How I Got Rich

Better late than never I guess! Not much to report for December. None of my Christmas sites from previous years were ranking so I wasn’t expecting anything from them and I was right.

Didn’t really do much work overall as had people visiting and it was Christmas. The work I did was based around trying to claw back some of my rankings taken from me in the Google update of October. Some sites have come back but not the main ones, at least not for all their keywords they were ranking for.

Some days were really quiet in December and I actually made no sales at all which was quite rare and then other days I was making over £50.

Still using Unique Article Wizard with mixed success, it does work sometimes but depends on where you’re articles are submitted and how competitive the sites you are trying to rank are.

My Earnings for December 2011 were £1300 / $1990 gross

2011 in a Few Words

Overall 2011 has been a great year. I had some great holidays visiting some new countries (Australia, Malaysia, plus lots of places in Thailand) we had a baby, I quit my job to be a stay at home dad and full-time (more like part-time internet marketeer) and I managed to make £1840 in one month from affiliate marketing. But in purely affiliate marketing terms the year has ended on a low note. I feel three years in affiliate marketing and I still don’t really know what I am doing. If someone gave me some money and said “build a site for me that would make money” I wouldn’t be confident of being able to do so as so far my portfolio is very hit and miss. The 80/20 rule is definitely in effect! I’m still no expert on picking a niche and keywords and not much better when it comes to link building. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month which is pretty good considering the hours I put in but not yet up to my goal of £2000 per month. Now I am no longer working in a day job and I am using my internet earning for living expenses so I’ve got much less to reinvest which has slowed me down quite a bit. I really want to get earning a few extra £100 a month so I can start reinvesting again and try and boost my income.

Goals for 2012

I just want to make more money really! £2000 per month would be great, £3000 per month would be amazing. My plans are to try and improve the rankings of my top 5 earners from 2011, continue building up one of my ‘big sites’ I started last year and get some more Adsense sites up and running. A new service is being launched at the Online Income Lab where you can hire a VA through them to build a site right through from researching the keyword to installing WordPress and doing the backlinking. I’m keen to give this a go as it sounds very hands off which is good as I have little time. Also these sites should be easy to sell on flippa or just keep and get some more money coming in.

How was your 2011 and what are your plans for 2012? Is internet marketing dead?

November picked up pretty much where October left off. I didn’t get up to much in November and continued trying to get my main sites that got downranked by Google back to where they were. I was also working on getting my first 10 Adsense sites completed and with backlinks for each site. I also signed up with Unique Article Wizard to make the process of getting links for my site a bit cheaper and easier.

Unique Article Wizard

I wrote about my first impressions of this tool here and they haven’t changed much since then. I’ve used it a lot more and have found that if I select the categories for the articles correctly, for some niches, I can get about 400 submissions per article. I’ve been setting the Wizard to only do 20 submissions per day so I don’t overload my sites with links. Due to this slow submission rate most of my jobs are yet to complete. For some sites I have seen an upwards move in the SERPS but for some others I have not. I guess it depends on how competitive the niche is, how good your site is, what other links you’ve got and what the competition is like. I’m going to keep using the tool for now but I’m not 100% sold.

Adsense Sites

After following the guys over at Niche Pursuits and Online Income Lab I couldn’t help myself from giving this type of internet marketing a try, especially with my other product niche sites floundering! In November I managed to finally get my first 10 Adsense sites finished. Some have multiple pages of content and some just have one page and nearly all have got some backlinks to them now. I’ve been buying quality content from The Content Authority but its not cheap so haven’t got much money left to invest this month which is a shame. I have bought another 10 domains for keywords which I found with SECockpit which is one of the best tools I’ve used. As I’ve no money to invest this month I’m going to try and write one 1000 word article for each of these sites myself. As the topics are pretty varied this might take a while but its better than not doing anything even if its not particularly time efficient. I’ve also been adding videos to these sites that I’ve had made on Fiverr.com and added to Youtube for an extra backlink. Seems like a relatively easy and cheap way to get backlinks and add different content to the sites. None of the first 10 sites are ranking in Google yet but I got a couple of clicks this month. I’m going to keep going with this approach and see if I can do 10 sites a month for the next six months or so.

Overview

November was pretty poor when it came to my sites rankings and earnings. I had little time to do much but tried to squeeze as many hours in as I could. Since my sites got hit by Google I’ve started to think I’ve gone about this game the wrong way. My lots of little sites approach didn’t really work in the end and I’ve now got too many sites to try and repair. Once I get a bit more money to invest I’m going to build up my best five sites and then try and build another five sites but build them with better, longer content and go for some slightly more competitive niches. I can’t be arsed to go after the tiny niches anymore that get you one or two sales a month and don’t bring in hardly any money.
It was ok before when they ranked without much effort but now Google is penalising those sites they would take too much work to rank in this day and age.

Other Affiliates

I read a great post from the Affiliate Musketeer who has been doing affiliate marketing as long as me (I think) but got off to a bit of a slow start but has now found his formula and is doing well. I was pleased to read his latest blog post but was also a bit jealous as it wasn’t so long ago I made £1800 in a month. I’m hoping for a Kindle for Christmas so if anyone has a copy of those books lying around feel free to lend them to me via email.

Earnings for November 2011

Like I said at the top this month carried on from October although this month I did slightly worse, continuing the downwards slide. I made £1.50 from my Adsense sites which was nice I suppose but not enough to pick up the slack from my product sites!

Last month I earned £1440 from affiliate marketing which was down from September but this month:

My gross earnings for November 2011 were: £1200 / $1870

So a drop of over £200 in one month. Some of this is down to losing top spots in Google while some of it due to my seasonal sites going out of season. I’ve not done anything to my old Christmas sites from previous years so I’m not expecting much of an increase in December.

Next Month

My goal for the end of 2011 was to be making £2000 per month but unless something major happens I’m going to be far short of that target. It’s been a good year in many ways but my earnings have been a bit disappointing but with the amount of time I’ve put into my sites in the last six months I can’t complain too much. I’m looking forward to the end of the year when I can work out my monthly average for 2011, have a little cry/cheer and then start the new year with a better game plan!

How was your November 2011?

Warning: this post is riddled with affiliate links!

Last week I signed up for Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you post articles to the blogs and article directories in their network. It’s web based so you log into the site and then enter your article and they do the rest of the work. This might sound pretty simple but their interface isn’t that great.

You can paste in an article in spintax form that you have spun somewhere else, perhaps in The Best Spinner or you can submit an article and two rewrites of that article. This is the option I have used so far and is probably the best for people who don’t like spinning or don’t own any spinning software.

What type of Content can you Submit?

When it comes to submitting an article and two rewrites into Unique Article Wizard the articles and rewritten versions need to have the same amount of paragraphs (seven plus). The paragraphs are then interchanged to make lots of different articles. For this reason paragraph one in each article and rewrite must be on the same topic but written differently. Same for paragraph two and so on. You also need to submit lots of unique titles to help improve the submission rates. For one of my articles I ordered two rewrities of an article I had previously ordered from The Content Authority. This was quite expensive so for the second article I hired someone from Odesk who charged $5 to write a 500 word article and then do two rewrites of it. Both articles got accepted so I guess the cheaper one from Odesk was good enough. Unique Article Wizard also offer an article writing service and charge $9.99 for an article and two rewrites. You could always write them yourself though!

Inserting Links

You can put two links in your article with at least one going in the resource box. This means you can put a link in the body of the text but when I tried this I found that some of my articles had this link removed. For this reason I recommend you put both links in the resource box. You can spin the resource box and the links so you can link to lots of sites and/or pages in one submission.

Submission Rates

You can choose how many times a day you want your article to be submitted. The minimum is 20, I’m not sure what the maximum is but for my articles, so far, I have chosen 50. In the future I think I will do 20 to make it look at bit more natural. It takes a few days for the submission to kick in after you have entered your article but then each day you get an email with a list of the submissions that have been made. So far I have only submitted two articles and both have gotten about 160 submission.

Index Rates

I’ve only submitted two articles so far but for the first article it went down like this:

• Submissions: 162
• Indexed: 95

and the other one went like this:

• Submissions: 159
• Indexed: 99

These are only after a few days of the job being completed so there is a chance more could get indexed over the coming days and weeks. You could always put the URLs of the non-indexed articles into a pinger or indexer and speed things up a bit. A good old fashioned Scrapebox or Xrummer blast probably wouldn’t hurt either.

SERP Movement

I used one submission on a new site and linked to a set of Web 2.0 sites that link to my site. Therefore none of these links went directly to the money site. That site hasn’t moved in the SERPs.

For the other submission I used it on different site. I used one link to link directly to the money site and the other link was spun and linked to one of 10 Web 2.0 sites that link back to my money site. This site moved from #7 to #4 in the SERPs. Although until the recent Google update that occurred mid-October it had been #1 for this keyword.

Final Thoughts

So with nearly 100 indexed posts for each article, and as each article contains two links I got 200 new backlinks to my sites for each submission. This sounds pretty good. But looking at the sites the articles are submitted to, they aren’t the best and if you are not writing the articles yourself it could get quite expensive especially when you factor in the $67 per month subscription fee.

If you have already hired a virtual assistant with time on their hands this might be a good way to keep them busy. Or if you have a cheap source of content who is able to do spinning or rewrites then you could make the most of this tool.

Doing it on the Cheap

One approach could be to write and spin/rewrite a load of articles. Sign up for one month and submit all those articles. Get them published then cancel your account. The articles should stay where they were published and you will have gotten your links and only paid up for one month. You might want to check how many articles you can submit a day and what does happen to your articles once you leave the programme.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as I am using it to try and rank my new Adsense sites but I’m not entirely convinced so far. But the proof will be in the pudding and if it gets my sites ranked and they make money then it will have worked. I guess it all comes down to results and if you can make the most of the tools you are using…

• Link to Unique Article Wizard: http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

A cheaper alternative would be the Article Marketing Robot which does a similar job but is installed on your computer and runs from there rather than being web based. It has a much larger list of sites you can submit to but it will take up your machines resources as it does so. It is a one time fee rather than monthly subscription and they do offer a free 5 day trial so go check it out.

October started off really well for me and I was earning on average £60 a day which meant I was on target to equal my best month of about £1850. But then around October 14 something went wrong!

Panda will get you in the End!

There was a Google update which I think was part of the infamous Panda and my sites took a hit. I had escaped the previous updates that made up Panda but was not so lucky this time. Nearly all my sites took a hit. Sites that were exact match domains still ranked for their main keywords but any long tail keywords they ranked for got knocked right down the SERPs. Sites like amazon, ebay and wikipedia seemed to benefit most from the update, at least in the niches I am targeting and I lost out to them for most of my long tail. I went from earning £60 a day to £30 a day overnight!

Before and After October 14 2011

Another site Before and After October 14 2011

Private Blog Network Deindexed

As part of my link building I have been buying posts on private blog networks. These services are advertised on sites like Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum to mention just two. They might not be to everyone’s tastes but they were working well for me and I was getting a good return on my investment. However, as part of this Google update (or at least at the same time) one blog network I was using got de-indexed which removed all my backlinks from those sites. It wasn’t the only blog network I was using but it still affected some of my sites quite badly. I know people will say it serves me right for using such services but they do work and I still made money while my sites were well ranked. It might not have been as long term as I’d liked but I did get a positive effect. I’m still going to use them in the future but if anyone has any suggestions of better places to get links I’d love to hear them.

Unique Article Wizard

I finally bit the bullet and signed up with Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you submit your spun articles to other peoples’ blogs and directories. I posted about signing up before and didn’t get very good feedback but two people I’ve been following lately (Spencer @ Niche Pursuits and Trent @ Online Income Lab) swear by it so I thought I’d give it a try. It’s too early to tell if it has any effect but to read about how it can be used go here: http://onlineincomelab.com/backlinking-strategy/

• If you want to know more about the Unique Article Wizard click here on my affiliate link.

Other Stuff I Did In October

Apart from crying when my sites got hit I didn’t do much work in October. We went on holiday to Penang in Malaysia for a week at half term which was really good. The food was amazing, much better than Thailand I am afraid to say, and so cheap to eat out at the best curry places. There wasn’t free Wifi in the hotels but it wasn’t too expensive – about £10 a day – so I did a few hours of work but not much. As the floods started to get closer to Bangkok my partner’s school was shut so we got an unexpected two weeks off work. We decided to go away again and went to Koh Chang, one of the Thai islands. This time the hotel had free wifi so I managed to do a few hours a day of work which felt good as I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed with what to do next and how I could try and fix my sites or whether to give it all up and get a proper job.

Lifestyle Affiliates

While I was away it got me thinking about what I would do if I could start over again. As the cost of living is so cheap out here in South East Asia I would recommend to anyone who is just starting out and who is making a couple of £100 a month to save up and move out here. Get a little place by the sea, lock yourself away and work your socks off without all the stresses of high overheads back home. You will get a good holiday and can hopefully lay down some good foundations on your internet business while you have little distractions. Of course if you have a mortgage and family this isn’t an option but for those that are young, free and and single: go for it!

Earnings for October 2011

Last month I earned £1490 which was pretty good and although this month started off well by the middle of the month it was clear I wasn going to be lucky to beat that.

My gross earnings for October 2011 were: £1439.29 / $2309

Not bad considering what happened mid-month but a bit disappointing when you look at how well things started off. The downward slump is continuing which is a shame. Pretty sure I won’t hit my long-term goal of £2000 a month by the end of the year.

Goals for November 2011

You can read what I am thinking about doing in my What Would You Do with $1000 post.

My main focus for November will be to get 5 Adsense niche sites up and running with 8-10 pages on and some backlinks for each.

Alongside that I will be trying my hardest to get my existing sites back to where they were. I will pick the five top earners from the last couple of months and focus on them for now. I will be adding content to them and getting them a few links where I can.

How was your October and what are you goals for the last few months of the year?

I haven’t done my earnings report for October yet but it wasn’t a particuarly good month for me what with the Google update that happened mid month negatively affecting nearly all of my sites.

The dissapointment has got me thinking its time to shake things up a bit.

I have £650 / $1000 in my Webgains affiliate account that I was saving for a rainy day but I think its time to withdraw the money and try and invest it into something that will boost my earnings.

Here are my thoughts so far on what to do with $1000 to increase my affiliate marketing income:

10 Adsense Niche Sites: I’ve been following the work of Spencer (Niche Pursuits) and Trent (Online Income Lab) who make good money from multiple Adsense sites. In a recent podcast Trent spoke of how these sites should be looked at as an investment. They can be setup with content and backlinks for about $100 each and with the money I could setup 10. In a few months I could sell the top earner and the bottom five earners for about $1000 and then do another 10.

This sounds appealing to me at the moment but I am also skeptical as I’ve not managed to rank my existing (phystical product niche) sites very quickly or consistently.

One Adsense Authoriy Site: On Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog he has documented how he made an Adsense niche site that, by adding more and more content to, turned into an authority site that makes $1500 a month from lots of long tail keywords.

This idea also appeals to me as I have long been interested in building a big site but have struggled to devote my resources to it. With the $1000 I could order a load of articles and start building something for the long term. Although this idea is quite risky as 1) if I didn’t pick a good niche or keyword I would loose all the money and 2) if the site ever got penalised or down-ranked by Google all my eggs would be in one basket.

Spencer has also started a large site like this which you can read about here but lets be honest I’m no Spencer (or Pat).

Fix What I Have Already: I could take my top five performing sites and invest $200 in the them to make them even stronger (or get them back to where they were before Panda).

This idea isn’t very appealing as I wouldn’t really know what to do to them to get the most from the money. Buy more links? Add more content? This might be the most sensible idea as at least I know what I am working with but should I take more of a risk?

Something Else Altogether: I imagine it will be at least a week before the money comes through so that gives me some time to think things over. I’d love to hear from people if they have any advice or tips. Alternatively I could use the money to buy a new laptop which might increase my productivity!

So, what would you do with £650 / $1000 in order to boost your internet marketing earnings?

None of the previous Panda updates have affected my sites except for one site which got knocked down a few places or pages depending on the keyword. It didn’t take that long for the site to return to number one though although it was my biggest earner at the time and I lost a few quid.

Now though, after what I presume is the release of Panda 2.5, my sites’ rankings have been decimated! I checked a few sites the other day to see where they are in the SERPs as I do fairly regularly and I saw they had lost their number one spots for some of their main keywords. The morning I noticed the drop in rankings was the morning I was leaving for a weeks holiday in Malaysia. Not a good way to start a trip!

I was taking my laptop with me but wasn’t expecting to do any work as my sites were doing ok. Now that they are all falling out of the SERPs that plan might have to change.

This month was going pretty well and I’d had quite a few days where I made over £50 but since the drop I’ve only made a few pounds.

I haven’t had much time to read up on what has happened. Has anyone else noticed anything?

What are people doing to try and claw back their rankings? It looks like Amazon has come out pretty well of this from looking at the niches where I have sites.

Never a dull moment eh?

24/7 Backlinks is back and this time you can get 1000 free backlinks just for signing up. These links are probably best suited for propping up Web 2.0s and stuff like that as well as getting other links indexed.

Sign up here: http://247backlinks.info/

September is over. One month closer towards the end of the year where I have been aiming to be making £2000 ($3100) per month by (not including Christmas stuff). This month was a bit of a step further away from that goal in terms of earnings as has been the trend the last couple of months. From looking at my stats it seems my sites have been getting more hits than ever before but making less money. Maybe as the keywords my sites are ranked for increases the less targeted the traffic is? Who knows but I haven’t got time to sit around analysing my stats and learning from my mistakes, I must keep ploughing on into the unknown!

Life as a Full-Time Affiliate

This was my first full month as a full-time affilaite and full-time stay at home dad. The two don’t really go together very well but I have managed to do quite a bit of work this month compared to the last few with at least something getting done most days. Maybe in the new year when the baby is a bit older I will get a nanny in the day for a couple of hours so I can pop out and get some work done. Babysitters and nannies only charge about £2 per hour here so I could afford it, its just whether I want to leave the little one on their own each day. We shall see…

Adsense Sites

I’m continuing to go down the Adsense route after following the progress of Trent and Spencer. I found lots of good niches/keywords with the keyword research tool SECockpit and have setup eight sites so far. My target was 10 by the end of September but eight is ok. The keywords look good to my inexperienced eye so we shall see if I can get them ranking and if they make any money. Once they are up and running I will start getting some more setup. I am very tempted to sign up for Trent’s Niche Site Mastery course but I’ve never paid for a course or how to guide yet and something doesn’t feel right about handing over cash for something like that.

New Niche Product Sites

This month I set up four more standard niche sites after months of not doing any. I made myself stop registering new domains and starting yet another site a while ago but now I think why not? Its how I’ve got this far so why stop. None of them are particularly good niches but if they each earn £10 a month I’m making money.

I’ve only put up about four pages on each one but I’ve changed the way I am going to do these sites from how I used to. Before I’d do one general page of about 500 words on the niche, then do product descriptions of products from the nice. Now what I am doing is a general 500 word peice on the niche then instead of doing product descriptions I will use the Google Keyword tool to find four or five related keywords that get searched for the most and then do a 500 word post/page targeting that keyword. For example my niche might be ‘Snowboards’, then I’d find the next highest searched keywords which might ‘Cheap Snowboards’, ‘Stunt Snowboards’, ‘Nike Snowboards’ and so on. Then if I need more content for the site I will do brand pages and then product descriptions. The problem with product descriptions are that they tend to be too long tail. For most of my sites, hardly any of them get traffic from specific product searches even though they rank well for specific product names. I find this the case more with lower priced items.

When it comes to TVs I expect people do find the one they want in the shops and then search for the product name online but with items under £50 or even £100 I don’t think people do the same level of research. Most people won’t search for ‘model name and number sandwich toaster’ but they do search for ‘cheap sandwich toaster’ or maybe even ‘Morphy Richards sandwich toaster’.

Content Writers

I’ve been using the instructions over on Sitey.net to find cheap content writers who write 10 articles for $10. The people who apply are mostly pretty crap but you do get the odd diamond amongst the rough. However the good ones tend to move on once they realise how much they could be making. I’m tempted to try out The Content Authority website but I’m pretty skint at the moment so can’t really afford it just now.

Link Building

I’ve managed to get a few sites to number one for keywords I’ve been targeting for ages. One site that is about two years old finally got to number one for the two main keywords. It is still bouincing around the top four which is a bit of a pain but while it is number one it gets about 150 hits a day which results in a few sales most days, this only brings me a couple of quid but its worth it for now. The 24/7 Backlinks service has been revived and you can get 1000 free backlinks per day just for signing up: http://247backlinks.info/ I’m also still using Social Adr for general easy social bookmarking backlinks.

You can see what other tools I use here.

The Future

Things have to change. I can’t really carry on building more small niche product sites. Adsense might be the way forward but it is very early days for me so can’t say for sure. My relative successes in link building has shown me that some of my sites that I thought would be quite profitable aren’t. My earnings aren’t to be scoffed at but they aren’t enough to live comfortably on and to give me enough to reinvest. I’m not really sure where to go from here. I need to find a new slant on affiliate marketing to push me on to the next level. My goal for the end of the year is £2000 per month but beyond that I’d love to be making £3000 or even £5000 per month one day. Is it possible?

Earnings for September 2011

My earnings for September 2011 were: £1490 ($2320)

Last month I earnt £1500 which is only a tenner more so not worth crying about but it is down about £350 from May 2011 when I earnt £1840 (seems a long time ago now). I made my first couple of sales through More Niche which was good as the comission levels were quite high compared to regular sales. I made more from Amazon this month than usual but less through Affiliate Window. I found a really good (free) plugin to help manage all your WordPress installations called managewp, it is definately worth a look if you have lots of sites.

How was your September?

So far out of all the link building methods I have tried getting a backlink from a post on a blog with Google page rank (3+) seems to be the most effective. So after being told many times by people like those at Sitey.net it is worth the hassle to set one up I am going to give it a shot. Buying a post on other people’s blog networks is ok but it would be nice to have my own so I can control how long a post stays on the front page for. I could even sell spots on the network to raise a bit of cash. If I was doing SEO for hire then it would also be nice to be able to have access to my own blogs to get links from.

Getting the Domain

This is probably going to be the hardest part. I could either look into getting an existing domain with page rank (PR) and paying a premium or just registering a new domain at the standard rate (about $10). I’m not really sure where to look for existing domains, I have looked at dropped domains but not had much luck. What sort of prices do existing PR3 domain sites go for and where should I look to buy one? When it comes to buying a new domain and then building up a site which might get PR I’m a bit sceptical. I have quite a lot of sites now, some that are over two years old, and the last time I checked only a couple had PR and none over 1. This tells me that it will take ages and lots of work to get PR for a new site. Am I right?

Hosting the Site

This might get expensive too. Each site should be on a new IP I think. So this sounds like separate hosting accounts of at least paying for each site to be on a different IP. How much would this run to? At the moment I pay $10 a month for Hostgator or about £25 a year for hosting for my newer UK sites. Setup 10 sites and it starts to get expensive.

Building the Blogs

I’m not too worried about this as I have access to some pretty good content writers who would be up to the job of writing for some new sites. It could get expensive if I get too many sites though.

How Many Sites in a Mini Net?

So if I build a mini network of blog sites how many do I need? At the moment I am seeing results from posting to about 20 PR3 blogs. My posts and links don’t stay on the front page for long but the results are ok for what I pay, but not amazing. So how many sites would I need to make to get enough links to rank a site? Would it be cost effective? I’m not doing anything too competitive at the moment so there wouldn’t need to be too many sites. Off the top of my head about 20 sounds possible.

Cost of Setting up a Mini Network

• Domain: £7 (if bought from new)
• Hosting: £25
• Content: £20 (starting with 20 500 word articles)
• Backlinks: £50 (the blogs will need their own links)

I think that is about it. So for each site it would cost about £100 to setup, that is if I bought a new domain. There is also the chance that the site doesn’t get PR and isn’t worth anything. It also might make money of its own if I stick a few affiliate links on it (or is that a no-no?).

If you have lots of sites in the same niche this could work out cheaper as you could link to lots of you sites from the same set of blogs.

Anyone got any experience of building a mini net/blog network for backlink purposes? Do my costs sound about right? Was it worth it?

My third month as a full-time affiliate has ended and my new role as full-time-stay-at-home-dad has also started as my girlfriend has gone back to work after her maternity leave.

While we were both off work I had plans to try and do five hours of work a day but that never really happened. I’ve now scraped that plan and no longer have a timetable, I just do a bit of work when I can. Some days I do nothing and others I do maybe up to an hour. This probably isn’t enough to help me reach my (current) goal of £2000 per month but its the best I can do at the moment and I prefer this approach as it means I don’t beat myself up when I don’t reach my target hours of work per day. When the baby is a bit older I might hire a baby sitter/nanny for a couple of hours a day so I can pop over the road to Starbucks and do a quick bit of work each day. They only charge 2 quid an hour so its not going to break the bank!

Less is More

So what have I been doing with my limited time? I haven’t got time to write my own content or find good links so now I have to pay for these. I’ve got a couple of content writers which I am using for content to use for links (Web 2.0s & Articles) and to put on my sites. I’d rather write my own stuff for my sites, at least for the important pages but I haven’t got time and this is better than nothing. I’ve heard the term LSI Content be mentioned a few times but am not really sure what it is, anyone know about it?

Backlinks

I’ve bought lots of types of banklink over the past few months and I think I have found out what works for me from the things I’ve tried. Right now blog posts from blogs with PR seems to work. I’ve tried Web 2.0s, social bookmarks and other stuff like that but what seems to work most of them time is a blog post on a blog with PR (3 or 4) with a link to my site. If you can find such blogs who are willing to let you post then good for you but if you can’t you will have to pay for it. Sometimes the boost in the SERPs stick and something it doesn’t and your site drops down again but while the site is number one I make sales so it is worth the money IMO. It gets hard to find new providers though so once I’ve used the couple I know about and need to rank a site for other keywords I don’t have anyone to turn to. If you know anyone selling blog posts or a service that will let you post to blogs/sites with PR please leave a comment.

Social Bookmarking

As I just said blog posts are working for me at the moment. But they don’t always work, as a competitive niche can be hard to crack. It is also worth mentioning that I rarely just use the blog posts on their own. The blog post seems to be the icing on the cake that moves the site but before I use the blog posts I will social bookmark my pages, do a few Web 2.0s and maybe a directory submission. I was buying social bookmarking services but at abou $10 for 100 bookmarks it was getting quite expensive consdierng how many sites I have (40+?). I’d heard good things about Social Demon/Bookmark Demon but it sounded like a fair bit of work to setup it up and as I’m tight on time I thought I’d leave it for now. I then signed up for the trial of Social Adr which is touted as a lazy persons social bookmarker. The trial expired and I didn’t cancel the service so am still using it but can’t say I’ve tested how effective it is but it is very easy to use and does get you bookmarks. Whether they get indexed or not is another matter.

Xrummer and Scrapebox

I’ve not had much luck with buying Xrummer (forum profiles) and Scrapebox (blog comments) blasts that link to the above bookmarks and blog posts. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to my sites ranking when I do it.

Adsense

So far I’ve made all my money promoting physical prodcuts from places like Amazon. But now after reading Trent’s blog, the Online Income Lab I have been persuaded to start making some Adsene sites. Trent has made good progress in a few months so I am following his approach to try and diversify my income a bit. I used a tool called SECockpit to find my niches which made it very easy. Even if you are not making Adsense sites and are just looking for niches in general I highly recommend this tool. I’ve setup one site so far and have registered three more domains which I am setting up now. These sites are quicker to setup than the Amazon type ones I have been doing so far so they could be a better use of my time. My goal is to get 10 setup before the end of September and then see if any of them make any money.

Earnings for August 2011

Last month I earnt £1186 which was quite a drop from a few months ago hwere I made £1840 but this month was a bit better.

My earnings for August 2011 were: £1500

I was pretty pleased with this as its £50 on average per day and movement in the right direction. My goal for September is £1600 and my goal for the end of 2011 is £2000 per month.

How was your August 2011?