Hi!
Just as I expected, the income wasn’t intended to grow due the last 2 weeks of April, when my sales have completely vanished into the Absolute.
The month ended so fast, I even couldn’t notice how fast it has gone.. Well SEo is a slow and tedious adventure, so sometimes we need just to keep doing the dull work, every day and even every other month too.
This was exactly the reason why I haven’t updated the blog quite often in April – lots of work, dull, repetitive tasks..
My main goals for the last month were getting back the positions in google for my main aff site, and completing 2 sniper affiliate sites and also launching the new authority site and promoting it.
The success/failure rate is 50/50.
2 sniper sites – I’ve completed them both and started promoting with SENuke and profile links. One of the sites initially ranked high due to having keyword in domain name, but later it has gone from serps completely. Now it’s back and taking positions 1 to 5 for my 4 main keywords. It generated around 90$ in leads.
Another sniper site ranked in top 5 after indexing, as I added content it’s gone to position 14 and now it’s ranking #4 for main keyword and #24 for plural variation of it. It generated only 1 sale of 50$ so far. My bad – the keyword only has 1000 exact seraches per month, so I cannot expect many sales from it… I need to either add more content or build another sites targetting more popular terms.
Now down to the bad stuff
Sometimes google analytics shows some things that I never could find out. This was exactly with my Feb success when the sales came in every day and I’ve made over 300$ per day sometimes.
I’ve decided to analyse what keywords brought me the traffic in Feb and what are my current rankings for these money-making keywords…
I’ve discovered the couple of keywords that flooded traffic to my site in Feb and found that I’m still rankign #1 for both of them! What the hell then??
It’s time to look into google insights. When I looked into it – I was shocked! There was a huge traffic spike for these exact product name keyword in Faebrary, and I happened to be on position #1 so this is the reason for my massive sales. Probably the merchant run some advertising campaign that resulted in a spike of interest towards the product.
More interesting stuff – people not only bought this product from my site, I’ve actually made even more money from another product that is more expensive but rated as #1 in my reviews 
Now the interest is gone and so are my sales… The site is still responsible for 90% of my incomes but I’m not happy with this – I cannot return traffic spike back.
The biggest fail was the new affiliate site. I’ve created it from html landing page. 25 pages of content. I tried all the known tricks to get it indexed, but nothing worked. I invested 105$ into content writing, then I social bookmarked the site and submitted rss feeds with SEnuke. Nothing worked. Next I’ve decided to move the site from html to wordpress platform and spent all day doig this. Again social bookmarking and rss, clipmarking and twittering the site didn’t get it indexed! After I’ve submitted great press release to a bunch of sites, and submitted a bunch of articles to Ezinaearticles, I hoped for a natural indexing.
Nothing happened. The site still not indexed yet. So day ago I’ve moved the whole site to the brand new new domain.
I’ve completed the site on a wordpress platform this night, and in the morning all 25 pages are already indexed I hope to get some rankings with it, since my writers generated a ton of content to promote it.
OK, now to the earnings, April 2010 – 1997.76$
I keep building new sites and now I’m about to launch another couple of affiliate sites, targetting product names. 1 site is nothing, it’s definitely not a business. Income spikes turn into big drops, and it’s important to diversify and spread the risks.
There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m also working on a bunch of adsense sites. I plan to experimant with some backlinking methods and see which are productvie and which are not.
Related posts:
Anton, Good Net profit, even drop some from last month. i am still struggle on 800 USD
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Anton-
Nice monthly total, but you captured the “magic” of an AdSens3 empire: diversification, and minimal risks, spread across a broad network.
I you have 100 sites each making $1/day…then even if 50% drop off the planet, you have $50/day.
Just a thought — of course, this assumes you make money w/every site, and that G doesn’t de-index you for poor sites, as seems to be happening w/ppl.
I’ve just posted my 6-month earnings on my site…the majority of my earnings is from Elance, all from a part-time endeavor. I’d much rather be 100% on AdSens3/Affiliate products…better income that way.
What works for me in getting sales from affiliate networks is article marketing through UAW: I sent out 2 pre-sale reviews to an affiliate product…sold about $10k worth in one month…sales have dropped since doing that run, but it showed me that this works.
Will be doing that again soon…just food for thought.
[Reply]
Hi Giannis!
It’s still better than losing money in ppc games ) but I’m sure with your dedication you’ll grow that income soon – this is really hard work, no exuses. Again I see no sales, however my site is very close to good position and already hitting top 10 for some high competition keywords.
Keep it up mate!
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Hello James!
I’ve just was caught by the catchy name of new blog I’ve never seen before – The Average Genius, and 10 mins later it appeared that it’s yours
Great, following it already. I’m glad that UAW can produce the income on it’s own and not only it’s good for backlinks. I’m prepairing a lot of stuff to run with UAW – my writers keep writing…just need to submit this all!
Adsense right, but I’ve bought 17 domains and content is almost ready, some are indexed and ranking somewhere, but I need to complete batches of these sites…
Seems that I’ve took a lot of projects at a time..this makes me depressed and I just need to keep my head clear a bit..)
[Reply]
Anton –
Thanks for noticing, yeah, I’m “The Average Genius,” lol! I’ve read on Sara’s blog that she hasn’t had a good run with UAW, and I’ve read that other places. I’m not sure why it works for me and not some others, but I think if you understand that from the blogger-end of things, if you want the free articles to appear on your blogs, sometimes those links vanish.
I’ve been on both ends: received/gave articles. Receiving the articles, I set it to “automatic post,” which I don’t recommend unless you have a throw-away domain for some reason.
That might explain what I keep reading about other people’s experiences…and before I say much more, I’m cooking up a review of UAW and a couple of really powerful ways to use it. It works really well, I have to say.
In any event – I saw you commented on Matthew’s blog that you were trying some experiments – pretty cool stuff! Between the two of you, I’m anxious to hear more.
Anyway, Anton, hope you’re well. Take care, and if you focus on smaller goals vs. the big picture, just a step at a time, it’s not so bad. Makes life much more manageable!
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