Website Building Update – Week 27
March 5th, 2010 by Clayton
Well, let’s keep going and start the next six months of this…
I fought back an urge to apply for a retail job at the mall, and decided to keep working full-time on these sites for another month. If things don’t start to improve more by then, I’ll probably get some kind of crappy job just to pay rent / pay down my credit card debt / dump into outsourcing.
This week, I’ve been slogging through some more backlinking for websites #3 and #6. Almost done with the article marketing part of my backlinking for these two sites.
This week has been cool too because I made my second sale ever from website #3. A whopping $2! But it’s just one of these trial offer things. When the trial is over, I’ll make another $29. I also got a sale from my weight loss site, which hasn’t happened in a while either and I made my first sale from website #6. I’m feeling hopeful about all this!
Anyway, not much new to say. Just doing all that oh-so-fun stuff like spinning and submitting.
Here’s my screen shot this week:
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Mistakes I’ve Made
March 2nd, 2010 by Clayton
So a bunch of you wanted to know what sorts of mistakes I’ve made in the past six months with internet marketing. I’m sure I’ve probably made a bunch of mistakes I’m not even aware of yet, but here’s what I do know about so far:
I built too many websites too fast. This is sort of a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because my first 3 sites aren’t really doing so well. If I just stuck to one site and worked on it until it made money, I probably would have gotten frustrated and given up. It wasn’t until I built my fourth site (the get your boyfriend back site) that I started to see regular sales. But now I have 7 domain names that I’m trying to turn into money-making sites and I sometimes feel overwhelmed with all the work I need to do for them all! I’d suggest starting with 2 or 3 sites so that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but you’re also not spread too thin.
I hated spinning articles too much. I already mentioned this, but when I first started, I thought I could get by with only spinning 1/3 of the article on my sites. It turns out this just isn’t enough to get the backlinks rolling in and keep you competitive with sites on the first page of Google. You need to spin every last article on your site. This is taking up most of my time these days.
I was not aggressive enough. For some reason, when I started I had the idea that Ezine Articles and AMA was all I needed. Not true. I now submit to 15 or 20 article directories, do AMA, and build web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogspot, etc. For a long time I shied away from web 2.0 stuff because some part of me thought it was a form of spamming. It’s not spamming though, if you provide good content that can actually help people.
I never really got too distracted by other “make money online” programs. Mostly because I’m too poor to afford them even if I did want them. I tried social bookmarking for awhile, but I gave up on that pretty quickly. After all, I’m doing all this so that I can eventually spend my life chilling out on some beach in Thailand or buying gelato in Rome, not so I can spend hours and hours on end bookmarking every little ditial brain fart that relates to my niches.
Anyway, I really think these are the big mistakes I’ve made. I am probably about 2 or 3 months behind where I should be because of these mistakes. I’m paying the price for it now, but I really think I can catch up pretty quickly (fingers crossed).
I’d love to write more, but I have more thrilling article spinning to do!
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Website Building Update – Week 26
February 26th, 2010 by Clayton
Yikes! I started this 6 months ago? Time sure flies. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I sat down and wrote five panic attack articles on that warm August day. I hoped that by this point I would be rolling in dough, but I guess this whole business is harder than I thought.
I’m not really sure how long I’m going to do these weekly updates. I’ll keep it up until I reach the 1 year mark at least though.
Anyway, this week has been all about building backlinks for website #6. I’ve been proof-reading some of the spun articles I got from my outsource guy before feeding them into AMA and posting them on a bunch of article directories. A lot of the articles are really good, but there are a few that I need to work on a bit.
Looking back on the past six months, I can see the big reason why I’m not doing better than I am. When I first started, my backlinking strategy wasn’t strong enough. Back then spinning articles was a pain in the ass because I had to do it all manually by myself. I really hated it. Most article directories and AMA let you put 3 backlinks in an article, so I figured I only needed to spin 1/3 of the articles on each site to build backlinks to each page.
But that wasn’t enough. I now know that you need to spin every last article on your site (the exception right now is the review articles – seems a little spammy to me). I think I should be caught up by the end of March. So don’t make my mistake and just start spinning like crazy!
Anyway, February is almost over. I’m not sure why, but it’s been a really slow month. I hope things pick up again in March! I’ve busted my ass and worked harder at this than I have any other month yet. I am really excited to see what the results from all this SEO will be in a month or two!
Here’s my screen shot for the week. Website #4 made a few more sales this week. The other sites just aren’t pulling their weight.
PS: As requested, I’m working on a “mistakes I’ve made” post. Should be up early next week.
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The Slow Path to Here
February 23rd, 2010 by Clayton
I think it’s interesting to look back on the strange paths we take that lead us to where we are. Here’s my strange little path to where I am now.
I first found out about internet marketing from reading about something called the Golden Backdoor near the end of 2007. I was curious about it and found a review of the product where someone said it involved promoting Clickbank products. I didn’t get the Golden Backdoor, but I took a look at Clickbank and got an account.
I didn’t know anything about internet marketing, so logically, I printed out a bunch of neon fliers with the address to a website I bought that redirected people to a Clickbank product. I then spent a few days plastering these fliers all over my neighborhood. On bus stops, at the local community college. Pretty much anywhere I could post anything. I then proceeded to make exactly $0.
I was in school at the time and classes started again. I let all this affiliate marketing stuff slip into the back of my mind.
In the summer of 2008, I got a crappy summer job working at Phoenix-area architecture firm that “designs” large big box and chain stores. I put the word design in quotes because we didn’t actually design anything. We got a prototype store from our clients and then did everything we could to trick local building departments into letting us build these monstrosities. “What? You don’t want a giant box in your city that doesn’t have any windows? Well, what if we put these fake windows on it so it kind of looks like a real building?” It was soul-crushing work that contradicted everything that I believed about architecture.
I was fortunate enough to work near a Borders bookstore. One day after work, I decided I should get an audio book to take advantage of my 30-minute commute. That was when I found The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I hated my job, so I got the audio version and listened to it every day on the way to and from work. I must have listened to it at least 15-20 times that summer.
I wanted to try out what Tim recommended, but I couldn’t really think of a product I could create and market. I already knew about Clickbank, so I decided I could just market someone else’s product. I opened up a Google Adwords account and started direct-linking to Clickbank products. It was pretty easy. I must admit that I didn’t make much money doing this, but I did make a little.
I kept this up until about the beginning of 2009. I heard about this course called Profit Lance. It seemed really good, so I got it. I started to get into it, but then school started again. I graduated in May 2009 and came back to it. It taught me a lot of good things, but I think the course became outdated since it was put out in 2007.
I gave up on it in June 2009, and floundered around in July. Then in August I heard about the Thirty Day Challenge. I did it and I built two Thirty Day Challenge sites. Both of them never really took off, but I learned a lot about the current trends in internet marketing.
One day while looking for a Clickbank product for a third Thirty Day Challenge site, I saw something called the Six Day Weekend. I clicked on it because it sounded like a knock off of the 4 Hour Work Week, which I liked a lot. This was Sean Morrissy’s site that he had launched about a week earlier. I watched some of his free videos. They seemed really good, but I honestly had no idea where to start or what order I was supposed to watch them in. I got confused. All I knew was that Sean said Mark Ling was his mentor and Sean was living the lifestyle I wanted to live.
So I went to Mark Ling’s site Affilorama and signed up there. I started making websites like they recommend back in August. Now it’s 6 months later and here I am still doing it.
The past 6 months have had a lot of ups and downs. I’ve had some success despite the fact that I recently realized I was doing a few things very wrong. Things have gotten faster and easier as I’ve learned ways to shortcut and automate things. Honestly, I’m really excited about the next few months and I’m eagerly looking forward to building some more websites!
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Website Building Update – Week 25
February 19th, 2010 by Clayton
I built website #6 this week. I know it makes me a total nerd, but I’m really excited about this site! This is the first new site I’ve built since November. It’s almost exactly the same as website #4, so I expect it to start earning money in a few weeks. This will really help out a lot! I need the money…
It’s already ranking pretty well for a site that has pretty much no backlinks. I’m guessing that it has to do with the awesome domain name I got (a buying keyword, boo-ya!).
Someone wanted to know about my Clickbank analytics, so I’m posting the past four months of Clickbank data this week (I hope you can read this–I had to reduce the image to fit on my blog). The green line is the number of hop clicks I’ve gotten, and the bars are the number of order form impressions. And of course I post all the sales I get here every week.
I make on average, one sale per 91 hops. But lately, that’s been a lot worse (for some unknown reason) like one sale per 162 hops.
Here’s my sales report for this week. I seem to be on an every-other-day pattern. Three of these spikes are just re-bills. Only one real sale.
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Website Building Update – Week 24
February 12th, 2010 by Clayton
This week consisted of more furious backlinking to my first set of websites. It is very boring and repetitive work. Heavy metal and fantasies of backpacking through Cinque Terre keep me going despite the boredom.
I finally finished all major SEO efforts on website #4 (get your ex-boyfriend back niche), and I’m almost done with website #2 (weight loss niche). There’s just a little bit of automated link building with Article Submission Helper to do, but I don’t want to do it too fast and risk getting penalized. This is a huge relief for me. I feel like I’m finally starting to get all my SEO under control, plus there’s this wonderful mental space that gets cleared away knowing that these websites can take care of themselves (for the most part) now.
Now I’m turning my attention to website #6 (get your ex-girlfriend back niche). This is mostly a matter of article “plug-and-play” work since I had all the content for this site outsourced.
Again, the strategy here is to focus most of my time on what has actually made me money (weight loss and get your ex back). This is classic Tim Ferriss 80/20 principle in action. I’ll get back to websites #1 (panic attacks), #3 (dating advice for men), #5 (tattoos), and #7 (learn Japanese) once I handle my money makers.
While working on website #6, I noticed that some lazy jerk stole some of my articles so he could do some cutesy Valentine’s Day post on his trashy blog. He copied them word for word, which really pissed me off. I normally wouldn’t care, except for the fact that not all of the pages on website #6 have been indexed yet, and I didn’t want Google or any other search engine to think that his stolen articles were the originals. He finally took them down (without even an apology, I might add), so I didn’t have to resort to my Plan B, which would be to completely destroy his blog (get him banned from search engines, banned from adsense, report him to his hosting company, contact all the clients he has listed on his site, and contact all his sponsored andvertisers).
My girlfriend decided that she wants to build one of these websites herself too, so I am teaching her how to do that and showing her the ropes. She is still working full-time, so her site will come together much slower than my sites.
Two more sales this week and one rebill for something I sold a few weeks ago. It’s been kind of slow lately, and I’m starting to feel pretty poor. I think I can hold out for another month or two on savings. After that I might need to sell my car or get a job at McDonald’s. Hoping my big pay day comes soon…
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My First Outsourcing Experience
February 9th, 2010 by Clayton
As some of you may know, I recently outsourced some work for the first time. I always imagined that the outsourcing phase would come after I was making “a ton of money.” But quite frankly, I couldn’t wait that long.
I currently have 4 fully-built websites. Out of those 4, most of my income comes from only one of them. It is a “get your ex back” site for women. I decided I should build a second “get your ex back” site for men. Do more of what works, you know… Anyway, I was so tired of writing about relationships from doing the first site, that the thought of doing more of it made me want to cry. So I decided to outsource it since I already knew that I could make money with this niche.
I shopped around a little and I found a guy on the Affilorama forum who was just starting an article writing / spinning business. I contacted him and we shot a few e-mails back and forth. Before you know it, I’m having him write and spin 25 articles for me.
He got me my 25 articles written in one week, exactly the amount of time he said it would take. I took a look at the articles, and some of them were truly amazing! Much better than I could even dream of writing myself. He then proceeded to spin the articles. Of course this took longer, but he would e-mail me a few articles every day or so. These articles are pretty good too.
Overall, I am incredibly impressed with the value I got for the price I paid. Outsourcing is really exciting stuff. All it takes is a few e-mails and you can have someone else do what would have realistically taken me about one or two months of work. Pretty frickin’ cool!
Anyway, if you’re looking for an outsourcer, I’d recommend you talk to:
jamesbryan2009 (at) gmail.com
I understand he plans on setting up a website, but as far as I know it isn’t up yet otherwise I would happily link to him.
His prices are very good (less than elance) and the quality of work is also pretty good as well (often times better than what I could do myself). He is very responsive and gives updates on project progress. I’m very happy with how everything went.
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Website Building Update – Week 23
February 5th, 2010 by Clayton
This week has been all about backlinks! I’ve taken the articles I’ve spun last week and the articles my outsourcer has spun as well, and I’m going berserk with directory submits and web 2.0 sites. It’s pretty boring, but at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done so much stuff!
I finally earned “platinum” status on Ezine Articles after submitting 60 articles. This is pretty cool for me! Sometimes I need minor accomplishments like this to make me feel good about myself. I can now get an article approved in a few hours, as opposed to the two weeks or longer it took back in September.
Article Marketing Automation (AMA) was down again on Tuesday, which was incredibly frustrating since basically everything I’m doing right now relies on me having access to my account on their site. They seem to be having lots of problems lately. I wonder when they’ll decide they owe us a free month of service to compensate for all of their constant site errors…
Plus there was an internet outage on Wednesday, which slowed me down too.
Sales-wise, this week has been pretty slow. I came in just shy of $500 for the month of January. Only two sales from website #4 since last Friday. I’m not letting it get me down though since I’m pretty sure that after doing my current SEO activities for a solid month or so, I should be getting a butt-load of traffic and hopefully sales.
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Website Building Update – Week 22
January 29th, 2010 by Clayton
I just past the 5-month mark doing this.
I’ve also started using a program called the Best Spinner to help with article spinning. I found out about it from an Affilorama member. It’s free while it’s in Beta testing, so I’ve been going crazy spinning as much as I can before it goes live on February 1st and I have to pay for it. Using this software has been great. I feel like some kind of really lame super-hero that has the power to spin an article in 30 minutes. This week has primarily been an article spinning marathon. Next week, or rather next month (!), I get to start using all these articles and submit them to directories.
Other than that, it’s hard for me to know what to write this week. I had one of those a-ha moments a few days ago and I am in the process of overhauling my SEO strategy. I think this will be extremely effective when I put it into action. The only problem is I think I built too many websites too fast and now I’m starting to feel like I’m drowning in work. So much to do. I’ll write more about this if/when I know it works.
This week I crossed the $400 mark for this month. This is really exciting for me because I just met one of my goals. I remember hearing about a report a few months ago that said that 46% of internet marketers make less than $400 a month, and 17% make over $20,000 a month (I can’t seem to find the report, otherwise I would link to it). Anyway, I’m in the top 54% of marketers now! That’s pretty exciting. Soon I’ll be able to pay my rent with all this IM stuff. I guess it will probably take some time to get up to the top 17%…
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Website Building Update – Week 21
January 22nd, 2010 by Clayton
This week I’ve started backlinking some backlinks to build up some link juice to my first level backlinks. Kind of complicated, I know, but I’ve been taking my previously spun articles and reformatting them for a different spinning service called Free Traffic System and swapping the link URL’s out for my web 2.0 sites and Ezine Article pages.
I also started some preliminary keyword research for website #7. This time, I’m running an extremely tight game. I’m going after keywords that not only pass Traffic Travis analysis (4- and 5-star rating), but I’m also using the Niche Profit Classroom keyword model, or at least what I can make of it from watching a few free webinars. I think this site is going to be really successful because of it. I know it makes me a super-nerd, but I get really excited about doing keyword research.
My outsource guy also got me my batch of 25 articles for website #6 (website #5 is still on hold for now). So far, I am really impressed with this outsourcing stuff. I did one day of keyword research and sent a few e-mails, and someone else did what would have taken me one or two weeks of work. Pretty spiffy! I’m really looking forward to getting my spun articles from this guy! All I need to do now is just go through these articles and add in my own voice and unique flavor.
My advertisement in a local paper went live yesterday. I think I’ll cut it out and save it as a memento.
So, let’s see how I did this week…
One sale from my newspaper ad so far. Not too bad, considering I only paid $25 to place it. Other than that, this week has been a little quiet.
Well, time to get back to spinning/writing/link building.
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