Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at
10:40 pm
Total AdSense earnings for June 2010: $153.95
June was a really bad month as I expected it would be with the Google update and crackdown on micro sites. I just ran a rank checker on all my sites and the good news is most of them are ranking in the top 10 on Bing and Yahoo, but all of my Google sites have been sandboxed and wiped off the first page!
As a result of this new Google update my AdSense revenue has dropped nearly 50%!
Now I was already thinking about giving up on putting all of my time and energy into building micro niche sites and only having AdSense as my one income source. It’s just way to risky to build a business model around an account which can at Google’s will be wiped out completely and have your entire income gone in one day. It’s already happened once before. Back in the day when you could build thousands of pages with scraper programs and stuff your pages with keywords for easy rankings, people were making thousands a day until Google changed the entire way it ranked pages and wiped out many accounts overnight by de-indexing thousands of pages from the index.
Moving forward I’m going to be building huge authority sites only and really writing great content that will be natural link bait instead of having to build artificial links in great numbers just to rank poorly written content.
I really feel like this is the way to go. It’s better that you really put the effort into writing great content and in return you won’t have to spend so much time getting it ranked where you need it. You have to remember that Google wants to deliver the most relevant results to the end user and by concentrating more putting more effort into your research and writing you will in effect have pages which spread like a virus on their own all across the web.
Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at
5:01 pm
Total earnings for May 2010: $288.47
May was a good month considering that not much was accomplished as far as updating sites and building back links. I put a lot of time this month in to building an old auto insurance blog that I have not touched in a long time. I really don’t know why I did not stick with the insurance niche, it really has some of the highest payouts. Even though it’s harder to rank for keywords inside of the insurance related niche, when you do get a click it’s well worth it!
I’m kind of getting tired of putting a lot of effort into building five page sites that rank relatively easy but really only earn maybe $5 a day and that’s a gem in my collection which are few a far between. I’m also starting to realize that although I could in theory put up 300 sites, but there is no way I’m going to have the free time to promote them and maintain their rankings while still working 40+ hours a week. I really need to focus my efforts on automation as much as possible and building a long term sustainable network of sites which are not at risk for potentially being flagged as spam or de-indexing.
It’s time now to put all of the noise and hype behind me. I think the number one reason why people fail to find success with making money online with Internet marketing is because they are always looking for the perfect system or step-by-step plan. I mean how many times can you buy an ebook or video or purchase a spot in a membership site telling you how to build a blog, get traffic to it and monetize it. I think the trick is to just learn the basics and then just go out on your own and do your own experiments and create and implement your own systems till you find something that works for you. Besides I’d rather build a website that revolves around something that I actually have interest in and can write really valuable content which will be liked by visitors and also will be in turn valued highly in the search engine robot’s eyes.
So that’s it for me! No more courses, ebooks, videos and membership sites. The only money I’m spending is on automation software, outsourcing and business expenses to keep this thing going and operating in the black! Now I really have to make the decision if I want to go ahead and continue to build micro niche sites. I think it might be worth it for short term income and I can always flip them for quick cash, but from here on in I really want to focus on really creating sites that are valuable to the user and not some spammy site made to get ranked quick and dropped a month later. The only downside to my auto insurance blog is that it seems like I have to put a lot more work into it to get it to rank and make money as opposed to throwing up a niche site.
The point is this. If you spend all of your time trying to figure out how to build the perfectly optimized blog post and what WordPress plugins you need and where the newest place to get back links from, then you’ll never move forward. It’s time to put all the guru’s in the closet and become one yourself. Create your own systems for driving traffic, SEO and marketing and the results will come quicker.
Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at
4:33 am
Total earnings for April 2010: $258.36
Well April was a pretty lazy month, I got no new sites launched. The good news is earnings are steady and pretty close to March totals so I’m happy with the results. What should be learned from my laziness this month is if you take no action you get no results, so if you want to earn more from AdSense then your going to have to put the work in and scale up your operation.
Part of the reason for my reluctance to put up new sites was dreading the time it was taking me to do keyword research and find profitable new micro niches. Well I got a new tool that’s taken care of that for me, but I am starting to think I should spend some more time building broader sites rather then put all of my eggs into micro niches. I am definitely seeing saturation start to kick in and now might be the time to get out or slow down because I’d rather have a couple of mega sites that rank well over time then take the chance with 100′s os micro sites that could possibly be de-indexed.
It’s also getting very difficult to find exact match domain names for these sites because of the saturation, but to be honest my best earning sites are not exact match domains for the keyword and have words added at the end of the domain after the keywords.
I’m going to start implementing AdSense click fraud prevention scripts on my sites because I’m starting to get nervous about some sites that get a lot of clicks out of nowhere and seem to be coming from the same IP. Also with all of these new competitors in the micro niche arena, it’s only a matter of time before a competitor comes along and tries to get my account banned, which makes no sense because it’s site rankings that will earn your more money and not getting your competition banned. If your evil enough to do this you not only will risk potential legal action from Google and publishers, but your competition will just find other ways to monetize and still outrank you anyway.
When I start to implement this new AdSense Click Lock script it’s also going to let me experiment with some other ways to monetize my sites with links from Amazon, ClickBank or Yahoo.
I just got finished launching four more sites at the start of May. Going to start working on my mega sites this weekend. I’m thinking about going with some insurance niches, because from past experience with other sites they always payout very high in the $3-4 per click range.
Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at
12:37 am
Total Earnings for March 2010: $279.83
This was my best month ever. My income has been steadily increasing and my traffic and CTR are improving with time. It’s now time to scale this operation up and start getting a lot more sites launched while I tweak my old sites and try to improve the traffic and earnings on them. I try not to touch my old sites that much because this is all about set and forget hands free maintenance, but it’s always important that you have a steady stream of back links linking to your sites from unique IP addresses. I’ve discovered that some sites however due to extreme lack o competition can get by with just a few links and maintain a steady first page Google ranking.
Now here is a couple of things that I have noticed……
My best performing sites are my first launches that have all original content and just a few back links from some Ezine Articles. The second batch of sites that I launched were based on a more lazy approach and were thrown up fast with some dupe content, auto blogging plug-ins and back links from social bookmarking websites and blog networks. These later sites are earning money but not as much as my initial sites with all original content and stronger back links. Based on this I started going back to an all original content format, but I don’t think that getting links just from one IP source is the best strategy. It’s my theory that the original content will outperform any sites with dupe content, even if they have more back links. Even though these sites will cost a lot more to launch, they will be profitable much faster and earn more in the long term.
Do not fear the Google dance!
I’ll have to admit that this is a very dangerous business. Your basically putting all of your fate in the hands of Google. Any major change in the algorithms and your sites can all be de-indexed, banned, rank beyond 100 or worse you can get your account banned. I’ve had sites de-indexed and then show up again. I have had sites rank first page then drop to 300 and then show up on page one again. From what I can see is that as long as you deliver Google what they want which is great unique content you’ll be ok. If you rank well right off the bat it’s a good indication that your site will rank well in the future even if your rankings fluctuate in the beginning. I think it’s just big G’s way of feeling you out and seeing if you are a spammer or not.
I am going to start experimenting with different site formats and see which ones draw more traffic and earn more. Next I want to go a little broader and add more content and have a tight internal silo structure which I’ll talk about in my next post. If my first sites are an indication of the direction I should be going in I think this format might be the most ideal to stick with.
