College is here, and it’s fucking badass. I love it 10 times more than high school. I’m attending LSU for those of you that didn’t know. School is currently consuming 22 documentable hours; 17 hours in my curriculum and 5 hours of math lab every week and then when you add studying, its way to much time. So that means less time to work and play.

LG Venus is now ranking #14 for the term LG Venus in Google. It’s really not that big of an accomplishment considering the competition, but I’m proud of it so far. I think the site has Top 5 potential, so only time will tell. At the rate it’s been going, it should earn around $150-$200 this month with the low amount of traffic it’s getting. Coupon and Sandals have dropped down in traffic and earnings. I might be able to resurrect them and bring the earnings back up.

A buddy of mine, Conrad (well I think that’s his blog now) just launched a new forum. You can find it here, it’s pretty cool looking. The place is brand new, and there aren’t any super techniques being dropped right now, but if you’re from the Talkfreelance crowd I suggest you check it out.

That is all. Hurricane Gustav hit my house pretty hard and I still don’t have power. Ike is dropping a deuce on me right now as we speak so I hope he doesn’t mess up my power situation any more than it already is. If any of you guys pray or whatever, make one for the Texans (and some Louisiana people like myself) who’ve been affected by Gustav and will be affected by Ike. They (us) (we) need all of the help we (us) (they) can get.

I recently found an interesting trend in my network: the sites I spend the least amount of time working on are doing the best. I wish I could post an example, but I’m getting ready to start some heavy work on one of the sites and don’t want to spoil the niche. But the site that I spent the least amount of time on is on an aged domain, while the sites that I spend a lot of time working on are on fresh domains. 

Everybody already knows this, but I didn’t realize the power of it: aged domains are the way to go. I started BSG on a fresh domain and put a lot of work into it. It isn’t doing that well. On the flip side I paid $3 for a year-old domain that a webmaster was just going to let expire, and right now it’s doing great, easily kicking BSG’s ass. I’ll never build a site on a new domain again.

That’s all for today, remember folks: buy aged domains!

I’m basically only going to build sites around subjects that I’m passionate about. Sure, they may be saturated markets. But there are tons of people that are just chasing money that I’m sure I could out rank because I actually give a shit about what I’m writing about.

In a week or two I plan on announcing everything in my network, and you’ll be able to tell what subjects interest me. I won’t be able to build a site about everything I like, but I’m going to try and cover a good amount of subjects. Some will be mini niche sites that I don’t plan to update more than once or twice a week, while others are sites I’d like to update as often as possible. 

I’m also working on trying to get a new job at a graphic design, marketing, programming, media, everything in one type of company. I have some pretty good connections to get inside, but I just need to make the effort. Of course I’m not guaranteed the spot, and I’m nervous as fuck about it; I haven’t even called to schedule an appointment for an interview. However I’m going to try as hard as I can and give it my best shot.

Thats all for now. This post turned out longer than I had hoped. Time to get some sleep, peace.

Next up I’ll find some forums and start posting. If I can find 5-10 forums and make 10 posts each, thats 50-100 easy backlinks. I’ll then purchase some social bookmarking links from some guys at Wickedfire. I’ll then continue to add content, at least a few pages per week. Hopefully that will raise the income of the site.

As you can see, nothing crazy or out of the box. Just basic stuff. Hopefully it will produce some results in the next few weeks. Time will tell…

So what’s going on? Why is a site that has been developed losing to a site that hasn’t been touched? Well there is only one reason I can come up with, and its because I threw something at the wall and it sticked. There are a few other factors as well though. Coupon’s domain is much older than the newly registered BSG domain. And come on, www.coupon.nu is going to rank a lot better than www.buyshotglasses.com. 

Moral of the story? Time to through money at coupon and see what happens. I plan on getting some social bookmarking done, content generation (mini blog), and more backlinks. 

Other News

LexusLF-A and NissanGT-R have been launched. They are both just mini niche blogs that will only be updated every now and then. Last week they had a total of 16 uniques each, with 7 of those uniques being me most likely. They have zero backlinks, I’m just focusing on creating content for the sites and worry about backlinks later.

I also built another phpbay site: BeachSandals. Thats the first link it has ever seen, so obviously Google doesn’t know about it yet. Time will tell if the site converts or not.

And that it for today. Time to get back to work.

I was recently on the phone with a friend of mine at Wickedfire, and we were discussing the issues I was having with BuyShotGlasses (lets call it BSG for the remainder of this post). I built a pretty decent site, however I was having problems getting some links for the thing. Building links has always been a weakness for me. But after talking things over with him, and blasting out a few PMs to some other guys, I was on the right track.

I think BSG has the potential to become a $1/day earner, and thats it. $2 per day is really pushing it. Why are the earnings predictions so low? Because of the potential traffic. While I picked a niche that was (should) be easy to rank in, there is a reason why its easy to rank in. There isn’t a lot of search volume for the niche. The collective daily search volume for my 3 main keywords is around 250 searches. 

Depending on how BSG does in the rankings will decide how much of those 250 searchers see my site. Then I have to convert them into customers. Mind you, most of those searches will come off the main keyword ’shot glasses’. So my overall goal with BSG is to get 100 unique visitors per day. If I achieve this, I will be satisfied. After that, I want to optimize the traffic as well as possible using multiple revenue streams: affiliate marketing, eBay partner network (EPN), Adsense (more like Adcents haha), and private ad sales. Those are listed in order of importance, with affiliate marketing and EPN being a toss up for first place. I feel that my site is targeted enough to do well with affiliate marketing.

Now lets talk about SEO. I’ve learned a lot about SEO in the past few weeks. Previously, all I have done to BSG is do your basic on page SEO, and do some social networking submissions to gain backlinks. Where did that get me?

• Top 5 for ‘buy shot glasses’

Great, that list is small. And I ranked for a keyword that doesn’t even bring in traffic. Hell, the only reason I ranked is because of my domain most likely. So what am I doing differently?

• Fresh Content - I built a nice static site, however Google likes new content. I built a blog awhile back and updated it daily for two months. I did nothing in terms of SEO. It was consistently getting 150 uniques per day. So obviously new content allows you to rank for even more keywords. And that means more traffic.
• Sitemap - Oops, forget to build one of these. Since I’ll be adding new content daily, I want Google (Yahoo and MSN as well) to find it.
• Link Injecting - But in a totally non-blackhat way. I’m just posting around on sites that allow me to inject a link to a site. Simple as that.
• Some Blackhat - Okay, I’m going to need a few paragraphs to explain this tactic, lets get rid of these bullets:

I’m talking mild blackhat. I won’t be spamming in order to get thousands of backlinks. What I’m going to do is build a network. I’ll have 3 layers of sites:

• Layer 1: Money Site(s) - In this case, BSG will be the money site. This layer needs to be as white hat as possible. That means 100% unique content, information that needs to be updated daily, and nothing that will risk people thinking its spammy in any shape or form. 
• Layer 2: Link Juice Sites - I’ll be purchasing around 5 domains that are in the same niche as BSG. The content will be ghost written; I don’t want to waste time making it seem professional, and I don’t want it to be flagged as duplicate content either. The ONLY outbound links coming from these sites will be pointing at BSG. And eventually, they will become 301 redirects to BSG passing all of there link juice to it.
• Layer 3: Spam Sites - Its all about numbers here. For the purpose of this small network, I will be creating around 7-10 sites for each link juice site. The spam sites will link to the link juice sites. These sites will have duplicate content, and they will be constructed on other peoples servers: think squidoo lenses, wordpress.com, blogger, etc.

This technique and similar techniques have been discussed numerous amounts of times all over the internet. I’m going to try it with BSG, however I’m going to be watering it down. I want some longevity out of this network, therefore its not going to be 100% spammy. I want all of the sites to be quality, and hopefully boost up BSG’s rankings.

I’m going to start off on layer 2 once I have BSG ready. Its currently getting some directory submissions done. This project has transformed from just another site to an experiment that I’m using to learn about SEO. Sadly, she doesn’t rank anywhere for ’shot glasses’ anymore however I hope to get in the Top 20 when I’m finished with layer 2. When layer 3 comes by and fails to push BSG to the Top 20, I’m going to do some serious evaluations on what went wrong.

Wish me luck, I’ll keep everybody posted on how it goes. Keep in mind that this is just an experiment. And if you like what your reading, I’d appreciate any comments you have.

Good news is I’m advancing around 10 positions in the SERPs each day for my main search term. I originally wasn’t anywhere to be found for the term ’shot glasses’ but yesterday I was at position 173, today I’m at 161. So time will tell if I’ll rank decently. I spent $25 on some SEO work that focused on that keyword and got me around 100 backlinks (and counting), so I hope it will carry me to the first page. Doubt it though, competition is pretty stiff on that first page. 

So, why am I bitching? I’m making some cash, I should just repeat this process and build more sites and over time the site will increase in earnings because its only about a month old. Well, I spent $25 (didn’t really need to spend the Adwords money so count that out) to make $1.50 in a month. Hopefully I’m being really impatient; are there any experienced guys out there can comment on this?

I also started an affiliate campaign, and I’m getting ready to build some more sites today. Acquired a few domains for cheap, along with the two car sites that I need to build. I’ve got plenty to do this week. Expect a more thorough update this week.

BuyShotGlasses.com

This site has been pretty busy lately. Google and Yahoo have been crawling all over here, and picking up traces of the site throughout the web (backlinks hooray!). I recently completed a 100 social bookmarking link campaign (well I outsourced it) and a day after it was done I started to see backlinks appear in Yahoo. The site originally ranked for the keyword ‘buy shot glasses’ at #8, but it is now at #3 with only 2 additional backlinks (10 total). I expect it to shortly rank #1 for the term, however it won’t bring in much traffic. EDIT: It now ranks at #2 for the term ‘buy shot glasses’. To bad it only gets like 5 searches a day…

I’m trying to rank for more competitive keywords that should hopefully bring in around 50-75 visitors per day when it is all said and done. And that is my goal, to at least attain 50 visitors a day. Sadly, thats as far as the shot glass niche will go. I don’t expect this site to earn more than $1 or $2 per day, so optimizing the site for the traffic is key. I’m pretty sure I can attain this, however it won’t be easy.

Coupon.nu

My coupon site is coming together well. I’m currently at my favorite coffee shop working on the site (using my blog as a break, as always) and I’m going to try and put in a good 5 hours before work. So far I have most of the sales front complete, however I plan on getting some more content for the SERPs before I leave. I’m having some issues with how phpBay is displaying the auction feed. It currently isn’t displaying dollar or percent signs, which is crucial for the niche.

I have so far surpassed all of my goals for the site as outlined in my last post. I finished keyword research in one day instead of 3, and I have 14 pages of content up instead of 8. A good rule of thumb is that if you find yourself meeting or surpassing your goals, is that its time to setup new ones and raise the bar. So, here are my new goals:

• Have the site indexed by the end of the week
• Have 30 pages of content total by the end of the week
• Begin attaining backlinks next week
• Start ranking for keywords by the end of next week

The last goal is going to be extremely hard, but hopefully I can end up somewhere in the SERPs for one of my keywords in 2 weeks. If I do, I’ll share the details.

NissanGT-R.org and LexusLF-A.net

I haven’t done much with these sites lately. I’m thinking about changing things up with them; instead of making them blogs that take a lot of time to maintain and don’t really earn that much, I’ll just build them into mini niche sites.

And to be off topic for a second, I’ll write a post in the upcoming week about why I think blogging for bucks is dying. 

I’ll be using wordpress as my CMS (like I do with all of my sites) however instead of having to update them every day, I’ll just write 15 or so pages of content and focus on SEO work. I’ll try and rank for some decent longtails, and throw up some Adsense. I’ll be happy if I can get a few dollars per day out of them.

Editorialize.org

Editorialize as been put on the back burner. I don’t own the domain (its complicated) but I may be able to purchase it from him. I basically used it for an educational case study at Wickedfire to try and earn some money on the web. Basically this guy Mike (SEO_Mike on the forums) setup a little case study to help noobs earn money online. I don’t consider myself a noobie, however I’m not a pro either. I sat around and waited, and nobody claimed the domain. So I went ahead a snatched it. The agreement was that if you earn money with it, you can buy it. Well I haven’t earned anything yet, but I might be able to. We’ll see.

The Etcetera Part

I’m going to try and index my Coupons site just by linking to it on my blog. Lets see how often Google really crawls my site. If the big G does, then I should be able to index at least the homepage just by linking to it. Just a little experiment. 

In other news, I’m really finding it refreshing getting out of the ‘office’ (my bedroom) and working in other environments. Whenever my father gets home from work (I need to move out) he sometimes works on his laptop in the dining room. I’ll join him every now and then. His giant Toshiba laptop towers over my MacBook Pro, however he can’t beat the simplicity of my laptop, which by the way I love. I’m so glad I switched from PC to Mac. I feel like I’m much more productive these days.

And I guess I did it again by writing to much. Maybe I’ll do another video blog update some day, but not as long as I’m working outside of the confines of my bedroom. People might think I’m crazy or something. Well see you guys later, and don’t forget to leave a comment or two. It helps knowing people actually read my ramblings haha.
 

My plan is to take the domain and design, and try some affiliate marketing with it. I’m going to create a wordpress blog out of the design, and possibly market some sort of product that deals with writing/publishing/work at home. I’m going to try as hard as possible to stay away from webmasters because that niche is way to competitive. I will use a combination of PPC and SEO for traffic.

As of now I’ve quickly glanced over what Copeac and Azoogle have to offer that could relate to the turn Editorialize, and I haven’t found anything that stood out. I’m going to sign up for CJ and possibly ClickBooth (or is it ClickBank? One of the two is a major scam, and I can’t seem to remember which one it is right now) and see what they may have. Worse comes to worse, I’ll just make an EPN site out of it and target magazines and stuff for sale.

As far as other happenings go, I wasn’t able to get much done today. I did some link building for BuyShotGlasses.com, but other than that all I did was check my email, stats, and wrote this post. At work I managed to slice open my index finger while cutting french bread, so its been pretty hard to type things with all of the bandaging required to keep my finger from bleeding again. Along with the fact that I’m dead tired after only sleeping 3 hours along with working a double shift at the restaurant today. In case you’re wondering, I’m a server at a cajun restaurant that is popular with both the locals and tourists (located in Louisiana).  

I’ll have some updates on my other projects soon. Check out NissanGT-R.org, I just put up a temporary framework design and some content. By framework I mean that its a premium wordpress theme that has some neat features, however I’ll be customizing it to make it look unique (much like what I did with my blog design). I’ll go into detail about what I’m doing as far as link building goes for BuyShotGlasses.com.

My next plan is to start a case study about LexusLF-A.net. I’m excited about that project because it seems as if there isn’t a lot of competition for the car as Lexus isn’t interested in releasing it any time soon. I’ll be showing you guys what I do when it comes to building these mini sites, and we can both learn from the experience because as you know, I’m not an internet millionaire, hundred-thousand-aire, or even a hundredaire. Buy hey, it could be interesting, right? 

I’m using PPC to get traffic to it to test it out while waiting for SERP results. However I don’t know shit about off site SEO, so I’m not sure I’ll see any results from the SERPs. But I just cancelled my PPC campaign because of shitty conversions. I saw 16% of the traffic click on the eBay links, with only 1% of the clicks converting. I had an adsense banner installed as well (only 1) and 23% of the traffic clicked it. So I made some money, but my ROI ratio is like 4:1. Not to good eh?

My page converts, but I’m getting shitty payouts. Its probably because of the niche, and because I’m not paying enough for my keywords and thus not getting a lot of traffic. After seeing what kind of payouts I’m getting, I’m reluctant to up the bid; if even use PPC at all. But if I were to dominate the SERPs for my keywords, then it would be a nice little money maker. I guess this site just isn’t made for PPC?

So that is basically what I posted. Whats the game plan now? Link building, and maybe a small network all linking to the site. If I can rank on the first page for some long tail buy-shot-glass-style keywords, I figure I can get around 150-200 unique visitors per day. That equates to around $100 per month in adsense alone (using private data, such as my adsense CTR and EPC). Through in some affiliate offers and the EPN (the store basically), and I’m sure I could make $200 per month off of this site in a few months. 

Not that much eh? Considering it took a day to build the site, and depending on how much time it takes to get links, I’m sure I could easily multiply this formula into many other niches. The only hard part is getting this site to be an earner. After that I could build as much as 20-30 of these sites a month. Over the course of 6 months that would be roughly 120-180 sites, and once they get into the SERPs and they start ranking, lets say they average $100 a month in earnings. In 6-8 months, I could be making $15,000 per month!

Don’t you love wishful thinking? All of the above statistics are a best case scenario, and you know that hardly ever happens. But the point I’m trying to make is the power of the rinse-and-repeat method. Find a formula that works, and duplicate it over and over again.