Website Building Update – Week 37
I’ve been having some good days lately. Honestly, I can’t really explain the results I’ve been getting. I’m getting about the same traffic and about the same hop clicks. It’s probably mostly luck. After all about two weeks ago I went 5 days with no sales. I guess it just comes and goes. I hope it doesn’t go for a while though…
Anyway, I set up a few deadlines and a business plan yesterday with my girlfriend. It’s her goal to finish actually building her website by next weekend. And I want to get each of my sites up to about 50 pages of content (all marketed) by August 26 (the one year anniversary since I started making these sites).
Based on my conservative estimates, I think I should be able to hit $2,500 / month by August 26 pretty reasonably. Of course, I could do much better, but $2,500 is a very achievable goal. It won’t make me rich, but at least I should be able to stop losing money every month.
Then sometime in September or October, my girlfriend and I can take a trip to Thailand. We can stay for about two months and then return in time for the holidays. $2,500 should go a lot further in Thailand.
The only bad part of this plan is that I’ll be in Thailand during NaNoWriMo, which is a pity. I’d rather spend my time riding an elephant than writing 1,500 words a day. I guess I can always do NaNoWriMo some other time. Someday I’ll write that novel. I guess it will just be more interesting if I can get some elephant riding under my belt first.
Anyway, this week has been pretty good. I’ve almost reached one of my goals of having a sales spike on each day of my Clickbank report…
May 14th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Wow, I really admire you about what you have achieved. How do you promote your site? Article marketing? or others.
May 14th, 2010 at 9:08 am
@Tonyguitar, I mostly use article marketing and AMA.
May 14th, 2010 at 11:01 am
Hi Clayton,
Nice work.
How many article do you write every day. Do you only use articles.
What about building backlings and social bookmarking? By the way how is PCC going?
Dennis
May 14th, 2010 at 11:27 am
@Dennis, Hey man! Lately I haven’t written very much. I’m training my worker to write original articles right now. Plus I’m doing a lot of article marketing these days too. In the past, I would spend about a week or two writing articles (3 or so per day). Then I would switch over to spinning articles and doing article marketing for a few weeks. Basically just submitting articles to about 15-20 different directories then letting it run on autopilot in AMA.
Writing articles can actually be pretty easy if you’re in a fairly subjective niche like dating or relationship advice. Just pick a keyword, and write an article on “3 Secrets to (keyword)” or “5 Things You Must Avoid to (keyword).” These articles usually only take about 20-30 minutes to write. If you have a more technical niche like language learning or building solar panels you have to make sure your information is technically accurate. These articles can take a lot longer to write depending on how much you already know about the niche.
Now that I have someone working for me, I’m trying to restructure things, and it’s hard to know exactly where things will fall once that happens.
I tried to do a little bit of social bookmarking, but it was so boring and tedious that I just couldn’t keep at it.
PPC is going okay. I’ve spent I think around $45. I’ve only made 3 sales from it though totaling about $140. I’m not doing so bad with my 3rd PPC attempt, but I feel like I still have heaps to learn. I barely know anything about how to improve Quality Score, get lower CPC, or write an amazing pre-sell. I feel like I’m almost starting over from scratch
May 15th, 2010 at 2:14 am
Hi Clayton, i’m very happy with your success, its great to have a person whos willing to show us all their journey from start to finish. I know I appreciate it!
I have some questions, maybe you can let me know what I am doing wrong. I used to follow the 21 day traffic blue print from NPC, but i noticed that the majority of my traffic is coming directly from ezine articles. The backlinks aren’t enough to get me good rankings in the SERPs. My conclusion was that while article marketing is a good traffic boost, unless I figure out how to get more backlinks I wont be able to get consistent traffic throughout.. Posting to article directories. Is your traffic coming from SERPs or Article Marketing, and if its coming from SERPs how much article marketing did you need to do in order to rank well?
Thanks in advance
May 15th, 2010 at 9:55 am
@John, About 75% of my traffic comes from search engines. 15% from articles. And the rest is direct. If article marketing isn’t enough to get you ranking in search engines there are two possible solutions:
1. Submit more articles to more directories. This will get you more backlinks which should push your SERPs up.
2. Go after keywords with even less competition. If your current marketing plan isn’t enough, your keywords are probably too competitive. Do more keyword research and get some really good keywords that everyone else has overlooked. I found a keyword about a month ago that got ranked at #5 on Google with zero backlinks, so I know that these gems are still out there.
I hope this helps.
May 16th, 2010 at 2:21 am
@Clayton,
That’s intense. I really hate writing articles. This weekend i wrote two aricles and used best spinner to spin them around.
The whole process took me about four hours. I guess I should just keep doing what am good at – outsourcing!
Anyhow, I have finally launched the site even though I haven’t finished writing all the content. Am not worrid becaue it is just a “toy’ for me.
hey, I should get back to work!
take care
Dennis
May 16th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Hey Clayton,
Just stopping in to let you know I’m still reading
I’ve had a few set backs recently. I was laid off from my job so I had to put my writer on hold. I’ve been making ends meet by writing articles… lol go figure. I’ve gotten a few privet clients from Affilorama at .015 cents a word which isn’t bad. When I get on a roll I make more then my dad job used to pay me but as you know it’s hard to stay concentrated.
This month’s sales were pretty good for me. Made about $200 on my sites. My friend took me to a psychic last month and they said my article marketing would take off soon… I don’t know If I believe in that stuff but they did predict my job loss so that was kind of spooky :p
Things are looking good for you! Enjoy your elephant riding~!
May 16th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
@Dennis, Yeah, that’s about how fast I can write and spin two articles. Spinning is enough to make you go crazy sometimes… What motivates me to spin is to think about all the backlinks I can get from it. backlinks = traffic = money!
@Amanda, I was wondering what happened to you! I’m sorry to hear about you getting laid off. Honestly, this isn’t how I planned on starting my online business either. After I graduated last year, I was hoping to get a cushy desk job and use my income to outsource most of the work for my business. Thanks to the economy, I couldn’t get a job, so I just had to start my business on my own. It’s not been easy and I’m struggling financially, but I feel like I’m almost “there.” Pretty soon I should be able to make more money than I spend and start paying off some debt.
May 16th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Hey, Well done in what you have achived here! I am mainly a website creator and never bother with backlinks or articles.
I will start writing tomorrow! you have gained me as a new follower!
May 16th, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Hey Clayton,
What is NaNoWriMo? Is that something new??
Cheers
Javier
May 16th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
@Ian, Good luck! Building backlinks can be very time-intensive, but eventually the rewards make it worthwhile!
@Javier, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The rules are that during the month of November, you try to see if you can write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time, but work/school has always taken up too much time. I guess I could do it any old time, but it would be more fun to do it in November when everyone else is excited about it
May 18th, 2010 at 12:21 am
Nice blog Clayton!
You’re right about writing article in subjective niche, I have 2 sites on technical niches and evertime I write new articles on them, I must do at least 30 minutes research.
I think 20 article directories is a lot, do you also submit to directories that put nofollow (like article base) or the one that forbid anchor link (like article city)?
Btw, Thailand is in political chaos now and I heard there are ppl die or injured every day there. Are you sure you’re goin there?
May 18th, 2010 at 8:19 am
@Stefan, Yeah, you’re telling me! I made a learn Japanese website last month and since I have no clue how to type Japanese characters on my computer, I literally had to copy and paste all the characters from other websites. Talk about time-intensive.
I do submit to articles base, even though it’s nofollow because it does generally rank pretty well with search engines. I ignore the other nofollow directories. I also do submit to article city. You don’t get the anchor text, but you can still get a link.
Yeah, I’m hoping all this stuff in Thailand gets resolved soon. But if for some reason things keep getting ugly, then I’ll probably go somewhere else. Maybe Peru? I hear they have a similar cost of living over there. Plus, in the southern hemisphere it will be spring / summer during October through December.
May 18th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
@Clayton
Which are the article directories you submit to and what do you guys mean about follow or no-follow directories? Do we target based on page rank of directories or traffic the directories gets or something else?
Cheers
Javier
May 19th, 2010 at 12:12 am
@Javier
Directories such as Article base put “no follow” in the link. Basically it tells google bot to ignore the link, thus you won’t get any SEO benefit from it.
@Clayton
I envy you for that. Japanese related stuff has always been my passion and I want to go there someday. I used to think about build one too, but since it is not really “hot” niche, I went with Mark’s example: World of Warcraft niche
Bad idea though, it is a very dynamic niche where the next patch will makes hot guide today become irrelevant trash tomorrow and I’m having hard time keeping my site and newsletter up to date with the current patch.
If your only concern is living cost, why not go for Malaysia or Singapore? I think they have decent environment for convenient living (just stay away from Marina Bay Sands)
May 19th, 2010 at 12:20 am
@Javier, Here is a list of good directories:
http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php
There are two kinds of backlinks “do follow” and “no follow.” Do follow means that search engine spiders will follow the link and index any content on it. The link will also be counted toward to total number of backlinks for that page and link juice will be passed on to that site as well.
No follow links have none of those qualities. Basically, you don’t really get any search engine credit at all. They are only good for bringing traffic to your site if people actually click on the link. Some people that are a lot smarter than me believe that no follow links actually do count a very little bit toward your SEO efforts. Personally, I don’t have enough experience to say one way or the other on this.
Basically, I just go for high PR directories that have do follow links. I also submit to Articles Base since it gets a lot of traffic even though it is no follow.
I hope this helps.
May 19th, 2010 at 12:38 am
@Stefan, Yeah, I went to Tokyo for two weeks in 2008. It was a blast! I’m going to have to make a lot more commissions before I can afford Japan though…
I’ll have to check out Malaysia and Singapore. I haven’t really looked into those places yet.
Yeah, aside from the fact that I would be completely clueless about anything WoW related, I was worried that something would change and the game would go out of fashion or they’d release some kind of massive update that would change everything. I’m lazy, so I prefer niches where things stay the same.
May 19th, 2010 at 3:15 am
@Stefan. Thanks for the explaination.
@Clayton, Thanks for the link and if you do come to Singapore let me know. I can bring you around for a tour and we can talk more about internet marketing.
Anyway, it’s always good to do niches that are evergreen such as muscles building, dating, making money and a few more as these are the niches that keep on having people searching for an answer. Try to avoid hit & run niches as in the long term, you will not benefit much from it because we want to build an online passive income instead.
May 19th, 2010 at 8:27 am
@Javier, Thanks for the offer. I’ll keep that in mind. Based on a little research, it seems Singapore is a bit more expensive than I was hoping for. What do you think? If I worked really hard and made it to my $US 2500 / month goal (about 3500 Singapore Dollars), do you think that would be enough to get by in Singapore?
May 21st, 2010 at 7:29 am
@Clayton,
3500 Singapore dollars per month for a household of 2 in Singapore is considered enough for me. However, I would suggest maybe you save up for a few months first and visit those countries you want to stay for a few days to see whether you find the environment suitable for you and your gf first. Maybe during the few days tour, you can go around researching on the rentel fees and visit our supermarket to see whether you find the food prices here suit your budget for your household or not as different people got different spending limits and budgets.
Don’t based on other people point of view of the countries you desire to go but experience it yourself and make your own decision whether it is suitable for you two.
Cheers
Javier
May 21st, 2010 at 9:07 am
@Javier, Thanks. I live a pretty modest lifestyle and I’d like to think that I’m pretty open to new things. You’re right though. It probably would be a better idea to wander around until I found a place I like to settle down for a while. There’s just so many places I want to visit and see…