Website Building Update – Week 33
April 16th, 2010 by Clayton
Hot diggity! I finished my Japanese language website! I’m excited about this one, big time. This is my first real “hobby” website too. All the other ones are “problem” websites. So I’m curious to see how this will fare.
Additionally, I’ve been churning out new articles for my older websites too. Honestly, my biggest fear is that I’ll hire someone to spin articles for me, and they’ll be so good at it that I won’t be able to keep up and keep them busy. I’m trying to build up a backlog of articles for them, I guess.
I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I think website #6 got out of the sandbox! Overnight all of my ranking jumped from around 250 to 11 or 12.
I’ve plotted out a set of about 25 keywords for each site to target for the “slow growth” phase. I’d like to get each of my sites up to 50 articles each. At that point, they should all be consistent earners. Especially since my keyword research is a lot better than it used to be.
This week was pretty good. Check out Sunday. My first $100 day!
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Website Building Update – Week 32
April 7th, 2010 by Clayton
I applied for a few retail jobs this week (thanks a lot professional masters degree…). I also just realized that SEOmoz is literally located about 5 blocks from where I live. They have an opening for a customer support position, so I applied. Man, that would be so cool if I could work there…
Anyway, I got a job as an “enumerator” with the census on Thursday. I start my training in about two weeks and I’ll be working for 4 to 6 weeks.
My mom loaned me some money. I feel really lousy because of that, but I might as well swallow my pride and put my shame aside and just put that money to use to hopefully claw my way out of this hole.
I signed up with Unique Article Wizard, which is like AMA, so now I can feed all my spun articles into there too and get double the backlink power.
I also started looking for a Filipino employee. I figure if I can outsource the article spinning to start, I should be able to focus my time on article writing and submitting. Even if things turn out really poorly, I should be able to write at least 3 articles / day and then give them to my VA to spin. That works out to about 60 pages of fresh content per month written are marketed. Even that would be amazing!
I’m feeling a little trigger shy about actually hiring someone full-time though. It’s like “Oh shit! Can I really be responsible for someone else’s livelihood?” I really need to do this though. Especially if I’m going to be working with the census and won’t have as much time to spend on this in May. I guess there’s a reason why Tim Ferriss made this one of his “comfort challenges” in the 4 Hour Work Week.
Website #7 is coming together nicely and I should be done with the actual website in about another week or two. I’m really proud of this one and I hope it takes off and starts earning. For some reason my articles are ranking pretty well considering I only have 2 backlinks and the website has been sitting around for a few months (so it’s not the “new site bump”). My hope is that it is because of the NPC Money Word Matrix.
Things have been rolling along with more sales from website #4, but the past couple of days have been quiet.
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Website Building Update – Week 31
April 2nd, 2010 by Clayton
This week I redesigned website #1 after some people at Affilorama gave me a bit of a crit. Honestly, I’m liking the new layout better. It looks more professional, which I think is a good thing for the panic and anxiety niche.
I’m starting my “slow growth” strategy on some of my sites. I’ve added a handful of articles that pass NPC standards (I hope they rank quickly because of that).
I’m also working on website #7 (learn Japanese), which I have neglected for oh so long. This is a very fun niche because it’s something I’m actually interested in. Plus it gives me an excuse to fantasize about riding the JR to Shinjuku or Shibuya when I go to Tokyo…
I installed instapop on my men’s dating advice site just to experiment and see if it really would increase newsletter sign-ups by 400% as people seem to say. I only did it yesterday, so I can’t really say how effective it is yet.
Things are pretty mundane. My daily ritual is basically:
- Arrive at coffee shop, order black coffee and start up computer.
- Write one article for “slow growth” on existing websites and post article to site.
- Spin article with the best spinner then save in AMA as a draft.
- Submit spun article to ezine articles.
- Take yesterday’s spun articles which has been approved by ezine and submit to a bunch of directories and web 2.0 sites.
- Take break and read affilorama / warrior forum / news / etc.
- Spend rest of day writing “learn Japanese” articles, or tweaking other websites.
- Leave coffee shop around 4:30 or 5:00 and meet girlfriend at work.
Anyway, it’s kind of dull, but it works.
March turned out pretty good. I made about $665. Still not enough to really make ends meet. Maybe I should look into getting a small business loan or just run away to the Philippines where I apparently already make a full-time income…
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Website Building Update – Week 30
March 26th, 2010 by Clayton
Well, now I’ve done it! I bit the bullet and finally formed an LLC company for all my internet exploits. I must admit that the process was remarkably easy, though incredibly stressful emotionally. It is hard to believe that I am now a genuine business owner. Datsu-Sara Media LLC was officially formed on March 25, 2010.
I guess I can no longer tell people at cocktail parties that I am “unemployed.” I can now tell them that I am the owner of a company with a projected 2010 revenue of $6,000 (does this count as my first quarter report?). Good grief…
Speaking of being unemployed, I accidentally applied for a job with the US census. I was working at a coffee shop yesterday when this woman comes in and says that they’re doing a census test there and that I needed to leave. I was thinking of signing up anyway, so I asked her if I could just take the test right there. I could, and I did. It was pretty easy and I got 100% on it. I guess someone is supposed to call me in a few days to discuss the next step.
The whole time I was taking the test, I kept thinking about all the stuff I could outsource with the money I’d make with the census. I figure if I work for like a month, I’d make about $1500 after taxes. That’s enough to keep someone in the Philippines working full-time for 6 months.
Anyway, on to website stuff:
Unfortunately I think website #6 got sandboxed. SERP’s tanked really fast. I guess I’ll just have to wait this out. Oops…
I’m also starting a “slow growth” plan on my sites that actually are pulling in money. I’ll be basically adding one new page to each site every week (plus spinning and article marketing). I’m going to start with the “get your boyfriend back” and “weight loss” sites. I think I’ll do the “men’s dating tips” site too since I know a guy that’s making like $250 a week in the same niche (and yes, I am very jealous of him).
I’m being really picky about my keywords these days. I’m using the Niche Profit Classroom model as the first filter (just do a Google image search for “money word matrix”– I think it’s the 4th result). Then I pick out the buying keywords and then to a Traffic Travis SEO analysis check as a final quality check.
I’m pretty sure that this is what Jem008 did (read affiloblueprint success stories at affilorama), and I’ve really been keeping his success in mind to motivate me all this time.
Anyway, I almost had a $100 day this week. Pretty good week overall.
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Website Building Update – Week 29
March 19th, 2010 by Clayton
Well, I finished article spinning for website #6. I would have finished article marketing but AMA was giving me more problems this week and replacing a bunch of characters with garbage symbols in all my articles. Now I have to go back and edit all the crap out of my articles that they generously inserted for me…
Honestly, I’m getting pretty fed up with AMA. Anyone have any experience with Unique Article Wizard or any other comparable systems?
That just leaves website #1 left. I feel like I’m so close. I’m guessing I’ll probably be all caught up on article marketing next week.
I’m really starting to get weary of all of this article spinning and article marketing. I saw some videos that Amanda (aka TangoShoes) posted at Affilorama during one of the many breaks I take (out of boredom) during the day. I’m considering hiring someone from the Philippines for like $200 or $250 per month.
I understand that people from the Philippines mostly only write “technical English,” but that’s fine. Maybe I’ll just make a bunch of technical websites (build solar panels, registry repair, anti-virus, etc…). You know…the kind of stuff that if I were to try doing it myself, I’d cry.
If this is as good as I think it is, I could get 20 articles written AND spun every week. Even if I low-ball it and it’s 15 articles per week, that works out to over 750 articles in a year. Enough to build like 25 or 30 websites. All that for $3000 ($250 x 12 months).
I already have 5 sites earning me about $100 / week. With an extra 25 sites, that would be an extra $500 / week, or a total of $600 / week.
And these are just conservative numbers.
This could be very interesting…
Anyway, this week was pretty much the same as the past several weeks. Furious article spinning and article directory submissions.
Sales-wise, things were pretty good. I finally sold something from website #1, which hasn’t happened since November. I made a lot of mistakes with that site (mostly bad keywords), but maybe there’s still hope for it!
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Website Building Update – Week 28
March 12th, 2010 by Clayton
I hung out with some architecture friends this past weekend. One of them got cut back to 20 hours a week since there isn’t any work in the office. The other one is expecting to get laid off in April when the project she is working on finishes up (there are no new projects coming into the office). The job market still sucks no matter how much all the “experts” out there are swooning over the fact that we’re not losing jobs as fast as we were before (I’ll wait till there’s actual job growth before I start celebrating the end of the recession).
I’m glad I never turned into one of those unemployed people out there with a LinkdIn page begging and pleading for a job every chance they can get and collecting business cards from recruiters like they’re valuable autographed baseball cards.
I may have only made $1400 in the past six months, but that’s $1400 more than I would have made from “networking” (ie. desperately begging and pleading for jobs that don’t exist)… and I get to keep my dignity to boot!
Anyway, this week I finished article marketing for the men’s dating advice site. I took some of Mark Ling’s auto responder messages for Meet Your Sweet and dumped them into Aweber to supplement my 6-part mini-course.
I crossed the 100 article mark on Ezine Articles too (for those keeping score at home, yes, I submitted 50 articles in the past month!).
I just need to polish up website #1 and #6 then I’ll finally be done with all this heavy-duty article spinning and directory submissions. Almost there!
So far, March is turning out to be a pretty good month. If things keep going like this, I may well break the $500 barrier this month!
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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 (sorry, Sean). 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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