My Family Blog
Posted on June 1, 2008
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Here is a link to my wife’s blog, where she blogs about our family, especially our daughter Anna Kate.
The blog has been up almost 1 year and still isn’t indexed. I really don’t care, but I do find it weird.
Regards,
Chris
Best Free Information in Months
Posted on May 30, 2008
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Jeff Johnson has some fantastic free information on his blog, and it’s all the start of a free tutorial. On top of that he is giving away a SEO Ready version of wordpress, which is apparently pretty powerful.
Things are going well here. I will update in a few days.
Chris
Google & De-Indexing
Posted on May 20, 2008
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The ultra competitive site that I discussed here has, for no apparent reason, be de-indexed by Google. The site is still ranking very well in MSN, so traffic and revenue still exist. I have absolutely no idea why it was de-indexed. It was only ranking in the top 300 in Google and I didn’t do any blackhat tactics at all.
Obviously, this brings us back to the importance of varying your monetization methods. Google can decide at any time to basically turn off all traffic from Google Search. Fun stuff. Kind of bummed today, so this will be all.
Stat Update & Some Thoughts
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Niche Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments
Time to update again. As I said in a previous post, I anticipated earning $300 from EPN for May and I am happy to say that I am currently on track for doing just that.
Halfway through the month I have had 5,200 clicks with my total commissions at $189. Hopefully this trend will continue. Despite stating a number of times that I am going to finally promote my eBay sites I still haven’t done any promotion for these sites. My best performing Mony Tree site earned $99 (from 3 sales) a couple of days ago, which is definitely my best day yet. I have not had an ACRU (new eBay registration) for the month, which is a little odd. These numbers are certainly nothing big, but I am personally esctatic that I’ve done as well as I’ve done this month without doing any promotion and without a $25 ACRU. This brings me to the reason I haven’t promoted my eBay sites.
Prior to building eBay stores I built traditional content sites monetized with AdSense. I still do this when I find a great niche. About two years ago I bought a domain name with the intent on building a content site. I knew absolutely nothing about keyword research, competition analysis or anything else. The only thing I really did know is that Google apparently pays $5+ per click in this financial niche many “gurus” claimed it really is easy. I put the site up and waited for the money to roll in. Of course it never did because the primary keyword the original site targeted has 200,000,000 exact match (search with quotes) competing pages in Google. Lesson learned.
In January of this year I completely overhauled the site. I did extensive keyword and competition research, had 10 high quality articles written and built the site. I promoted it using article marketing (only 3 articles submitted), directory submissions, bookmarking demon & 3WayLinks. I didn’t even think about the site after doing this and forgot to keep up with the stats etc. Well last week my AdSense took a huge jump and it came from this site. Previously the site hadn’t earned $0.01, and suddenly it started earning $8-10 per day. Come to find out the site is ranked 3rd for the primary keyword and 4th for a keyword that I wasn’t actually targeting. This keyword has 180,000,000 competing pages! I still can’t believe it. This is my greatest SEO achievement to-date. This really got me off track a bit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Once I saw my AdSense at that level (which is still weak compared to many), I couldn’t bear to lose the rankings so I started an extensive article marketing campaign for the site in an effort to retain the current rankings and to rank for some of the other keywords. After all, the money I earn from Google & eBay funds the expansion/scaling of my business $10 / day is an extra $300 to use for content etc.
Josh Spaulding released a free report called the $5 Formula (which has an in-depth article marketing strategy). The report does require you to opt-in, but it is absolutely worth it. I don’t receive anything for recommending it. I have implemented the strategy with the site discussed above and now believe every word of the report. Grab it here if you’re interested:
That is really all for now.
Regards,
Quick Update
Posted on April 30, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 1 Comment
Google is updating page rank so all of the A list bloggers are holding their breath. I hope to receive an increase and PR but by all means don’t care one way or another. So far I have noticed one of my sites increased from 0 to 3 and is actually receiving about 100 visitors per day. The site is based on Australian Shepherds and isn’t earning anything at all (despite being monetized by AdSense and an affiliate offer). I need to look at optimizing the site a bit more I guess.
My earnings from the eBay Partner Network for the month are right over $100. Nothing earth shattering, and a significant decrease from my commission junction earnings last month. I am hopeful that the decrease in earnings is due to the transition to EPN and that May will bring a $300+ month.
Here are my EPN Stats for the month:
Total Clicks: 4,328
Total Sales: 25
Total ACRUS (eBay registrations): 1
Total Sites: 12 Mony Tree Sites, 1 Build a Niche Store Site
The nice thing is that I still haven’t done any significant promotion for any of these sites.
My goals for May are to finally start my promotional work for each site. I am going to promote 2 sites at a time starting with the first two I built. I intend on submitting a minimum of 20 articles per site for article marketing and continuing to bookmark them using Bookmarking Demon. I will keep you all updated.
That is all for now.
Regards,
Tim Nolan - Wow
Posted on April 27, 2008
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First $10 day with AdSense, First Ebay Partner Commission
Posted on April 11, 2008
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Today was a day of a couple of firsts for me. The first is I hit $10 / day from AdSense (with a couple of sites) and I had my first commission from EPN (eBay Partner Network). I am most happy about the EPN commission, even though it was only $2, it confirms for me that everything is properly tracking.
Hopefully my eBay sites will continue the momentum and my earnings will continue to increase. I just wanted to give an update, that is all for now. Have a great weekend.
Regards,
Transition from Commission Junction to eBay Partner Network
Posted on April 9, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments
As most everyone should know by now eBay decided to bring their affiliate program in-house and left Commission Junction. Affiliates were given until the end of the month to change links to the new network. I contemplated on waiting until the last week of the month to ensure all the kinks were worked out, but after another member of Mony Tree made a sale and said that everything is tracking well I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change all my sites (11 total, 10 Mony Tree and 1 BANS). I made the change on April 5th
The actual process of changing the sites, both Mony Tree and BANS, from CJ to EPN was absolutely painless. Thanks to the hard work by the staff at MT and BANs, all that was required on my end was to change the unique ID for each site. I had all 10 of my sites changed within 15 minutes.
So, I am a stat junkie and of course logged into my EPN account 5 or 6 times the first day to make sure it was tracking properly. The first day I didn’t notice any clicks at all but was told that it takes a while for the system to update. Long story short, today is the 4th day since I made the change and clicks appear to be tracking fine (568 clicks in 4 days). I haven’t made a sale yet though! So we shall see.
These sites are always lagged a bit due to the nature of the auctions on eBay. The only way to receive an immediate commission from one of these sites is if the visitor to your sites uses “Buy it now” or if they win a 1 day auction (not many 1 day auctions). So according to my stats I should hopefully see some sales come in over the next few days.
I will post an update soon.
Regards,
Mony Tree - Are You Doing This Too?
Posted on March 28, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing | 6 Comments
Many of you know that I have on the eBay Store bandwagon since the beginning of the year. I regret not starting building these sites before then. I have a total of 8 stores up and my commission junction account has just under $500 in it, all from Feb through today. This is hands down the quickest I have profited from new sites ever. The conversion rate of these sites blows me away more than anything. Not one of my 8 sites averages more than 40 unique visitors per day, yet I’ve already made a decent amount from them. I can only imagine what will happen once I really start promoting these sites. My goal at this point is to build two more and the focus on doing nothing but promotion for the next month or so.
Really, if you’re trying to make a go at affiliate marketing and you aren’t building these sites you are really missing out. If you are considering it, I do recommend that you wait until early April after eBays move away from Commission Junction is complete. For those of you that don’t know by now, eBay is bringing their affiliate program in house and severing the relationship with CJ.
My preference for building these sites is hands down Mony Tree. As I said in a previous post, I have used both Build a Niche Store and Mony Tree and have really always preferred Mony Tree. I now prefer it even more. Let me give you an example of why I think Mony Tree is the best option. Most of you know by now that Google decided to create a new policy requiring every website with Google Ads on it have a privacy policy (headache for those of us with many sites). As soon as I found out about this new policy, I notified the members and staff at Mony Tree of the policy change. Within 6 hours of my posting the staff at Mony Tree added a privacy policy to every site in the Mony Tree system. I didn’t have to do anything! That was a huge relief and one of the reasons eBay’s affiliate program change doesn’t concern me at all. I really have countless examples just like this. If I ever make a suggestion to the Mony Tree site, they take it to heart and if possible implement it.
Lastly, the absolute best feature of Mony Tree is the speed/efficiency in which you can put up a fully customized site, with a 100% unique custom header. You can put a BANS site up just as fast, but to put one and and customize it fully takes about 10 times as long as it does with Mony Tree. The only disadvantage Mony Tree has going for it is the monthly fee. With that said, I made more than 2 months fees within the first month. The first month is completely free. So I have been cash flow positive from the start. If you’re on the fence, you should at least give them a shot and take advantage of their 30 day free trial. If you do sign up and have any questions feel free to ask me via email or on the forum.
Regards,
Back from Vacation…
Posted on March 23, 2008
Filed Under Misc | Leave a Comment
Sorry it has been so long since I have updated. I have been quiet busy. I spent Wednsday through Saturday in Florida with my family, paying no attention to the stock market (my 9-5 job) nor internet marketing! I spent my birthday (Thursday) on the beach with my wife and daughter. We had an amazing and relaxing time.
Back to work tomorrow!
Regards,
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