Well, don't you know it? December is here already!
Looks like Santa came a couple of weeks early for me
Here's the highlights from November
Chasing Pace Makes Its Debut
Before I dive into the income report, I want to encourage you to check out a new blog called Chasing Pace. It's run by this cool cat named Wes who has done a lot of research on Internet Marketing. Even though he's only been in this game for a few months, he's super-knowledgeable, and his monthly income is already surpassing mine.
So check it out, bookmark it, add it to your feed reader, or whatever is it you do to hang onto cool stuff you find in the web-o-sphere. He "practices what he preaches" so his blog already has a bunch of fun tips about his internet marketing journey and is definitely worth your time.
Here soon, he and I will be teaming up for a series of blogposts that will give anyone who is ready to replicate this journey, some really concrete steps to follow. I'll keep you posted as we get closer to the New Year.
Crashing The Christmas Sleigh
So, in a moment of frustration with my current websites, I launched an entirely new site focused on the Christmas shopping season.
Building nomorewhitesocks.com
Basically, I built 40-some pages reviewing web products. For my wordpress theme I used a free Zee Theme called Synergie. Then, to help it get indexed, I submitted it to ismysiteindexed and bulkping to get as many pings to it. It took about 5 days after I bought the domain before it was indexed by google and started getting a random trickle of traffic.
Promoting the Site:
Now it was time to get some rankings! I proceeded to build backlinks to it from Postrunner. Now, Postrunner lets you send two backlinks per article, so I ended up with one backlink to each post, and 40 backlinks to the home page.
Also, at Wes's suggestion, I used a free tool called Socialadr to create some backlinks to it from social media. And then a couple days following, I added a backlink to it from Infobarrel and one from Ezinearticles.
Backlinks can be powerful, but too many of them, too soon, can put you in the "sandbox" -- a place where small sites go to die in a pile of stinky kitty poo.
Ranking The Site
My site was not ranking for much of anything except the random search for "christmas gift ideas for dudes"
Then I realized that I had not done much on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now, I'm going to write a post about on-page SEO this month, because it will freaking make you a ton of money if you know how to use it. I don't know much, but I am going to share some of what I know here in a couple of weeks.
But suffice it to say that the term "Christmas Gift Ideas" turned up once in the entire front page. So I added it to the title and as a couple of headings. I also took a couple of the pages on the site and added a little sentence about Christmas Gift Ideas and hyperlinked it back to the homepage.
Within 48 hours the traffic started pouring in. Turns out it was #8 on Yahoo's list for the term "Christmas Gift Ideas" and on page # 6 of Google for the same term.
Crashing the Site
Being a greedy guy, I added one Adsense block to it. The Amazon traffic was converting pretty nicely, and I was just entirely thrilled. (It made a total of $15.53 during its brief hey-day) I highlighted it in my Mid-November update and went back to working on my other sites.
The site disappeared. I don't know if it was the fact that it went from getting 4 backlinks a day to none, or the fact that such a new site had received so many backlinks in such a short period of time, or if adding the Adsense to the site killed it. But as you can see, it died.
RIP Christmas site. I shall resurrect you next spring.
Cracking The $100 Mark!
But, what was fun, was cracking the $100 mark. I did this with my primary site -- the one that I actually started a little over a year ago, now, when Pat Flynn was doing his Niche Site Duel. I wrote about 2 posts and then let it languish.
When I discovered the Keyword Academy in late April of this year, I began following Mark's guidelines on building a site, and now that it is maintaining the #1 spot on Google, it is doing nothing but making a steady flow of money.
The downside is that all of this money comes from one page on one site. It alone made over $151 in Adsense. I need to diversify and find other winners. To do that, I need to follow Pareto's Law of the Internet, a post which I shall bring you next week.
Additionally, a lot of my site income is down from my other two sites just sitting, neglected. They are new enough, that when I stop posting to them and backlinking them, they sink quite a bit in the rankings. I had neglected them to focus on my Christmas site, and likely lost extra moolah because of it.
One last thing, I have removed share-a-sale from my vendors as I am doing slightly better with Adsense on that site. Additionally, I am experimenting with Yieldbuild for their free automatic ad optimization on this one site, and so far, it looks promising. I'm sure some of you will want to hear more about my experience with them, so I'll keep you posted.
Last Month
Visitors: $60.53
Income: 5467
This Month
Adsense: $172.47
Amazon: $20.83
Chitika: $0.38
Total Income: $193.68 (220% Increase)
Total Visitors: 10,526 (92% Increase)
I'll see you next week with my long-promised Pareto's Principles for The Internet Marketer .... there's some really good insight from some really smart people that I'm looking forward to sharing (and yes, I am biased).
Looks like Santa came a couple of weeks early for me
 |
| My first check from Google! - $115!! |
Here's the highlights from November
- Chasing Pace Makes Its Debut!
- Crashing The Christmas Sleigh
- Cracking The $100 Mark!
Chasing Pace Makes Its Debut
Before I dive into the income report, I want to encourage you to check out a new blog called Chasing Pace. It's run by this cool cat named Wes who has done a lot of research on Internet Marketing. Even though he's only been in this game for a few months, he's super-knowledgeable, and his monthly income is already surpassing mine.
So check it out, bookmark it, add it to your feed reader, or whatever is it you do to hang onto cool stuff you find in the web-o-sphere. He "practices what he preaches" so his blog already has a bunch of fun tips about his internet marketing journey and is definitely worth your time.
Here soon, he and I will be teaming up for a series of blogposts that will give anyone who is ready to replicate this journey, some really concrete steps to follow. I'll keep you posted as we get closer to the New Year.
Crashing The Christmas Sleigh
So, in a moment of frustration with my current websites, I launched an entirely new site focused on the Christmas shopping season.
Building nomorewhitesocks.com
Basically, I built 40-some pages reviewing web products. For my wordpress theme I used a free Zee Theme called Synergie. Then, to help it get indexed, I submitted it to ismysiteindexed and bulkping to get as many pings to it. It took about 5 days after I bought the domain before it was indexed by google and started getting a random trickle of traffic.
Promoting the Site:
Now it was time to get some rankings! I proceeded to build backlinks to it from Postrunner. Now, Postrunner lets you send two backlinks per article, so I ended up with one backlink to each post, and 40 backlinks to the home page.
Also, at Wes's suggestion, I used a free tool called Socialadr to create some backlinks to it from social media. And then a couple days following, I added a backlink to it from Infobarrel and one from Ezinearticles.
Backlinks can be powerful, but too many of them, too soon, can put you in the "sandbox" -- a place where small sites go to die in a pile of stinky kitty poo.
Ranking The Site
My site was not ranking for much of anything except the random search for "christmas gift ideas for dudes"
Then I realized that I had not done much on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now, I'm going to write a post about on-page SEO this month, because it will freaking make you a ton of money if you know how to use it. I don't know much, but I am going to share some of what I know here in a couple of weeks.
But suffice it to say that the term "Christmas Gift Ideas" turned up once in the entire front page. So I added it to the title and as a couple of headings. I also took a couple of the pages on the site and added a little sentence about Christmas Gift Ideas and hyperlinked it back to the homepage.
 |
| We peak. And we fall. |
Within 48 hours the traffic started pouring in. Turns out it was #8 on Yahoo's list for the term "Christmas Gift Ideas" and on page # 6 of Google for the same term.
Crashing the Site
Being a greedy guy, I added one Adsense block to it. The Amazon traffic was converting pretty nicely, and I was just entirely thrilled. (It made a total of $15.53 during its brief hey-day) I highlighted it in my Mid-November update and went back to working on my other sites.
The site disappeared. I don't know if it was the fact that it went from getting 4 backlinks a day to none, or the fact that such a new site had received so many backlinks in such a short period of time, or if adding the Adsense to the site killed it. But as you can see, it died.
RIP Christmas site. I shall resurrect you next spring.
Cracking The $100 Mark!
But, what was fun, was cracking the $100 mark. I did this with my primary site -- the one that I actually started a little over a year ago, now, when Pat Flynn was doing his Niche Site Duel. I wrote about 2 posts and then let it languish.
When I discovered the Keyword Academy in late April of this year, I began following Mark's guidelines on building a site, and now that it is maintaining the #1 spot on Google, it is doing nothing but making a steady flow of money.
The downside is that all of this money comes from one page on one site. It alone made over $151 in Adsense. I need to diversify and find other winners. To do that, I need to follow Pareto's Law of the Internet, a post which I shall bring you next week.
Additionally, a lot of my site income is down from my other two sites just sitting, neglected. They are new enough, that when I stop posting to them and backlinking them, they sink quite a bit in the rankings. I had neglected them to focus on my Christmas site, and likely lost extra moolah because of it.
One last thing, I have removed share-a-sale from my vendors as I am doing slightly better with Adsense on that site. Additionally, I am experimenting with Yieldbuild for their free automatic ad optimization on this one site, and so far, it looks promising. I'm sure some of you will want to hear more about my experience with them, so I'll keep you posted.
Last Month
Visitors: $60.53
Income: 5467
This Month
Adsense: $172.47
Amazon: $20.83
Chitika: $0.38
Total Income: $193.68 (220% Increase)
Total Visitors: 10,526 (92% Increase)
I'll see you next week with my long-promised Pareto's Principles for The Internet Marketer .... there's some really good insight from some really smart people that I'm looking forward to sharing (and yes, I am biased).
Awesome! Congratulations. Very motivating--thank you.
ReplyDelete220% increase in income and 92% increase in visitors in 1 month! That's awesome. And by the way, love the pictures in this post.
ReplyDeleteFun read. That's impressive that you got that site on the front page of Google for that search term. Keep up the work.
ReplyDelete@Gramma - I know this gig isn't for everybody, but its really fun to see these ideas work. Hopefully, some of the tips I start putting up in the next few months will help with those infobarrel posts ;)
ReplyDelete@Wes - You know, it is exciting, but this is the first month that profit has increased significantly more than visitors. I think that shows that I'm profiting off the 'tip' of the iceberg. It feels unbalanced. I really want to diversify and get more winners so that it won't disappear on me.
@Erik - Glad you liked it. Really honored to have you following along. After all, most of the dangerous coding that occurs on my sites was somehow inspired by you...
@Everybody. I think I should find a better commenting system...