Grand Online Profits

Oh boy – another month is over..

I’ll be straight now – thanks to google, my income dropped a bit and:

March 2012 – $7208,33

One of my lastest posts was about blog networks. I’ve showed some real numbers of how a typical blog looks like in each network. Thousands of posts indexed, even more – not (yet) indexed. Any imaginable topic. And thousands of such sites serving the needs of IM SEO crowd.

It’s 1000% obvious that google doesn’t want this in their index – so, all the recent events with BMR. I also was a member of Backlink Solutions – and checked several of their domains (got data from pingbacks) – all were deindexed. That was enough for me to discontinue my membership.

You can also check out other people’s incomes for March 2012 by visiting Mark’s page – Curated list of income reports from blogosphere March 2012.

What’s Working, What’s Not…

Well, there’s recently been an insane amount of useless content generated on the topic of “SEO – sky is falling” with variations. Death of blog networks, google this, google that etc..

Here’s my take on that all – it’s all the same like a year or 2 before.

1. Analyse who’s in top 10 and their overall strategy (not only backlinks, but the site itself, how it’s laid out, the content)

2. Diversify as much as possible

That’s basically it – I haven’t come up with better streategy for myself (and advice for people who are in SEO and affiliate marketing, like me) for the last several years of dealing with google and their ongoing worthless paranoia about so called “better sites in SERPs” .

Always analyse the top ranked sites. I personally now use blekko.com + all known free SEO tools + SEO Power Suite that I bought with a good discount some time ago. Enough to see what’s behind the site that ranks #1-2-3. # of unqiue domains linking to it, the overall links profile, whick links he’s relying on…

You will be amazed at what works now – I mean right now! post panda x.xx. I’ve seen sites that rank #2-3 and use nothing but good old sidebar links. Not a single blog comment, profile link, article link, guest post – just links exchange (or adding) like in good old 2007.

I’ve used a good old directory submission and got one of my recent sites to #2 for pretty competitive keyword – and nice $20 daily earnings added to my adsense portfolio.

I’m still using good old profile links and my sites are not buried in the 100+ page of google, but make me money.

Yes, the death of 1-2 blog networks doesn’t mean that all other blog networks are dead now and their links are a waste of time, obviously these links work, you just need to diversify as much as possible… probably like that:

(protecting the networks by hiding their names)

And these are just blog networks…

3. Just build new sites.

A lot of advice is now given to the sites that at least require some serious time and money investment to became real authority.

But – we are building sites that don’t have that huge inventory of super-researched and expert content on the topic – we just target the buyers and give them all the info to make an informed desicion and click that “order now” button on the merchant site.

Who cares linking to us with the so called “natural” links? “Look, that 10 page mini-site about the product is so great, that I can’t help pushing this FB like button like crazy, tweet about it and send it to all my friends over email”!!!

Oh, maybe your competitors in the same niche will kindly link to you? I’m doing this every day becase this is what google is dreaming about – narual linking to great content 

google doesn’t care about your business – so phrases like “so this, and google will love you” are complete BS.

It’s not google that decides how I should monetize my site, how many banners/links to place & where – it’s ME who decides.

It’s not a robotic google algo that determines relevancy of conent->search term – again, it’s me, the marketer, who understands marketing and relevant content a bit better then virtual algorythm of ranking. So when some google slave starts to spread out his philosophy of “how things should be because I said it” – well, who cares about his words? Newbies? Probably! Smart guyes just keep smartly adjusting to the new rules and turning it in their favor

Aren’t you sick of these crazy advertisements all over Youtube, you have to wait 5 secs to skip the ad in order to watch your favourite clip. Quite often, you HAVE to watch it anyway.

“Using our video hosting platform? – eat the s#*t we’re getting money for!” – but you cannot do this on your sites, because we set the rules, and your sites are just the food for OUR crowd, and WE want all the money from it – you just help us with it and eat your adcents, or if you’re earning from 3rd party programs – get lost from our top!

OK, I hope this post won’t get spread too far, so I humbly shutting down my mouth and keep working on my business.

Is anyone still missing me? )

It’s been a while and I never posted my monthly report posts with such a delay. I’ve finally managed to get out to a vacation, which was aso much needed for both me and my mom, who wasn’t on any vacations for over 10 years.

For about a month, we had a rest in a beautiful place in Belorussia – there was a white snow, frost and lonely wood with no towns nearby. Unfortunatley though, this affected my online work, as I had to buy a wi-fi card, activate it and enjoy the slowest connection I can recall from my early “internet” days.

So, I could only answer emails and manage my assistant who did all the work.

Despite my pessimistic thoughts, the last 2 months appeared to be the incredibly cool in terms of affiliate earnings. December sucked badly – but this is how January and February did for me:

January 2012 – $8813,76

Yes – the month with a spiking buying activity and overall actvity – even adsense, my weakest venture so far, produced $185,89. I had sales in 10 different affiliate and CPA networks, ranging from thousands to hundreds dollars per single sites. Yes, Amazon was a real fun – only $0,52

February 2012 – $9023,06

In Feb my sites kept on killing it and I even reached the new height, which was so close to my goal of $10K a month. Do you remember I said that a portion of the sites are not making any money, despite high rankings? So, these 2 months were the time when all these products converted – so a huge factor determining the return on investment is how good is the product and is there any offline “substitutes”?

This is extremely important! If the product you are promoting online, has a lot of alternatives available offline (like in the stores, supermarkets, drugstores) – you need a really huge advantage in order to successfully convert it online – like massive discount, or probably exclusive freebies that come with this product online only, etc…

Is It Going To Be So Cool In The Future?

Hmm, I saw it many times – just as I’m starting to gain the momentum and reach new heights, google starts it’s ugly convulsions and ruins all the hard efforts.

And 2012 is set to become a year when SEO is totally unpredictable and unstable like never before! I’ve been tracking a lot of sites in different niches – and I see how drastic are top 10 SERP changes. Just 1 month ago the particular keyword was dominated by adsense site, now all the top 10 are huge merchants, the marketer’s sites are down to page 2 and deeper, which is basically $0 income. In some niches, there are still affiliate sites dominating top 3-5 results, but in other niches big companies or merchants outrank all other sites, no matter how valuable or helpful their content is.

Today is March – and I too see a huge difference (mostly negative) in traffic, especially for adsense minis that I have. Most of these were built around either product brands or names of products (like – pet supplies) – now who’s dominating these keywords? – merchants selling pet supplies. Top level domains.

I see that the problem of our types of sites is NOT in the backlinks (like which links “work” and which are no longer effective) – but what type of content is now favored by google. I think the surefire way to get top 3 rankings is pick targeted keywords REALLY smart!

For some terms, typical sites we marketers build might not rank high even if the keywords are really non-competitive and “easy” – google simply doesn’t want our type of content any more, even if we craft a 2000-word article instead of typical 500-word.

So, I’m still on the fence – watching what’s going on and procrastinating with what I know works in SEO – creating new sites. I know what to do, how to do it, but looking at my traffic drops now, I find it really hard mentally to keep on doing what worked all the time for me – creating new sites. Even despite the fact that one of my latest sites I created is now generating over $800 a month.

I hope to hear back from you, how are your sites doing?

Looks like I’ve been neglecting blogging these days, after so much hard work the energy levels exhaust and you need time to make full recovery.

In the last months of 2011 I kind of lost my bearings and this resulted in the effectiveness of online activity.

Yes, in order to grow the income, we need more traffic – that’s obvious. So it’s also obvious that we need to get more content published, make new sites or grow existing ones. There are a LOT more variables however – such as the rankings return on SEO efforts, conversion rates of our presell, lifecycle of the products promoted, and others – but return on SEO efforts is one of the most important – as this is what eats most of the time, money and energy…

Yes some of my sites were also hit by this update, aimed at “improving the quality of SERPs” – always makes me laugh and angry simultaineuously… Like the new “GOD-like” algorythm will decide if my page/site is high quality or not…

It’s been around 5 years in this business – and I haven’t hit my so called “tipping point” – when the business is growing on a larger scale than – It took me 12 months to add $2000 to my monthly income.

December 2011 – $4841,06

Yes I had better months, but I woudln’t call it “passive” – it’s ongoing, daily sweat and tears if done in the traditional SEO way.

I still have one money-making site that sits under “-10 filter” (if that one exists), no matter which links I built, it’s stuck to page 2 and more. But the main reason for low income levels in December is strange drop in conversions across all my sites.

Have you already listed your 2012 goals?

I’m still thinking of what direction to take. I haven’t achieved $10000 a month yet, my closest income was around $7800 but that was due to product launch – and I worked on 1 site for almost a whole month, so hard was competition.

Spitting out non-converting snipers is a waste of time, when it comes to affiliate marketing – but the same approach works better with adsense. But adsense income from a mini site is pretty small, so you see what I’m thinking about now? Paid traffic is another alternative – but my recent attempts to even USE my account in Facebook were smashing fail – I found that my FB advertising account is closed due to “unusual payment activity” Unfortunately, they don’t answer “WTF???” type of questions.

How’s your 2012 began? What are your goals? Eager to hear your thoughts!

The income in November is in the decline after the October’s peak. It looks like October was also a peak of my performance as nowadays I’m not doing a lot of work myself.

Partly due to some offline matters, partly due to health issues, but now I tend to concentrate on less sites.

November 2011 – $6540.65

I have to say that despite some sites only dropped several positions in google, which is enough to lose income, this is not the only thing that affects earnings. Some sites face some magic time when they stop generating any sales, while the traffic is still coming in. The only one explanation I see is the decrease in the buyer activity.

Less sites are easier to manage, as the product-oriented model (mini sites) seems to be really “hit-or-miss” for me these days. It’s better to create a good multi-product site and populate it with good content, lots of good articles targeting the low-hanging keywords…

Backlinking Stuff

This is what I’m getting to now. The backbone of my SEO now is blog networks – there’s plenty of them to choose from… As YSE died, Link Diagnosis seems to be a replacement for quick backlinks analysis, but to be frank it’s even 10% not good as YSE was…

I thought of getting a basic membership in MajesticSEO, as their database seems the most valuable on my opinion, but still deciding on alternatives.

SEOSpyGlass has recently added their “own” database of links (which I doubt though, probably they’re using some source like Magestic or OpenSiteExplorer) so it’s also nice to get the picture of the site’s linking strategy.

Future Steps

I haven’t decided on the exact strategy of making money online yet – what I feel like is that ranking sites in google trying to make affiliate commissions is definitely a pretty unstable way of earning online. It takes too much work and can die in a moment, I mean all the time and money investment spent on creating and ranking sites.

I know people are making money just with SEO, but it’s much better to have some other ways as well. Spencer for example is not only a successful adsense publisher, but he’s also earning from his own product, and seems to keep working on the IPhone app now.

For 4 years online, looks like I only learned to stupidly keep building sites and ranking them, until google plays another huge dirty trick.

I can’t believe another month has passed so fast – I wish our goals would be achieved as fast, so that we could enjoy the life a bit and reap the awards.

October was a pretty hard month for me, as I mentioned in comments – I had to significantly reduce the workload due to health issues. There were plans to complete a big affiliate site and start several others (the content is collecting dust on my hard drive for 3 months already) – but the reality always makes her own tweaks.

Considering my health condition, I decided to work on only 1 site personally – and my assistants worked on the other projects, maintaining backlinks. This site was a product launch in the IM industry. Due to the limited time before the product launches (JVs had only 1 month to get their bonuses up and sites ranking) – I had to make this project my #1 priority.

Well, it was a huge SEO clash, as I was competing with some smart guyes – and to be frank I thought I lost this battle (on the product launch day my site was #6 or 7) – but now I seem to be #1.

A Bit Of SEO Philosophy

In my humble opinion, nowadays SEO comes down to the number of services/resources that we can afford now. I mean, all we need is to understand the basics and being able to turn these into a strategy that can be applied again and again, sometimes without our own efforts. I mean, everyhing can be outsourced or bought now – press releases writing and submissions, profile links – everywhere!, massive article blasts, high PR blog networks – both mainstream like BMR or Unique Article Wizard and private ones, that cost a bit higher.

So, each new site becomes a project that has investment and ROI – and approaching SEO game from this angle makes it possible to invest earnings back into the scaling the properties that rank high and make us more money. So we have several variables like – will our gut feeling of profitability work out? will our approach towards the specific niche/keywords set work out?

Couple Of Words On Panda

Yes my sites were also affected – not all of them. Some lost top spots, some became stronger, some remained intact. I didn’t do any investigation into possible reasons, since we never know which variables in google’s algo changed that caused these SERP movements.

To be frank, I still don’t see obvious ways of getting the dropped sites “out” back to top. Yes I keep adding backlinks, but this doesn’t change things to the better. I’m waiting for this update to settle down, and as a way of maintaining the earnings – my unique recipe for ANY panda (and other) updates is – KEEP BUILDING NEW SITES.

Did you see any way to recover from the SERP drops? Did you manage to recover any of your sites? I’m eager to hear your thoughts!

How Much I Made In October?

OK, down to my earnings:

October 2011 – $7885,47

Not bad considering the reduced workload! Beating my record again, that’s nice. By looking at figures, I put it down to:

• increased buying activity in health niches
• replacing the top recommended products on one of my sites
• successful product launch promotions (achieving #1 position for the product name keywords which resulted in the sales spikes)
• improved rankings of some sites after panda

At the same time, a couple of my money-making sites lost rankings which resulted in the loss of some incomes, but again – the more sites we build, the higher the chance of surviving the constant google devilry.

Adsense is the part of my busniess that I seem to be neglecting despite the asseverations to keep working hard in this field. Adsense sites (which are XFactor minis and a couple of bigger content packed sites) produced only $113,95 in October, due to the google update I guess.

Introducing the Monthly Income Report

Recently I was contacted by Adam from Monthly Income Report. He created a blog that tracks the bloggers who share their real online incomes and ways to make money online.

It’s a great idea for many marketers who look for inspiration and methods that work for other people. For me, it’s a great place to discover the approaches and personalities of other successful marketers, that helps me break my own limits by learning from these people.

Wishing Adam success in his venture!

September earnings made my day!

With a quick burst in sales in first days of September, the income went down a lot – I even calculated the gross earnings on Sept 20 and found that I haven’t made even $3000! That supposed to be a huge drop – after all, despite the “slow” August my income still was on the highest level. So I got mentally prepared for the drop…

But what happened later, in the late days of September – was a crazy buyer frenzy! Sales started picking up really fast, and conversion rates were through the roof. While in the mid-September I started to getting used to below-$100 days, now my income hit new records.

September 29 – $562.46 day, 12 hours after – total of $754.41. I also had several $200 and $300 days before. I have to admit – many of us get emotionally attached to the incomes our sites generate in organic rankings. Not WE generate them, as there are outside factors that we cannot control.

Probably you’ve heard about SWOT analysis? S – strengths, W – weaknesses, O – opportunities, T – threats. Since I’ve learned this strategy from Jeremy Palmer, my understanding of the business has changed. There are ALWAYS 2 variables that we don’t control – we can (and should) take these into account prior to starting a busness/campaign/site, but never take these under our control.

So, instead of checking stats 10 times a day and jitter over these, I better concentrate on my own strengths and weaknesses and work with these. Keep building sites, hiring staff and planning our future steps. I became less emotionally attached to the stats – that definitely doesn’t convert into more sales.

If we don’t have sales for 3-4 days and our sites are still getting traffic, well that might be temporary issue outside of our control, but we always can so something to improve conversions.

OK, let’s get down to the stats:

September 2011 – $6730.80

I still have underperforming sites, and several domains that need the highest priority attention. If you see the new trend/keyword that is very promising – it’s very important to launch and get the site indexed as soon as possible. All others will follow, and harly ever rank in the top 3. Why? Well. let’s imagine if 1000 sites are agressively targeting the same keyword – which sites will get #1 rankings? Those with more backlinks?

I also have another site that sent over 1180 clicks to the offer. It made only 10 leads and $450 in income. So the conversion rate was below 1% (!) I guess that’s because of the low quality of content, that is not preselling visitors. I’m planning (someday…) to get to this site seriously and work on CR improvement. Over 1100 clicks from site to offer is a huge potential – I guess this is a perfect situation for building a list and promoting to it.

I also build new bigger sites now, writing the content myself and working will all the wordpress posting. This cannot be outsourced since every page should be laid out for maximum conversions. That’s why I sometimes think of adsense sites – it’s so easy to outsource and promote these sites, and scale the business much faster than affiliate sites!

So far I’m working on 2 adsense sites in the education niche. Pretty competitive but the clicks are over $1-2 each. OK it’s time to sleep – it’s 4:20 am here, I’ve been working on 1 single page for over 5 hours… The site has over 30 pages.

You’re welcome to share your own progress, please leave a comment below!

August is the month when everything seemed to slow down really.

Adsense traffic and CTR, sales volumes, overall traffic to sites… And to be frank I expected August to be my worst month of 2011, as the “dead” period was so long… But during the last days of the months things started to pick up so fast and I saw nice increase in sales. Especially one of my sites that didn’t make a sale for 3 weeks straight. It got over 1200 clicks to the offer (imagine the traffic!) but the conversion rate was around 0.75% – and it was for a product name keyword! Only last days of August brought in those long awaited leads.

OK, down to the results:

August 2011 – $6089.50

It looks like another record? Seems like that…

WSOs…

OK, I spent over $1000 this month, mostly due to buying WSO almost on a daily basis. Once you appear on someone’s list, this becomes a nightmare – every single day you get these “brilliant” methods, case studies and traffic grtting plugins that will make your whole online adventure a breeze!

The same guru stuff, but on a WarriorForum level… The strategy is pretty simple – release some WSO (like how to got a whole site to the top of google with a “SECRET” strategies proven to work), build a list – and promote other WSOs every single day!

Soon I discover a lot of folders with ebooks and sheets on my hard drive, and a couple hundred bucks sent to the WSO releasers. Well, I have to say many WSO’s are nothing new, but there were a couple of cool things to add to arsenal. I even thought of doing the same, as with my level of skills I could easily release several WSOs on different SEO tricks, but I’d prefer not to create competition.

Anyway, in Sept I decided to stop buying this, as it really distracts from the money making activities. Using own brain helps a lot more.

AdSense…

Stating from Sept, I decided to put some serious effort into building adsense sites. I already got my 1st one ready. As the owner of the famous CTR theme, I decided to see how it works. My main niches in adsense will be education/medicine and related. Adsense sites are much easier to SEO comparing to the affiliate sites, as there’s no clear commercial intent behind these (you can easily turn off adsense blocks when submitting to some directories etc..) and generally the more traffic you get, the more clicks you get.

With affiliate sites this is not the case – you need targeted traffic, otherwise the site will not make any sales at all.. And this targeted traffic is much harder to get, as there are 1000s of other guyes smart enough to target the same converting keywords.

Best ClickBank Month Ever

Yes August made me $1129.69 on Clickbank. How I did this? I just decided to play with the product launch in the IM niche. I took the #1 rankings for the Rankd and Pillage set of keywords, and dominated these terms during the launch day, and weeks afterwards.

This strategy can bring a lot of money, and I only made $862.39. With the right approach, you can make thousands upon thousands. It’s not hard, just provide high quality content and some good on-page and off page SEO. All the methods I used are here in this blog.

August 14 was a great day, bringing over $200 in CB only… What I can say, Rank and Pillage is a great course, I bought it myself in order to write a good review, and looking at my stats, I only had 3 refunds with 39 sales.

Check Out Rank and Pillage Here

Sorry for my shameless affiliate link It’s only for those readers who start in affiliate marketing and want to learn successful strategies from A to Z.

Other Plans

I work a lot on affiliate sites for different markets. My plans are to maximize the leverage of outsourcing and get a good system for launching/ranking sites. SEO nowadays comes down to how many services you can afford + the right strategy. It’s all so simple. Top rankings are achievable for many keywords that seem too competitive… All I need now is a system in place to get things growing faster… $5K a month level is a good level, but my goals is to double it.

Please don’t tell me another month is behind…)

Yes July was a very slow month, especially in the beginning. Despite having several sites back to top 3 after the recent google’s update, I’ve seen much lower conversion rates as well as traffic decrease in the weight loss related niches.

But – sticking to my diversification approach – I had another nice month. Here’s the stats:

July 2011 – $5146,55

The net spend this month was $864,43, where most of the spend was outsourcing payments. I was amazed to see that I only spent $65 on the content creation, which is definitely not the way to go for a marketer relying on organic traffic, that requires content, a lot of it and high quality.

I’m feeling fine about it – despite the slow summer season, I’m still on the level. As always – I expected $3K maximum, and mostly spent time offline in July!

My top July money maker shot to $982, and that’s different site. Top June’s (and pretty much top site of recent months) moneymaker site only generated $588, which is an average income across my top sites. Adsense clicks are stable – $179, 72. And yes – in July Clickbank sites made me $717,71 (after refunds) – Highest CB monthly earnings ever since the PPC era… Guess what I did? I bet you will hit it in 3 attempts – one of the ways to make money on Clickbank ), read below…

Got too tired and exhausted, mostly because of lacking the established system… and still jumping across the range of projects/sites – big ones and small ones.

In June and July I did my first 2 attempts in the Internet Marketing niche Well, I think this deserves a separate post! Especially how I got late to one IM product launch and managed to rank the site in top 5 for product name keyword in 12 days, with lots of competitors who also tried to take the top spots… That was a real fun and great experience!

There are currently 2 big sites with all the content ready, that wait to be created and launched, and 3 small sites – I need to stop procastinating and start working harder, like in good old days. No time to retreat – it’s time to keep turning our goals into reality!

I can’t believe one summer month is passed already…

So much work is done, and even more to be done!

As you have noticed, all this google earthquakes seem to settle down a bit, many sites got back to top positions, including most of my sites as well. Plus, I recently noticed a PR update.

This was a HUGE PR update, I mean for my sites… My top ex PR4 now got PR6, I also seem to raised several PR3 sites to PR5, and I even noticed some of my inner pages for authority sites are having PR5… It looks like I’m the prowd owner of a really fat link juice network, ranging from PR1 to PR6, and several PR5′s as well…

However, I’m still not satisfied with the rankings – I wish rankings came faster!

I’m just telling about PR toolbar guyes, it all seems like a big myth, and definitely not worth bragging about, because we all know high PR is not equal to high rankings.

OK, down to my June 2011 earnings:

June 2011 – $6035,86

I expected it to be over $3000, but later google regained it’s consciousness and returned some buried rankings, so I just discovered I hit another record!

Again, it’s all random – month to month… I see some products that converted at 10% are now not selling at all, while the traffic grows… While other products that have been sleeping, start to take off and result in nice addon profits. I realize it’s the nature of this business – numbers game, and nothing more. Whoever says whatever.

We need more sites, in different niches, with different monetization strategies. Mini sites (these still work well, snipers aren’t dead), and definitely larger sites that earn google trust and every page you add typically ranks high faster thanks to the domain’s trust.

OK, enough for this post, I still work on multiple projects (sites) and testing things out, as usual. If I find something of value to share here, I’ll definiely post. All I do now is already in this blog – just applying the same strategies again and again. But new stuff comes up all the time, so I test some things as well…

Once I see some results, I’ll post! So please don’t forget to check me out couple times a year

Another month passed so fast and I hardly managed to blink an eye…

It’s been a month when google kicked out another bunch of my sites with it’s update, including those that made some healthy profits on a daily basis. And despite all these changes, I still managed to keep up my earnings, and even raise the bar a bit!

I’ll be short here in this post, otherwise it’d take a lot of time and space to describe all the good and the bad what happened in May. I’d only say that I’m going to change my hosting asap – accidentally I found that my sites (including this blog) are loading incredibly slow.

This is not Indiantes SEO hosting, these guyes are great and I highly recommend them if you seek for the good SEO hosting. It’s my old shared hosting Midphase – stay away from them! I’m on them since 2007 and only now I saw this awful slowdown that keeps on happening day after day.

OK, here’s my earnings:

May 2011 – $5060.65

I achieved my next goal that was to make $5000 in a month. It’s not the net profit as I spend around 800-1000$ for outsourcing, services, domains, hosting etc… But – I like the tendency!

My adsense increased in May to $199.85 – thanks to my backlinking of several mini sites that I finally managed to do. Other factors of success are increased buyers interest in my products/niches, some recenly created sites starting to rank high and convert, and one of the CPA offers is back again. Well, the site was in top 3, made me $240 in leads and disappeared from google…as always!

If it were not for google’s crappy convulsions, I’d made a LOT more money in May, but this is our enviornment, and we have to adapt as it’s the only thing we can do.

OK mates, it’s interesting to hear how’s May performed for you. I have some ideas for posts, and a lot of work to do (building new sites now, several simultaneuously). I don’t expect to get the same level of income in June, as some of the performing sites are gone now from the top, but I’ll push it harder – there’s no other option but to win!

It’s been a month…

April started great for me, the conversions came in very good, seems that the overall buyer activity increased. However, after 1-1.5 weeks, buyer activity started to slow down, so I wondered if I have to look for another job

Usually April is very good month for health related niches. Unless your sites are getting top 3 SE traffic and convert. But with the recent google changes a lot of people seem to have lost faith in the affiliate marketing and SEO.

What helped me to stay on the surface is one of my sites for CPA offer that I created last year, then the offer was removed from CPA networks (this is not a free trial like acai or colon stuff), so i only had to move on… I’ve seen this 2 times last year – once I create the site for specific offer and it gets to the top 3 – offer gets removed! Bad luck? I don’t know but BOTH these offers are now live again.

OK, I’ve just completed my income calculations, and

April 2011 – $4647,82

Just a week ago I did my quick calculations and it was only around $3600, but the last week the sales for a couple of products increased again, and seems that I’ve beating my previous month’s record. Really good.

The Good And The Bad

Well, the good is that I simply keep working on my new sites, and backlink the old ones, whatever changes are happening right now. Currently I’m in the process of creating big site that will have over 100 pages of content. Around 20 pages are aready done, and I’m painfully adding them to the site, picking pictures and thnking on the page layouts for better conversions.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the overal site structure and layout, placement and content of widgets, major keywords that I will target etc… That really takes a lot of time and energy. All comes from competition analysis and further tweaks.

The bad – as you know, google is implementing it’s algorythm update now, Farmer/Panda or something. It started in March, but seems that a lot of people been hurt on April 25 and later.

I’ve read people losing sites completely, not only drops in rankings, but completely banned domains with all the content. Some affiliates have several domains banned, mostly from top 10 results.

From all live domains I have now – one site seems to have solid rankings and some tier3 keywords rankings also improved. This is the Authority site I’ve been doing case study on.

First 2 keywords are tier1, or main keywords that bring the most traffic and sales (I optimized the homepage for conversions). Then 3 “product review” keywords (I could have worked here to get higher rankings) and 15 keywords that I never backlinked, but now I see their rankings are very good.

The site is not a huge money maker, but it brings around $500 a month.

Another bad thing is that my CPA site was pessimized in rankings after 3 weeks of making me leads. I made $810 total for 3 weeks and then google got it’s ugly algo-hands on it.

I mostly used continuous content adding to the site, for keywords searched by my targeted audience, and did Unique Article Wizard runs. 90% of the added articles appeared in top 10 for their respective keywords, and the trraffic went up fast. Probably it was too aggressive, I don’t know, but the site is now down and making no money. I still hope it will get back since it has nice structure and content.

Current Backlinking Strategy

Now I mostly do blog networks submissions and high PR backlinks. I do sometimes add profile links, but nowadays the SEO landscape is so unstable, that I just want to sit still and wait until google finally stops it’s paranoid “improvements”.

For new sites, it’s definitely good social bookmarking campaign, some directories and press release or two, articles and then high PR links from blog comments and where I can find them )

My colleagues told me that google keeps on banning affiliates in adwords, it got rid of huge spenders that had perfect campaigns for years. So I personally see it as a rampage against people making money with affiliate marketing.

I don’t want to spend my own time typing in some useless “guess” on what will work in SEO in the near future. Nor, I want to spend your time reading it. Let’s just diversify as much as we can – different sites, niches, backlinking strategies, revenue models…

That’s the main reason why I’m not posting a lot now – I don’t yet have something valuable to share or say. Let’s just wait a bit and see what happens.

Long title for this post would be – “How I Slipped Into Depression Last Day Of Month Due To NO Sales At All And Revived Back Once I Calculated My Incomes For Whole March“.

Yes this is true – no sales yesterday, considering that I’ve added affiliate links to one of my fresh sites that was launched 1.5 months ago so the clicks spiked, as this site is already in top 10 for some of the keywords, and on page 2 for the main kw bringing in some healthy traffic acc. to GKT.

I have a total of 10 money pages on the site, and I spread backlinks over these pages. Somehow, the site managed to get over 2000 links as Yahoo Explorer shows, but this is due to some sitewide links (I really didn’t add links to someone’s sidebars). Anyway, the # of unique domains linking to the site and their authority is more important than sitewide links from a handful of domains.

You never know how sites performed until you see exact numbers. I felt really tired this month, and thouht that I HARDLY made $3000 – really. Now the numbers show the reality, and it’s not that bad I have to say March is a good month, but April should be somewhat better – at least it was.

Ok, down to the numbers -

March 2011 – $4312,61

Again, I’m now looking at my stats per product (site) and see what made me good incomes. Well, most of my sites are typically keyword-targeted (sniper), usually it’s either product names or closely related keyword very likely to convert.

Looking Deeper Into Sites

This is very limited model, until we cast a really wide net of these mini sites and target products from different niches, in order to keep the earning on a certain level. My top sniper made $700,03 in March.

Standing close to that – sites produced:

1. $684.27
2. $600
3. $530,65
4. several sites in a range of $100-200 – most of them are Clickbank related.

My adsense totals are – $132,74. Still a great passive addon to the income. I had to start that link building to them, since only 2-3 sites are making that money, and I have 17 adsense sites now.

What I’m Working On Now?

Well, as I said in the previous posts, I no longer build small sites. In mid Feb I launched 2 sites that have at least 10 pages of solid content, each page is targeting some keyword set (2-4). All the backlinks are coming to all these pages simultaneously.

I also continue my experiment on a site that has 5 pages of static content (targets one of the CPA products) but also I add posts targeting low volume related keywords – 300-700 exact searches a month. What I have to say? While for  my main keyword (product name) I’m on position 5-8, these additional keywords take top positions within several days (!).

Recently the product came back to the CPA networks and I added affiliate links from EpicDirectnetwork 5 days ago. So far, I’ve made 3 leads and $135 in commissions – and most of the traffic comes from these “low-volume” related keywords. Not bad for 5 days of live aff links.

I’m now starting to add content for a full-packed authority sites with lots of reviews and articles. Just need to work on this, all the content is ready, but adding pages, thinking on the layout, images and links placement, on-page SEO, meta stuff – all this requires a lot of work and time..

OK, I hope April will be good month as well. At least I’m going to take more top 10′s and get some more income from these