Adventures in Lifestyle Design from a Path Less Traveled
Website Building Update – Week 35
So, I have no real self-control. Once I get an idea in my head, I’m going to end up doing it probably sooner rather than later. After seeing Keith’s results with PPC, I’ve decided to start a few small but cautious campaigns. I’m bidding on “product name review” type keywords and doing a Sean Morrissy type pre-sell and offering a bonus as an incentive to buy from me.
I figure by setting my budget pretty low, I can pay for a day’s worth of advertising with about half an hour of census work. When I look at the upside (Keith’s results), I figure I’d have to stupid not to at least try this.
No sales yet from PPC, though. I’m not spending much either. Only a few dollars total for a couple days of advertising.
Today is my birthday too. I am 28. My birthday feels pretty irrelevant though. All I want is to make enough money travel and do what I want, when I want to without having a desk job. And the only person that can give that to me is myself. Overall this year has been a painful year of struggling to make it online. I’ve had a lot of fun though and I feel like I really am starting to understand how to make it work. I think 28 will be a much more exciting year.
This week started off really badly. I went 5 days with no sales at all and only one $17 rebill. I haven’t had a stretch of bad luck like this in a while.
I’m still rolling forward though, pumping out more articles for low-competition keywords. My actual output has been lower this week, since I could only work about 2 or 3 hours per day (because of census training), but the girl I hired seems to be getting the hang of article spinning and is more than making up for any time I can’t actually work.
Hopefully, I will get more time next week to focus on link building and article writing.
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Nice work Clayton.
My sales have pretty much dropped in recent days, I went about 6 days without a sale.
Am also thinking about quiting my job and concentrating on IM but its scary!
All the best.
zenji
Hey Clayton, Happy Birthday!! I’m only 3yrs older than u and i’m catching up…..
Glad to know your staff is doing some spinning for you and you can free up time to do better things in life.
HI Clayton,
First, Happy Birthday to you and hope you have your wish come true. Anyway, got to know you through one of my friends who are striving to make a full-time income like me. Read through your blog from day 1 to now and learn a lot from your hard work. Thanks for keeping this online live journal.
A few questions to ask you. When do you silo your site? Do you keep on building links for your AB site after the first 30 articles and once your site make money, you start adding new content onto it?
Cheers
Javier
@zenji, yeah man, it can be kind of frightening. I guess I had the “luck” of not being able to get a job in the first place after college :)
PS: I got your e-mail. I’ve been so busy with my job training this week, I’ve barely had any time to sit down and reply though.
@Javier, thanks for reading my blog. I can’t really offer any logical answers to your questions, but:
Siloing – Personally, I silo it when the sidebar starts to get so full of articles it leaves a big white space at the bottom of each page. Really, I do it so my site doesn’t look ridiculous. However, the last website I made, I planned all the keywords and broke them into silo categories right from the start. If you can, I recommend that you do this. It just makes things simpler right from the beginning. You don’t need to worry about redirects and all that.
Adding new content – My first couple of sites aren’t doing as well as I would have hoped. I chose some keywords that were just too competitive. I know more about doing proper keyword research now, so I’m adding new (better researched) content to them to hopefully get them getting more traffic and earning more money. I’m really just doing this to give them a second chance to start earning. My websites that are making money, I’m adding to them to make even more money.
Personally, I would recommend starting with 30 page site, then moving on to another 30 page site and continue until you find a winner. Once you find a winner, add as much content as you can :)
Happy Birthday! I hope 28 is an exciting and fruitful year. Congrats on all the progress you have made this far.
hi clayton and happy birthday!
i’ve just finished to read all your blog posts about online income experiment, and ‘ive noticed that only one of your sites get sandboxed (and get out of sandbox really fast)…
moreover, you made your first sales really soon…
now i’ve 2 sites, both sandboxed. so i’ve no visitors at all and i bought the domain name in january… :(
but i’ll keep to build backlinks with linkjuicer, web 2.0 and article directories…i hope i can reach your first results soon
Hi Clayton,
Thanks for answering my questions. In more detail, how do you actually silo your site through the wordpress blog? Sorry for asking a technical question as I face problem thinking of how to silo with my first site with XSitePro so I thought of using wordpress for the second site instead.
Is it best to keep on building links for your first 30 articles until your site goes up in ranking before you continuing adding new content to your site?
Cheers
Javier
Thanks for the birthday wishes everyone :)
@Corrado, My site that just got out of the sandbox was in there for about a month. Also, with my very first website, I got very high SERP’s as soon as I made it, but those dropped after about two weeks. Google often gives a little boost to new websites, sort of like how a bookstore might display new releases in the front window before they shelve them with the rest of the books.
I can’t say for sure if your site was sandboxed or if it just got the new site boost and now it’s wearing off. Either way, the solution is to keep building backlinks and with a little time your rankings will rise again. If it was sandboxed, it will probably rise in rankings very suddenly and very unexpectedly when it gets out of the sandbox. Otherwise, it will rise slowly.
@Javier, I use the AB wordpress theme. If you go into the “theme options” section in your wordpress control panel, you can change the website from “article mode” to “category mode.” Then you just need to go through your articles and assign them as “parent” and “child” articles to silo them.
When I build links, I will usually just submit articles to a bunch of directories and then publish the article in AMA. AMA continues to submit articles over the next couple of months. During that time I might add new content, but that is pretty much the only link building I really do. AMA continues to build links on autopilot.
Thanks for the advice Clayton. Just check my clickbank and saw a new sale came in. Going to start my link building again after a few weeks of some soul searching of my outcomes.
@Javier, no problem. Glad you’re seeing some sales!