgets in terms of conversions. I want to have a good amount of data before I do so, and I want to have a good chunk of these sites performing close to full potential to get a really good idea.

Third – I’ve got plans for at least 2-3 new large sites. I really want to work on developing some quality flagship sites – I have a couple right now, and I feel like I should be working more on this. I think they’re the best bet long term, and it’s much easier to manage 1 x 100 page site than 100 niche sites, so if I can master building large sites like I have with niche sites, I’ll be in great shape and probably be creating less overall work for myself.

That’s basically it. I’m hoping to start posting more frequently here, and please keep the questions and comments coming.

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?

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!

So I started out this month extremely excited to see what the new EPN QCP payout structure was going to be. It’s been a turbulent year for me with EPN, and affiliate marketing in general. I started the year out on fire, thinking I finally had this IM thing completely licked. By late April, my ACRU Quality score tanked for no apparent reason – seriously – and I also started to see chunks of my niche site empire get deindexed by google, a few each month, all the way up to August.

Luckily, I got started with The Keyword Academy back in June, and totally shifted my entire paradigm on making money online – this was key, as I was quickly able to replace my bad web properties that had stopped generating revenue with new, solid properties, thus keeping my overall earnings the same, if not a slight bit lower. But considering the amount of my sites that got hit, and I also lost my 2nd best earner overall, I came out of July feeling good, which led me to conjure up my 100 EPN Sites in 30 Days Challenge. About 2 weeks into the challenge I woke up to find an email from Ebay in my inbox, announcing their new Quality Click Pricing structure. At that point, I figured I could either get really pissed off about it, or make the best of it and continue my challenge. I chose the latter. September was a good month for me. My EPN earnings were up about 20%, I completed all 100 new sites, and my earnings just from the new sites was probably near $300, not bad for the first month, and especially considering I did not finish all 100 sites until mid-September, nor did I do nearly any linkbuilding.

So I was feeling great about everything, and looking forward to the new changes with a positive attitude. After recoding a solid amount of clicks yesterday, I literally couldn’t wait to see what my first EPC would be. For the entire month of September, I checked my EPC daily. I had days as high as 0.40, and a couple as low as 0.05. Mostly, I was between about 0.08 and 0.12 per day on average, fine by me considering the volume of clicks I’m dealing with.

When I refreshed my EPN stats and the EPC had finally been updated, I was shocked by what I saw. My account level EPC had been set at 0.06 for Oct 1… Totally fine by me. The curious thing, was the earnings per campaign. On Campaign view, I could see that one of my sites was listed with a 0.23 EPC, and was showing earnings, the same earnings showed on my account level report. All my other campaigns showed an EPC of 0.00 and earnings of $0.00 for October first.  Now I’m still not freaking out about it or anything – I still made some nice money on the first, although modest, but earnings nontheless. The strange thing was that all month long during September, I checked my QCP preview almost every day and what I would see was basically the same thing – my EPC for the day would be set at the account level and every campagin would receive payment for each click based on that account level EPC. So every campaign would have the same EPC for that day listed on the Campaign report, and there would be earnings shown for that EPC x # of clicks that campaign received that day. The only cases where this was different was if there was an unusually large amount of clicks for a given campaign on a given day, which were obviously bot clicks – then the EPC would show 0.00 for that campaign on that day, but this literally happened less than 10 times total I would estimate – the entire month. So somehow, the report I saw today was completely different than what I had been seeing the entire month of September.

I spent some time  checking out some other EPN related resources today and found a couple people with similar problems, however there really aren’t that many great EPN resources out there these days, so who the hell knows? Funny, you can’t even comment on the EPN official forums anymore unless you link your Ebay account, which I personally don’t feel like I should have to do, because my Ebay account has absolutely nothing to do with my EPN activity in any way, shape of form. So I believe that that has led to less activity on the EPN forums than there normally would have been had everyone been allowed to participate. Funny how that works…

Anyway, the main thing I have seen is a lot of dissatisfaction from EPN affiliates for a variety of reasons – even people who’ve benefitted from the changes so far are still complaining. I think everyone can see how fragile this program is, and how things can shift on a whim and leave top affiliates with their pants around their ankles.

Overall, I’m a little disturbed by the first day of reporting. I really went into it with a positive attitude, but I’m not happy about the fact that the report I saw today was not the same as the report I was previewing for the last 30 days. I just cannot wrap my head around that one yet. I have a strong feeling that things will even themselves out – there could be a variety of reasons for the discrepancy – the program may be calculating the data from scratch for these first couple days, which could for some reason lead to not every campaign showing an EPC, or maybe I just plain misunderstood the whole thing from the beginning – but that still doesn’t explain how I was literally physically seeing something different on the same reports when comparing September to October.

The positive thing to take away from this – for me – is that at least I still received a modest amount of earnings for Oct 1, regardless of how it was displayed on the report. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I’ve been hearing from countless other EPN affiliates who are extremely pissed talking about blowing off EPN completely and going another direction. Let’s face it – all of us who are EPN affiliates right now are so because we want to be. We want to be EPN affiliates because, at least at one point, EPN was a perfect format for product related affiliate offers, and in the past the payouts have always been excellent compared to other similar programs, like Amazon for example. Even when I was getting jacked around with my quality score early this year, I never really thought about jumping ship. There just isn’t a great alternative – at least nothing that will be that close. So to all the pissed off affiliates out there I say, shit, give it a month, let’s see what happens. In fact, give it a couple of months. The holiday season is coming up, it can’t possibly be that bad. If your shit tanks during the holiday season, then you know it’s time to jump ship, but you can’t pull all your Ebay ads after 2 days under the new pricing structure because your numbers are down X%. It’s not like Ebay is going to change what they’re doing because some publishers are pulling their ads, there’s people out there desperate to get an EPN account right now that can’t, so I highly doubt Ebay is going to feel the loss of a handful of affiliates – large or small. There’s always going to be more people who step up to take your place, and are happy with getting jerked around by changes to the rules every few months.

Personally, I’m going to keep my head down and continue working as if nothing has changed – I’ve got 100 new ebay snipers that I’m actively working on linking and fully expect to be making big money off them before the end of this year. Although I’m a little disappointed in the stats I saw today, I can’t say I’m surprised, and I’m not going to let it get me down. Worst case scenario, I’ll sell off my shitty thin EPN sites, and convert my 100 new quality sites to adsense… But there’s a lot of time left to make a lot of money this year, and I don’t intend to go down without a fight.