Adventures in Lifestyle Design from a Path Less Traveled
Website Building Update – Week 40
Well, it looks like I’ve got just under 3 months to hit my $2500 / month mark by my August 26th deadline.
In May I made $1360.53. Seeing as how I may be interested in selling some sites down the road, I thought it might be a good idea to start documenting their individual monthly earnings:
Website #1 – $349.50 ($142.74 from PPC)
Website #2 – $61.53
Website #3 – $151.03 ($22.72 from PPC)
Website #4 – $373.21
Website #5 – $0 (website on hold)
Website #6 – $334.02
Website #7 – $0
Other Shenanigans – $91.24
This week I shifted focus to Website #2 for generating more content articles. I am sticking with my productivity trick from last week to pump out heaps of articles.
One of my good friends recently graduated from college and moved back to Seattle. She’s considering leaving her profession as well, so I gave her a copy of the 4 Hour Work Week. This got me thinking that I’ve, in many ways, drifted away from the 4HWW lifestyle. I guess I’ve just been busting my ass trying to get my “muse” up on it’s feet.
I’m thinking of revisiting the 4HWW and all of the exercises in the book in order to get on track for my trip this autumn (whether it be Thailand, Argentina, or elsewhere).
Anyway, this week my dry spell ended and I made some good money. I’m feeling really good about the next few months.
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omg! I am so stoke, so stoke, so stoke! just made my first sale! weee~!
@Lilian, Good job! I remember my first sale. I was sitting down before dinner and I thought I would check Clickbank one more time. Then I saw that green spike and I just stared at it for second before it hit me…OMG! This stuff actually works!
Keep at it!
Congratulations on surpassing the $1000 mark for May! It looks like you are well on your way towards meeting your goals. I also find it difficult at this point to follow the 4HWW plan. I just hired a VA, but it hasn’t freed up any leisure time yet. I am still working just has hard – just on different (and hopefully more productive) things. Hopefully in a few months I will be in the spot where I can hire another VA and start actually reducing my work load (although I guess you can always keep on saying that…). A mini-retirement vacation would certainly be good right about now! :)
@Michelle, yeah, I know what you mean. I have the audio version of the 4HWW on my iPod and I listen to that A LOT. I probably have the whole book nearly memorized. Anyway, one thing Tim encourages would-be NR to do is to let things be “good enough” instead of “perfect.” I often find myself nit-picking over little details like whether or not an image has the appropriate alt text or if I bolded a link or not.
Personally, I think I just need to learn to let go of some of the less-important details.
Yeah, a mini-retirement would be nice. Just when this fickle Washington weather makes you think summer is about to start, we get all this rain dumped on us. Makes me want to run away to Koh Samui.
hi clayton,
are you still using the matrix for keyword research?
Your doing well! would love to know your niches ;) haha
@Lilian congs! AM glad you have made that very important first sale.
@Michelle, a VA would be great but we still find so much attachedment and wanting to control even the smallest of details. I have the same problem. unfortunately for me, I cant afford a VA at the moment because I quit my jb for IM. Just followed Claytons move!
Michelle, learn to treat it as a real business – be the CEO and look at the bigger picture.
@Ian, we all want to know others niches when they are successful but one thing I realised is that you might even be in the same niche but the only difference is that one of you is “TAKING ACTION” and the other is buying “The Next Big Thing” or “Magic Bullet” and storing on the harddrive!…lol..
@Clayton, glad to see visit your blog every weekend to chec your progress.
Looks like you are mastering the “science” of PPC. I might start “watching” you like a hawk!..lol..Anyhow, any tips? I still haven’t used my google voucher…think I still have over $70 to spend but am very hesitant.
I will email you with a few questions.
Dennis
@Corrado, Yeah, I’m still using the NPC money word matrix. I haven’t really put it to the test yet since most of my new pages don’t have backlinks yet. It should get me better results though. I’m glad Mark Ling updated the keyword research part of AffiloBlueprint recently though. His old method (over 1,500 searches and 3 words or more) was a bit too simplistic. Have you ever tried to rank for a keyword like “lose weight fast?” I have, and it is not easy :)
@Ian, My niches aren’t really anything sneaky. Just big niches that tons of people are already making money in. Weight loss, dating tips, relationship advice, etc. You know… The usual suspects.
@Dennis, Thanks. I’m not really having that good success with PPC so far. I made a few sales last month when I started PPC, but none recently. One campaign was profitable, but it’s starting to lose money, and the other one is profitable, but it gets very low search volume. Maybe people like me just aren’t any good at PPC. Maybe I just need to make more money so I can afford to try out several campaigns at once. I’m not really sure how Keith did it… Maybe I’ll figure out PPC one of these days…
Hi Clayton,
Nearly $1400… WoW and congratulations :) I have a quick 2 questions if you don’t mind.
Which pages of your websites make the most sales,
The review pages or the rest of the content pages?
And i see you haven’t monetized some pages on your get your ex bf back website, any particular reason for that?
@Clayton, I guess Keith might want to share his secrets with us. Let me shoot him an email.
Dennis’s last blog ..Internet Marketing – Week 16
How do you intend the serp results of the matrix? As broad or exact match?
what’s the update of mark ling about keyword?
@Alex, Honestly, I don’t have very good click tracking on my sites, so I’m not sure which pages produce most of my sales. But I have a hunch that the majority of them come from the review pages.
I try to keep my websites secret, how did you find that one? I guess I need to do a better job at covering my tracks :) Anyway, I’m adding new pages and it helps me to focus on just one thing at a time. Right now it’s writing articles and posting them to the website. Once I’m done with that I’ll go back and monetize, etc.
@Dennis, Cool. Let me know if he spills the beans :)
@Corrado, When I use the money word matrix, I do a “phrase match” (in quotation marks) search. Sometimes that can be misleading though. I also look at the first page results in Google. If there are a lot of article directories (ezine, articles base, etc.) and even some sites that are listed twice, I go for those keywords. If I’m up against Wikipedia, WebMD, About.com, etc., it is will probably be a ton of work and may not be worth the effort.
Mark updated the AffiloBlueprint Week 1 lessons about a month or so ago. Basically his keyword research method is now 1.) over 1000 searches, 2.) 3 or more words, and 3.) 4 or 5 star rating in Traffic Travis. In my opinion, this isn’t the best keyword research method out there, but it’s much better than what he was recommending before.
Hi Clayton. Nice to see another AB member getting the success that you deserve.
Mark has tried to keep the KW research simple in the beginning, because he knows it is the hurdle that stops 75% of people from ever moving forward. He tried to take out all of the trouble of analysis that paralyzes most people.
I do like his new method a little better, but I agree, it could be a little more detailed. Personally, I target a lot of keywords that sometimes only get 500 searches monthly. Of course some of my sites have over 100 articles on them now, so I still get more traffic than a 30 page site with 1000 search keywords. I have found that the lower search terms are more targeted to buyers, so they convert better, and there is less competition, so they are easy to rank for. I have some that i landed at the top of google within 2 weeks, and only have about 100 backlinks. This makes adding new content to your site more regularly a lot easier. Of course, I am not all about “set it and forget it.” I keep building and adding new content regularly. I try to add at least one article every 2 weeks to each one of my sites. then, spend 2 weeks building backlinks to the new articles.
Anyway, good luck, and keep up the great work. Don’t fret about ppc. I have done a little, and did make some money using it, but I make more money off of SEO and social media marketing than from the paid traffic.
PPC is a good way to monetize a site quickly, but it is not for everyone.
@James, I agreed with with you that Mark Ling do it in a way to stop Analysis Paralysis as something I do think too much about whether the keyword is a buying keyword and whether the competitions is too much. I think the most important thing to do is actually do a proper keyword research and focus on building backlinks instead.
@James, Yeah, I agree that it’s better to just get started and get off the ground when you’re a total newbie. The longer you’re in this game the more little tricks you learn to make things easier and more efficient. I’m fine-tuning my techniques all the time, and I doubt I’ll ever stop.
How are your larger sites doing compared to your smaller ones? I’m in the process of expanding my first 5 sites up to 50-60 pages each. I hope doubling their size will double everything else (especially earnings), especially since I think I’ve got better keywords this time (no more of that “lose weight fast” stuff).
@Javier, Paralysis Analysis is something that can hold a lot of people back, I agree. I think the best way to get over it is to find a reason why you must succeed.
For me, it’s because I’m virtually unemployable (thanks a lot, masters degree) and if I don’t make this work I’ll end up flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Plus, it really motivates me to get my girlfriend to quit her job and to travel all over the world sending postcards to people back home to make them jealous :)
Hi guys. I followed Mark Ling’s “Latest Confidential PPC Domination Plan” which I got as a bonus with a product called “Google Cash” (which I cancelled ;))
I don’t know if Mark still sells it or maybe you could ask him if he’s willing to sell it to you as a stand alone product.
Sales have been not as good this month but like Clayton says, dry patches come and go. I think one of the keys is volume – the number of products you’re advertising – because some will only sell once a month so you need potentially a hundred at least to do really well. Just bid on product names.
Your 5th website is “on hold” as in “sandboxed”? (I remember you mention this before). How do you know that you are being sandboxed anyway?
@Keith, Thanks for the advice. I suspected, I just needed to scale up the number of campaigns. I’ll have to look into this PPC Domination Plan…
Hope your sales pick up soon, buddy!
@Stefan, Website #5 has been on hold since December. It’s in the tattoo niche and I just don’t have the resources to build it the way I want to right now. Basically, I’d like to get (buy) a bunch of images of cool tattoos and make a gallery-style site. It’s on hold until I can get the money to buy a butt-load of photos.
I’m thinking of selling it though to someone that maybe has a bit more enthusiasm than me…
One of my other sites was sandboxed a while ago. Basically, it was fairly new and I was so excited that I built too many links too fast and all of my SERP’s dropped like a rock overnight. I was on the first or second page of Google, then BAM! down to page ten or lower. It only lasted about a month, though.
This is different than the “new site bump” though. I like to buy my domains months before I actually start building a site. I’ll put up one or two articles and just let the site age while I work on other things. I don’t like all the drama of the “new site bump,” so I try to start the clock early and let the site get some age before I truly build it out.
do some of your sites are suffering for google mayday update? i’ve read that this update tend to penalize sites focalized on long tail keywords
@Corrado, I don’t think I got hit by the May Day update… From what I understand, it mostly only hits low-quality pages, like Amazon review pages that just scrape a product’s specifications from the Amazon page. I’ll admit, I don’t know much about the May Day update, though…
Do you do somethingt to make it out from the sandbox? I have a site with similar case as yours (serp dropped drastically) and it never come back even after 5 months or so.
About PPC, I guess Perry Marshall is the best in that area? Recently he just hold a seminar that only invite people who spend thousands of dollars/month in their PPC campaign in Maui (if I recall, the cost is also a few thousands dollar). But then again, he focuses on helping small business that create products, so I don’t know whether the techniques can be applied to affiliate business as well.
@Stefan, I’ve only had the one site get sandboxed. As far as I know, there really isn’t anything you can do about it. Just keep building links and adding content having faith that it will come out sooner or later. I’ve heard that sites can stay in the sandbox for anywhere from 2 weeks to 4 months.