Website Building Update – Week 11
I apologize for not posting on Wednesday. Comcast went out in my neighborhood and I was unable to get online for a while.
Anyhow… This is the 11th week that I’ve been tinkering around with these websites. It’s been almost a month and a half since my last sale and I’m honestly getting frustrated with it. I’m not going to stop though. I’m way too stubborn for that. One of the curses of being a Taurus I suppose.
Traffic and search engine ranks are holding steady on the first three websites. Clicks on affiliate links are up though. I’m getting about 5-10 clicks on affiliate links each day. If the conventional wisdom of 1% conversion on sales pages is true, I should expect to make about one sale every 10 or 20 days. Not great, but at this point I’ll take it.
This week I’ve been focusing on submitting articles to article directories. I unearthed some additional “do follow” article directories this week, so I have more places to submit too and hence more backlinks. This is essentially a game of copy-and-paste, which is honestly quite boring. But at least those e-mails that say “your article has been approved” give me a little sense that I’m making some kind of progress.
I’ve also turned my attention to Website #4 this week. I’m generating content for it and I’m nearly half done. This week, I’ve averaged about three articles each day for the new site. At this rate all the content should be done by next week. I’m closing in on my goal of getting five websites up by the end of 2009. If nothing else all the writing is good practice for NaNoWriMo, which I fully plan on doing next year.
I’m really excited about Website #4. It’s a niche site that supposedly has a very high conversion rate, so once I start getting traffic to it, I will hopefully start getting some sales. That will definitely boost my confidence in all this.
Sometimes I’m not sure what keeps me going. I remember after I finished the first site, I thought to myself “Wow! That was so much work! There’s no way I’ll be able to stay motivated to do that four more times!” Some how I keep doing it though. I’ll admit that I do get a strange pleasure out of fabricating the life stories for each of my pen names.
I guess one thing that you need to get used to is the dark side of separating your income from your time. That is to say passive income means that you get paid without having to work, but it also means you have to work without getting paid sometimes.
Okay, so here’s my Clickbank sales report for this week. Keeping at it. Something has got to give soon.
Still Waiting
November 15th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Keep working at it! I don’t have much advice to offer other than that. I think some of these things just take time.
November 30th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Thanks, Eric. Yeah, this kind of stuff takes time. It can’t be easy or else everyone would be doing it. I just keep telling myself that and I keep pushing on.