Wow, I can’t believe tomorrow is the first day of May! That’s means I only have about 6 weeks left till my kids are home from school for the summer and all productivity will fly out the window. I was hoping to have my plans more strategically in place by now so I could take the summer off, but unfortunately that has not happen. But that is okay as I’ve changed my focus a bit and am looking more long-term.

First, we have been looking for a new house for over a year now. The inventory in our area has been bad plus we have a very small area targeted, so it is taking a long time. But last week we finally found a house we liked, although it did need some updating, and we made an offer. It turned into a very frustrating progress and as we sit today we still haven’t come to an agreement. At this point I don’t expect to get the house, which is disappointing but I am sorta over it now. But that did have me very distracted this week.

But back to my sites. I think I said in a previous post (or the comments) at how I had been unmotivated and not “feelin the love” with my niches. I have also given up on a few of my older sites as they just hadn’t been profitable with adsense. So I have decided to start over a little bit and throw aside the non-performers and think about new niches. I have also decided that I need to get into niches that are larger so that there are many keywords to choose from  and I need niches that I actually have an interest in. My ultimate goal would be to have less than 10 sites that can be continually expanded. To get there, though, I would like to have more than 10 to weed out the duds.

During this time there have been rumblings of adsense mini-site/XFactor-like deindexing. Certainly nothing widespread, but enough stuff has happen to start to make people a bit nervous about putting adsense on small sites. I am not surprised at all by this and have always been scared to put adsense on any site less than 10 pages. If there is one thing I never want to lose (after my kids) it’s my adsense account.Maybe I should throw my husband in there also.

So all those rumblings have just solidified my decision to go big and try to create sites for visitors more than for SEO. Not to say I won’t still be smart about KW selection and other stuff, but I am trying not to be so obvious about it (like making every url = site.com/kw.html). I also have removed adsense from the sites that were not performing and now only have it on my old personal site (which is fairly big but not a big earner) and my ONE performing niche site. Yes, after a year and a half I only have 1 good site that actually earns and not that much. Well, I guess 2 sites as I have a small Clickbank site that has made a few sales.

BUT, I do have some newer sites that are untested. I did pick the niches and KWs a few months back so if I were to start today I probably would do things a bit differently, but I still think the sites have potential. We shall see. I have also recently chosen 2-3 new niches to start sites in. I say 2-3 b/c I’m still iffy on the third. I like the niche but it may be too competitive and too broad. I also have some backup niches that I have researched but they aren’t calling to me at the moment. I think I need to keep looking.

My immediate plans are to start up the 2-3 new niche sites before summer. Get 10 pages on the sites and then I can start backlinking over the summer when I’ll only have very limited time available to work on the sites. My one niche site with adsense will have some content added and I’d like to reorganize the site a bit. The site actually has a PR3, about 1000 BLs showing in YSE, and ranks at the bottom of Page 1/top of Page 2 for it’s main KW (can’t seem to stabilize it). I will continue to build BLs for that site. I then have 3 more sites that have 8-13 posts and I need to start backlinking to see it I can rank those sites and how they will perform monetarily. I then have about three CB mini-sites (one with sales) that need some backlinks. After that I have 4 sites on hold, the ones that didn’t work with adsense. I have been working on other forms of monetization but it’s too early to make a call so I’ll just let those sit.

Beyond that I think I will continue to look for some new niches. One of my problems in the past (in addition to some bad advice on KW selection) was picking niches too quickly and going too small. I am now trying to pick niches that have enough room to be built into authority sites and that I have an interest in so that writing isn’t such a huge chore. I still look at competition but not as much. The fact is, the competitive niches are competitive b/c they are profitable. I figure there is always room for one more. On the flipside, I am not worrying as much about CPC but looking for niches where there are multiple ways to monetize. That way if Google bans my adsense account or Amazon shuts down my affiliation (b/c of state taxes), I can still make money.

Okay, so that is my new thinking and new direction. In addition, I have relaxed a bit on momentum. I stopped working at my job mid-March and became a little obsessive with my online stuff and frankly, it wasn’t any fun. There are non-monetary online things I enjoy and offline things I enjoy and I don’t want to work 4o hours a week on my sites. At least not now.

I originally planned to stop working someday (before I was laid off) to lead a less hectic life. So while I do need to have some earnings by next year and while I do enjoy IM, I don’t want it to take over my life which is what was happening. That is the reason I plan to have no expectations for the summer. I need to focus on my kids and in September I can re-focus again on my work.

Well, this turned into a long post mostly about me! Hopefully in another post I can talk about some of my new toys and how I have been using them.

Related posts:

1. August Update – Getting Ready
2. Niche Site Building – Progress Update
3. Full Time IM – Not Quite What I Hoped