Time For Some Changes

Posted on May 25, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | 3 Comments

I took over 2 months off from working my EPN sites. I went from making over $3k to probably making just over $1k this month. I can’t say that making $1k this month is bad considering I didn’t actually do any work this month. My problem with it is that next month it might be $500 and eventually $0. Why is this? Probably because my sites suck and have no content. Sooner or later G figures that out and stops sending traffic to them.

I have proven that you can make money with thin sites like mine. I know I could hit $5k in a month if I really pushed and had the time. But to keep earning those numbers I would have to keep working real hard and always be creating new sites to stay ahead of G. Truth be told I am getting tired of doing that.

So here is what I plan to do. I am going to take 2 or 3 of my best sites and transform them into content sites. Then probably add another 2 or 3 new content sites to the mix. I hate writing content so I am going to use a service to do it. I will be placing content on the sites as blog posts and then show related eBay auctions. Every post will be based around a specific set of keywords that I will be choosing from Micro Niche Finder. I also plan on posting some articles to sites like ezinearticles.com and articlebase.com. This should help build up some backlinks.

So there you have it. I am going to try and do it the right way for once and see how it goes. I had some sites that earned over $1k in a months time. My plan is to build up 5 sites or so that all earn about $1k per month from EPN. Then with good content and backlinking just maybe they will have more reliable traffic.

I already have about 15 articles/posts ordered and I am excited to get started. I have not decided yet if I plan to release the names of the 5 sites that I am going to be focusing on. I hope this works or else I will be coming back to thin sites in a few months…

Niche Site 21 – Expired Domains

Posted on April 20, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 7 Comments

Like I said previously since I do not have much time right now I am focusing on expired domains with what time I can find. I picked up Lures Online the other day. It was a PR1 site and a good niche for this time of year.

I have several bids out on expiring domains but it is hard to tell how many i will win. I did win another on from GoDaddy that should be available to me in a week or so.

New Record Set Yesterday For Highest EPN Day

Posted on April 18, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

Yesterday I made the most I ever have in one day with EPN. I have decided to keep my highest day listed under my stats column on the right. Yesterday’s  (4/17/2010)  earnings came in at $195.14.  I think my previous high was back on 1/14/2010 at $181.22. I have high hopes to break a $200 day this month yet.  Even though I am not spending a lot of time on my sites right now they still seem to be doing pretty well. I hope to be able to spend more time on them soon. The only thing that I am doing currently is watching for good expired domains to grab. This can be an easy way to bring in some quick traffic if you find the right domains.

Niche Site 20 – Slightly Busy Lately

Posted on April 7, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 2 Comments

I have been pretty busy lately with the family and might be taking it easy for a month or so… not that I want to… but have too… I will still try and keep things stable and get a few new sites out along the way.

Here is one now… Great American Tackle Shop… this was a PR2 expired domain that I found using dropday.com.

Mach 2010 Results

Posted on April 1, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | Leave a Comment

So March 2010 is over and I have to say that I am pretty happy with the results. I was able to earn more in March then in January 2010. Now if I can just beat out December 2009 I will be really happy and on my way to my $5,000 per month goal.

I am going to do the same thing this month that I did in March and see what happens. I might not be able to work as much as I did in March but I am going to try. I will be putting out a few new sites throughout April as well as continue to switch over some old sites to my latest script.

Twiceler – Robots.txt – Block Cuil – Hope I Don’t Jinx Myself Here!

Posted on March 25, 2010
Filed Under Helpfull Tips | 4 Comments

Those of you that have been following me know that I have had my share of hosting issues along the way. I thought it was my cron jobs or scripts causing the issues. HostGator told me it was my scripts. Well they are correct to an extent.

I was having issues again about a week ago. Usually this site and my others start to run slow and sluggish or don’t respond at all. When that happens I can expect a call from HostGator saying they disabled something to preserve the health of the server and other users on it. I do not have a dedicated server. I use HostGators reseller package that gives me WHM access. Sure enough I got the call. I emailed them and this time I got a little more information. They said my search script was being abused by Cuil.

Turns out that this is not uncommon. After a little searching I found that they randomly throw stuff into the search script to try and find new pages to index. Well the way my script works, it will always give them a results page no matter what they search for. Sometimes it will say no results found but it is still a page. Cuil is known for this behavior and has brought many servers down by doing this.

I could care less about Cuil. When was the last time you saw a referral to your site from Cuil? I don’t think I ever did. So HostGator said they would block Cuil using Robots.txt for me. They offered to put it in all my sites… 100+! Sure enough they did. This was above and beyond in my book. It saved me a ton of time.

This is what needs to be placed in your robots.txt file to block Cuil:

User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /

Turns out that the Cuil robot can bring your site to its knees… but for the most part they honor the robots.txt… go figure…

Also you can visit this site to request to be excluded from indexing:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

I wanted to share this because my sites have been running much faster. It makes it easier for me to setup new sites and manage my existing ones. Every site I put out now has this code in the robots.txt file. I suggest you do the same because once Cuil finds you… look out…

Niche Site 19 – Picked up an expired domain

Posted on March 25, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 2 Comments

I just picked up this expired domain, VOIP Feed, it was a PR2 site. I got it for $10 at GoDaddy.com. At GoDaddy you then have to pay for a years registration on top of your winning bid plus privacy if you want it. So in the end it cost me  under $30. Not to bad…

I hope I can drive some EPN sales from it but I would like to see some AdSense clicks from it too since VOIP clicks are usually a few dollars a pop. I guess time will tell.

March Quick Update

Posted on March 23, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 3 Comments

I have been working on updating some of my older sites with my new EPN script and AdSense. So for a little while you might not see me with any new sites. I decided I need to take some of those stagnant sites that I stopped auto-posting on back in Dec/Jan and get them running again.

Those couple of sites that I made for AdSense are raking in the money when I get clicks. The problem is that I am not getting much traffic to them because they are mostly very competitive keywords. I might need to work on that a little to find a happy medium. Still to early to tell until I see if they start getting more traffic or not.

Overall so far this month my AdSense earnings are up about 3x a normal month. So I am happy with that.

EPN is running at about the norm for me over that last month or so. I just had my best day yesterday for the month at $133.04. I think that is my second day this month that came in over $100.

Amazon is only on a hand full of my sites. I managed to pull in another sale with them this month bringing my earnings so far this month to $40.26. Not much but it does show that there is some potential there.

I am hoping to break the $2,000 mark this month. I slipped a little from Dec/Jan but that is to be expected due to the holidays. Overall I am pleased with my Feb/Mar results as these are supposed to be slow months. I am hoping to start seeing some increases in the next few months to come and work my way closer to my $5,000/month goal.

Niche Site 18 – Keyword Tool Anounced!

Posted on March 16, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 6 Comments

I know that I have been talking about this keyword tool for a while now and have not told anyone which one that I am using. Well before I started sending people out to buy it I wanted to be sure it was worth the investment. I can safely say now that I love this tool. It is the best keyword tool that I have used to date. If you cannot find a way to make the money back that you paid for it then you are doing something majorly wrong.

The tool: Micro Niche Finder

Some things that I have done with this tool.

1.) Sorted my results by the Ad Cost column. Then look at SOC. SOC is a rating of the site based on various factors. Get a low number like 0 – 10 and you can almost guarantee first page results in google. Since I am targeting high ad costs I am using this to make AdSense sites. Then I know the clicks will be worth dollars instead of pennies. This is how today’s niche site, Anti Spam Appliance, came about.

2.) Sort the results by the local search count column. Then look for a low SOC. Doing this you can go down the list and pic out the first good SOC and that keyword will be the most amount of traffic for your keyword search. I used this technique for my EPN sites.

3.) Another great tip that I found was to perform step 2 and export all the search phrases to an excel file. Then copy all the phrases and paste them into godaddy’s bulk domain registration. They drop all unavailable domains and give you a list of available ones. Take that list and compare it to the results in step 2. Find the domain name that is available with the most traffic and a good SOC rating.

4.) BRAINSTORMING! I love this! I sort by my desired column, say adcost if I am looking to do an adsense site. Then hit brainstorm. It pulls back like 20 or so results and I can quickly decide to narrow a search down on one of the phrases or hit brainstorm again to get 20 new ideas. Keep repeating! Love this!

I have come to love the SOC rating and the little green arrow next to it. If I see the green arrow I know that I have a chance of ranking for those keywords. There are probably a ton more ways to use this tool that I have not discovered yet. The other feature that I love is that it saves all searches and results automatically for you. So I can go back anytime and pull up a search I did in the past.

Now for the bad… No product is 100%. The software has a few bugs. One thing I noticed is that if I brainstorm say 20 times or more I get an error and have to restart the program. I have not reported the issue yet so I can’t complain. But i have heard that the support for the product is superb and they are always coming out with updates which are free. Also it is easy to get banned by google on a temp basis and you have to enter a captcha to search then until the ban is removed. Not a huge deal. You can use a proxy to avoid this. Also you can use the background service to pull the data in and let it run over night. I have done this and it works great.

Overall, even with a few negatives, I think this is a great investment. This software has already paid for itself for me. I continue to us it daily and don’t know how I did without it in the past. If you decide to give it a shot I am sure you will not be disappointed!

Niche Site 17 – Things Looking Good

Posted on March 15, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

Things are still looking good in the terms of AdSense. Today I got another fair sized click on one of my new sites that I setup looking for just that. I got another site setup today called, Business Phone System PBX.

My goal with these sites is simple… at least one AdSense click from each per day. If I can do that and they pay the way they have been I could earn around $75+ per site each month. This of course is all theory at this point. I don’t have enough research to back it up. I am going off of very little data at this point. But it really has my hopes up.

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