Take More Risks

In the past week I’ve been exploring a number of ways to boost my income quickly. Most of my efforts have been concentrated into Gothic Fairies, my spoof Goth blog, which is just over 6 months old. Googlebot seems to be very reluctant to index the site and when it does it normally stops at the front page, so it can take around a fortnight for it recognise new content I’ve created. Most times it won’t index all of the pages correctly which is really frustrating. So what’s the answer?

I’ve shifted my priority from creating content on Gothic Fairies to Drunken Hero. Why? Well Drunken Hero is over 2 and a half years old, is PR5 and ranks well for a lot of competitive phases. If I were to write and publish an article now, I’m pretty sure that the post would appear in Google’s index within 48 hours. This means that I can create some momentum and maximise my return on investment quickly.

Since Gothic Fairies is still in the Google Sandbox it may take another few months for it to start well for popular keyphrases. In the meantime I’m going to continue to create a steady flow of content on each site and let the link popularity of Drunken Hero boost Gothic Fairies.

Now the question is, should you start off with a new domain or buy an old website? It depends of course upon your motifs. If you’re more interested in creating a high ROI over a short period of time by all means consider buying an existing website.

Whilst the inital outlay will always be more than starting afresh, you often have a platform from which to take the site to the next level. The only problem is it might be difficult identifying with the previous owners branding, requiring an adjustment in your approach to copywriting

There are risks involved obviously, which is why it’s important to carry out extensive research on the domain beforehand. Here are few pointers to help you get started.

• Always ask the owner why they are selling their website. Have they taken it as far as they can? Is it in decline? Is it difficult to maintain? If you owned the website why would you want to sell it?
• Ask to see several screenshots of the sites referrals. Some traders will sell websites whose only form of traffic is from sites within their network. Shortly after the sale the seller will remove the link, leaving you with an inactive site.
• Verify that the links are genuine by performing a link:www.domain.com search within Google. Alternatively you could try out the Page Strength SEO or Blog Juice Calculator to check the websites popularity.

The biggest problem is finding a website that’s in your niche. That’s why it can be a great idea to make a “Want to buy” request over on Digitalpoint’s Site Sales Forum. From here you can describe what type of website your after and it’s ideal specifications (Pagerank, link popularity, domain age etc).

Alternatively you could try emailing the webmasters of inactive sites asking if they’re interested in selling their site. The only problem is many of the owners will not have much knowledge about transferring websites and may therefore be reluctant to accept your offer.

On the flip side, you could just land a bargain if they’ve lost all interest in their website. Try a Google Search for something like “there will be no more updates”, “this is my final update” to find pages like this, they are out there and it’s just a case of being inventive with your search terms.

From now on I’ll definitely give more thought to buying an old website than starting afresh. I just can’t bear spending 6-9 months ranking for absolutely nothing any longer!

It’s been a real struggle finding something to write about today so I’ll just provide y’all with an update on how things are going.

Windows Vista

Finally last night I upgraded my laptop to Windows Vista and I was very impressed by how easy it was. Normally if you’re installing a new operating system you have to format the drive and reinstall all of your old programs which is a serious pain in the ass. At least with Vista it preserves everything, including your applications and settings. The best thing is I haven’t had to configure anything differently from Vista. It’s working straight out of the box!

Now for a screenshot of my desktop!

I thought the sidebar Widgets would be a lot tackier than they are. The Feed Widget is actually quite handy and stops me having to refresh the same webpages over and over. I love the Slideshow Widget too, it’s a great tool if you’re feeling uninspired, just pop in a few pictures that are related to your goals.

Site Sales

I sold three of my inactive sites over on Digitalpoint yesterday. Wahey! I’ll be reinvesting the cash into 2 new niche websites.

Theirish.info – $45 (sale pending)
DDR.info – $50
Nick-Drake.info $40

Adult Friend Finder

I recently introduced Adult Friend Finder ads into Drunken Hero and so far it’s exceeded my expectations. On the first day I earnt $7.35. The last two days have been less impressive, but I’m expecting this to pick up again. I think with a bit of work I could earn $300 a month from this program alone.

Wordpress Plugin

I’m currently developing a plugin that should make dealing with blog advertising straightforward . I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll take but it’ll certainly be over a few weeks. Hopefully I can get it released by the end of March. I’ll release more information as it comes to me!

Anyway that’s it for now. No doubt I’ll find something a little more concrete to blog about tomorrow!

I’ve spent the last week trying to establish some concrete goals to achieve over the coming year. These are continually evolving and I think I’m close to pinning the first goal down properly   Here’s a breakdown of what I’m going to achieve by June 1st 2007.

Short term goal # 1

Earn $30 a day by June 1st 2007

• $10+/day will come from Gothicfairies.net via Adsense
• $10+/day will come from Takemorerisks.com with a combination of Adsense / Text Link Ads / Ad Volcano / Reviews
• $5+/day from Mykewlspace.com via Adsense/Adbrite and Text Link Ads
• $5+/day from Drunken Hero via Adult Friend Finder and Link Sales

Now for a breakdown of how I’ll achieve that $10 a day with Take More Risks.

• Starting today I’ll be offering paid site reviews for $20 a shot. There will be a maximum of 5 reviews of month. This will generate $60-100 within that period.
• 5 Sponsored Links slots available on the left hand side bar.  Each of these will cost $15 a month.  $75
• 5-10 Sponsored Posts per month each costing $5. $25-50
• Predicted Adsense earnings of $50 a month.
• 480 x 60 banner at the top of the page – $40 a month.

That makes a total of $260-$315 altogether for the month. I’m going to introduce Adsense units into the page later on tonight and I’ll make an advertising page as well.

All in all I think these goals are pretty conservative and I can’t see why I can’t exceed them easily!

It’s hard to know how to invest your money for best effect. There are so many options available that it can become a little overwhelming at times, particularly if you’re new to affiliate marketing.

In the past I’ve invested a lot of cash into creating thin content sites that were made especially for generating Adsense income. On average it would take around 4 months to break even again, which meant I was pretty broke until my next Adsense payment came in.

I think it’s important to have a constant stream of income to work with – it means that if an opportunity comes along you’ll be able to take advantage of it.

Here are a few points to consider if you’re currently struggling to think of ways to invest your money.

• If you’re strapped for cash, try investing money in avenues where you’ll make an instant return. For example, you could invest $100 in a copywriter to create a fansite dedicated to Anna Nicole Smith. Since Anna’s death is constantly in the news these days you could quickly sell the website for $200+. You can then use half of this to create a site around another hot topic and invest the rest into a thin content site.
• It’s important to have a good mixture of content-rich earners and thin sites. Whilst the long-term income potential of thin sites is limited, they can provide a huge return on investment in the short term. You can then use this money to build serious websites and new thin-content sites.
• Investing all of your money into one project isn’t really a wise idea unless you’re sure it’ll be a success. Think about ways of scaling the project down a little bit so that you’ll still have cash to use. As an alternative you can cut the cost of an investment opportunity by partnering with a friend in a revenue sharing system.
• Don’t be afraid to ask your friends for advice on the best investment option. Visit websites on your blogroll for more inspiration, you’re might stumble across an opportunity that you weren’t even aware of at the time.
• In the past I’ve been reluctant to invest money in a copywriter as I sometimes see it as a waste of money, after all I could just write the content myself! Remember to put a price on the work you do. You shouldn’t be working for free. Once you’ve set yourself an hourly wage you’ll be much more willing to invest money to free yourself from having to complete a task.
• There should only be criteria for evaluating the success of an investment and that’s your return. If the ROI was high, immediately seek out similar opportunities and invest in them!

This is just a quick post to announce the opening of the Hateful Dead network! Within the coming months I’m hoping to build up the two parent sites wehatecats.com and ihatethe80s.com into my biggest “players”. The emphasis here is on fun as well as long-term profit.

My plan is to create some cool microsites that people actually want to visit with the unique selling point being my twisted sense of humor. I’d rather create something truly unique than just another reworking of the same damn Wikipedia article, it’s easier for me to create content that way.

As I’ve mentioned in my plan I want to extend the network to 5 by the end of March. By then Gothic Fairies must be earning over $5 a day. I’ll have to investigate ways of monetising this site too as I want it to hold my collective efforts together.

Thanks again for everyone’s continued support over the last few days, it’s been great hearing from you and I’ll be back tomorrow after an extended night’s drinking.

Godspeed to y’all.

Sorry for the late update, I was helping my dad install Windows Vista there (which I’m quite impressed with actually!).

Anyway let’s get down to business, yesterday John Chow posted a comphrensive review of Take More Risks which raised some key points that I’ll delve further into later. Now, onto the gravy…

Many of you were interested to know what effect the review would have upon traffic and subscribers. Let’s start with the former.

Traffic

Last week my blog received on average 50 visits a day. Yesterday it received a (comparitively) whopping 406 uniques! Today a further 626 visits have been recorded, totalling 1000 direct referrals from John’s blog in a 26 hour period.

Now 1000 visits may not seem overly impressive, but the level of visitor participation has been phenomenonal. You’ve all submitted 50 comments within 26 hours. Wahey!

Subscribers

Before the “John Chow Effect”the blog had 2 subscribers, that figure has since quadrupled to 8. I’m about to hit the big time here folks!

Conclusions

Whilst it was cool to receive the influx of traffic and the additional subscribers, both paled in comparison to the great advice given by John and his visitors.

I’ll share just a few of the wise words posted over on the review page. You should read it if you haven’t already, it’s quite inspiring!

Second, Matt could document how his blog goes from his current state, to a blog that has direction. In fact, that could be the theme of his blog.

Wouldn’t that be a good idea? Throw up a random blog, pay for ads, and have people come back to your site to read on what you did to use the exposure for gaining MORE exposure by Mr Stockshaker

Mr Stockshaker has hit the nail in the head in a big way. Exposing the path of transformation from failure to success is a fantastic idea! It’s an avenue I’m going to explore in the next month or two. It will give the blog some desperately needed coherency. I could even change my blog’s branding to reflect this.

“You say you are going to be a millionaire soon. The “soon” part I don’t like. To me, soon is the same as someday. I recommend you put a date on when you will achieve millionaire status. Saying soon just makes it a dream. Putting a date on it makes it a goal. I challenge you to change your “I’m going to be a millionaire soon” to “I’m going to be a millionaire on [enter date]” and put that on your blog. It will be a daily reminder on how little time you have left and help drive you forward” by John

I knew in the back of my mind that the millionaire comment wasn’t for real. John’s right in that I’ll never make it if I keep envisaging success in the future. I should be focusing on each individual step on the road to success, rather than staring blindly at an illusion. The problem is I don’t have a road at the minute! I’m finding it really difficult creating a coherent plan. Where should it end? How will I know it’s the end?

Here are the steps I have so far.

• I want to move to the mainland by June 2008. I would like to buy a house in the region of $400,000, which would require me to be making at least $80,000 a year for it to be affordable.
• By July 2007 I want to be earning $400 a week, which is my current full-time salary.

Hmm…I’ve just thought of something and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. I should publish part of my plan on a static page on the blog instead of making scattered posts everytime I want to add something to it! It would erradicate the need for at least 2 of the overlapping post categories as well. Bingo!

And finally

The big question! Would I recommend John’s service? Yes definitely. I’ll keep this as short as possible by summarising the key points.

• John offers open constructive criticism on your website. The commentators take it to another level by questioning parts of John’s argument, pitching in their own opinions.
• The review has provided a continuing swarm of targeted traffic.
• Many of the visitors have expressed interest in becoming regular readers over here. Fantastic!
• John kept my review at the top of his blog for over 12 hours – which I thought was really cool.
• I now realise that I need a little more discipline in order to achieve success. Repeat after me! Focus is key. Focus is key.

If you want to kickstart your blog, I honestly can’t see a better way to invest $125. Be quick though, the half price offer ends in March!

Hey, it’s good to see you here! I’m Matt, 23 from just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. I’ve been blogging on and off for a couple of years, starting again seriously within the last 3 months.

I created Take More Risks to log how I was earning money off the Internet. Now I’m trying to cover broader issues whilst still giving everyone an idea of how I’m getting on!

I’m currently earning around $4-5k a year and I’m hoping to establish some proper goals which will help me progress well past that figure.

Here a few of my more interesting posts.

Blogging

When Viral Marketing Goes Wrong
The 10 Greatest Mistakes I’ve Made
Asking for Negative Reviews of Your Blog Might Just Be The Best Thing You’ll Ever Do

Domaining

Little Known Ways Of Registering Valuable Domain Names
Capturing Premium Domains the Easy Way

Goofy

Ten Tell-Tale Signs of a Webmaster on Acid
Web 2.0 Dies Overnight, Enter Web 3.0

Thanks for visiting and I hope to see you again!

$522.30! I can’t believe it!

The best bit about it is that I can now register .com’s for $6.99 a year which is pretty cool.

Good news on the earnings side of things, I’m gradually recovering to my pre-January levels on Adsense, about $6 a day. I want to be closer to $60. I’ve no time scale penned out for it at the minute, I’m too busy concentrating on developing websites now. The earnings will follow natually if I keep penning original content.

I’m definitely thinking of moving to the mainland in May 2008. I’ll have to figure out how much I’ll need long before then though. $60 a day is the equivalent of my current wage which would be enough to survive but I don’t want to be scraping by.

I’m looking to buy a decent budget tool to track my finances. Has anyone any experience with the Accountz programs? I’ve seen some mixed reviews over on Amazon.

It’ll be helpful to seperate my personal and business accounts. Too often I’ve spent £40 on a night out and thought “Shit, I could have bought 8 domains with that!”. Similarly I’ve registered 8 domains in the past and thought “Shit, I’ll have to stick to dingy cider tonight!”.

Another update, I’ve had a great idea for a network of websites! The first of which will be wehatecats.com which is currently in development. It follows on from what I was saying yesterday on how I find it easier to develop pisstake/fun websites. My plan is to generate and reinvest the revenue from these sites into serious ventures.

1. I think we can all agree that the 50 sites in 50 days campaign was an absolute disaster. Most of the sites created during that period are lying completely stagnant and it’s proving hard to sell them on for anything over $50. My advice now would be to concentrate on developing one or two sites that capture your interest and increase your revenue that way. If you’re just starting out and you don’t have any websites in your network, buy an established one off Digitalpoint.
2. At times I’ve been afraid to try new formats out like forums or wikis. Back in September I was absolute bored with webmastering because I thought it only entailed static websites and blogs. If you feel uninspired visit similar sites within your niche and gather new ideas from what they’re doing.
3. I regret not seeing all of my sites as assets. Everything you create is worth something and by adding content to it you’re inflating it’s value on the spot. It’s important not to see all of your inactive websites as failures, but as stock in your account which you can later trade.
4. I should have rid my portfolio of all of the “deadwood” at an early date. Think of this way, if you can sell two websites for $50 each, you can reinvest that money into developing a minisite on an extremely focused topic.
5. It’s my aim to be more adventurous in the coming months with trading. It’s important to keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground at all times because you don’t know when the next opportunity is coming around the corner. These things have a habit of trampling right over on your ass if you’re not careful.
6. I now realize that I should be running my development efforts as a business by keeping financial records. How am I meant to gauge how successful I am if I don’t have accounts? This is crucial I believe to achieve to success as it makes goalsetting that much easier and envisaging the bigger picture is a doddle.
7. Letting past failures interfere too much with my thinking was a mistake. If I struggled to complete a website I wouldn’t let myself move on and develop more websites until the other one was finished – even if I had no intention of completing it. You can put failure to bed now by focusing entirely on the present and creating something which excites both you and your visitors.
8. I should have recognised that “goofy sites” were my speciality from the start. Y’see, I struggle to write seriously and always feel the need to take the piss of something and for some reason or another I thought it was impossible to monetise fun sites, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean my biggest seller was emohairstyles.info which was a complete pisstake created in 2 hours and it went for $1000. $500 isn’t a bad hourly rate at all.
9. I created emohairstyles.info and punkhairstyles.info which were both popular in their own right but I stopped there for one reason or another. I should have created similarly themed websites like gothhairstyles.info, raphairstyles.info. In other words if you find an easy way to make money, replicate it over and over until you’re making big bucks.
10. I’m completely paranoid about grammar and spelling. I understand they are both important but I think they can be restrictive. I’ve deleted whole paragraphs at a time from my blog simply because I thought they read ackwardly, yet they were actually enlightening one way or another. Take Shoemoney’s lead and write in a way that’s comfortable for you. Remember : all grammar nazis are 45-year-old spinsters with 5 cats who often live on their own in a shabby apartment block in Kentucky. These are the same type of people who’d throw you out of bed for mispronouncing “fuck me!” during sex.

Can you write about the subject at hand with ease?

Instead of rushing in and acquiring the domain name straight away you should try writing 2 or 3 500 word articles on the topic beforehand.

If writing the articles is a chore, you might want to consider building a site around another niche that you enjoy. Pay attention to you intuition as there is nothing more disheartening than wasting money on domains that you’ll never use.

If you are having problems creating content but are still interested in having a site in that niche, it might be worthwhile hiring a copywriter from either Rentacoder or Digitalpoint. Be aware that you’ll normally get what you pay for with copywriters. I recommend investing at least $15 for a 500 word article, that way you stand a better chance of attracting a decent writer.

Decide upon the site’s format

Gone are the days that the static website ruled supreme (thank God!). You should tailor the site’s format to the way that you work best, not to what’s the latest craze.

Consider how much time you are willing to devote to the project before typing a word. For example, if you aren’t looking to update your website on a regular basis it might be worth creating a static site which links to a blog on a sub-domain.

You could concentrate on developing a strong backbone of static content which is supplemented with blog entries. As John Chow mentioned in 10 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid it’s important to create a blog update schedule which you adhere to.

If you can’t update your blog consistently, you could try disguising your blog as static pages by removing the code which displays the time and comments. The advantage of this is first time visitors won’t be put off by the fact you haven’t updated the blog in months!

With that said, you should keep your readers informed about any changes to your update schedule. If you’re going on holiday or just wanting to spend more time with your family at the weekend, just say so!

If you’re still having difficulty deciding upon a format, visit competing sites in your niche and try adapting their style to the way you work. It might take a few tries to find your format but persist!

Unfortunately it you can’t find anything unique to add to the niche then your website is destined to be minimally successful. Instead, brainstorm entirely new ways of presenting your information! Let’s say that you are running a Dream Dictionary website and you are considering two options

1 ) You could generate a bunch of static pages about Dream Symbols….

2 ) Or you could create a facility which allows your users to incorporate their own interpretations into the site.

Since much has already been written about Dream Symbols, your content would have to be exceptional to be noticed. Adopting the latter approach would add something different to the area – thanks to the unique perspective of each dreamer!