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 $113,95 in October, due to the google update I guess.
Introducing the Monthly Income Report
Recently I was contacted by Adam from Monthly Income Report. He created a blog that tracks the bloggers who share their real online incomes and ways to make money online.
It’s a great idea for many marketers who look for inspiration and methods that work for other people. For me, it’s a great place to discover the approaches and personalities of other successful marketers, that helps me break my own limits by learning from these people.
Wishing Adam success in his venture!
Related posts:
Congrats on the awesome month, Anton. And thanks for the mention! I’ll be posting updated rankings through October in the next few days.
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Grand Reply:
November 5th, 2011 at 6:22 pm
Hi Adam!
Thanks )) Interesting to see how other marketers performed in October.
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Congrats Anton for your great earnings last month. I get lot of motivation by reading posts like these.
I have a question about product launch, can you tell me how does this work? From what i know, the gurus send email to their lists which affiliate link and people buy from them but i am not sure how the sites ranking on page 1 makes money?
Can you also tell me in which product launch did you participate?
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Grand Reply:
November 8th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
Hi Ray!
Yes sure, if you are ranking #1 when the product gets buzz and the launch day comes, you can expect sales. I did 3 product launches until today and while my 1st launch did made me around 200-300$, the 2nd launch was much better (as I was #1 at the day of the actual product launch when most of the sales happen) – $1,281.67 until today and the last one is SEO Experts Academy which is also really nice and will beat this income as I get the commissions for the 2nd $97 payments as well.
Again – I’m only promoting really high quality product launches, and also provide great bonuses (at least as good as I can). RIght now I’m working a lof on providing my bonuses to the people who bought SEOEA and asked for my bonus offer.
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Ray Reply:
November 9th, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Thanks for replying, i just checked out SEO experts academy and have read good reviews about it on warrior forum. To increase my SEO knowledge, i am planning to buy this product. I have seen couple of sites ranking on first page and also their bonuses, however i plan to buy from your link, so can you tell me what bonus i may get if i order from your link? You can also email me.
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Grand Reply:
November 9th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Hello Ray!
Sure, what’s your email?
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Ray Reply:
November 9th, 2011 at 10:24 pm
raycolere @ gmail.com
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Ray Reply:
November 9th, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Just update me here once you send it.
Grand Reply:
November 11th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
@Ray, Hi Ray! I’ve sent the email already.
Grand recently posted..Income Stats – October 2011
Nice post, can you tell me how many words articles you are using on your sites? Do also tell me some good sites to outsource article writing.
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Grand Reply:
November 8th, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Hello John!
If I write the content personally (which I do sometimes and mostly write reviews of the products I wish to sell most) – my content is between 500 and 1000 words. I tend to write a lot!
The rest of articles is usually around 600-700 words.
The best service I use a lot these days – Textbroker! Great as you can order 1 day delivery and usually the articles quality is really good. Need-an-article.net – my 2nd best pick, I really love several writers there as they are superb, and the article cost is also moderately low comparing to the Elance or Odesk native speakers.
Plus, I also ordered content from Philippines and Indian writers and picked 3 writers who I work with over 1-2 years now…so good they are. You can usually do the same and you will find a lot of amazing writers who will write for $4-5 per 500 words and the content is well researched.
Hope this helps!
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I added you in my link section and keep visiting your blog. My question is which is your main income source. Affiliate marketing or adsense? How much you make from adsense, rough estimate can be satisfactory for me.
Thanks
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Grand Reply:
November 12th, 2011 at 11:07 am
@Rahul, Hi Rahul!
Thanks, I only make around 120-150$ a month on adsense, the rest is affiliate marketing.
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Rahul Reply:
November 15th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
@Grand, Well how you earn from affiliate marketing. From adsense point of view, i don’t need any guidance. But i only wanted to learn affiliate marketing.
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Grand Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 6:46 pm
@Rahul, Hello Rahul!
This is a different story than adsense. Adsense is much easier model. For aff marketing – a lot depends on the product you choose to promote. If you know which products are real converters – you can make money even with lots of competition. I’d go with the product range from MarketHealth for example.
Do you have some product to promote in mind?
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Rahul Reply:
November 24th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
@Grand, Well i have crossed 100 sales in amazon and made $90 approx. but still this is very low. Why don’t you add big adsense sites and make another stream of income… think adsense accounts with $10k per month..
Rahul recently posted..Blogging Goals Re-defined
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Grand Reply:
November 27th, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Hi Rahul!
Yes Amazon is the lowest commissions from all the affiliate programs I know. Another HUGE tip – try to promote products that are only accessible ONLINE.
Most of the Amazon products can also be purchased in almost any good superstore offline, so you basically can only push the “online discount” emotional buttons in order to make people buy from Amazon.
A lot of products have this online exclusivity which makes people pay good money to get them. I’d also check out CJ.com as they have a massive inventory of products and sometimes commissions are much healthier.
Yes I’m thinking of seriously getting into adsense, but I still have a lot of unfinished projects and to be frank I really don’t like google
I think that doing adsense Spencer’s way is what I’d try.
Paczan idet k uspehu. Chotko!
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Grand Reply:
November 15th, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Privet Andrey!
Spasibo )) Da rabotauy seychas ne tak mnogo, zdorovje v osnovnom popravlayu. A ti kak pozhivaesh? Kak business?
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Hey. Nice earnings! My main earning site was hit by Panda and I didn’t see any way back so in the end I started from scratch. My niche is good and I knew the potential so I bought a new domain and started writing completely new content and most importantly improving from what I had before. I had done a lot of research so it wasn’t too hard to do.
I’m starting to get traffic back and most importantly I’m earning again from it. It’s only 1 10th of what it was before but I’m currently ranked #12 rather than the #1 I was before. In time I hope to get up there and with quality articles I hope I can stay there.
Adem recently posted..Knowing when to quit and how to succeed
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Grand Reply:
November 23rd, 2011 at 6:44 pm
@Adem, Hi Adem!
Thanks for visiting me ) Yes this update appeared to be a huge hit for most of marketers. I’ve also had some sites down, and one of those was making around $500 a month. So I’m also in the process of tweaking it a lot.
Right now there’s another bad thing happened – Yahoo Site Explorer is down so most of the tools are not showing backlinks.
Sometimes I feel that having lots of sites is not so good as I cannot devote a lot of time to each one of them ((
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Yahoo Site Explorer is gone for good, so hopefully there will be some tool updates soon.
I definitely believe it’s better to have lots of sites on a financial basis because you will be less effected by updates etc, but from a quality point of view we only hav eso many hours in the day, but gimme the money I say
Adem recently posted..Knowing when to quit and how to succeed
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Hi Anton,
You mentioned that you didn’t pay enough attention on adsense this month. Out of interest how many adsense dedicated sites do you have at the moment and what is the earnings to sites ratio. Are you making most of your money from just one or two successful sites or even amount from across the board.
Great work btw on your earnings in general.
Cheers, Dave
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Grand Reply:
November 27th, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Yes Dave – and to be frank that”s what saved me from all these recent SEO earthquakes – lots of sites. As many marketers say – once you have a system/process in place, you can follow it and scale up to hundreds of sites (again, like Spencer does.
I usually treat each new site as a new way of doing things, so there’s no system absolutely in my business, which makes me crazy as taking it all under control turns into real hell )))
But this month I did nothing, took a rest, and the income was not so good – the average conversion rate is down.
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