Current Heartbreak

Big Waste of Time

I have a confession to make. I waste a lot of time! The way that I waste my time is that I find internet marketers and read their blogs which chronicle their money-making adventures. These are usually relatively small time Internet Marketers making $500.00 - $5000.00 a month. I spy on them and trace back all their other sites and figure out their money making methods and their back linking strategies. This is a stupid waste of time and it will end NOW.

I am going to dedicate a big chunk of money to be put back in my business via outsourcing and I am going to double my income by the end of 2011. So in order to make 5,000.00 a month in December 2011, I will need focus and determination and the removal of stupid time-wasting pastimes.

November 2010

I thought it was time to give an update on my earnings for October:

Adsense: 965.00
Text Link Ads: 755.36
Linkshare 31.12
CJ 156.88
Shareasale 55.70
Linkworth 136.00
Blogads 0.00
Private ad sales 100.00

I've been changing up my approach lately. I've built a few more sites and I have bought a few services for promotion. I think I'll wait and see how it plays out and if I get some good success, I'll let you know what I'm doing.

Decisions, decisions.....

I'm trying to decide whether to promote one of my new small barely earning sites or further build out my moneymakers. Of course, the best decision is to do SOMETHING rather than just weigh the options. (I constantly need to remind myself to take action, cause left on my own, I'll just read blogs of other internet marketers all day)

So, I'm going to install a directory on one of my sites. I have a site in the wedding niche and I get several emails a week from vendors who would like to be listed on the site. ...I have no interest in watering down the content with these folks, so a directory could be the ticket to make everyone happy. I'm not sure what to charge though??

I think I should start it cheap and see how it goes....maybe $20.00 for a year? Seems relatively painless. We'll see.

I'm either going to use www.wpdirectorypro.com or www.directorypress.net/ both are wordpress plugins, so they should be relatively easy to set up.

Onward!!

Back again - January 2010 Earnings....

Here I go again.....

I always love when folks print their earnings and I see that I haven't listed mine since May 2008?? Can that be??

Oh well, Here goes, you can see and laugh at me!! ....

Google 1014.59
TLA 839.78
Linkshare 17.96
CJ 292.70
Shareasale 135.32
Blogads 0
Misc affiliate 80.00
Misc ads 125.00

total $2626.27

Well, if I compare to May 2008, I can see a big drop with google and blogads.

Time to get cracking! I'm serious this time, I'm going to get working again. (I've really been doing very little and this is serious passive income.)

What's Up?

I am still plugging away. Making some money online. I seem to stay in a place (income-wise) where I make a wonderful part-time income but have trouble stepping it up a notch where I can kick the day-job to the curb and work from home. I don't have it bad, though cause I'm a webmaster in my day job and I get to play on facebook and twitter and make blogs all day. But, man! I'd love to work in my pajamas and ditch all the office politics crap.

Anyway, for an update, I have been stalled BIG TIME!! I've been stuck since January...and there is no way I can lie or weasel out of this cause I have had a "business coach" for the last two years and I had to fire her recently cause it was embarassing to talk to her every 2 weeks and have very little to report on growing my business!! Eeeks ...no one to blame but myself (even though I want to blame my husband and my job and bla bla bla) Nevermind blaming anyone/anything, I am going to make some changes.

First change is that I am dumping Stompernet. It is expensive $800.00 a month ..I think it is worth it, but I really don't use it enough to justify $800.00 a month...besides, with $800.00 a month at my disposal, I can buy some other educational materials and shake things up!! Stompernet has had a big shakeup lately with one of the founders leaving ...I'm sure it will still be top-notch but I've paid $800.00 a month for 2 years and don't feel the need any longer!!

I get a lot of my online mojo these days from Wordpress Goldmine (that's an affiliate link!) The guy Mark who runs the site (it is a book, videos and a forum) is a cool guy and I first "met" him (he doesn't know I exist, I'm sure) in NicheRockets (which had some other name before which I can't remember) ...so I've been following him for 5 years or so?? and he has always been a straight shooter. I am pretty much a lurker in forums, so that is why I doubt he knows me.

Btw, just in case you didn't notice, I am recommending something that costs $67.00 one time fee vs something that costs $800.00 a month. I've followed LOTS of the gurus and if you are new, watch out, cause some of them are just plain junk. That is another thing about Wordpress Goldmine, Mark doesn't promote a lot of crap.

Anyway, other than that, I'm turning 50 in a couple of months...how could that be? Boy, it is really important for me to live my life to the fullest. I struggle with wanting to grow my business but not really wanting to be on the stupid computer ALL. THE. TIME!! You know?

Anyway, I'm going to start promoting a few new sites I made a few months ago and see what happens. I'll pop back with an update. In the meantime, if you want to make some money online, give it a try ...there is nothing like getting those checks from all over the place every month!!

What's going on with me?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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....

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!

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!!

Affiliate Summit in February

I want to go to Affiliate Summit in February! and this post is my entry into the contest over at Zac's blog. When I picture the life that I want to live, I want to be making a generous salary from my online endeavors and be able to continuously improve my knowledge by attending conferences around the world. Recently, I moved from Boston to San Diego and that brings the Affiliate Summit to within a day's car drive. With the move, I left my full time job and am working full time online but I am not yet making the same salary as I was in my Boston cushy university job. So, Affiliate Summit may be the answer to giving me the knowledge, the networking, and THE GUTS! to be able to make it.

How's your holiday season coming along?

I'm curious how other people are doing during this holiday season. Personally, my adsense earnings are going through the roof. Which is great!

However, I spent a lot of time on incorporating affiliate links and I am not getting the returns I expected. Which is sad! ...I guess I have a bit of time left however.

In other news, my contest is going well! I let people enter by either commenting, signing up for my newsletter or linking to my blog (if they link to my blog, I quadruple their chances of winning) ...it has gotton me several non-reciprical back links out of the deal. (always helpful) Also, as people see the contest, other suppliers are getting on board, so it keeps getting extended and I am going to be giving things away every week through January. (originally it was going to end at xmas)

It is a bit of work, but fun and an interesting attempt to get some traffic!

Try Niche Rockets for $1.00

I have been a member of Niche Rockets for a couple of years. It used to be called Keyword Avalanche...but they have recently changed its name. It is a nice little community where lots of money making ideas are discussed quite openly. It is a good mix of occasional newbies and lots of old timers who really know their stuff. The volume of posts is not too overwhelming either, so once I got caught up with all the content, I feel like I can keep up with the the different threads and goings on....with out needing to spend a bazillion hours reading forums. In addition, they just started giving out 5 "businesses in a box" each month. Where they give you an ebook which you can rewrite, a website, a sales page, graphics ---the whole shebang if you are interested in creating your own products.

They are having a deal where you can sign up and try it for 7 days for $1.00 and then you can get in for $97.00 a month (rather than the $147.00 a month that the site advertises). I'd recommend trying it out for 7 days for $1.00 and if you don't like it, leave!!
Here's my affiliate link: Niche Rockets

Stats and more stats

From almost the beginning of my blogging career, I used mybloglog.com to keep an eye on real time stats. I liked it. It gave me a quick peek of how things were going and I could make adjustments if I was being hit hard by stumbleupon or if something screwed up and one of my sites was down for some reason. Recently, (and it is unfortunate because I just reupped 3 blogs for a total of $75.00) something has screwed up and I can't log in. It something to do with yahoo and mybloglog and the combination of passwords or something. I'm emailing support but I have my doubts...and since this is such a crucial time of year, I felt "naked" without my realtime stats. I use google analytics and awstats as well...but they aren't exactly realtime.

Anyway, I just signed up with mint at http://www.haveamint.com ...it is $30.00 for each domain but unlike mybloglog it installs on your server so you don't have to pay yearly. I only signed up 3 blogs to start, but I really like it! Great referrer info and great to see the search phrase activity ...a bajillion times better than mybloglog.

Another helpful stat program is crazy egg. http://www.crazyegg.com That program has taught me a few things as well ..and it is free ...can't argue with free!!

Google - do you think this is funny?

Above is the traffic from google for the past month or so for the blog that was stolen. As you can see on October 26th all traffic from google virtually stopped except for people typing in the name of my site. ...all long tails KAPUT!

This particular site went down because I ran out of bandwidth right around this same time (October 26th) and originally I thought the problem was somehow related. Now, I think it was just a coincidence.

As I mentioned before, this site doesn't get a ton of traffic nor is it a huge moneymaker for me but I have been working on it for two years and the traffic was finally getting to a respectable level.

I'm not sure what got it to pop back into google's search listings. It could have been one of the emails that I sent to google when I was reporting that a site stole all my content. I mentioned the traffic drop off starting on October 26th. I don't think that the site stealing my content was up and running all that long ...so I don't really believe it had something to do with kicking it out of the results.

Anyway, it looks like order has been restored. Just important to realize how vulnerable your income can be relying heavily on one search engine for traffic.

Someone stole my site

Never a dull moment here in Green Affiliate land!! Yesterday, I happened to notice that someone had stolen one of my sites. Basically they took all the content from one of my blogs and re-uploaded it on their own site in a different wordpress theme.

This blog gets about 5000 visitors a month ...like is this person stupid??? In other words, this is NOT my biggest money maker.

Anyway, just in case you would like to know what to do when someone steals your site, here is what I did.

1. I went to domaintools.com and looked him up. The brilliant man had been too cheap to pay for privacy protection so his name address and phone number and email for me to get in touch!! Lucky me!!

2. I called him and left a message and told him if he didn't take his site down in 24 hours I was going to report him to google adsense and my lawyer was going to show up at his home, after which I repeated his address!!

3. I waited 1 minute and then I reported him to google adsense. I clicked on "Ads by Google" on his site (oh no!! I mean my site!! but on his server) and then I clicked on "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw" and I reported a violation.

4. I then went to google webmaster tools and clicked on "Report Spam in our Index"

5. Then I emailed the abuse address at godaddy where the domain name was purchased

6. Then I emailed the host who was hosting the site (I forget who is was, someplace in Canada)

Success!! Today the site is an apache generic host success page.

Oh, and since he was stealing not only every word I've written, he was also stealing all my images and the bandwidth to host them. This is the image I had him show on the top of his page:



If anyone cares: the site where he hosted MY site which is now taken down is: organicbabythings.com

Does anyone have a full membership to domaintools? Apparently he own another site and I'd love to continue to torture him.

Learning about Bandwidth

One of my sites ran out of bandwidth last week. It was only for a few hours before I noticed it, but since it happened, my traffic has taken a serious dive. This is so frustrating, since I've been working really hard on this site to get it more traffic. Previously, hostgator would send me an email at hitting the 80% mark....but no emails this time until it was too late. Grrrrrrrrr