Take More Risks

Woooo! And it only took 5 months! Still £120 is £120 and I plan to place it straight back into the WebDev kitty. Which reminds me, you need to reach a minimum of £20 for Affiliatefuture to send out your payment and I haven’t heard anything from them. It seems as though I’ve forgotten to fill my payment details. Shit! I didn’t realise that they now pay by wire. When I first signed up all they sent out were checks. I think. I could be wrong.

I’ve been flicking through my other affiliate accounts too today and I’ve just found out that I have $50 in commission from Allposters that I wasn’t aware of. Sweet! It’s a pity that there minimum payout is $100. I seriously doubt that I’ll reach that tally any time soon as none of my content sites have Allposters links incorporated into them. That’ll change in a few weeks though as I’m planning on creating a number of websites dedicated to music and sportstars. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s strange to think that my Allposters earnings have all but dried up in recent years. This time, 2 years ago I was easily generating around £70 a week from their program, thanks to the allposters.pl script. That all stopped with Google’s Florida update though. I was still earning reasonable amount for the next few months but it was ever decreasing.

Hello! My god I’m tired! Right before I go off on a rant about how weak my body is – let’s get down to business.

I managed to flog two websites on Digital Point over the weekend.
Play Ouijaboard.com – $50
I Hate God.net – $100

I am pleased with this, particularly with I Hate God. It reminds me too much of a bad time in my life and it’s good to turn over a new leaf. I’m going to list a few more sites over the week. If I can top $100 with any of them I’ll be delighted.

The money will be reinvested in hiring a ghost writer for a few of my other domains which I might end up selling too. I don’t want to become too reliant on this for income mind. It’s addictive though.

Work has ceased temporarily on Blog Cram – although I have a meme that is ready for release at any time and a decent enough design. I’ll start work with it pretty soon again.

Ok now it’s time to off on a tangent. I really love the winter. I love the darkness and the feeling of sinking into your bed at night when you’re really tired. I have some incense on the burn at the moment too so it’s pretty atmospheric in here . I want to go to bed but for some sick reason I’m finding pleasure in keeping myself awake. Sadistic or what!

I’ll update more regularly this week. I’m sorry I’ve left things slip recently! It’s quite ironic considering things really have been go-go-go!

At times I can feel this blog descending into a bitching fest about my dwindling returns from the Adsense program. Rather than bore the rest of you with my bouts of self pity I’ve decided to take affirmative action and actually begin producing more websites again. I’ve got into the mentality where I’m waiting on my Adsense earnings to improve before I commence work on another project and it just isn’t going to happen! If I’m to succeed I have to act now otherwise I run the risk of sitting there constantly refreshing my webpages and that’s serving no-one at all.

So from now on I’ll check my earnings on the first of every month – that way I’ll actually have something significant to look forward to when I login to my account Coupled with that I’ll be able to see the big picture more easily rather than complaining about how my ePCM has decreased below $1 for the 100th time this week.

Hopefully this will fuel the changes I’ve been searching for recently, in terms of productivity.

I’ve been reluctant to invest money in affiliate marketing of late for one reason or another and it’s beginning to effect my enthusiasm for the business. Or maybe it’s the other way around – a chicken or egg thing?! What really frustrates me is that I’m still spending over £100 a week on absolutely garbage – money that I could be using to boost my online presence and really kickstart things! Grrrrrr.

Take Meaning of a Dream for example. I spent $100 to start with on a ghost writer and a further $10 on the domain. To begin with earnings were minimal, I was maybe earning a maximum of a $1 a month back on that initial investment. Things were looking hopeless. That was until recently when my income from the website rose dramatically and I’m now earning closer to $30 a month. If that rate maintains, by this time next year I’ll have earnt $360 which is triple the amount I invested in the first place.

Yet still I’m just scared of spending money for some reason. I need to get out of this habit! I wanted to spend at least $100 on backlinks but I don’t know where or who to purchase them from. Should I really go down the Text Link Ads route again? I could always use their feature where they select the websites that your ads will appear on for you but still it means I’d have to invest a minimum of $45 on three months worth of links for the campaign to have any effect.

Everywhere I turn the statement “Content Is King” is staring me in the face! I’ve heard it so many times of late it’s becoming a wearing cliche. If the truth be told I find it extremely difficult to create content day in day out when I know that I don’t have an audience. It feels like I’m talking to myself a lot of the time. It’s reassuring when you know people are reading what you have to say!

It’s just kickstarting everything that’s difficult and normally that’s where links come in. I think I’ll head over to Digital Point now and see what’s on offer. It’s a pain having to wade through the crap….

I can sense it’s going to happen soon as I’ve been averaging approximately 80 a day for the past week. I shouldn’t really be interested in this stat alone really – after all I could be earning 0.05 for each of those clickthroughs and where would that leave me? Thankfully that’s not happening though – PPC has recently doubled for a few of my websites namely Punk Hair Styles and Meaning of a Dream. The PPC hasn’t reverted back to last months high but it’s getting there I guess.

It’ll be cool to observe just what impact Pagerank has upon the PPC for each site over the coming months. Most of my sites that are serving Adsense ads have no Pagerank at the moment so if smart pricing theory is true there should be a definite increase as the weeks progress. That’s assuming that the link popularity of each website increases too.

I’ve been averaging around $3 a day on Adsense this week which is a slight increase from the usual $1-2 bracket. I ideally want to pass the $10 a day average by New Years at the latest. Hopefully I can keep everything on track as things haven’t been going that well recently.

Wish me luck.

I knew it’d happen sooner or later! Google has only recently stopped indexing my parked Namedrive domains which has practically ended any potential for revenue from that particular avenue. I’m a little disappointed, a few of them were bringing in about $5 a month whereas the majority were generating squat.  In the long run it never was going to work out. I’m against cluttering up Google’s SERP’s with parked domains.  I hate it when someone acquires a good domain just for the purpose of parking it especially when you can see a valid use for it.

I might park all of my domains over at Sedo in the meantime. There seems to be a much larger pool of buyers over there although the 10% commission that they charge is a bit of a disadvantage. I think if I’m to sell any of my existing domains I’ll have to develop them which will be a pain as I’m not that interested in many of the subjects they are based on at the moment.

Still I shouldn’t feel too disappointed, the $850 I made from the domain sale more than makes up for what I’ve spent on all of my domains in the past x 5! With a bit of luck hopefully more buyers will arrise in the future but I’m not holding my breath! I’ll spend more time investigating and generating different streams of revenue from my sites. Digitalpoint is brilliant for this. The knowledgebase on the forums is incredible, that is if you can wade your way through the sales pitches!

Just discovered this article over at Problogger.net from a year ago which explains the effect of Smart Pricing in Adsense. I think this could be the reason why Punk Hair Styles and Emo Hair Styles are registering such low PPC’s. I’d honestly never thought about this possibility and it makes sense I guess.

I’m going to have to solidify the content on both of those sites if they are to be successful in the long run. At the moment there just isn’t enough there…..

A change of strategy is needed. I will spend more time adding content to my existing sites and once I feel that I have exhausted that particular niche I’ll move on. It might be best to guage my interest in the sites before proceeding, that way it’ll be easier to add new content in the future.

At least that’s one mystery solved anyway..

The escrow process took around 3 weeks to complete all in all and tonight I can confirm that my first ever sale has went through! I’m delighted! It went for $850 which will provide more than enough spending money for our break in Edinburgh

On the same topic, I get off work on Wednesday! My dad’s already on his holidays the lucky sod. He’s downstairs drinking wine. I fancy cracking open a bottle of……urm cider. I’ll leave the champagne for the wedding.

At least now I can cover the cost of the Wordtracker subscription. Onwards and upwards hurrah!

Things are improving a little! I’ve yet to have a sub $2 day in about a fortnight which is quite cool. Revenue isn’t soaring but it is stable at the moment which is a good thing. The plan now is develop 2 or 3 new sites over the week which are optimised for Adsense. I’ll need to ensure that there’s at least one other affiliate that’ll act as a contigency plan if anything happens to my Adsense account. That shouldn’t happen really but you can never be sure in this industry!

Quite a short update tonight I know but I’m knackered and I’m going to hit the hay. Good night.

The CTR continues to increase whilst PPC dives in the opposite direction. I’ve no idea what’s going on here…..am I getting a lot of international clickthroughs or something? Are my ads better tailored now that Googlebot’s had a chance to crawl my site? I’m not complaining, I’m just curious as hell.

Yesterday I decided to close Stop Crashing for good and it now redirects to here. Instead of trashing all of the articles I’ve published some of the better ones with eZineArticles, at least that way some good will have came of the site. Looking back on it I now realise that the blog had limited potential. I only set it up to monitor a temporary problem I was having with my desktop and for some reason I used it as more of a web design resource! In a way it was a prototype of this site.

There is still a few articles over there that may be of use to people so I might transfer them to here. I wonder if it’s possible to backdate entries in Wordpress. I’ll try later.