Take More Risks

Yesterday I decided to list Fart Noises up on Sitepoint after realising it would be more profitable in the long run to acquire some fresh new blogs with the proceeds.

I’ve been overwhelmed with the interest in the site so far! The bid currently stands at $1,200 with a BIN of $2,000 which I think is fair for a website that should consistently make at least $200 a month for the next year.

I’ll keep y’all posted on how the sale goes. Hopefully I can have it all wrapped up by early next week.

I’ll miss the bugger y’know, it’s reinstated my faith in blogging. I think it goes to prove that it isn’t strictly necessary to keep to any type of blogging schedule if the content is compelling enough. After all, I failed to write a single post between November and March and once I resumed blogging the audience came rushing back. Weird eh?

Sometimes all of the advice from the “gurus” can really take the joy out of blogging. It’s almost as if there are a set of blogging commandments that we all must adhere too!

• Thou must update x times a week.
• Thou must write in lists.
• Thou must write at least 300-500 words per post.
• Thou must not place your ads like this.

I understand that most of these are considered best practices in the blogosphere and I can see why people recommend them. However there comes a time where all of these regulations can take all of the fun out of blogging. Rather than updating because you want to, you find yourself obligated to stick to these standards in fear of failure. Little by little blogging becomes more of a struggle!

I think it’s crucial to test these things out for yourself, finding your own set of best practices. Sure enough most should overlap with what is commonly accepted in the blogosphere. But in the end of the day you should let your earnings do the talking. In short, be your own guru and find what works for you!

This week I’ve been on the lookout for some cool websites for sale on Sitepoint, Namepros and Digitalpoint. As per usual it’s a case of wading through the usual heap of proxy, turnkey and pixel dollar sites without encountering anything interesting.

Anyway I’ve started to notice how many people mention how their website has “huge potential”. Once I see a listing like this I can immediately smell bullshit. I mean if the site has such a great future why list it in the first place? Wouldn’t it be better to hold onto it and make the required changes to unleash it’s potential?

That’s not to say that it’s true in every case. At the start of the year I wrote something similar in my listing for I Hate God.net and I was right. I sold a PR4 blog with about 100 uniques a day and 50 reasonably well written articles for $100. My Adsense earnings were minimal from the blog due to poor Adsense positioning. In this instance the site had real potential, especially at $100. I just didn’t realise it at the time!

In terms of evaluating a sites true potential here are a few factors to consider.

• Is the content provoking thoughtful reactions from it’s audience even if traffic is minimal?
• Has any SEO been performed on the site? The less, the better!
• Is traffic steadily increasing or has it reached a plateau? It’s often better to buy a website that is experiencing prolonged gradual growth rather than one which explodes with traffic – hits a rut and then dies on it’s ass.
• Will you be able to update it? There’s no point in buying a meditation blog if you know nothing of the subject area.

The cool thing about Digitalpoint is that every so often someone will list a PR3 or PR4 site with a reasonable amount of quality content for under $200. If little to no SEO has been carried out in the blog, it’s safe to say that you can easily double or triple your income by optimising the site correctly.

New sellers are particularly susceptible to undervaluing their websites by assuming that $0.75 a day on Adsense counts for next to nothing. Depending on the overall quality of the blog (taking into considering both it’s design and content) the site could be listed for $400-500, whereas many newbies would be happy to settle for a lot less. I think it’s crucial to view your websites as real estate with tangible value, that way you are in a much better position to make informed trades.

Whilst my progress with the Text Link Ads program has been comparatively modest so far, I’m looking to establish it as one of my largest sources of income over the net few months. It’d be cool to bring in somewhere between $300-500 a month by the summer.

As you can see below I’ve managed to sell 5/10 of my ad units on My Kewl Space. If everyone renews their link subscriptions next month I’ll be making close to $70 a month. Not bad for a site that I paid $400 for!

Anyway I’ve recently added Text Link Ads to 3 more of my sites. Let’s hope that I can sell a few more over the coming weeks. I’m looking forward to adding them to Take More Risks in due course!

What I Like About the Service

• With most affiliate programs there’s normally a months delay before your payment is processed. Text Link Ads automatically credit your Paypal account on the 1st day of each month. It’s sweet.
• Earlier this week I emailed the Text Link Ads team with a query and within hours the owner Patrick Gavin replied. Talk about great customer service!
• Whilst it could be argued that I’m losing out on 50% of the link revenue, this is a small price to pay for the service provide. Not only do they actively promote your links but they also take care of interacting with the link buyers which can be a real pain to manage yourself.

I’ve just noticed that they’ve introduced a Wordpress plugin that takes care of all of the TLA code for you, all you have to do is place a small snippet of PHP code in the location in your template where you want the links to appear. It’s small things like this that really make a difference.

In August I set up ia.mthebest.com a site that would allow me to demonstrate (sarcastically) to the world why I was the best. Inevitably it was a failure and here’s why.

1) No focus

In order to attract significant search engine traffic to a site, it must be targetted towards a theme. Ia.mthebest.com is just a hopeless collection of idiotic rants with zero consistency. It will never rank well for any of the individual topics I’ve ranted about as there isn’t enough coverage of one particular issue.

It would be different if I was writing a blog which ranted about religion, at least that way Google would know what the site’s about. Taking it from Google’s POV, the first thing it encounters is the title “I am the Best”. What exactly is that meant to mean? I am the best at what and why? There are no indicators there at all.

2) No value, unknown audience.

You can’t expect to receive something in return for nothing. The website offers very little to it’s potential audience. I mean who cares about what some jerk-off thinks of the world? It’d be different if the posts were well-written and humorous, but most of them aren’t, and that brings me on to my next point.

3) 1 post is often better than 6

It was during my ia.mthebest phase that I challenged myself to write 6 posts in an hour. Sure enough, I achieved this quite a few times with little effort. The problem is that the posts were all reasonably short (150-250 words) and weren’t interesting enough in their own right to catch the attention of other bloggers. My posts weren’t very search engine friendly either, mainly due to their length (pesky duplicate content filter!). Short posts can be effective in search engines if they are provactive and you have an audience who contribute regularly through comments, but this wasn’t the case here.

It’s better to have 1 comphrensive kick-ass post than 6 weak entries as it makes it much easier for another blogger to justify linking to your work.

Summary

The failure of ia.mthebest.com taught me that it’s important for a site to have a coherent theme and that it’s not enough to try to rank for popular phrases with single articles on an unrelated site. Even if visitors arrive at your site, they likely won’t be targetted, increasing the likelihood of you being smartpriced on a Made For Adsense site similar to this.

My Fart Noises blog was established back in September as somewhat of a joke, never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that it could have been profitable. From September to October I spent a while each day developing about 15 pages of content targetted at what I thought were keywords with serious traffic potential. Alas, I was wrong! The keyphrases brought in very little traffic which led me to hastily abandon the website.

Fast forward to December when I decided to overhaul the website with Cake PHP. Well that was the idea anyway! I ended up ruining the website leaving only unformatted text where the blog articles used to be. I thought the site was dead for good and I was a little upset.

Now in March I accidently stumbled across the Awstats for the fartnoises.info domain. I wasn’t expecting much to start with, I would have been reasonably happy with maybe 20-30 visits a day. It turned out that I was wrong! Fart Noises was receiving at least 100 visits a day. At this point I converted the site back to Wordpress, sought out a new template, slapped in the Google Analytics code and began writing some silly posts related to farting.

Throughout March the traffic began to climb like hell, as did the earnings. The trend for April has been much more stable. You could almost say that I’ve hit a plateau with traffic. Still with that said Fart Noises is now one of my best earners, bringing in on average $10+ a day. Not bad for a site that I’d almost given up all hope on, eh?

I think it goes to show that it’s possible to resurrect a dead blog and bring it back to the attention of a new audience. If you feel like you’re falling behind with your blog schedule don’t let public expectancy cripple you.  Instead focus your energies on creating cool content that your audience can gain value from. Even if your audience is a bunch of fart-loving teenagers……

Some of you might remember that I started a case study for Take More Risks on it’s appearance in Google’s Supplemental Index, thanks to what I believed was the duplicate content filter. Back at the start of March, Google traffic counted for 16% of my overall traffic. In an attempt to increase this figure I began removing unnecessary elements from the single post template in Wordpress in order to concentrate the post content on each page.

I’m glad to announce that Google now brings in almost 50% of my traffic!

I think with some SEO my blog could really start performing in Google. At the minute it isn’t optimised one bit. I’ve been procrastinating over optimising the index page in particular. I mean who am I trying to target? Webmasters? Other entrepreneurs? Which keywords should I optimize the page for? Here are a few ideas (I’ll feed them through Wordtracker and the Google Adwords tool when I get home)

• Sell domains
• Make Money Online
• Young Entrepreneur

I’ll optimize each of my post categories for two different keywords as well. In the past I’ve found that this can dramatically increase search engine traffic. It’ll be much easier to generate keywords for the categories as each is tailored to a specific topic (domains, web development, blogging etc). Since I’m covering so many different topics it’s hard to find some middle-ground for the site’s index. I guess I’ll have to think of something that ties all of the categories together.

Whilst bringing in organic traffic is desirable, I’m struggling at the minute to cater for my existing readers. I think if I continue to improve the content and manage to stick to a proper update schedule then my blog will spread by word of mouth.

Nate wrote this excellent post a few days earlier weighing the pros and cons of monetizing young blogs. As you may have noticed I still haven’t placed any permanent ads on Take More Risks. Much like Nate, my income from CPC ads didn’t justify the negative impact that the ads were having on my site’s image.

I couldn’t help thinking that if the ads discouraged bloggers from backlinking to my work then I would actually be losing money. How much is a link worth after all? $10? $20? My Adsense earnings over a two week period didn’t even reach $3.

I think it’s crucial that you gain a strong readership with many backlinks from reputable sites in your niche before even completing monetization. Shoemoney, for instance, generally monetizes a site once it reaches 1000 uniques/day.

I don’t think it’s wise to base this decision on unique visits alone, it might be the case that your site is well optimised for the search engines but few people are actually citing your work. You should factor in the quality and desirability of your content as well. If no one is linking to your site then all it takes is a search engine algorithm update for everything to fall on its ass.

You need to be in a position where your blog has enough varied recognition across your niche so that it can maintain it’s popularity for a many months to come. Placing ads from day one will discourage reputable bloggers in your niche from linking to your work.

Remember backlinks from such authority sites will form the backbone on which the success of your SEO campaign rests upon. Paid reviews will only get you so far and are arguably worthless until authority sites begin to link to your work.

In the meantime, develop content that will appeal to your audience and forget about the few measly beans you can make from Adsense. Your earning potential will sky-rocket if you continue to give your readership what they want.

As for the future of Take More Risks, I feel like I need to update this blog more consistently before I can even begin to justify monetization. My aim is to get back to the average of 1 post a day that I was at before the Mid-March slump.

Brandon tagged me for this a few days ago and I’ve only got around to completing it now. So here goes!

Why I Blog 

1) Voice/Influence/Friends – It allows me to express myself to people I would normally have no influence over. It’s cool interacting with other bloggers via comments and trackbacks, I’ve made a few good friends from this blog.

2) Convienience – It’s so easy to create new content! All I have to do is login > click Write Post and start typing. It isn’t as easy to update static websites where you must integrate all of the templates yourself amongst other things. With Wordpress you can have a blog up and running within a few hours.

3) Laughs -  I love writing for my comedy blogs. It feels like second nature! I’d still create these sites even if I wasn’t making any money from them.

4) Freedom – I can write what I want when I want. It’s a brilliant medium for free space.

5) Making Money – This is probably the biggest one and it’s why I got into in the first place. I think it’s dangerous if you over-priortize money making as your main objective as it will dampen the impact it has with your visitors in it’s early formative years.

Why I Don’t Like Blogging

1) Pressure – Once you’ve started to build momentum you must continue to produce good content otherwise your audience will dwindle. Posting can become more of a chore than a hobby.

2) Finding your Voice / Self Doubt – There’s always the danger that you’ll come across as an ill informed bufoon to your audience, especially if you are new and trying to find your voice/writing technique.

3) Maintaining Consistency – You have to be dedicated to your blog over a prolonged period, even when you are going through hard times. You can’t have any days off, particularly if you are still a small-gun and can’t attract any guest writers.

4) Being Part of the “Blogosphere” – Arghhh! The next person to mention the blogosphere will receive a trout to the face The whole blogging thing can seem a bit incestious, it’s like you are part of a secret society or something. This sucks.

5) Getting a new blog indexed can be like pushing an elephant up the stairs.

It’s great to wake up in the morning knowing that you don’t have to go into work! I’ve spent most of the holiday’s gorging on chocolate, reading books and lying on the ground ready to barf my guts up.

The good thing is that I have tomorrow off too so I might have a bit of a toast tonight. So what’s new? It’s been so long!

Site updates

Fart Noises continues to perform beyond expectation. It earnt $13 on Adsense alone three days ago which is really good news. A number of my other new sites are rising stars too. It’s an exciting time and my work is finally paying off. The next target is to be earning $22.50 consistently by the last week of April.

I think I’m ready to try something similar to the 50 sites in 50 days challenge again, only this time it won’t be as ambitious and I’ll use domains I’ve already registered. The problem with the last campaign was that I was trying to develop complete sites within a 2 hour period which isn’t really possible. The idea is to start a new blog a day, getting it into a position were it can be developed within the coming months and leaving it.

I received my check from Adult Friend Finder a few weeks ago but unfortunately my camera is broken. I’ll have to take a picture of it before I cash it heh. I’m well on my way to the next one. Hopefully I can push my earnings from AFF up to about $200 a month. My target with Text Link Ads is $300 a month by August.

Things I’ve learnt this week

• Develop something you can fall back on. You need at least a few sites which provide real value to your visitors that you can then monetize.
• Don’t judge yourself by the standards other bloggers set themselves. Know why you blog and set your own standards. It’s your journey after all.
• Enjoy some time away from the computer. If you are struggling with ideas for your sites then step away, relax and enoy life! You’ll come back envigorated!
• Establish a long term goal. When your earnings don’t meet your expectations then look towards your goal rather than sinking into apathy. Everyone has a day where they earn fuck all. Those days will continue unless you act upon your disappointment.
• Establish true friendships with webmasters in your niche. Networking works to an extent but it sounds too damn impersonal! Get to know the people who are working in the same market and learn from their mistakes as well as your own.
• Find what works for you and do it over and over again!

Dynadot are currently offering a 5 day grace period on almost of their all newly registered domains, allowing you to delete your names for a full refund in credit. It’s certainly a great idea but one which is liable to be abused. How so?

Well let’s say that you are experimenting with domain typos. Theoretically you could delete all of your domain names which receive little or no traffic within the grace period and have a “second bite of the cherry”. The question is, is this abusing the system or is it a legitmate form of domain speculation?

It definitely has it’s advantages. Firstly it frees up domains that aren’t of any use to you. Secondly it dramatically reduces the amount of risk involved in selecting valuable typos. This could be especially useful for newcomers to the business. It would have saved me $45 last month on registering useless names (if I’d known about it at the time).

The question is, how much is too much? Would Dynadot or any other registrar which implements a similar system allow you to delete 300 domains a day? Would this be dependent on how much you’ve already spent with that company?

If any of you have experience with a grace period system it would be great to hear from you!