I have updated my earnings page. It’s still peanuts, but it’s a few more peanuts so I’m at least moving in the right direction.
I hope to update more soon.
Niche Site Update - Temporary Slow Down
June 18th, 2009 · Niche Sites
Just thought I would check in with an update of what I have been up to. The short story is, not much. I haven’t been feeling well the past week and have spent almost no time working on my sites. And since I have some events coming up next week, I’m afraid that trend will continue for another week or two.
The one thing I did get done was set up my accounts for the backlink WSO I mentioned before. That will actually require at least an hour each week of participation so that I will have to keep up with that – hopefully it will be worth the effort.
I also blew my budget for the next few weeks on Market Samurai. I don’t think I have ever spent that much on anything, but I really wanted something to help with keyword research. When I saw that MS now included a Rank Checking module, I decided to take the plunge. Now I need to set aside some time to play with it.
My backlog of things to do includes editing some rewrites I outsourced for niche site #13 and getting those posted. I also stumbled across a great deal on some original articles and had some articles written for my second mini-site (sniper), but still need to get that site set up. And then there is always a need for more backlinking…
My niche site #6, which has been the focus of all my promotional efforts for the last few months, is not ranking as well as before. After first starting some serious backlinking a month or two ago I was sitting for weeks on Page 2 of Google for my keyword. I then suddenly dropped to Page 6, back to Page 2 briefly, then back to Page 6 and am now stuck on Page 5. I really expected to rebound to Page 2 by now, but that is not happening and I don’t know why. All I can do is continue building backlinks and keep my fingers crossed.
Finally, I mentioned my disappointment with a Web2.0 site creation package I purchased where I ended up redirecting all the links to the Squidoo lens created to try and get one strong BL to my niche site. Well, I noticed the Wordpress site was shut down, but worse yet, the Squidoo lens was deleted as well as my account. The lens did have non-unique material on it, but it wasn’t exactly spam. Looks like Squidoo is really cracking down which should cause some issues for a few people.
Well, that’s my update for now. I will likely be scarce for the next few weeks, but I am probably not alone. I have noticed a lot of the IM blogs I read are a bit slow. Good to see people are (hopefully) trying to enjoy the summer.
→ 1 CommentTags: Backlinks·market samurai·Niche Sites·squidoo
How Not to Assess Competition
June 6th, 2009 · Site Promotion
Well, it turns out that my bad week is not quite over.
I mentioned that I had outsourced a web 2.0 package that didn’t quite meet my expectations. I thought I could just clean up the grammar on the articles and be done with it, but as I thought about it I became concerned about the crosslinking. Basically 18 web 2.0 sites had been created with the same article, just slightly spun. By that I mean that a few words in each article had been changed, but potentially not enough to create a unique article in Google’s eyes. All of these articles had a link back to my niche site but also two links to one of the other web 2.0 sites created.
My concern was that all the crosslinking to essentially duplicate content would be at a minimum useless, or worse, somehow earn some sort of penalty and I didn’t want a link back to my niche site to be involved. Perhaps I am being paranoid but better safe than sorry, so I decided to switch things up. One of the sites was a Squidoo lens, so I changed all the links from the other sites solely towards the Squidoo lens and then put a link back to my niche site in the Squidoo lens. The lens was pretty bleak, so I added some content to it also.
So for $40 I basically bought a Squidoo lens with some links. Oh well.
But that’s not all… I went to work on my first sniper-like site and was ready to post the first article. I went back to my keywords to figure out which ones I wanted to add and decided to recheck some of the competition numbers I had logged in before. Well, one of the numbers came back very differently and long story short, my main keyword (which is the domain name) doesn’t have ~16,000 competing sites when searching in quotes but 149,000!!
The competition I had recorded for a few of the related keywords was off, so the best I can guess is that Google was “dancing” and the results the day I checked were inaccurate. Obviously that stinks considering I had already bought the domain, set up the theme, made a header, and had my about page already done. Plus I had written 2 articles.
I decided to go ahead and post the first article and move forward as planned, but I have VERY low expectations. With alot of backlinks maybe I can rank or maybe the planets will align and my keyword-only domain will somehow put me on Page 1, but I won’t be holding my breath.
So I guess the moral of the story is not to do keyword research when Google is on the fritz. Don’t ask me how to know when Google is on the fritz though.
Hopefully next week is better.
→ 4 CommentsTags:
Making Money with Hubpages?
June 6th, 2009 · Hubpages
I have been watching the Hubpage challenge over at The Keyword Academy with alot of interest. I was surprised at how successful Court has been with making money on Hubpages.
Another blogger has been tracking his progress with the challenge and I think his latest post has some good info that really is applicable to other IM methods: Make Money Online with Hub Pages.
I’ll add Hubpages to my long list of things I’d like to try when I find the time.
→ 2 CommentsTags: