I did some link building through Lexorsoft, main social bookmarking and a few web 2.0 and forum account creations. Toward the end of the month, I did the 10 free blogs thing for 2 of my sites; now I need to go back and build links to those blogs.

My coffee site dropped out of Google. It was a bittersweet realtionship anyway. I was getting more traffic than ever, but since the disappearance of the free coffee maker offer, my revenue was crap. If that offer was still running, and with the traffic I was getting, I know I would have been doing $300+ a day.

Every cloud has a silver lining however. Right when my site dropped out of the Google results it showed up at #2 in Bing/Yahoo for a one-word term. I’m getting just as much traffic now as I was when I was 7/8/9 on Google. I just wish that free coffee maker offer was out there!

I reworked the landing page for the coffee site and made Adwords prominent. Yesterday (3 Novemebr) I did $50 in Adsense (all combined). I did $33 on the coffee site alone! So thjat’s a bit of a consolation, although I’d rather have the free coffee maker offer.

Here’s the results for October 2011:

My expenses remained pretty much the same. A slight reduction in content creation because I found a cheaper provider.

So my total income for the month was $1,116.85. That’s down slightly from September, mainly because my As Seen On PC income was half. I lost traffic on that site too (from Google).

And my expenses

So profit comes in at $1,168.24. I haven’t got Adknowledge in there yet, but I’ll get that in later. Can’t get to the site from work. I very slight increase over last month, mainly due to higher Adsense and AsSeenOnPC comissions.

That feeling has been mitigated somewhat. At the beginning of the month, I finally put Adsense on it and the end result is underwhelming to say the least. I’ve had the domain name since 1998(!) and the site has been through various permutations. It’s finally settled into a WP blog that I’ve been (I must admit) irregualr about updating. With 50+ visitors a day and 100+ page views, I figured I should be getting some clicks, right? I need to revisit the theme I suppose.

In the meantime, content, content, content. Recognizing my own weakness, I outsourced articles and have 11 in the queue, with (hopefully) a few more in the various throes of creation.

I started with TextBroker, but I had to request 2 revisions to get it even close, and even then spent a good 20 minutes rewriting. And it was $8 for 500 words – to rich for what I’m looking for. I went back to a tried-and-true, a guy I first hired from WarriorForum – he does a fantastic job, but he’s even more expensive than text broker. I feel irresponsible spending 2 cents a word for articles when the site has yet to turn revenue.

There’s another guy in the wings, from DP, who I can only assume is prepping some articles now. He did a sample one, I sent back with some guidance, and he delivered successfully, and at only 1 cent a word. So I tossed him a list of terms along with a jaunty “have at it”! But no word since….

I haven’t been doing much keyword research, because it takes so long. Listen, I like Micro Niche Finder, it’s damn handy, but it takes a good 3-5 minutes to bring back results. FirstWorldProblem, I know, but there you go. Kick off a search, read Reddit for 5 minutes, check search results…. LAME.

Perhaps I’m being too particular. In my mind, the easiest way to perform a first check on competetiveness is to assay the available domains, with my contention being that any exact phrase that still has a .com available has yet to be targeted by marketers. Finding terms with sufficient volume and adequate CPC pricing with the .com still available has proven to be challenging. Yet my assumptino is that if the .com is gone, someone, somewhere, has decided to target it. I’ll make another post about his later detailing some caveats….

I also did some link building, with good results, but bittersweet. I’m ranked #2 now on Google for a single world keyword related to coffee, and it’s driving me 150+ visitors a day. Unfortuantely, the coffee offer I ran for so long expired months ago, to be replaced with a crappy 20% coupon. I think I already whined about this before. I can only hope they bring back the offer, since I’m doing about 3% revenue-wise of what I used to do, even with the increased traffic.

The second focus of my link building has yet to bear fruit. A home cleaning product, it’s been a steady performer for 3+ years, but I can’t seem to get ranked any higher then the top of the second page for the main key terms.  If I could get that one into #2, I’d be much pleased.

And the third, a newish blog on an aged domain, seems to be resisting all efforts. Traffic is trickling, but it’s a bare trickle. I don’t seem to be ranking on my key terms, and the ones I do rank on don’t bring much traffic. I might be barking up the wrong tree here, but nothing to do but wait. I’ve spent quite a bit on content here too, with no return.

No new projects in teh mix right now – need to get my keyword research ramped!

Pretty pitiful compared the what I used to make, before Gevalia pulled its free coffee maker intro offer. I whined about that elsewhere though, so I won’t subject it to you again.

Almost half my dough comes from the AsSeenOnPC offer. That’s another one that’s been around for years (like Gevalia). I hope it doesn’t dissappear too.

Revenue is only half the tale though. As far as expenses, I’m looking at:

Profit for the month came in at $1,000.85. A decent extra income, but not flip-your-desk-storm-out money, that’s for sure.

I’ve been doing some content creation and link building lately. I changed the Adsense configuration on ProhormoneDB and saw a doubling of the click-through rate, but it’s still very, very low. If I was getting a click-through rate of around 5%, PhDB would be making $100+ a month…. but it wasn’t built for Adsense and traffic is still growing, so who knows?

I think I’ve found a little tip that can help you with your keyword research: when I do a domain search for the keyword phrase, if the .com, .net, and .org are all available, chances are it’s a keyword you can rank for, because that generally means no one else is specifically targeting or optimizing for it. You could probably even narrow it down to just the .com.

The challenge is to find these keywords with sufficient volume to make it worthwhile. In the last week I think I’ve found 4 after several hours of plying Micro Niche Finder, and those four are all under 1,000 exact matches per month (around 800).

I tend to be a numbers person, so let’s back into it. For ease, let’s say you find a keyword with exact match of 900 a month (30 a day) of which you might be able to get 10 if you are top 3, or maybe 15 or 20 if you’re number one. If you can acheive a 5% click rate on Adsense (probably on the high side) you’re looking at 1 – 1.5 clicks per day, or 30 – 45 clicks per month. Hopefully you’re getting an average 50 cents a click, so that would be $15.00 – $22.50 a month in Adsense. Pretty damn low. You’d need (or rather I need) $200+ to make a decent living (less if you’re single or have lower expenses).

But these seem to be the types of sites Adsense Flippers and the Niche Pursuit guy are building. BTW, the Niche Pursuits guy posted his August income. Look through his posts and you’ll see that 5 or 6 of his sites provide 80%+ of his income. Pareto’s law at work.

1. Adsense Flippers
2. Niche Pursuits

Both sites have good information and are very straightforward in telling you what you need to do in order to build Adsense niche sites. These principles of niche Adsense site building can be expanded to other sites as well, since the success of any site, Adsense or otherwise, depends on your ability to rank for your chosen keywords and drive traffic.

And that’s the issue I think I’ve had. When I look back over my list of sites, I can see that many of the keywords I went after just weren’t that good. I never really sat down and took stock of why some of my sites worked and some didn’t. So I did. Comparing those that earned with those that didn’t, I noticed a few things that might be helpful:

• For me, brand names didn’t work. I found I was unable to beat out company sites, or even the large retailers for a brand name item. This seem even more true since Google started showing multiple results for the same site. Sometimes, the top 5 results are pages from the same (usually the manufacturing company’s site).
• I didn’t do enough research into Cost Per Click. I have a site that gets 80 – 100 visitors a day, which generates 3-5 clicks, but each click is only worth 30 cents (or less). I recommend looking for key terms that get at least $1 a click.
• I’m a tech guy, so many of the sites I built were targeted toward tech, but the problem with tech keywords is that the people searching for them are technical, which usually means they’re Internet savvy, which usually means they’re ad blind. The result? Good traffic, no Adsense (or other ad) clicks.
• Answering questions. By this I mean some of hte key terms I went after where intenedted to provide infoamtion in response to a query. But if you answer the question (how do I _____) with your content, there’s no need for the visitor to click on an Adsense link (or other ad) — you’ve already given them what they are looking for.

So with the above in mind, here’s some of my new guidelines:

• Target non-technical users
• Target generic terms, not brand-specific
• Only go after keywords with a value of $1 per click or higher
• And the hard one: target “entry” terms that are early in the click-stream (so you get out clicks on your ads)

With the above in mind, I fired up Micro Niche Finder (aff). I’d bought it years ago when it was version 2 (I think). My current version was 4, but they’re on 5, so I did the update (thanks lifetuime updates!). I know a lot of peopl euse Market Samurai, but since I’d already paid for MNF….

No lie – finding good terms is hard (for me anyway). I’ve come up with about 6 potential candidates afetr several hours of playing with MNF. However (and this is a big however), I’ve moved toward finding low volume, low competition keywords. Maybe my keyword research methodology sucks, but I just can’t seem to find good volume (call it 5K searches per month), low competition keyword worth at least $1 a click with a top level domain still available.

Sp here’s where I’m headed: Niche Cluster sites. By Niche Cluster I mean a site that targets a cluster of low competition keywords. I’ve started looking for terms that have less than 1,000 local searches per month, some as low as only a few hundred. My intent it to try to build sites that “cluster” these terms so that the whole site has an aggregate search volume of several thousand when all the terms are added together.

Yet according to Google guidelines from their Panda update, multiple articles around the same topic targeting very similar keywords can flag your site for de-indexing. So the challenge will be to find clusters of related terms that have little to no overlap.

On the less theoretical side, I comissioned some linkbuilding from Lexorsoft for some existing properties, reformated the Adsense ads on three of my sites in a quest for a higher click-through rate, and added two more coupon offers to three of my point-of-sale affiliate sites.

Still waiting on the template for my rewards site!

There was a guy on Flippa a couple of weeks back selling a site called Freebster.com. I had a bit of communication with him, asking about the script that runs the site, and he told me it was custom built. I asked if he was willing to sell the script, but he never got back to me. For the Flippa auction he was claiming $7k in revenue per month, but it seemed pretty shady to me. He was trying to get a starting bid of around $6k; I don’t remember what the buy-it-now price was, but it was over $10k. The auction ended up closing with no bids.

Tip: watch yoursel fon Flippa when it comes to site that claim they are already making revenue. Personally, I don’t think I’d buy a site that claimed to be making money off of Flippa. I’ve heard too many stories of traffic, PR and revenue being faked. I have, however, and will, continue to buy brand new site with good exact match keyword domain names. You can get them with WordPress already set up for around $60 – $100, and the seller will usually move it to your own hosting company for you.

Back to my reward site stoery…. Yesterday I got a message on Fliapp out of the blue from a guy who claimed to be the original developer of the Freebster script. He said he’d built it in 2010, but didn’t have the time or inclination to market it. He threw up a Facebook page, got about 200 followers, made about $20, and then sold the site. He cautioned me about buying the site (he’d seen my comments on the auction at Flippa) and expressed the opinion that he didn’t think the claimed stats were realistic.

And he asked if I was still interested in the code.

Well, I still was, sorta… but I’d just dropped $199 on FSRevolution and $150 for the template customization, so I wasn’t ready to crap out any more cash, not until I knew a rewards site could work. And it was developed using Cake PHP – like I want to learn ANOTHER framework to be able to make some edits.

So I thanked the guy and told him I’d be in touch if my first rewards site started working out.

Last week I went through and deleted over 400 registrations, but new ones keep coming. I think they’re auto registrations.

So I added a plugin that adds a CAPTCHA to the registration process (and to commenting as well). Hopefully, if all these registrations are auto, the CAPTCHA will prevent them, and save me the time and effort of haveing to go through every few months and delete the zombies.

If you’re looking to establish an incentive/rewards site, it seems as though the best option out there is FSRevolution. A single site license is $199 and I’m looking at another $150 for template customization, so it’s not an inexpensive solution.

It was a bit of a bear to set up, as it has some specific hosting requirements to work, the main two being PEAR and IONCube.

PEAR stands for PHP Extension and Application Repository. I’m a Windows guy, so I have no idea what this is, but there’s a DB component from this repository that needs to be installed for FSRevolution to work.

IONCube is a encoder, used to secure scripts so people can’t deconstructing/steal it.

So if FSRevolution is a solution you’re looking at, speak with your host first to make sure you’ll be able to run it there.

After a few hours of back and forth with my host, and some advice for FSRevolution (who was very responsive), I got the site running. I haven’t yet had a chance to configure it, though I have taken a peek at the back end.

The site I’m running will offer points as rewards, with members being able to exchange earned points for Amazon gift certificates. Before I “go live” and start accepting registrations, I want to get a few things configured.

I want a person to get points for registering
I want members to be able to refer other people to sign up
I want members to earn a percentage of the points earned by any members they refered

I wasn’t able to get the above figured out after playing with the admin area a bit, and a search didn’t return anything, so I have a post in the FSRevolution forums.

I’ve already contacted an expereinced FSRevolution template designer, so a should be customized in a week or so.

Once it’s up and running, I’ll reveal the URl in case you’re interested in taking a peek, or even signing up, earning some points, and getting Amazon gift certificates!

It’s a popular model, with several big sites making big money, and smaller site making (I assume) smaller money. MyPoints.com is one of the most popular rewards sites that has forged relationships with online merchants to provide points for money spent (so they aren’t really a good CPA example). You can accumulate these points and then exchanges them for prizes. XPango.com is another one taht seems to be more oriented around CPA. Both of these are huge sites with hundreds of thousands of members, and both have been around for a while.

There are plenty of CPA marketing companies that offer incentives (I’ll list some as I try them out to see which are best).

So my next endeavor will be to build an incentive site. I’ll be building a points reward site with a very simple flow: join, complete offers, earn points, exchange points for Amazin gift certificates. You’ll also earn points for referring members and will also earn a percentage of the point the members you refer earn.

There are a few reasons why I’ve decided to give this a try. The main one is that I’m tired of one-off offer sites. By one-off I’m talking about the vast majority of typical niche sites. You build a site about blue widgets, you backlink it to try to get it ranked, and a person searching for blue widgets (hopefully) finds your site. Once they arrive, you convince them how great blue widgets are and entince them to click through to Amazon (or wherever) in the hopes that they will buy a blue widget and you’ll get a percentage.

This is the most common type of affiliate arrangement, but there’s a limitation here (albeit one that’s highly dependant on the product or service you’re marketing). Once customer buys a blue widget, he or she most likely won’t be looking for another one any time soon. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that repeat business is limited primarily to people looking for blue widgets. There’s typically no community, no membership. And the next time a person wants a blue widget, he or she will type it into Google again and go to whomever shows up (which might no longer be you).

I’ve built a great many of these types of sites. Some made very good money while others made very small money. What I want is to get away from the one-off and get into the repeat business. In the catalog world, we call this downstream. This is the terms used for additional sales past the initial sale. It’s essentially a measure of return business. It’s the difference between getting paid once and getting paid multiple times.

List building is the one-off methodology for downsteam promotion. Maybe when you show up at my blue widget site, I tell you I publish a monthly blue widget newsletter and I get you to sign up. Now, once a month, I sent you a newsletter with the most recent blue widget news. This is my way of staying in touch with you so the next time you want a blue widget, or decide to buy blue widget 2.0, you’ll do it through my site.

Don’t get me wrong – one-off sites can make money, but it’s leveraging the downstream and generating repeat business that really takes you to the next level.

Hence my foray into building a rewards site where you join, become a member, complete offers and earn points, trade points for Amazon gift certificates, and then come back to. Why? Because new offers are added that will give you new opportunities to earn points and, hence, get Amazon gift certificates.

I started out coding my own rewards site, but custom development takes time and motivation, two things I’ve been lacking recently. So I’ve gone with an off-the-shelf solution. As I get the site stood up and use the software, I’ll do a review of it and a summary of the research that led me to buy it.

Out of all the sites I’ve built over the last 5 or so years, (around 60) only 3 have been successful beyond making a buck or two a day.

Gevalia

One site was built to promote the Gevalia introductory offer. It’s about 4 years old now. It didn’t do squat the first couple of years, then traffic started trickling in. I did some occassional link-building, and after the site was around 2.5 years old, it started makeing a pretty steady income to the tune of selling 1-5 Gevalia offers a day. Each of these offers was worh $22, so I was making, on average, about $2,000 amonth. Around the holidays, it could climb as high as $4,000. This was true passive income. The site was static, hand-coded using a free CSS template. It’s about 10 pages or so, themed around coffee obviously, with the Gevalia offers front and center and all over.

Well, about 5 months ago, Gevalia pulled their special offers off the affiliate market. Dunno if they hired a new VP of marketing or what, but the offers where gone. They ran a 20% off coupon on CJ for a few months after they pulled the special offers, but my revenue dropped from $60 – $80 a day to about $40 a month. Unfortunately, that single Gevalia offer made up 75% of my income. Despite all my other efforts, I never got anything else going with anywhere near that level of success. Then Gevalia dropped out of CJ, and that was that.

I slapped Adsense on the Gevalia site and started making a buck or two a day, about the same the 20% offer had been making me. I added a Tassimo special offer page, but have yet to convert one of those (I’m also not ranked for any Tassimo terms, although I’m still well position for Gevalia, shoudl it ever come backl). Link-building for Tassimo…? Maybe.

About a month ago, they came back on Pepperjam with their 20% coupon, so I immediately added it. Now it does $1-2 a day on Adsense and maybe another $10 a week through the coupon. A far cry from where it used to be. Fingers crossed that they’ll push out their special offer again.

Swivel Sweeper

About the same time I built the Gevalia site, I also built a site to promo the Swivel Sweeper. While the Gevalia started seeing some success after the first couple of years, the Swivel Sweeper site didn’t. A few vistors a day would trickle in and I’d do 1-2 sales a week for an extra $100 – $200 a month. Not chump change, but not quittin’ money, that’s for sure. I tried some PPC with it, but the margin was too thin to be worth it. I built out some more pages a couple of years back for parts (battery, slides, charger, etc), pushing through Amazon, and added about $30 – $50 a month.

Then, a few months ago (only a few weeks after Gevalia pulled their offer), organic traffic started showing up. It went from from 5-10 visitors a day to 30 – 40. Now I was averaging a sale a day. Nice. August has been crappy – only 6 sales so far, but July was good for $476 and June for over $700. And it still does $30+ a month on parts through Amazon too.

Odds n’ Ends

I used the Gevalia/Swivel Sweeper model for many other sites over the years: Collectible Jewelry, Clarisonic Face Brush, Cigar Samplers, and many others, but none of them ever did much. Maybe another $50 a month all added together.

So I guess the upshot of this, at least for me, is some niche sites work, and some don’t, but I’m unable to figure out the key to figure out which ones will do $10 a day and which will do $10 a month.

Or maybe my expectations are unrealistic. I can build a niche site that can make a few dollars a week, so maybe I should buckle down and build 500 sites? Seems as though that would be a nightmare. Plus, it took years for some of these sites to start doing anything, even the crappy ones. Bleh.

So….

Those are my big earners over the last 5 years. All the rest of my sites together bring in another few hundred a month, but none of them looks like a break out. I do, however, have some other sites I wanted to talk about. The thing that’s different about these sites is that I didn’t build them to make money.

And they don’t.

But they do get more traffic than all my niche sites combined. I just haven’t figured out a way to monetize the traffic. What’s different about these sites is that I built them around topics I was interested in. After being an Internet Marketer for so long, I think it’s impossible for me to approach building a site without having some sort of money-making intent, but nevertheless, money-making was not foremost in my mind when I built these. And they also take effort. A lot more than throwing up a niche site with some purchases articles.

So how are these sites different than all the micro-niche and CPA sites I’ve built? The main difference is original content.

One of these sites is a book review site I started because I like to read. Another is about bodybuilding supplements because I like to lift weights. A third is about nutrition, exercise, and lowering cholesterol becasue I wanted to get my diet in shape, maximize my workouts, and lower my cholesterol. And the last was simply a programming experiment in that I wanted to build a site where people could add text to images online.

These sites have three main things in common:

1. They are all about topics I was interested in and wrote original content for (or provided a real, usable functionality)
2. They all get a decent amount of traffic (the lowest gets 100+ visitors a day, the most popular get 1,000+)
3. Realtively speaking, they don’t make any money

They all have Adsense. The bodybuilding supplement site does the best out of these. I averages $5 a day in Adsense and another $100 a month in supplement sales through Amazon and Shareasale. Now again, you might be thinking “hey, an extra $250 a month is nice” and you’d be right. But, as I said above, it’s not quitting money.

At it’s peak, the book review site was doing 3,000 visitors a day. But guess what? Sell a book for $7 at Amazon and you make about 45 cents. So even though I was selling 100+ books a month, it was rare for me to see more than $50 in earnings. And despite the traffic, I couldn’t sel advertising. They best I go was some crappy banners off ProjectWonderful that earned me $2 a day. But those days are long gone. After years of growth, I decided to invest in the site in an attempt to really grow it out and make it a player. I purchased vBulleting CMS and moved everything off my home-grown, cobbled together site I’d built myself (and used to teach myself programming). My investment was a resounding failure. Despire all the features of vBulletin (maybe too many) my community faded away. Now I’m lucky to see 100 visitors a day. Go back to the old version> Been considering that for a while now.

What’s the point of this ramblingm useless post? I guess Iv’e vioalted the rule of blog posting because there is no point. I just wanted to fill you in on the stuff I’ve done. Maybe you can take some useful info out of here, or maybe not.

What next?

Glad you asked.

There are people out there making a very good living online. I still want to be one of them. My next project will be an incentive CPA site. Complete offers, get points, exchange points for Amazon gift cards. You m ight not ever get that free iPod, but you can get points for completing the offer, and if you get enough points, you can buy that iPod yourself right off Amazon.

I’ll keep you up to date.