Dedicated Server Running Super Slow!

Posted on July 12, 2010
Filed Under Custom Affiliate Sites Blog | 3 Comments

Man I am getting so sick of trying to get to the bottom of my WordPress sites sucking the life out of my server!

I picked one domain that was acting up and tracked it down to wp-cron.php that is running everytime I get a visit or even a bot visit like from googlebot. So today Googlebot is just all over this site and the wp-cron.php runs each time and returns a 404 error. I read up on this and it says to modify your etc/hosts file. Well I can’t find that file on my server. I have a etc/hosts folder but no hosts file.

That is as far as I got so far… this is so frustrating to me at the moment that I feel like dumping WordPress and finding an alternative.

So until I get this under control you can expect this site and any of my others to be running slow or even unresponsive.

How am I supposed to fix my Mayday issues and get my income back to a respectable level when I am spending all my time tracking down technical issues?

Forced to Make the Move to a Dedicated Server

Posted on July 9, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Helpfull Tips | 2 Comments

I woke up this morning and checked my EPN stats and noticed no clicks registering for today. I thought that is kind of weird. Then I logged in around lunchtime and still had no clicks. I immediately then thought something must be up with my hosting. In the past Host Gator would shut me down for degrading the shared server I was on. They always emailed me about the issue. So I checked my email and there it was the letter stating that they shut me down for maxing out CPU usage.

The email went on to say that this time they would not reinstate my accounts unless I moved to a VPS or dedicated server. They made me a good offer to move to an unmanaged dedicated server so I made the jump. I have to say that I was not happy to see my sites down for almost a day. But boy was I dreading the thought of having to move the files and mysql data on each WordPress site. The Host Gator support guy offered to handle the move for me if I stayed with them on a dedicated server. So low and behold they did just that. Things are still working through DNS at this hour but I manually flushed my PC’s DNS and the sites started working great.

So I am going to finish checking all my sites tomorrow and move on from this. I felt like sharing this experience so that others can learn from it. I would recommend anyone starting out making many sites and using WordPress to spend the extra in the beginning for a VPS or even better a dedicated server. Your host will not shut you down for hogging resources if you are the only one on that server.

I was not given an answer yet for sure what exactly about my sites was using the CPU usage but the last time this happened it was the CUIL search engine hammering away at my sites. I will be going back to Host Gator tommorrow to see if they can answer that question for me.

All this happened just when the site I am focusing on, www.antiquecashregisters.net, was having its best traffic day to date. It followed through to EPN also and it was the highest number of clicks through for that site as well. I think my efforts on that site are finally starting to kick in. More to come on that in a few days once I get stuff back to normal.

June 2010 Earnings – Not So Good For Me

Posted on July 1, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

Yep, I am still trying to get a handle on what happened with the Mayday update. At the same time I had to stop working this business for about 2 months so I got a double whammy. I am testing the waters in many areas and doing a bunch of research. I just have not found the right combination yet to get my earnings back to the level they were.

My earnings for EPN in June 2010 was $361.48. This is substantial drop. It had nothing to do with EPN or eBay. In fact it all had to do with traffic. I lost a ton of traffic coming from Google and without that traffic you just can’t make the money. So I know my EPN piece would work if I could get the traffic back to my sites. Easier said then done…

I will keep everyone updated as I try different things.

My antiquecashregisters.net site has been in Google’s index for a while but not in the search results for any of the keywords I targeted. I found this strange and then finally yesterday, almost 2 weeks I think, since I started the site Google started to send a little traffic to me based on my targeted keywords. So I am hoping that this site gives me some ideas on what I need to improve on.

Here is hoping that July is better then June!

Blog Posts and Submitting Articles

Posted on June 23, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

Today my BuyKeywordArticles.com order was completed. So I posted a few blog posts on AntiqueCashRegisters.net and scheduled a bunch to post over the next week. Now I am going off to submit some articles to ezinearticles.com and articlebase.com.

One thing that has me puzzled with this site is that Google has multiple pages indexed but is not sending me any traffic. I even put quotes around my keywords and looked at all the results. I am just not there. I think I remember having a delay like this once before on a .net or .org site. So maybe that is it.

I also noticed that a site I was playing around with is ranking first page now. What I did with this site was ditched WordPress and just did text only articles and some EPN ads. It looks like crap but is fast to load and gets a YSlow score of like 98/100. The site has content but no backlinks. When I am done with this cash register site I might go back to this test site and do some backlinking and see if I can’t move up on the page 1 results. I am also curious if it might be time to step away from WordPress for a while and see what happens. Food for thought…

Keyword Research and Buying Keyword Articles

Posted on June 18, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

Tonight I researched my keywords for my current niche site antiquecashregisters.net. Then I decided to order ten 200-300 word articles to use for blog posts and five 400-500 word articles to use for submission to ezinearticles and articlebase. I ordered the articles from BuyKeywordArticles.com since I used them in the past and it is as simple as supplying them the keywords and they do the rest. Here is a breakdown of my investment in this site so far:

Domain Registration - $9.69
Header Image – $5.00
Ten 200-300 word articles – $46.50
Five 400-500 word articles – $35.95
=====================================
Total Investment to Date – $97.14

Since I have to wait until the beginning of next week for the articles I am going to get to work on a new plugin for the site that will manage all my adsense and EPN ads. As I mentioned before I plan to only show ads on certain pages. I want visitors to come to my site read content and then sort of click through to a shop on my site that will display adsense and EPN ads. I am hoping to keep these pages out of Googles index and avoid people being sent directly to them. Thus keeping my bounce rate low and making the site more about content and the user experience up front. This is a theory I have been hearing and want to test out.

I might do a few posts on the site soon that I write up myself too just to get a little head start. Plus then I will have some content to start testing out my new plugin.

Yesterday I mentioned WordPress 3.0 and I want to followup a little on that. The load times on 3.0 with the Twenty Ten theme are much better then any I have seen from WordPress so far. A month or so ago Google stated that they are looking at load times as a factor for ranking. So this is a good reason to use 3.0 or the new theme. Someone should upgrade to 3.0 and keep their existing theme and see if the load times are better. I am not sure if it is the new version or the theme.  You can use YSlow for Firefox to view page load times and get a grade on your site. I could only get a B grade before and now I am getting an A with this site. So I definitely see improvements with WordPress 3.0.

First Niche Site Using Some New Procedures to Combat Mayday

Posted on June 18, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network), Niche Sites | 1 Comment

I picked my niche for my first site that I am going to build to combat the Mayday changes. I will be putting a lot of effort into this one site which is something kind of new for me. I usually just kept pushing out new sites and didn’t focus much on building them up. I will still share my site with you guys and all the details about what I do to them to promote them. I will only be doing one site at a time now and not start a new one until this one succeeds to my expectations or I declare it an complete failure. I have not decided yet how much it needs to earn to be considered a winner and move on to another site. I will think on that and let you know soon.

So far I got the site up with a custom header and one welcome post. I loaded it up with WordPress 3.0 which was just released yesterday. It is totally awesome! I love the new themes API! this revolutionizes themes in WordPress. I am not going to spend a ton of time explaining… just install it and checkout the new theme called Twenty Ten. That is the theme I used on this new niche site.

My next step is to do some more keyword research and get some articles on order.

I think this is going to be a fun process for me as I share with you how I build up this niche site. I just hope that it turns out for the best and at the end you will be able to see exactly what procedures I took to create a successful niche site for EPN.

One last thing to share with you in this post and that is the new niche site… and it is Antique Cash Registers.

Anyone know which way is up?

Posted on June 14, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 5 Comments

I am going crazy lately trying to figure out what I should be doing.  I feel that my traffic decreased over half due to the Google mayday update that focused on long tail keywords. After all my niches sites main source of traffic was long tails.

I had a site that was top 5 page 1 in Google that dropped to page 10+ after mayday. I went from over 900 clicks to EPN per day down to just over 100 clicks per day. So I took this site and bought 5 blog articles and posted them and also bought 2 articles that I posted to ezinearticles.com and articlebase.com. I should also note that this site was a PR3 all along this process. So here I had a PR3 site that was tanked after mayday. I was almost ready to give up hope for this site that is now getting 10 – 20 uniques per day… when today it sprang back into action! Today the site had over 200 uniques. I am going to assume that my article submissions and fresh content posts are what did the trick.

I read several blogs that talk about mayday and they are all saying the content and back links are what you need to regain your long-tails back.  I targeted long-tails because they were easy! They are not so much any longer.

So this got me thinking that maybe I should restructure what I do. What if I pick one niche and do one site at a time. I will work this one site until I get it to maybe 50 or 100 clicks to EPN per day. I will do articles and back links and all the stuff I really hate to do. Most of it I will probably outsource. Maybe I will set a goal of $10 per day from the site before I say it is finished and move on to the next niche site.

Doing this will help me create a better niche site that Google and the visitor will find more useful. Thus hopefully keeping my rankings longer and gaining a more stable income. Thoughts?

Niche Site 23 – Using New Niche Finder Keyword Import Plugin

Posted on June 11, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | Leave a Comment

I mentioned my new plugin that pulls in keywords to post titles from the CSV file exported from Micro Niche Finder in my previous post. So far I am liking this new plugin that I created the other night.

I just put together, Wholesale Pool Pumps. I found niche using Micro Niche Finders brainstorming feature. Then created a list of about 75 keyords using the same tool.

Niche Site 22 – Back to the Basics

Posted on June 9, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | 3 Comments

So here it is a very basic one of my niche sites, Vintage Table Lamp Store.

This site pulls in as many current eBay titles as I want and sets those titles up as the titles for past or future wordpress posts. I don’t put any content into these past or scheduled wordpress posts. What I do is use API’s to then use those titles that I got from eBay to generate content.

I removed all my Yahoo API’s from this site since I was having issues with them. I was using Yahoo to get related search terms. For now I am going to stay away from dynamic related items and dynamic related searches. I don’t feel like worrying with the API’s not working or hitting my monthly limits. Instead I will just focus on autoposting the eBay titles that are very niche focused.

Tomorrow I am going to revisit this site again and add some API or RSS content from places around the net. Most likely this will only show when no eBay auctions are available to be shown for the title keywords. This would happen when the auction for that title ends and I no other auctions contain the same keywords.

I wanted to get this posted  tonight though because I want to see how long it takes Google to pick up the site after I make this post. According to Googles blog this should happen pretty darn quick not that Caffeine is in full swing.

I Need to Get Back to Work!

Posted on June 8, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | Leave a Comment

Man when I slack off I do it like a champ. It has been almost 2.5 months since I put any hard work into EPN. Boy does it ever show in my earnings. June is shaping up to just plain suck. Traffic might soon be non-existent at this rate. I really want to blame Google Mayday but I can’t since I stopped working. Did the traffic just dry up because I was not putting out new sites? Or was it because of Mayday? I have been reading about how Mayday affected a lot of people using long tail keywords like I am.

So I guess there is only one way to tell… start putting out sites again and see what happens.  This is exactly what I plan to do starting asap. I also plan to build up one site with original content and see how that works for me like I mentioned in my last post. Actually I posted 5 original articles on one of my blogs and also got 2 articles approved on some major article banks. Not really seeing any improvement yet from those efforts though.

I really want to do the original content thing and have it work and actually have some stuff stick and hold a position in Google but it takes so long to see results! If I can make $3k or more a month throwing up blogs for 1 year and then just let them expire… well then I guess I should do that too. It is work though that will not create a residual income. Hmmm… what to do…. Well for now I think I will just try my hand at a little of both…

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