How I Got Rich

Monthly Round-up: April 2012

I suppose I better get this over with. One third of 2012 is over and just as things were starting to pick up after the last three bad months Google go and release the Panda and Penguin updates towards the end of the month.  You can read about my thoughts on going forward from the massacre my sites suffered in this post that I did the other day: Starting from Scratch.

To cut a long story short nearly all my sites got down-ranked in the serps and traffic is way down across the board. 

Life After Penguin

I think a couple of my sites are worth trying to save as they are in good niches that do make money. I’ve hired a couple of writers on Odesk to write content for me for two of my sites. I’ve instructed them to go out and find news items and interesting or useful articles and then write their own articles on them. I’ve signed up to Copyscape premium to keep an eye on them too. I will then add these to my sites in a bit to try and balance out the product reviews pages with affiliate links on that make up almost 100% of my content. These new pages should also bring in a trickle of visitors as they might rank for some long tail stuff and make my sites a bit more useful to the average reader interested in the niche. The two writers claim to be able to deliver 10 articles each per week for which I will be hiring them at a rate of about $3.50 per hour for 10 hours.

Does $35 for 10 articles a week sound ok?  

It certainly is a lot cheaper than Text Broker but I guess it depends on the quality of the content. This means my two sites will be getting 10 new articles a week which should bulk them out a bit. I will let it run for a month and see if anything happens in terms of rankings. As well as my sites being almost 100% product review pages I also have a problem with anchor text diversity which probably also contributed to my downfall. 

Dealing with Over Optimised Anchor Text

I’m not really sure to go about rectifying this but when I look at my backlink profiles in Majestic SEO it doesn’t look good! My initial thoughts are to do lots of Unique Article Wizard submissions and some Link Authority ones for the site using not optimised anchor text like click here and other random stuff. But I’m not sure if now is a good time to start building more links.  But if I guess a site is out of the SERPs then I’ve not got much to lose?

• What do you think I should do about my dodgy anchor text backlink profile?

Still Ranking but Not for What I Want

At least one of my sites that got hit hard is on page one for some low traffic keywords so the whole site doesn’t appear to be penalised, just the big keywords that I also happen to be over optimised for. What does this mean?  For some searches my sitemap is ranked higher than actual pages targeting that same search term!

So as you can see I’m not completely starting from scratch but my main focus in terms of my own time will be in working on my big ‘authority’ site.

The Authority Site

I guess like everyman and his dog I will be starting on my authority site soon. To be honest I have already started it this week and am following the 60 Minutes to $100 Days approach which seems like the most solid approach I’ve come across. So far, each day this week I have spent 60 minutes, or more like two hours, writing a good, long article for my site. I’ve got the articles ready to go now but I need to find a domain. I am torn between trying to find an aged domain that has dropped or just go with a new one. I think I will just register a new one as I am raring to go. This big site will be in the fitness/exercise/gym niche which is a hobby of mine.  I read websites and magazine on the topic already so have quite a bit of knowledge to draw from. Hopefully the people I hire to write for my other sites will lead me to a good writer who I can hire to write for me on this project.  I might be putting all my eggs in one basket with this site but let’s hope they are eggs that hatch into something good!

In the spirit of throwing myself into this niche I bought myself an exercise bike for the apartment. I know we have a gym downstairs but being able to exercise indoors with the air con on full blast while watching a decent TV show can’t be compared with the gym!

If anyone can recommend me a good TV series to watch that would be good. Or some good podcasts. Or a video course on how to make money online.  

Starting a Mailing List

As everyone is always going on about how mailing lists can be great sources of income I finally decided to add one to one of my sites. It was one of my busiest sites and I used iContact.com as they have a free trial. Unfortunately just after adding the form to page the Google updates happened and the site lost its rankings and traffic so no one signed up! Are mailing lists really that great?

Getting Started with YouTube

I’ve also started messing around with making videos for YouTube in a bid to a) get traffic from somewhere else apart from Google, b) get some different backlinks and c) add some interesting content to my sites.  I did a post on what I’ve been doing so far: Getting Started with YouTube.

Travelling Affiliate

For the Easter/Songkran break we went on holiday to Langkawi in Malaysia. It was really nice to get away and although I planned to do some work each day I didn’t really stick to that schedule. I blame the lack of free wifi! I do envy the people who can travel the world working from their laptops making money online but I guess living in Thailand isn’t that bad.

Earnings for April 2012

Well April was looking pretty good until the Google updates around the 24^th of April. Not as good as 2011 but better than 2012 so far. Then when disaster stuck I was left wondering if I’d hit four figures or not.

My earnings for April 2012 were £1012 / $1636

They pretty much tailed right off towards the end of the month and it is only £55 up on last month but it’s nice to hit a grand again.

After the recent updates I was pretty fed up and half tempted to throw the towel in. I have to make this work though as my options out here are pretty limited in terms of getting a job and I’m not ready to go home just yet. My long term goal is £2000 per month by June 2012 which sounds like a long way off but as this month has shown I’m only one update away from losing it all.

Earnings Breakdown

The earnings break down like this but most of it, as usual, came from affiliate niche product sites like left-handed-golf-clubs-for-dwarfs.com:

• This blog:                             £45.68
• Product Niche Sites:       £957.78
• Adsense Niche Sites:      £9.25

Who knows what will happen in May. Perhaps my sites will rise from the ashes and hit number one but I’m not so sure.  It is nice to see this blog making a few quid. Perhaps one day I can be one of those guys that makes more money teaching people how to make money online than they do actually making money online. 

Adding £100 a Month Every Month

So I made £1000 and my goal is to reach £2000 in about 12 months. To do that I would need to add £100 to my earnings each month.

Now, if you put a few hours a day every day into this game for a month, let’s say 75 hours in a month. Lets say you also invested £200 per month on content and link building. What sort of return would you expect on that investment per month?

Is an extra £100 per month, then another £100 the following month and so on too much to ask?  I can’t decide if it is or isn’t. How much do your earnings increase each month?

Other Stuff I Did in April 2012:

Read some books: Any Human Heart (brilliant), The Great Gatsby (good but not as good as I’d expected), Forgotten Voices: The Falklands (didn’t know much about this war and this gave a good account of it) and When China Rules the World (still reading this as very long but quite interesting and a little bit scary).

Watched some TV: Finished Breaking Bad season 4. Possibly the best TV show ever. Not sure how they can do another season though? Started on Dexter 6.  Looks a bit rubbish now after Breaking Bad.

Bought a new laptop. Finally replaced the old worn out Samsung NC20 netbook and got a new Lenovo Z470. Its a mid to entry level laptop but has an i5 cpu and 4gb of ram so is like a breath of fresh air. Not sure I approve of Windows 7 though. Should increase my productivity no end…

Goals for May 2012

• Get at least one content writer confirmed and writing for at least one of my sites.
• Do at least 60 minutes each day of solid proper work on my big site.
• Use the exercise bike every day.
• Increase my earnings by £100 to £1100.

Sites and Services Mentioned in This Post:

• 60 Minutes to $100 Days
• iContact
• Link Authority
• Unique Article Wizard

Monthly Round-up: March 2012

I was pretty busy during March. Tried to do something most days and even got in the gym a few times. No golf though but AM is my main focus now as I have to get earning again or I will be forced back into the 9-5 and have to start hunting for a day job.  The main things I got up to this month include:

• Buying a PR Domain
• Continuing to use Link Authority
• Adding new content to my sites
• Buying some WSOs
• Setting a new schedule
• Revising my link building ‘strategy’
• Earning some money!

Buying a PR Domain

Buying a PR domain has been on my to-do list for months and months. I wanted to get one to start my own private blog network so I could get backlinks at will from quality sites that I owned. It wasn’t until I read a blog post on Andre Garde’s blog covering how to buy a PR domain that I bit the bullet and bought such a domain. I bought it from the digital point forum where there are quite a lot of people selling PR domains. I think I paid about $20 for a domain with a PageRank of 3. The domain had expired so the site had been lost.  I bought the domain and put it on some spare hosting I have with Hostgator and installed WordPress. My plan was to rebuild the site as it was before but couldn’t find any of the content cached anywhere so gave up on that idea. This purchase was more of an experiment into how the process works and its wasn’t a domain that was particularly related to any of my niches so I decided to plug it into Link Authority (LA) as it would give me three posting credits a day.

Link Authority Update

Since BMR closed down I think a lot of people have gone to Link Authority as it seems like a good alternative to Build My Rank as it is a similar service in that for each post you submit you get one link from a site with PR.  Recently I did a test to see if Link Authority works which you can read here.  I used LA for a month and it moved my site to number one in Google for the two keywords I was targeting. After the test was up I stopped building links with LA as I wanted to see if the site would hold its rank. The test finished on March 7 2012 and as today is April 6 2012 I thought it would be a good time to check on the site.

This is a comparison of the rankings of various keywords on the site from when I stopped building links on March 7 to today, April 6 2012.

As you can see the number one spots have held and there are even a few more keywords that are now number one. This has brought me in a  good few sales so I am more than happy with the results from using Link Authority.  I might add the odd link from now on just to make sure it stays where it is as it is making money.

Changes with Link Authority

After doing the test I started using LA on some more of my sites but during last month LA announced articles will now need to be 200 words instead of 150 for one link and that 300+ word articles will only have two links. They also stated that 2% of the articles you submit will have the links stripped out of them. I presume this is to avoid leaving a massive footprint and reduce the chances of getting caught by Google. This meant more work and writing these posts was taking a lot of my time. I tried to find writers on Odesk but everyone I tried was crap and had their work rejected so I gave up. I’m still using LA but am finding it hard to use my daily quota of 10 submissions per day as I can’t write enough posts in the time I have.

Which is Better: Content or Links?

If you are writing 300+ word articles each day in order to get a link to you site would that content be better off being added to your site?

Is a new page of 300+ words added to a site every day going to be better in terms of increasing traffic than getting one link per day to you site?  This is the question I have been asking myself when writing these articles for Link Authority. Sometimes when I’ve been writing an article for LA and it turns out quite good I’ve added to my site instead. One upside of writing for LA is that you can essentially write the same thing for each post. I don’t mean the exact same article but you could write on similar topics which you couldn’t really do for your site as it would have loads of pages saying more or less the same thing which wouldn’t be great from a user experience perspective. Not sure whether it would hurt rankings or not?  As I have limited time I don’t want to be using my time in the wrong way and not putting the content I write to the best uses but at the moment I am leaning towards adding more content to my sites before building links.  As I was pondering this dilemma I came across an approach to affiliate marketing that seemed to provide an answer to my problem. 

60 Minutes to $100 Days

Now I hate the Warrior Forum as much as the next guy. I don’t really go there that much but when I do I am quickly repelled by all the hype and crap that is posted there by people trying to sell their system, blueprint or push button money making scheme. I’m not saying that that is all there is there but when you just dip in and out its mostly what you find. Some of the bloggers I follow occasionally release products there or WSOs as they like to call them and in the last month I did surprise myself by buying a few of them.  The first one was an amazon product comparison widget for WordPress. It was only $7 and looked quite good so I bought it. I haven’t installed it yet. The second one was a WordPress product review theme that I mentioned here that too looked pretty good and only cost $7.  Needless to say I haven’t properly set it up yet.  Both are on my long to-do list.

A Diamond in the Rough

The third one however was a course called 60 Minutes to $100 Days. The reason I bought it was that not only was it $7 but it was made by Nate Rivers of Strayblogger.com.  I’ve been following Nate’s blog since hearing a podcast he did with Trent from the Online Income Lab and when he released this course I thought I’d give it a go as I’ve been looking for something new to try lately. It is a video course so nothing much to read and you can watch it all in a couple of hours. It was a really good product and although not really groundbreaking in its teachings it did give me something new to try.  The title pretty much sums it up: you work 60 minutes a day for the foreseeable future and eventually you will be having $100 days. I don’t even have $100 days with all my sites combined so if this works I will be over the moon. I am going to give it a go for a few months and see how it pans out but I have high hopes although am healthily sceptical.

My New Schedule

At the start of March I was spending the first part of my working hours writing an article for LA for each of my five main sites. Then adding some content to one of the sites per day and then doing some link building. That was the plan anyway and most days I wouldn’t get much further than writing the articles for Link Authority let alone adding new content to my sites.  Some days I’d do no work as I wouldn’t have enough time to even get started.

Since watching the 60 Minutes to $100 Days course I’ve changed my schedule a bit. The first hour of the day will be spent doing the stuff from the course for a new site I am starting. Then I will add some content to one of my existing sites for each day (Monday site 1, Tuesday site 2, etc). Then if there is time left over I will do some link building.

Revised Link Building Approach

What with all the comings and goings lately in the world of paid links I’ve been thinking of going back to basics and only linking directly to my sites from Web 2.0s sites or quality article directories and then linking to those sites with tools like Unique Article Wizard, Link Authority and Article Marketing Robot. I want to stop linking directly to my sites with links from these networks as Google obviously has them in its sites so I don’t want to expose myself any more than I need to.  From what I’ve read on the blogs and from my own experience Unique Article Wizard is still working and for now I will use it to link to my Web 2.0s sites rather than direct to my money sites. Link Authority works too and I am in two minds as to whether to link directly to my sites or via a buffer site like a Web 2.0, Ezine article or Youtube video.  The reason I am unsure is linking directly to my sites does seem to work and show results quite quickly so you can really see it working but for how long and at what cost long term?

Automated Link Building

I’ve been using content from Article Builder to make my Web 2.0s and it seems to be ok, none have been deleted so far although I’ve not used this content on Squidoo as even the stuff I write myself gets rejected there!  I’ve also been using content from Article Builder in Unique Article Wizard and it means I can do a UAW submission in a matter of minutes rather than writing three articles myself. But this still requires some work so I am testing out a couple of link building services at the moment. I’d rather handover the money and let someone else do the work providing I know there are going to be good results at the end of it.  We’ll see how the initial jobs get on before I decided what to do.  I am still keen to try Backlink Banzai but have not heard that much about it.

Earnings for March 2012

My earnings for 2012 have been rubbish (Jan: £745 & Feb: £718) compared to last year and it is restricting my options when it comes to reinvesting money back into the ‘business’. Due to my lack of funds I launched a fiverr gig which did pretty well but I’ve had to pause it as I’m going away next week and won’t be able to complete and any orders. Plus it was taking up quite a bit of time as people wouldn’t give me the right information when placing an order and I’d have to chase them up, and then there were lots of questions from tyre kickers. It is a good short term solution if you are short of cash but was eating into my time quite a bit but I earned about $100 from it which was nice. I’m not sure I will reopen the gig again but I can see how people make good money from it providing you can sell something which is pretty much automated.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, well done, if you’ve just skipped all the above then go back to the top and start again!

My earnings for March 2012 were £955 / $1515

To break it down it goes like this:

• Fiverr:                                   £63 / $100
• Adsense niche sites:       £6.50 / $10
• This blog:                             £15 / $24
• Affiliate sites:                    £870 / $1380

Not bad and its nice to be improving after the last couple of month but still about 50% down on my best month from last year.

Plans for April

Well I am going on holiday for about 9 days but will try to at least stick to my 60 Minutes to $100 Days schedule. I will be taking the laptop so hopefully there will be decent wifi at the hotel. I’m going to keep focusing on my top five sites that were my previous best earners before getting down ranked by Google in a Panda update. When I get time I will add content to my Adsense niche sites and any other sites that I think need a bit of attention but the majority of my time will be split across my new site for the 60 Minutes course and then the top five sites.  If I can get one site earning $100 / £63 a day that would be $3000 / £1890 a month and would really change my life. I am a bit sceptical it can be done, especially in just 90 days but we shall see. What do you think?

How did you get on in March and what are you doing in April?

Sites and services mentioned in this post:

• How to Buy a High PR Domain by Andre Garde
• Link Authority
• 60 Minutes to $100 Days
• Nate Rivers’ blog StrayBlogger.com
• Trent from Online Income Lab interviews Nate Rivers
• Article Builder
• Unique Article Wizard

Monthly Round-up: January 2012

I think this must be the start of my forth year doing affiliate marketing. My average earnings for 2011 were £1500 per month and my goal which I want to hit before the end of 2012 is £2000 per month. As of August 2011 I no longer have a day job and spend my time as a stay at home dad while trying and do a bit of affiliate marketing when I can although I’m trying to do at least two hours a day this year after letting things slide big time since about April 2011.

Link Building

This month has been very quiet. Some days I didn’t make any sales which has been quite rare for me for a long time. My main sites have mainly been travelling downward in the SERPS although a few of my older, more neglected sites have been moving in the opposite direction thanks to my building some links to them using Unique Article Wizard.

I’m still using this tool and am seeing some positive results on less competitive terms but I’m not convinced it is cut out for more competitive niches or at least not on its own. Although I’ve not been using it much as it is time consuming to write the articles and submit them. I find one article submitted tends to get published about 100-200 times and as each article can have two links this means up to 200-400 backlinks. With the two links I tend to use one of them to link to one of my sites and the other link either points at a Web 2.0 site which links back to my site or directly to one of my other related sites. I think this is better than having both links from an article pointing to the same site. I’m trying to mix up my anchor text a lot more now so my links look something like this:

< a href="http://mydogtrainingsite.com" >{dog training|dog training ideas|dog training guide|click here|more info}< /a >

I’m also building more links to my inner pages. As I said writing and submitting articles is time consuming so I’ve not got much data to see how UAW is working. But this month I’ve hired two people form Odesk to write and submit articles in UAW. They are both going to do five articles and submit them each week and are charging about $5 a go. I will see how they get on any if they are good possibly increase this amount.

I also want to try Build My Rank as I hear good things about that. The cheapest package only lets you build links for five domains so I will pick my five best sites and focus on them. Focussing only on five sites is a good idea and something I want to try in 2012. I’m really bad to doing a little bit hear and there on my many sites instead of focusing my efforts so they actually make a difference.

Content Writing

The other day I mentioned I wanted to give article writing a try and see if I can bring in a few extra pounds a month to tide me over while my earnings are low. I’ve not found anything yet but am still looking. I know it makes sense to work on my own sites but when times are hard needs must!

Monthly Affiliate Earnings

As I said it was a slow month. Perhaps after Christmas people are skint and I hear there might be a recession looming in the UK? Either way it was bad and bearing in mind I earned £1200 last January it looks even worse!

My earnings for January 2012 were £745 / $1180

This doesn’t even cover my monthly (non-affiliate marketing related) outgoings so it is pretty bad.

Goals for February 2012

Well February is a short month so that’s already off to a bad start! I’m aiming for £1000 but obviously more would be good! I’m going to focus on my top five sites and try and get them back ranking before I start thinking about my ‘strategy’ for the new year. I’m quite interested in this Video Tycoon course which sounds good but I’ve just not got the time or money to invest in something new. Although after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad earlier this month I should be saying not “I can’t afford it” but “how can I afford it?” Good book by the way and definitely worth a read!

How was your January 2012? As bad as mine or did you start the year with a bang!

Also I think I want a new WP theme for this site. Any recommendation for a free, clean theme with two columns? Thanks.

Anyone looking for a Content Writer?

January has been one of my worst months in affiliate marketing in terms for earnings for as long as I can remember. For the first part of the month I was depressed that I didn’t have enough time or money to devote to getting my sites back where they once were and bringing in a better amount of money.

After the depression stage I started to think about other ways I could make money while at home. Then I got an email from Tom Ewer whose newsletter I signed up to from his blog Leaving Work Behind. Tom has recently become a full-time online worker deriving some of his income from affiliate marketing. Tom also makes some of his money from content writing and in his newsletter he outlined the benefits of doing this for a good source of online income.

In the past I’d not been keen on doing content writing. Working for someone else again seems like a bit of a step backwards after quitting the day job to become my own boss. Also why write for someone else when you could write for yourself and make money from the websites you publish your own content on.

But due to my decline in earnings from affiliate marketing I need to start looking for other ways to bring in some money especially now this is my only source of income after going full time.

So my question is: does anyone do content writing and what are my chances of making money from doing it?

I think I can write ok, I am a native English speaker with an honours degree (knew it would come in handy one day so what are my chances and how much could I earn?

Ideally I’d like to devote just one hour a day to it and charge £10 an hour bringing in £50 a week or $80. This would be a good amount of time vs income as it would cover my day to day living expenses but still give me time to work on my affiliate marketing projects. Is this realistic though? What if someone wanted me to write 1000 words on the symptoms of chicken pox? How long would it take me to research?

If anyone has any tips on becoming a content writer it would be great to hear from you, also if you are looking for a content writer please get in touch using the contact form on the contact page.

Monthly Round-up: December 2011

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?

Monthly Round-up: November 2011

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?

Monthly Round-up: October 2011

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.

Monthly Round-up: September 2011

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?

Monthly Round-Up: August 2011

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?

Monthly Round-up: July 2011

This month I became a full-time affiliate. Well, a part-time dad and a part-time affiliate. But either way I gave up the day job to earn my crust soley from affiliate marketing.

Going Full-Time

I didn’t take to going full-time very well and found it very hard to get the hours in. I set myself the target of doing five hours a day but this soon went out of the window and I was finding it difficult to get anything done most days. I decided that if I had such limited time I would spend it outsourcing link building rather than writing and adding content to my sites as this would take the least time and get me the biggest return on my time. I figured spending 10 minutes filling in a form to order some links would be better than spending 10 minutes writing half an article for one of sites. At least I was getting something done. Some of the link building paid off and some of it didn’t. I’m still trying to find out the best type of links to get a small niche site ranking.

Holiday!

After all that hard work it was clear I needed a holiday so off we went for a week in Phuket. There was no internet at our hotel, well there was but I refused to pay £4 per hour so I stayed offline for a week which was nice but also meant I spent about 1/4 of July not doing any work at all.

Staying Motivated

When you are doing affiliate marketing on the side trying to steal an hour here and there, working is quite fun but once you go full-time it just becomes like any other job and after last month’s drop in earnings I am finding it very hard to stay motivated and do some work. This usually happens when my earnings dip. I think “what’s the point in putting in the work if it doesn’t correlate with my earnings”.

July 2011 Earnings

Last month I brought in £1200. This was down quite a bit from the £1840 I made a few months ago.

My gross earnings for July 2011 were £1186 ($1930).

That was a bit of a kick in the nuts and not a good way to start my full-time career as an internet marketeer. But I have been busy the last three months or so a drop is to be expected I guess.

The Future

I’m not really sure how to progress. A grand a month is nice for a few hours work here and there but its not enough. I want to be making a solid £2000 per month by the end of the year and then much more after that. But at the moment that seems like a step too far. I’d love to lock myself away for a month and work 24/7 but that just isn’t possible.

Adsense

I’ve been reading Trent Dyrsmid’s blog: http://onlineincomelab.com/ and have been impressed by the quick progress he has made with Adsense sites and I am keen to give it a go. Anyone else done this kind of thing?

How was your month?