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Income Stats – February 2011

Written by Grand on March 1, 2011 · 5 Comments

Well Feb is over and google turned one of the best months of the year into the average one..

Thanks to my disversification across different sites, niches I’ve finally managed to keep the incomes. Just finished calculating my incomes, and saw that incomes are still going consistent:

February 2011 – $3697,46

Last year my income was $3908,76 (as I see from monthly incomes page), and most of the income came from my authority site, that hasn’t yet recovered from the SERPs pessimisation.

These days, this income comes from many of my small sites, targeting 1 to dozen keywords. I constatly see a lot of fluctuations in rankings, this month is especially “earthquaking”, as we all know google has changed it’s algo again.

Ranking Sites High – My Observations Today

Just as many other marketers, I’ve seen some significant drops in my sites’ rankings. Some site got back to high positions, some got back, then gone again, some are sticking to their positions no matter what I do…

The last case is what makes me wordering most. I mean – there are 2 things that affect our rankings: 1 – outisde enviornment (threats) and 2 – out own activity towards these rankings.

1st case is everything outside of our control – all these algo changes, or some very smart moves by competition that leave us behind.

2nd case is everything that we control – quality of content, using some bells and whistles (like these SEOPressor-like plugins), amount and quality of backlinks we add, techniques and services we use to support SEO etc…

But when the sites are sticking and not moving anywhere for weeks… Hmm that’s really interesting and I still need to smoke some heavy stuff to open the astral and see this hidden core of things

What I Do Now?

So far, as I already said in the previous posts, I’ve stopped doing new “sniper” sites… I see that recent google changes that are supposed to affect low quality and scraped content make this model of SEO a bit more tough.

I’m not sure what effects good old profile links or massive blog commenting will cause – no information yet, but I work on the authority sites now, I’ve launched 2 new sites now, 1st – I wrote all the content personally so it’s 1000% unique and original and maybe even valuable (I hope so), and the 2nd site – all the content is unique and the site aims for 30-50 pages of keyword optimized content.

I tend to concentrate more on the site structure since I believe this is where one of the keys to high rankins lies.

Adsense Makes Me Happy

What keeps me smiling despite all these recent google earthquakes, is my adsense income growing every month..still without me lifting a finger to backlink sites or create new ones ) This month is highest adsesne earner (the tendency repeats every month) – $155.93

Truly passive income, that I never touch yet… I even watched my last year of SEO and found that my top performing and ranking sites are the ones that I don’t touch a lot Ones that I’m sweating on typically make me sad about rankings. Looks like a psychological pattern – things that I take easy are usually successful and vice versa…

Niche Marketers Think Tank – Pick Other People’s Brains And Skills

Written by Grand on February 27, 2011 · 4 Comments

Dear reader!

Recently Yolanda from Paid In Passive opened a community forum for marketers that are willing to share knowledge about SEO, SEO Tools and personal stretegies that work, and also trade services with each other.

I really like the idea of the community forum for people like us, as in fact we use pretty similar approaches to online marketing, whether it’s creating adsense sites, mini-sites, more authority niche sites. Many of us also use the same SEO strategies, but we all do have own twists and tips that we can share in this community – to achieve better results.

I’ve participated in a private forums (with paid access – Niche Marketers Think Tank is free) and I have to say that these are the most beneficial places to participate. TONS of valuable information that you can get nowhere else.

I’m a member of Warrior and WickedFire, and both forums are amazing, but this is a huge portals with tons of information, so you can spend your whole day reading it, and finally get a headache from information overload. To be frank, I’m now reading Warrior and Wicked, just look for some services and then abandon, otherwise I’m sucked in with tons of discussions.

On a more private forums, you can get all the relevant info that you need, especially if you ask some questions – people tend to give you short and to the point answers instead of turning your thread into the flood. We don’t have that much free time to waste.

I encourage you to participate, since Yolanda has already posted great article on using Scrapebox for massive competition analysis, with screenshots and explanations how to save hours of time analysing competition backlinks.

We can share:

soft and services work good for us
soft and services that scammed us (!)
personal experience on ranking sites high
thougths and ideas on current SEO landscape
our personal skills that we can trade with each other (UAW run for say, header graphic design)
a lot more…

Access Niche Marketers Think Tank Here

Other News

The situation is pretty hard now, it seems that gogle is doing some complicated upgrade that means a lot of marketers are seeing downgrade in rankings. My money making sites were down in rankings, then I saw some improvement as the rankings got back to high positions, then after 2-3 days all the positions gone again.

It affects now all my sites, but unfortunately top performers are down, thanks to this obstacle the incomes are low. Clickbank income reduced by 50% or more. Other sites that I’m working on now are not growing in rankings, no matter how many diversified link building I do.

But at this point I’ve decided to wait until the situation gets more clear and I’m using this time to create new sites. Now I’ve created one 9 pages site for a very competitive keyword, now I’m adding content for another niche site that I plan to launch in 1-2 days, and I also got the content for another authority site that uis on my priority to-do list.

These sites will require a lot more work since the niches are all competitive, but I’m workng on domains that I bought back in 2007-2008 so I hope to see the returns after some time.

The month flied away too fast, so in 2-3 days I’ll update on how much I earned in February.

ClickBank Sales Update

Written by Grand on February 17, 2011 · 2 Comments

I really don’t understand the current online tendencies, but last year February was a smashing sales hit month. Now, I’m under $1500 in gross earnings and sales decreased across all my niches.

ClickBank showed the weak week now, all thanks to another google kick to the site that achieved #4 position and started making me some consistent sales. As I told in the previous post, I’ve made some on-page changes to improve conversion rate, that affected the site’s rankings after the 2nd day.

Still better than nothing, but this is not how I expected things to proceed.

Another clickbank site (targeting one of the hottest CB products now) was growing lately due to consistent backlinking (high PR blog links, Blog Blueprint and other blog networks links and more) and suddenly got wiped out of google.com database.

That’s not the first time when I see my sites getting to the top and disappearing, then TAG pages (!) ranking instead of top level domains.

How To Determine The Most Relevant Page To Your Keyword In Google’s Eyes

Now I saw a lot of instances when tag pages of my sites rank instead of the top level domains. It looks like google reconsiders the relevancy and assigns it to the inner posts or even tag pages. Please note – tag pages (not posts).

Another question – have you ever carried about optimizing your tag pages, sending backlinks to it etc…? I never did it, however google somehow decides that this page is more relevant to the keyword than any other page of the site or even domain itself.

For determining the most relevant page to the keyword you optimized for, I use this google operator:

keyword site:myurl.com

So, if you build a site around, say, how to lose weight, you need to type into google:

how to lose weight site:myloseweightdomain.com(org/net/us etc).

Here’s live example:

It’s obvious that the #1 page in results actually ranks #3 for the keyword how to lose weight fast, thanks to proper on-page optimization (also internal linking and off-page as well).

Typically google ranks the most relevant pages of your site on top. What I’ve seen after I did this for my tag paged sites, that my tag page currently showing in rankings actually is #2 after the TLD. And – it has 2 keyword instances in TITLE! And my home page has only 1 instance.

This is why I think that in our SEO plugins settings, we need to remove the %blog_title% in the %tag% | %blog_title% tag page format. Sometime I see that keywords get repeated 2-3 times in tag page titles where the default settings are left – this may smell like over-optimization!

Could it be the reason for pages replacement in rankings, when google determines that tag page is more important than actual main page since it has main keyword twice? I guess yes. Please also note that each tag we assign to the post is actually inner link to the tag page. Internal links count a lot.

ClickBank Sales Update

Written by Grand on February 9, 2011 · 9 Comments

Hi mates!

I can call this peroid as “stagnation”. So far, I’m not doing a lot for creating new sites or promoting the old ones.

I mean, 2 weeks ago I hired a full time Virtual Assistant on onlinejobs.ph and spend most of the time sharing all my backlinking secrets to him =) In fact, all is here in this blog, nothing to add here so far considering backlinking strategies I use.

As I’ve told, I’ve created 3 CB sites targeting one of the most popular CB products now, lowest gravity is around 300, highest is the 500+. One of my sites achieved top 4 position for main product term, but I was not happy with the CTR and sales volume, taking into account the actual traffic volume which is over 10000 exact in GKT.

In Jan 2011, this site only made me only 9 sales and $249.47 with only 130 click-throughs. I’ve decided to change the layout and did this on Feb 3, which immediately made me 3 sales and $70+ in income. But later I saw no sales at all… so I checked this site’s SERPs and found that google dropped it to 70 position, which is a traffic death.

I even invetnted a new term – “google shit” that represent all instances when you’re just starting to reap the $$$ benefits of your hard work, and google decides “it’s enough, affiliate buddy!” and kicks you back to nowhere. So, google shit happened again to this site, and now I’m working on getting it back to top.

Other 2 sites are still around #14 to #7 in google UK, and kicked out from google US or #80 in google us. Now my VA is working on backlinking these sites as well.All this income comes from 3 sites only. These 2 sites are still on the way, and one of the 3 money-makes is gone now, so I’m expecting some lower results until I get it back to top.

3 Metrics That Can Help Turn SEO Into Investment Projects

Currently, SEO can be completely outsourced to either VAs, or SEO services and individual workers that offer a huge range of different SEO tactics for some fees. Just look at Warrior forum, Backlinks Forum and Wickedfire, and there tons of SEO services with great reputation that will do all the work for you.

Now, in 2011 I decided to shift to outsourcing seriously, and this is where “treating each site as a separate investment” helps me.

Putting it simply – you have a CB product and you know that average conversion rate (CR) on Clickbank is 1%. You have a targeted keyword that is expecting to bring you 100 visitors a day (GKT data will show around 3000 exact searches a month – average, in January it can be 300 visitors and in August it can be 10000 visitors so the average will be around 3000 – this is what I see across all my top sites, all the time – traffic differs significantly month to month).

OK, so you may expect making 1 sale a day in case you’re in top 3 positions, top 1 preferrably You also know commission volume per sale – suppose it’s $30. Let’s say the projected income is $600 a month (people may not buy on weekends). I always pick the worst scenario – it appears to be most realistic in most cases.

If you;re already having a cash flow – how much money you could invest into SEO of this site to the top?

I’m leaving this question opened, and I suggesting why proper planning and keyword and competition research becomes an impotant step in this process. With all today’s supply of SEO services, the rest may become easy task, just find the proper market and ketwords and get to the top.

Income Stats – January 2011

Written by Grand on February 2, 2011 · 4 Comments

Hello dear reader!

I’m proudly stating that the income calculations for January 2011 are finally over, after 2 hours of non-stop work. Starting from this month, I’m going to control my budget on the planning stage, which I’m going to describe later. Now, I’m pretty much done with the “let’s see what I’ve spent and made last month” approach, not too serious approach to the online business.

Starting from the first weeks of January, I was hoping to make at least 2000$, since the sales were SO slow, add here constant rankings fluctuations, that inevitably affect the traffic and sales! Well, people were overspending during pre-Christmas time, so it’s pretty expectable to see slow activity after the New Year.

Having a diversified portfolio of sites and niches helped me to see some stability, so the final income is:

January 2011 – $3845.87

…which I never expected to be frank. I thought it’s around $3000 gross in the best scenario! Well, still too far from my $5000 a month net goal.

What I’ve learned in January 2011:

“Let’s see what I’ve spent and made last…”

This model of business (I guess many people are also doing this mistake) caused my net profit for January to be less than 2000$, all thanks to another paid traffic experiment that burned $1800 from my budget (!!!). I planned to spend $500 at most, but didn’t write it down, and kept on adding funds to a pretty huge traffic source, that was happy to eat $100-300 a day.

I’ve made some $350 in incomes, but as always, my SEO experiments are much more successful that paid traffic ones. And I know why – don’t spread yourself too thin.

Now I have a whole picture of my investment activity for the last month. I decided to treat every site as an investment project last year, but still didn’t implement this into the business, that’s probably why I’m still at $3000 a month levels.

No Matter How Many Sites I Have, 80/20 Principle Works All The Time

In December 2010, my top earning site made me $2296.67, almost 50% of my gross income. In January 2011, this site made me $192. Product related keyword. But – another site earned me $353.22 in December, and $1143.50 in January. Another product.

And I see this all the time – there’s always top performer that is responsibe for at least 30% of my gross monthly income at least, up to 50-60% at most. And, more importantly, these top-earners change all the time! Last month, one product was rocking, this month, this product shuts up, but another one rocks the club. The rest of sites are producing low income, or no income at all.

I guess this is the nature of product related sites. Traffic is pretty limited, and conversion rates depend on too many varaibles. Presell copy, page layout, banner placement, call to action in text links etc…

Well, so far, I’ve stopped buying new domains and decided to work on top positions for all the old ones, as well as completing several sites that are still not completed. Also, as my constant rankings tracking shows, google is doing a lot of ongoing algo changes, and the current SEO climate is still a bit unclear to me (I track both my sites and some other people’s sites).

I’m still pretty unhappy with my business stagnation, so now I’m working a lot on planning things out before I “shotgun shoot” my time and money here and there to see what sticks…

ClickBank Sales Are Getting Even Better Part 3

Written by Grand on January 28, 2011 · 13 Comments

There’s a quick update on ClickBank sites and sales. Today I’m at $300 a day income from all SEO sites, hope this will repeat more often. January is the worst month for me now, today seem s like a breakthrough.

Since November, I’ve decided to improve my ClickBank business a bit, but instead of working with classic affiliate sites (Affilorama style, however it existed long before Affilorama was released), I’ve tried to focus on targeting high gravity CB product names.

After so may fails with CPA related products, I’ve decided to try something that would be more consistent, and more – with higher traffic volumes. As previous year showed, targeting product name keywords with 1500-3000 exact searches in GKT doesn’t mean sales, even with product names where the conversion rates should in theory be much higher, it’s not always the case.

There are too many variables involved, such as on-site message, location of links/banners, competing sites (people may click through several sites among top 5 and buy from the site that appealed more to their individualty, that really depends. They just may like next site’s banner or call to action and skip mine etc…

At the same time, people targeting higher search keyword are the same are people targeting low-volume keywords. If you analyse top 10 for some popular products, you’ll find no actual difference in backlinking strategy. This is a good hint

It just may take some more time to get to top, or you may try to choose more agressive link building (high velocity). I must admit that I was NOT agressive, and around 1 week ago, one of my new CB sites got to position #3 for the main product keyword (with gravity over 500). As I write this post, it’s down to #6, but today it generated me 2 sales so I need to speed up backlinking a bit to stay in top 3 and get sales coming in. So far, I’ve already made over 10 sales and 1 refund (that’s CB reality….)

Here’s the screenshot of how it looks like now:

Few Words About How I Build My Sites Now

I’m going far beyond sending all the backlinks to the TLD (top level domain). In fact, I spend extra 20 minutes and find related keywords that are likely to convert on their own and that are not as chased by other people as the product name.

Then I add posts (using internal linking capabilities of SEO Ultimate plugin) and each new post always contans links to the TLD with main keyword and other posts with their targeted kws.

Then I spin the article and do Magic Submitter run, as well as add it to UAW, and so far I see that my sub-posts are actually ranking pretty high. My recently aded article for this site is now at position #3. Each post also contains call to action and link to the product site, in case the visitor may want to buy the product after reading the post

This is what I’m doing with all new sites now, not making 3-5 posts and push all backlinks to the main domain. As many “snipers” do, they just throw in a bunch of topically related articles but don’t actually backlinks these articles, concentrating on 1 main keword. I make a step further now.

My TLD gets the most diversified backlink rain – press releases, blog comments, profile links, some article marketing, web 2 platforms (most of these can be done with SENuke or Magic Submitter plus outsourced, but related posts are pretty fine with content syndication strategy (UAW + Magic Submitter un). That’s basically it.

Further Steps With ClickBank

I still have 2 more sites targeting highest competition products (I bet you all know these products ), one is #18 for main keyword, another is # 100+ in google.com and #6 in google UK. My bad, I still didn’t add affiliate links to all the pages I have. Gotta do this today! It’s been 2 months since I started to backlink them, but still no high positions. It’s mostly due to low link acceleration, since I now more into administration stuff than backlinking these sites all day long.

I’ll report more in the future how these 2 sites perform.

Quick Recap Of 2010 And Goals For 2011

Written by Grand on January 26, 2011 · 2 Comments

Hi dear readers!

It’s been a while since my last post where I let my subconcsious mind speak (with help of cogniac) and the most fun part of it is that my signature on WarriorForum (as I’ve discovered today) says “Grand Online Profits – don’t read this blog if you think that SEO sucks for affiliate marketing”.

I can imagine what a confusion for a visitor coming to this blog from my Warrior signature

OK, this post should be written at least 3 weeks ago, but since January appears so busy month for me, I do it now.

2010 was a year when after failures with PPC I’ve finally seen some profits in SEO. There were many small ups and down, all are revealed here in the blog, and more importantly, I did so much experimenting with different SEO strategies that now I simply need to let it all done on a daily basis and see where I get.

Here are top things of 2010:

Easiest Way Of Earning Over 1000$ In a Month

It happened in February when I accidentally noticed that my affiliate links for one of the produts on a site are not working (the merchant changed tracking platform). I simply spent 10 minutes updating my aff links and the very next day found several conversions. This repeated daily, since my site happened to be #1 for a keyword and this keyword was on a huge spike since janurary. Now I have 2 sites in top 5 for this keyword, and can only hope the spike will repeat!

My #1 Income Generating Strategy Of 2010

Definitely, it was so called “sniper” method. I had a site targeting dozens of keywords, (see above) but “keyword in domain” and targeting product related keywords was (and still is) what made me most of the income.

My Top Strategic Mistake Of 2010

THis is why I’m still not making 10000$ a month, and just dance around 3000-4000$. Targeting product names! I did a lot of sites that chased CPA related product names. CPA offers are the most unstable offers around. The good exxample are some acai offers that somehow became very popular and in-demand so SEO traffic was really good, and conversions as well. But this doesn’t last long, so the traffic dries out after some time.

ALso, I had several cases when the hot offer got removed from ALL CPA networks right before my site hit #1-3 spot. All I had to do is create new sites… was it worth it? For experience, yes, but not for consistent income.

Product name (as well as most likely to convert keyword) related sites are very limited in traffic they get. At the same time, the competition is huge, since everybody’s chasing the same keywords. This strategy has it’s pros and cons, and I think it shoudln’t be the only SEO strategy under the belt.

My Easiest Income #2 In 2010

Adsense. The ONLY true passive income out there. You just login into adsense account and see approximately the same amount of money every day (fluctuating definitely, but the most consisent).

So far, I have 17 live adsense sites all created in XFactor style. All are exact keyword domain names. I did a serious keyword research and almost NO backlinking, yet my adsense income is around 100$ every month. The worst was December when I made $90+, but now I’m about to get 190$ in Feb. Not much, but not bad since I don’t touch these mini-sites for months.

Top Google Kick In 2010

The very same site that made me nice incomes in February 2010 and later, was seriously dropped in rankings in July, and cannot restore since then. With this site I’d be making around 5000$ a month minimum now, but… I’ve completely changed internal linking structure in October or November, but the site only lifted for 2 weeks, then dropped down again. Now I’m moving it to the wordpress platform and want to add some more content and backlink it seriously and see how that goes.

Top Converting WordPress Theme In 2010

Thesis. Maybe it’s pure luck that all the sites on Thesis were my successful picks, or people prefer clean and simple themes, but this is the fact – most of the money I made in 2010 are on the Thesis equipped sites. Where’s my aff link for Thesis? Not today, just visit James, he had that link to buy this converting theme

Worst Converting WordPress Theme In 2010

You’ll probably wonder, but this is the fact – Socrates theme was the worst performer for me. I ended up moving majority of my sites to other themes. For one site, I checked the tracking of clicked affiliate links, and found that for several months, my in-content links generated 0 clicks!!! All the clicks were on the banners in the sidebar. The Socrates styling needs serious rework. I’ve only made 2 sales on Amazon site, that still has Socrates. CTRs are worst. Very easy-to-use theme, but no luck in it for me.

#1 WordPress Plugin In 2010

SEO Ultimate. Thanks to James for introducing this plugin, it really replaces several plugins. Internal linking on autopilot, and internal linking means a lot in the rankings, especially in google and Bing.

Top Backlinking Method In 2010

Finding and getting high PR links. This is exactly how I quickly ended Google dances that dumped my money making sites into 100+ positions in SERPs. My post Position #14 To Position #1 In 1 Day – Quick How-To explains how I did this.

Top Lesson I Learned In 2010

Analyse why you haven’t achieved $10000 a month in 2010, make adjustments and achieve $10000 a month in 2011.

My Goals For 2011

I’m already working toward these goals.

#1 – Shift from “sniper” approach to bigger authority sites that are bringing more consistent income. Right now I’m revamping my “google-kicked” buddy, plus working on the site that will have 30-50 reviews plus articles covering different easy to rank long tails. Huge traffic keyword is the main (around 60000 monthly exact). Who knows. THere were times when I dominated “weight loss pills’ keyword. with 2 properties One of them was Ezinearticles.

#2 – Shift from being “product” oriented affiliate to “traffic” oriented affiliate. In 2010 I promoted products/offers. In 2011 I want to get where traffic is, simple. Traffic is money this is always true, product is money – not always. It it was so, ALL my sites would be making money now and I’d easily earn over 10000$ a months, and the more sites I’d create, the more and more money would roll in. As 2010 showed – this is just a dream Well, now it’s too early to talk about this in detail, it’s what I plan to do in future.

OK, now I’ve shared my strategic goals for 2011 and today actually was a hardest-working day, at the same I’ve made several huge steps that I will post about a bit later. Stay tuned!!

SEO Sucks All Sucks In my Opinion

Written by Grand on January 16, 2011 · 17 Comments

I’m sitting in a bar near m house, nice bar, I’ve made a shot but my Nokia doesn’t transfer pic to my netbook, it sucks. SEO sucks because today I’ve got no sales, I’m siting alone here in a beautiful bar near my house, nice music, nice peopple, but I don’t know what the hell to do next. Rank Tracker seem to have issues with .com database of google, my sales are 0, I still undecided where to invest my funds, cogniiac is cool and I’m drunk,

Clickbank sales stopped now, other sales are stoppen now, my banner campaign doesn’t make sales n’t makes sales, I n make money (it’s dark here sory for misspells).

Even my fucking Nokia doesn’t send picture of a bar via bluetooth now.

I’m tired ff all these things. People are sitting around me, enjoying each other, men, women, girls, . I’m sitting alone with my notebook and thinking where the hll to go further. Invest in SEO or invest in paid traffic, PPV or banners, or SEO? I see no consistency, last month the site makes me 2000$ now it hardly makes 3 sales a week.

Rank Tracker seem to face another google’s algo change. Life sucks big time. I’m fucking tired of this never-ending battle for a piece of funds to prolong this life, pay another set of checks, buy another bunch of food, just to keep liing this worthless life….

Nothing but these “money getting Concerns// No fun, no enjoyment, no sense. Yep time to go home and get some food to be able to

ClickBank Sales Are Getting Even Better

Written by Grand on January 5, 2011 · 5 Comments

In November 14 I wrote a post Watch My empty Clickbank account where I just showed how “much” money I make on CB.

“Showing weakness” worked good as a motivation for me to start concentrating on Clickbank as a source of income and make these weekly deposits happen quite more often. I like Clickbank money, as it’s a really serious help in the cash flow.

So now, after 1.5 months of continuous efforts, things have taken off a bit:

I’m not doing Clickbank a main part of income, this is just for diversification, as I remain a strict follower of diversifying everything online, after several failures I faced in the past.

My personal take on CB – yes good money can be made, but the nature of CB products is a little different than typical physical products, so there are always some ups and downs in conversion rates.

All this income comes from only 3 sites, and now I’m working on 3 more sites targeting heavy trafficked keywords/popular products. 1 site is now on position 7 (I need to finally add those affiliate links , another one is #23 for main keyword, and the 3rd one is #24 in the google UK (- in google us). All the products are gravity over 300 and really competitive.

Couple of these sites are also targeting several (4-5) related keyword as well, to grab even more traffic. So, I’m now kind of evolving from “1 keyword per site” (aka Sniper) model.

OK, I’m doing a lot of experimenting, every new site is tesing some SEO-related stuff and I’ll probably cover some in future posts when I have more reliable data.

Income Stats – December 2010

Written by Grand on January 3, 2011 · Leave a Comment

The New Year celeration craze seems to be cooling down, so tonight I calculated all the incomes for the past month.

Again, the month started with a sales hits, making me 100-200$ daily, but there’s still no consistency and sometimes I only saw 30$-days or so..

Again, my set for diversification across many niches/sites helped me in this hard period, when majority of my sites were down thanks to the hosting issues.

Another bad point for December was usual google’s SERP convulsions for a handful of sites, including those that are making me money. So, 500-600$ incomes in previous months turned into 100-150$ incomes from these sites in December.

Well, at the same time, only 1 of my sites sitting in top 1-3 positions, is responsible for 57.5% of my gross December’s income, and the gross total is:

December 2010 – 3992.52$

This one site was on another hosting, and lucklily the niche showed some spike in demand, that resulted in me taking all the converting traffic ).

Luck Factor

Yes, this is what eventually helped me to beat my November’s income. But – it’s still not the stable income growth as I see it now. It’s obvious that the more stuff we throw at the wall, the more will stick eventually, however I wanted more stable and reliable income from SEO, and now I realise it’s pretty hard.

Passive income appears to be too dependant on too many variables, so we have to be quite active to maintain our so called “passive” incomes.

Future Steps

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I keep building more and more sites now. Targeting keywords with exact traffic over 5000 searches per month, sometimes as much as 15000 searches.

The positions keep growing, more slowly due to more agressive competition, but it’s DOABLE, just need a bit more persistensy and some more out-of-the-box twists to get ahead of other competitors.

For example, one of my sites that I started in Mid-November targeting one of the top CB products (gravity over 500) that gets over 10000 exact searches for main keyword, was sticking at 180-150 positions for weeks, now after consistent backlinking, I see it on position 8 now. Ops, I only got 1 aff link on it now, just didn’t have ime to finish it, started to SEO it.

ANother hot product I’m targeting now, I see it growing slowly and now it’s on pos 25 (this is in CB weight loss niche and competition is extremely huge now).

We’re not weaker than other same guyes who are taking these top 10 spots, until we’re not watching what are they doing, and not trying to outgame them. No excuses not to dominate this google )

OK, I’m closing it down now, got some observations and ideas that I wanted to share in separate post, concerning current SEO and what I believe will work in SEO 2011.

Stay tuned players! We gonna rock this year!

Getting The Edge Over Competition In SEO – Video Example

Written by Grand on December 27, 2010 · 12 Comments

Hello!

I’m not quite active on my blog now due to recent “nightmare” that happened to me…

The “Nightmare”

THe nightmare was called “one of my SEO hostings was down for days in a row…”. Imagine having dozen of blogs/sites both supporting and money-making that are in a “server not responging” status. You cannot update them, you cannot access them and your postential customer cannot make you money!

This is the WORST situation in SEO, even after my site was banned by google in Sept 2009, it still made me $$$ from other traffic sources. If it was dehosted – I’d be making zero. Simple.

So it took me over a week of hard work of getting into all the details of transferring my sites from one host to another, tons of support tickets etc, issues on the road and fixes, checking the links, plugins, reconfiguring stuff… Thanks to the professional team of my new host for help!

Another Glimse Into How I Get More Backlinking Opportunities

It all starts from the good old competition analysis. Note that not only hunt for my direct competitors for keywords I’m about to dominate, but also I love “tough” niches like pharma, forex, acai, weight loss in general, replica watches, ugg boots etc. as there are many hardcore SEO strategies are being used to get these hard keywords.

Sometimes the casual backlink I find can be turned into potentially hundreds of backlinks due to discovering a new blog/content platforms, that are not widely used as, say, SE Nuke or Magic Submitter roperties.

We need an edge – competition uses MS or SENuke, we use that + our own secret blog platforms and similar “hosts” for content with our backlinks.

Let’s look at this example (sorry for the quality – it was my bad to use free Jing, will use Camtasia next time):

Now I’ve made a note of the string that I’ll be using as a footprint, and it’s time to see if there any more platforms similar to tdkspace.com where we can create blogs and leave dofollow backlinks.

Please note that I ONLY used 1 simple footprint to find over 260 potential blog platforms where I can leave my article with 2,4 or more backlinks. There are many more footprints that I see if I watch the site layout, like (Powered By PHPFox), or “Powered by phpFoX Version 1.6.20″ + inurl: blog etc etc….

Ok, the last one step – get all these sites and start placing your articles with backlinks in them! Not all of these sites allow dofollow, some are striping the links inside the posts, but the majority do allow posts with dofollow links, so what are you waiting for??

Again mates, the amount of backlinks is virtually UNLIMITED – it’a sll about time to invest into it, or money to invest into outsourcing.

I’ve got some more stuff like that, but here I decided to share the approximate way of how I find backlinking opportunities all the time I go to the top 10 with SEOQuake turned on…

Merry Christmas!!!!

And stay tuned for more content from Grand )

First Amazon Sale

Written by Grand on December 8, 2010 · 8 Comments

Hi!

A couple of days ago I logged into my Amazon account, and noticed increased clicks activity in December. I have only 1 site targeting Amazon products (initially planned to target this product on CJ, however the approval process was so long that I switched to Amazon).

The site is really small and only has 300-word reviews of 5 products related to 1 merchant. The domain was brand new, and all I did was some profile backlinking, UAW submission and some SENuke web 2.0 blog postings. It was in July-August, and the rankings were not good at all, so I hardly got 20 clicks in a month. Suddenly google decided to ramp the site to some top 10 and I’ve seen 30 clicks in 5 days, and 1 sale.

Now I checked the rankings and google decided to bury this site back to nothing, google is as usually – predictable in it’s unpredictability.

So, again my vote is for physical products, with the proper approach, Amazon can really become a good source of income, at least comparing 300-500 hops in clickbank and 0 sales, I tend to stick to my beloved physical products.

Now I’m working hard at 2 sites for top clickbank products, and tomorrow I plan to launch another one. I’m doing a lot of testing now, each new domain contains some ideas that I test in terms of faster and higher rankings.

I hope to see some effects in the future (the keywords I’m targeting are far more competitive than what I’ve done before), and if something will work, I’ll share my findings.

Now, back to work. Today I’ve spent over 8 hours researching some strategies of top 10 sites. There were several moments when I realized I’m a complete SEO newb =)

Income Stats – November 2010

Written by Grand on December 2, 2010 · 12 Comments

Completely drunken post – cogniac works inside me!

This month was controversial first 2 weeks – almost no sales and I was going to change my goal of 5000$ back to 3000$. Last 2 weeks – sales suddenly skyrocketed – and 200$ – 300$ from SEO days are back! Yeah! Not bad…

OK, down to the earnings mates:

November 2010 – 3149,65$

I’m cutting down my memberships that are worhtless, like Dree Feeb Blasts. Profile links do not bring me good rankings… I also made a hude Xrumer blast for my authority site to see how that goes – nothing changed in rankings. Penalty is penalty – I end to say google “fuck you” and switch to outside traffic sources. ..

Bad news – seohost.com has some servers down so a huge amount of my high PR sites are also down. I cannot create new sites on this host now – no access.My 3 high traffic oriented sites and on seohost.com - I can only hope they will resove the issues before google drops my rankings.

Goood news – I have a fresh batch of high PR sites that I will place on another host – now doing extensive research of reliable SEO hosts.

Also – most of my time now I spend on learning new stuff to get traffic outside of google. PPV, media buys, lots of traffic that makes tons of money there is! Tomorrow will be celebrating 1 year of my adwords acc ban – I notice that outside of google I’m profitable, so SEO is a foundation to make money to invest in other traffic sources mates – so many shit going on with google now — my guts telling me they want to kick the middle men (us affiliates) out completely – of PPC and SEO.

SEO is still doable, but like with my seohost.com sites – don’t put all the eggs in 1 basket – diversify! My top money making sites are on another host, thanks God!!!!! So I keep making 100$+ every day now.

I never expected to make over 3000$ in this month, so bad were the sales in the 1st 2 weeks. Now I see the raise, and hope December will be OK. Still doing a lot of research, learning, I want to go beyond SEO and start making more with paid traffic.

Fill time VA still not hired – I’m too busy offline helping my mom with all the freaking household stuff (communal apartment) so I work in the night time and drink cogniac to help my brain get going with this stuff…

ClickBank Sales Are Getting Better

Written by Grand on November 29, 2010 · 2 Comments

These days are a bit of slow in terms of online activity.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, instead of doing a lot of doing So my results in this month will reflect this. Anyway, several days ago I posted a screen of CB earnings, and decided to improve situation as quickly as possible.

My 2 new sites for CB products seem to face a hard competition, since this is high traffic keywords and the products are among top CB sellers. I see some progress, however having a full time VA would help a lot, and I lost over 2 weeks trying to contact one of the site that offered VAs for SEO/content etc.

As outsourcing pros say, middle men just suck, this is true. I’m now getting into onlinejobs.ph, just have to complete my list of tasks/projects and stuff related to hiring a worker.

Here’s what I have in CB now:

Not too much, but the sales started to show up. I think I’ll need over a month to see a consistent incomes from CB, since the sites are still far from top 10, and I have more sites that I’m just about to launch, also for high competition products with some traffic.

Other projects

Well, that’s pretty much what I’m now doing, still the authority site is under penalty, and makes no sales at all. CPA sites also lost almost all traffic due to offers being removed. I’ve had the first 2 weeks worst ever in the last months – under 800$ for a long time.

Now I see some good improvement in sales, sometimes I made over 200$ a day, now it’s around 50-100$ a day consistently. My goal of 5000$ is still in the future, but I keep working on that and building new sites. I also plan to test different stuff, including bigger sites aimed at longer tail keywords, again I need VA to help me handle all this stuff.

Income update will come soon as well, so let’s see how November turned out for us!

What About Your Sites Rankings?

Written by Grand on November 18, 2010 · 7 Comments

Over the last time I’ve started to notice some wierd things going on with my sites, mostly fresh ones.

Whatever I do, the rankings seem to “stick” and not move at all. Somt other sites that I launches are not appearing anywhere in rankings, which is even more embarrasing.

ALso one of my top money making sites (pretty old one and with lots of pages) is under the kind of penalty since July, and I see 1-2 sales a month from it instead of daily sales.

Just got up and decided to check what the hell is going on again with google, and here are some fresh articles that I found:

At least my goal of growing the incomes has been seriously affected, and now, as I’ve laumched a couple of sites for high traffic keywords, my old strategies I’m trying to apply to these sites seem not give any effect at all. Yet..Well, many of my sites are still in the top positions, but – whether the offers are dead, or my traffic predictions were wrong and I targeted worthless keywords.

Again, back to diversification – we’re all slaves of those who control traffic, and dependance on one traffic source (especially of such crud as google) is like being a prisoner waiting for THEM to decide his last day of life.

I completely hate this situation, and the game will be merciless.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be investing into another article network membership, or the like – they all promise google’s paradise, but in fact 1 slight bowel movement in the google’s guts - and all the efforts may be wasted in 1 day.

I’m just thinking, and thinking a lot about this stuff now – and I hope not on the google mercy (worthless) but on finding new ways to game their freaking system, again. They don’t deserve the fair play, as always.