Website Building Update – Week 43
Well, I made it through the awkward gear-shifting phase from writing/spinning articles to article marketing. Surprisingly this is a lot more difficult than it sounds when you’re juggling 7 websites and trying to keep your writer busy.
I’m now doing some heavy backlinking together with my worker on websites #3 and #7. This is probably what I’ll be doing for the rest of the summer.
On Wednesday the internet decided that it was going to be huge pain in the ass for me. Hubpages stopped working and I couldn’t make a hub. Same with Tumblr. And Tripod became almost useless by making all the text I gave it invisible and inserting random symbols everywhere in my blog posts.
Anyway, I’ve got way too much to do these days. If you see me skulking around leaving comments on your blog or posting too much on Affilorama, smack me and tell me to stop slacking off and get back to work 
Also, I think I’m going to put together a bonus package for the AffiloJetpack launch. I have an idea that might just be stupid enough to work. If nothing else you’ll get a good laugh out of it. If you’re interested in AffiloJetpack, I will totally be your IM BFF if you buy through my affiliate link Stay tuned…
This month has been a little slower than last month despite slowly increasing traffic. I think it’s because I added a lot of unmonetized pages on my sites that were “leaking” visitors. I patched up the problem this week with more monetizing. Hopefully this will help boost sales. So far I’ve already made two sales from the website after I monetized the extra pages.
Overall, things have been more consistent though. No dry spells, no hot streaks. I’m making about one or two sales per day, which is pretty nice for someone like me that craves consistency.
June 25th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Hi there,
Greetings From The UK
Found your site via Chris Guthries’ comments page. Happy to meet a fellow affiliate marketer who was inspired by the writing/talking of one Mr T Ferris.
I am currently trying to figure out how to make an online living myself and am also documenting my progress.
Tim has an updated book out which I am trying to get hold of here but it hasn’t been released yet. Have you read it at all? I am mostly interested in reading about the case studies by people who are living and working in the way that he describes.
Anyhoo – good luck with your progress. I hope to enter further into the Clickbank arena at some point. Even though I only have one clickbank site and a couple of hubpages I still keep checking my account, crossing my fingers in hopes of a sale. sad, I know.
Good luck on your money making journey!
June 25th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
@TipTopCat, Thanks for visiting my blog. I did get the updated version of the 4 Hour Work Week, but I lent it to a friend before I could really take a look at it
It is graduation time and one of my friends just graduated into this dismal economy. I thought she could use another perspective to see things from before struggling to join the rat race.
Don’t worry about being a ClickBank addict. I sometimes check my CB account like 10 times a day. LOL.
Anyway, I just took a quick glance at your blog. Looks like you’re doing pretty good for yourself. I’ve never been to the UK, but I believe 1 pound = $2, more or less. It seems you make a lot of Hubpages. Personally I haven’t had too much luck with them myself, but admittedly, I haven’t really tried that hard either.
June 26th, 2010 at 4:36 am
@Clayton, nice work this week. Don’t forget you have just under 10 weeks to complete one year at this.
All the best this week.
Dennis’s last blog ..Internet Marketing – Week 18 and 19
June 27th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
@Dennis, yeah, I’ve got a lot of work cut out for me in the next 9 weeks!
I hope you’re doing well these days.
June 28th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Hey Clayton,
It’s been a while! Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m glad to see you’re doing well!
Ken
June 28th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
@Ken, Hey man! Yeah, I was actually thinking about you the other day when I was writing an article about learning Japanese and used the word wasabi.
Anyway, things are definitely going better these days, but I still have a long way to go. I’ve gotten sucked into the internet marketing world and haven’t had much time for the personal development world. I need to get my income up to a live-able level before I can really kick back and ponder the bigger questions like “what is life all about” ya know?
Anyway, I’ve had your blog bookmarked for several months now. Just don’t get time to read very much these days. Way too busy… I hope it changes soon
June 28th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Clayton,
No doubt! I just left my full time job to jump into the world of Internet marketing, so I’m in the same boat as you. We’ll keep in touch, maybe prodding here and there to keep each other motivated! (Although I don’t think you need any motivation!)
June 28th, 2010 at 11:52 pm
@Ken, Wow! Are you just getting started or have you been doing IM for a while now? If you’re into affiliate marketing there’s lots of great (free) info at Affilorama.com
Trust me, I can use all the motivation I can get. Making $1000 / month online may sound really cool, but if that’s all the money you have to live on it can be tough. Especially if you’re used to making $3000 or $4000 per month.
June 29th, 2010 at 2:21 am
Hi Clayton!
Good to see your improvements on IM!
I have a technical question for you, because I’m stuck with rankings and I’m going back to keyword research…
Lately, to chose keywords, I checked the SERP results for exact match, allintitle and allinanchor…but some days ago I understood that this method doesn’t work well, because even if you have only 10 competitors, but they are all PR9 sites, you will never rank.
So I came back to check Traffic Travis SEO Analisys, leaving the SERP results as a complementary method.
And I’m stuck again! Because I’ve found that the largest part of keywords have been yet choosen by sites better than mine…
So, the question is: when, analizing your competitors, you can say “ok, I can get the 1st page with this keyword”?
What’s your parameters when you create a new site? PR<3? Backlinks <1000?
Corrado
June 29th, 2010 at 11:01 am
@Corrado, Yeah, definitely look at the first page results in Google. To me, the most important things are:
Page Rank
Number of Backlinks to that specific page
I like to look at the overall picture that the front page makes. If there is one or two PR 9 pages, that might not be so bad if everything else is PR1 or 0. But if everything on the front page is PR5, then there could be a problem. Just ask yourself “could I do better than any of these pages?” Generally, I can get PR2, probably about 30-40 backlinks to a page, and several hundred to a domain. If your competition is a little bit better than that, but their on-page SEO isn’t very good, then you can probably beat them.
One of the biggest clues I’ve noticed that a keyword is easy to rank for though is if there are 2 pages for the same domain listed on the first page (for example 2 Ezine Articles, 2 WikiAnsers, or 2 Hubpages). If Google has to go to the same domain twice to fill up the first page, then you should be able to rank relatively easily.
Hope this helps.
June 30th, 2010 at 5:38 am
Great to see you getting there with the increasing income, slowly but surely! A good reminder that hard work, over time, doe pay off!
June 30th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
@Michelle, Thanks. Yes, it’s been hard work, but I still have a long way to go before I’m making a full-time living at this.
July 1st, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Hey Clayton, just wanted to know how many different websites you’re juggling right now and how are you keeping abreast with all of them?
I have my sites in a spreadsheet right now, and even though they’re only a few sites, it’s already getting cumbersome to track everything.
Thanks,
TRENDS
July 1st, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Hey Clayton,
I always find great info in your comments areas. Really thanks for the tips that you wrote above for @Corrado and it make more sense to me right now after seeing them.
Cheers
Javier
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:53 am
@TRENDS, Hey, thanks for stopping by my blog. I have 6 websites. Honestly, it’s pretty tough to juggle all my sites these days. I’m struggling to keep ahead of my worker which is pretty stressful. It helps if you just focus on one or two at a time, though. Whenever I’m too stressed it’s because I’m working on too many sites at once and I just need to focus.
@Javier, I’m glad that helped you. Good luck with your keyword research.
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Clayton, your comments are a goldmine of information. As I read through them, I am seeing a lot of nice tidbits of information that complement the nice simple journal style of the site.
A question. Above you say, “Generally, I can get PR2″ How long in months does it seem to be taking you to gain pagerank? Have any of your sites broken over to PR 3 yet?
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:19 pm
@Jameson, Thanks for checking out my blog. I do have PR3 on one site. It’s tough to say how long it will take for Google to update PR. They only update it 4 times a year I think, so you might end up waiting up to 3 months for Google to even give you a PR0. Just keep building quality backlinks and trust that Google will reward you when the time comes.