LOTS!!
Income is down. I've tried to grown my inventory of sites by making a few new sites and I bought a couple of sites. One of the purchased sites was annoying because it ended up to be a bit of a "bait and switch". (luckily I didn't pay too much for it)
Now, I need to spend the time to promote these new sites a bit. (the fun part!)
I'm outsourcing a lot of the work, but I still have too much to do and the quality of outsourcing is not that great. I think site visitors can pick up the vibe when a site is loved and cared for (even if it isn't updated that often) vs the vibe where it is updated often, but it is by folks who are not really emotionally invested.
Not sure what/where I'm doing/going. I still work a full time job as a webmaster however I feel like I work too much and don't have enough time to stop and smell the roses. I'll give a few more details in the next post.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
I want to crank out the work!
Okay it is now 2:50pm. I am sitting down to work. I'll check back with a status update in a couple of hours.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Bored!!
I am trying to make a new blog every week. However I find it very boring. Want to know what would make it more exciting? If these new sites took off like wild fire and started making lots of money!! I got to get over being bored and start working!
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Well, well, well. I'm sure no one reads this blog anymore, but I find it helpful to track my progress. What is going on with me?
I've consistently kept my earnings at around $3500.00 since about May of this year and I have stalled there. I have made minor attempts at new sites but it still comes down to about the same 8 sites. ...I should probably say 6 sites since two are very neglected and don't make any money. I got a "day job" in May and that along with the freelance work I do (web design and programming) I found it hard to keep up with all my sites and have started outsourcing the content. You can say all you want about outsourcing, but outsourcers never ever will have the passion and interest that I do in the subject. I think that working with outsourcers will let me maintain the level of my sites but I doubt they will have the ability to grow them into great sites. I still keep up my main money site and do NOT outsource the content for that site. My second biggest money earner site is more of a website than a blog and it rarely gets updated and it brings in a good adsense and affiliate based income. It has a blog that I rarely post to ..and up until recently had a forum. But the spammers beat me down with the forum and I had no interest in spending my time deleting their stupid posts.
My goal now is to create some new sites and beef up my income. I figure if I can make $10,000.00 -$12,000.00 a month that will be enough to support myself and my husband. (I live in Southern California and it is NOT cheap!! ...and I am not interested in scaling down my lifestyle by much!!) I would like to ditch the day job, but I enjoy it (I'm lucky, I know) so there is no rush.
In a future post, I'll talk about some of the ways I've been experimenting lately to get traffic and go over some of the new sites I build.
I've consistently kept my earnings at around $3500.00 since about May of this year and I have stalled there. I have made minor attempts at new sites but it still comes down to about the same 8 sites. ...I should probably say 6 sites since two are very neglected and don't make any money. I got a "day job" in May and that along with the freelance work I do (web design and programming) I found it hard to keep up with all my sites and have started outsourcing the content. You can say all you want about outsourcing, but outsourcers never ever will have the passion and interest that I do in the subject. I think that working with outsourcers will let me maintain the level of my sites but I doubt they will have the ability to grow them into great sites. I still keep up my main money site and do NOT outsource the content for that site. My second biggest money earner site is more of a website than a blog and it rarely gets updated and it brings in a good adsense and affiliate based income. It has a blog that I rarely post to ..and up until recently had a forum. But the spammers beat me down with the forum and I had no interest in spending my time deleting their stupid posts.
My goal now is to create some new sites and beef up my income. I figure if I can make $10,000.00 -$12,000.00 a month that will be enough to support myself and my husband. (I live in Southern California and it is NOT cheap!! ...and I am not interested in scaling down my lifestyle by much!!) I would like to ditch the day job, but I enjoy it (I'm lucky, I know) so there is no rush.
In a future post, I'll talk about some of the ways I've been experimenting lately to get traffic and go over some of the new sites I build.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
May Earnings
May Earnings
Google 1730.67
TLA 633.99
Linkshare 81.90
CJ 545.10
Shareasale 50.54
Blogads 326.32
misc affiliate 11.80
total 3383.32
more later....
Google 1730.67
TLA 633.99
Linkshare 81.90
CJ 545.10
Shareasale 50.54
Blogads 326.32
misc affiliate 11.80
total 3383.32
more later....
Sunday, January 27, 2008
update
Well, adsense income is still about 50% higher than pre holiday traffic. I was stuck at aprox. $30.00 a day average for about 5 months and after a banner month last month, it has now settled back to aprox. $47.00 a day. I always worry about relying so heavily on adsense.
My traffic building strategies are working. I've found a few good places to advertise the contests that I am running on my one blog (only 2 more weeks to go with the contests!) which brings in quite a bit of traffic. I also offer additional entries if a blogger links to my site and I would say that I am getting about 5 new links a week from that. I will be happy when the contests are over, however, because I find it disruptive to the flow of my posting ...but we'll see.
On my wedding site, I am working on optimizing my SEO efforts. I think it is helping and traffic seems to be increasing ...or is this the natural time for increase in the wedding industry? Not sure. I am pushing an affiliate product on this site quite heavily. I make between 10.00 and 20.00 for each sale. This month I've had four sales so far; last month, I had 2 sales; and two months ago I had 1 sale.
Goal: I'm going to try to get 10 sales of this product in February. What I've done so far is: I tried the product and I wrote a review article about the product on my site. Before this month is out, I'm going to do a little video on the product and see if that will help. I also hired a writer and got 15 articles written for this site. The articles ($4.75 each) aren't really all that great and I *may* create a feeder site with them rather than put them on this site.
Other stuff: I still haven't done diddley with my travel site ...why do I have such a block on this site???? I bought a few books off of amazon in the subject hoping to motivate me ...so far, the books sit on my desk and mock me.
I also need to pay attention to my main money site ...I have neglected it a bit lately and haven't been posting as much. One thing that I've seen over and over in my network of blogs is that posting frequently and regularly helps on every level!! It is hard to be steady and consistent and it is so easy to come up with excuses to blow off posting ...but I know deep down in my heart that that is one of the main tenets of success in this crazy online world.
I've had quite a bit of web dev freelance work lately, but I've also been looking for a full time job with benefits. In the meantime, I am trying to make this time of working from home as productive as possible!
My traffic building strategies are working. I've found a few good places to advertise the contests that I am running on my one blog (only 2 more weeks to go with the contests!) which brings in quite a bit of traffic. I also offer additional entries if a blogger links to my site and I would say that I am getting about 5 new links a week from that. I will be happy when the contests are over, however, because I find it disruptive to the flow of my posting ...but we'll see.
On my wedding site, I am working on optimizing my SEO efforts. I think it is helping and traffic seems to be increasing ...or is this the natural time for increase in the wedding industry? Not sure. I am pushing an affiliate product on this site quite heavily. I make between 10.00 and 20.00 for each sale. This month I've had four sales so far; last month, I had 2 sales; and two months ago I had 1 sale.
Goal: I'm going to try to get 10 sales of this product in February. What I've done so far is: I tried the product and I wrote a review article about the product on my site. Before this month is out, I'm going to do a little video on the product and see if that will help. I also hired a writer and got 15 articles written for this site. The articles ($4.75 each) aren't really all that great and I *may* create a feeder site with them rather than put them on this site.
Other stuff: I still haven't done diddley with my travel site ...why do I have such a block on this site???? I bought a few books off of amazon in the subject hoping to motivate me ...so far, the books sit on my desk and mock me.
I also need to pay attention to my main money site ...I have neglected it a bit lately and haven't been posting as much. One thing that I've seen over and over in my network of blogs is that posting frequently and regularly helps on every level!! It is hard to be steady and consistent and it is so easy to come up with excuses to blow off posting ...but I know deep down in my heart that that is one of the main tenets of success in this crazy online world.
I've had quite a bit of web dev freelance work lately, but I've also been looking for a full time job with benefits. In the meantime, I am trying to make this time of working from home as productive as possible!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Happy New Year!
Time to regroup and get those resolutions written down!
First to regroup:
Looking at where I was last year, I think I did pretty well this year!
I have had an awesome month this december with adsense (almost double the usual) and affiliate sales were pretty good (way more than last year but could have been better).
Traffic was incredible due to a mention in the Washington Post on November 30th which went on from there with mentions in 3 other newspapers during the first week of December. This of course resulted in an increase in traffic which helped sell a few blogads.com.
But the biggest thing for me in 2007 was moving from Boston to San Diego in July. When I left Boston, I continued to work remotely for my Boston employer (switching from full time to part time) until just recently and now I am completely unemployed, and need to pay for my own health benefits and all that crap.
I feel like I am not as productive as I should be with all this additional time and I am worried that I am not going to make enough money. I have always done a bunch of web dev freelance (which always annoyed me since it cut in to my IM time and energy) so I am not ready for the soup line yet!!
So here's my plan:
1. Continue working on my main money maker site posting a couple posts a day.
2. Continue to work on my #2 site. I've been running some contests on that site lately (you can read about it on this blog). Traffic has picked up a bit and I have received some backlinks due to the contest...but I have a few more weeks of prizes and then I am cutting that out for a while. The contest isn't a lot of work, but it cuts in to the flow of regularly updated content and I'm not really enjoying it.
3. I have a niched wedding site and there is no reason for me not to rank #1 for all the phrases associated with this niche. (I'll go in to this in more detail in a later post.) Also, I've found a good affiliate product to promote on this site, which I want to write a couple articles and promote. In addition, the entire site needs to be gone over for broken links and a general overall update. I've also seen a few blogs lately where I could use as research for me to create more content.
4. I have a niched travel site which I don't update hardly at all ...but I believe has grand potential. I've bought a couple of books from Amazon around this niche and will start updating content, one post five days a week. (this is something I could possibly outsource.)
5. I have a niched gadget site that my husband was updating and now isn't, so I'd like to give that a push.
6. I want to get more in to affiliate sites and less on relying on adsense. (doesn't everyone?)
7. I also want to loose 10 pounds!
8. My "main money making site" has a "sign up for newsletter" box since everyone says the 'money is in the list'. Thing is, I have yet to send out a newsletter to these 700 people who have signed up for it. This seems like a great place to explore to make some money with affiliate links.
9. I belong to a membership site (nicherockets.com) which gives its members 5 ebooks each month to sell. The books are pretty good and they come with articles, keyword research and a whole website built. Basically, the only thing I need to do is change the title and maybe change some of the graphics so that it looks different than everyone elses and then do a bit of social bookmarking SEO to see if I can get it to rank and sell some of these. As I've mentioned before, there are some topics I'll never touch, like: acne, anxiety and the like. But, there are a few of these ebooks on physical products like security cameras....so I would like to venture down that road. It will be fun for me from SEO perspective mainly.
Basically, I just want to get to a place where I am making enough money so that I can sleep at night. And if you look at my list, nothing requires a huge amount of skill or brains, it all just requires a bit of ACTION!! So my New Year's Resolution is to quit reading so many blogs and figure out what everyone else in the whole internet marketing space is doing and ignore it all and just do something /anything / something!!
First to regroup:
Looking at where I was last year, I think I did pretty well this year!
I have had an awesome month this december with adsense (almost double the usual) and affiliate sales were pretty good (way more than last year but could have been better).
Traffic was incredible due to a mention in the Washington Post on November 30th which went on from there with mentions in 3 other newspapers during the first week of December. This of course resulted in an increase in traffic which helped sell a few blogads.com.
But the biggest thing for me in 2007 was moving from Boston to San Diego in July. When I left Boston, I continued to work remotely for my Boston employer (switching from full time to part time) until just recently and now I am completely unemployed, and need to pay for my own health benefits and all that crap.
I feel like I am not as productive as I should be with all this additional time and I am worried that I am not going to make enough money. I have always done a bunch of web dev freelance (which always annoyed me since it cut in to my IM time and energy) so I am not ready for the soup line yet!!
So here's my plan:
1. Continue working on my main money maker site posting a couple posts a day.
2. Continue to work on my #2 site. I've been running some contests on that site lately (you can read about it on this blog). Traffic has picked up a bit and I have received some backlinks due to the contest...but I have a few more weeks of prizes and then I am cutting that out for a while. The contest isn't a lot of work, but it cuts in to the flow of regularly updated content and I'm not really enjoying it.
3. I have a niched wedding site and there is no reason for me not to rank #1 for all the phrases associated with this niche. (I'll go in to this in more detail in a later post.) Also, I've found a good affiliate product to promote on this site, which I want to write a couple articles and promote. In addition, the entire site needs to be gone over for broken links and a general overall update. I've also seen a few blogs lately where I could use as research for me to create more content.
4. I have a niched travel site which I don't update hardly at all ...but I believe has grand potential. I've bought a couple of books from Amazon around this niche and will start updating content, one post five days a week. (this is something I could possibly outsource.)
5. I have a niched gadget site that my husband was updating and now isn't, so I'd like to give that a push.
6. I want to get more in to affiliate sites and less on relying on adsense. (doesn't everyone?)
7. I also want to loose 10 pounds!
8. My "main money making site" has a "sign up for newsletter" box since everyone says the 'money is in the list'. Thing is, I have yet to send out a newsletter to these 700 people who have signed up for it. This seems like a great place to explore to make some money with affiliate links.
9. I belong to a membership site (nicherockets.com) which gives its members 5 ebooks each month to sell. The books are pretty good and they come with articles, keyword research and a whole website built. Basically, the only thing I need to do is change the title and maybe change some of the graphics so that it looks different than everyone elses and then do a bit of social bookmarking SEO to see if I can get it to rank and sell some of these. As I've mentioned before, there are some topics I'll never touch, like: acne, anxiety and the like. But, there are a few of these ebooks on physical products like security cameras....so I would like to venture down that road. It will be fun for me from SEO perspective mainly.
Basically, I just want to get to a place where I am making enough money so that I can sleep at night. And if you look at my list, nothing requires a huge amount of skill or brains, it all just requires a bit of ACTION!! So my New Year's Resolution is to quit reading so many blogs and figure out what everyone else in the whole internet marketing space is doing and ignore it all and just do something /anything / something!!
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