Wham or Scam

Since my last update things have been going a little down hill. I initially thought that my travel sites had largely escaped the impact of the ‘Panda’ update, but it appears I may have been wrong. Visitors to my site have steadily dropped, largely because the links to my sites have been dropping from the Google index.

Why? Most of my links have come from article directories that allow  ‘Follow’ links. Since Panda targeted content farm sites (i.e. article directories) they have had no choice but to implement ‘No Follow’ tags on any outbound links. Nobody is entirely sure whether No Follow links are as negative as they were before, but for my sites it has had a huge impact.

The solution? Revamp my existing sites and set up new links, using the Do Follow article directories and my own sites. This is with the exception of Hubpages. Whilst their site still allows Do Follow linking for users with a 75 score or more, the fact that most of my hubs are for promotional use has severely impacted my scoring, which means they are not likely to be Do Follow for much longer. Furthermore, Hubpages have implemented their own ad program for hubbers which so far have earned hubbers quite a bit of money. The one thing I notice about those hubbers who are benefiting the most from the ad program is that none of their hubs are for self promotion. From now on, any hubs of mine will be for fun, not promotion.

So where does this leave me? My Joomla site experiment will now be on the back burner while I get my most profitable site back on Google. I have no idea how long this will take, but needs must. I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Yet again, it’s been too long since my last update. However, there are reasons why this time. I have moved recently and with all the time and effort that takes up there has been little time for anything else.

Well, now I am ready to get back into it and this time I am going to go about things a little differently. Instead of trying to juggle ten different websites in ten different campaigns at once I am going to concentrate on one main campaign, with little side projects to run alongside it. My travel campaign has been my most successful and profitable (an enjoyable) so I am going to improve and expand on that.

With this comes new challenges. Whilst I love the wordpress platform and it has served me very well it still has some limitations that bother me and that I feel are holding back my campaigns a little. I am going to experiment with the Joomla platform to see whether I am able to achieve a better website layout and hopefully a better conversion rate. This will be tested on a website that I set up last year but have done little work to, so anything that goes wrong will not harm my campaign. It will be a steep learning curve, but I am up for the challenge.

This leads me to my next point. The nature of Joomla means that with its steep learning curve and the fact that the pages created within its system do not get indexed as fast as wordpress sites means that any results may not be seen for some time. For this reason, I am going to do mini projects involving writing high search/low competition articles in the hope of creating a little extra baseline income while I re-invent my travel campaign. I started this last month and I have already started seeing results. One of the major ones being a noticable increase in my adsense earnings. There is also an in-house ad system on the article directory that I write my articles on which is also bringing in money. This strategy, although at the moment is not bringing in a large amount of income, is quick and low maintenance. This means that when there is little time to work on my main project, I can do these articles and still make progress.

I’ll hopefully give some updates as the project progresses. Catch ya later

Well, another year has come and gone, and another is fast approaching. 2011 marks the three year anniversaryof me joining Wealthy Affiliate (in March 2011). The past years have not been as successful as I had hoped in terms of earning money, but do you know what, it doesn’t matter. The past two years alone have bought goals that I never would have thought possible.

Highlights of 2010:-

• January to March 2010:- The best ever period of commissions. For the first three months of 2010 I grossed £502.00 in commissions, averaging around £160 per month. This was from one of my holiday sites, so I am assuming that sales and traffic to these sites are very much seasonal. Hell, during some months where search volume for specific keywords are low my sites drop of the face of google’s earth, only to spring to life when people start searching again. They have been known to dissappear for weeks.

• My first ever AdSense payment:- Since I started AdSense in 2005 I quickly gave up because I was expecting big money quickly, like you do when you are sold get rich quick schemes. I have since learned that AdSense is a lot more successful if you have good quality content on your site. I decided to give it another go, and in August 2010 I received my first AdSense payment into my bank account. Six months on I am already half way there for the next payment. I have also learned that AdSense is slow around this time of year, not many people on computers and searching the net, spending time with their families, as it should be.

• Beat off the Amazon three year rule:- Amazon’s affiliate program has this rule that if you don’t manage to sell anything in three years you’re out. I set up a website that sells Amazon.co.uk products and reached the deadline with just hours to spare. I have the US Amazon covered.

• October 2010:- October saw the first sale from my Kenya holiday website. It was a long time coming…

• First AffiliateFuture sale:-A sale of £51.00 was made through my Cape Verde holiday site. I haven’t been paid yet, but I need to get that organized, it’s next on my to do list.

• Overall Gross Commissions this year:-  £863.75 which works out at an avarage of £70.00 per month gross. This is remarkable considering where I was just 12 months ago. Unfortunately this is a gross amount, I have to take into account the expenses of running a number of websites and of purchasing software and affiliate stuff that maybe I shouldn’t have purchased. The end of year accounts will tell a full story in April.

Where next for 2011? Just carrying on with the same. I have probably too many websites to manage effectively at the moment. I really need to sit down and number crunch the statistics for each site and see what sites are making a profit and which sites are not. What I will do with the non-proft ones I don’t know, I may need to sell them and concentrate my efforts on the ones that are making money or have the potential to. I need to ask for some advice on that one. I also need to consider whether to cancel my autoresponder account for the time being, it hasn’t been as successful as I had hoped.

That’s all for now. I am signing off for a few days to enjoy some family time. Have a great new year and i’ll see you on the other side.

P.S. Just because it looks good on the eye, here is a screenshot of those first three months of 2010. If you just try you never know what might happen…

Google has recently made changes to their ranking algorithm, making freshly updated content top of their ranking priorities; now it seems others are getting on the bandwagon.

Bing anybody? There has been a recent announcement that Yahoo and Bing will merge their search results, with Bing searches appearing in Yahoo. If your sites are enjoying good rankings in Bing then they will receive a lift-me-up in the search results in Yahoo when the strategy is eventually employed.

Which led me to one question? How are my sites ranking in Bing? I down loaded cuterank (no affiliate link) to see where one of my sites is currently ranked.

As you can see, my site already has good rankings in Bing compared to Yahoo and Google. If the switchover does happen, I wonder how much more traffic I will get if my site continues in the position they are in .

This is a surprising turn of events. I have previously focused all my attention on getting my sites to rank on Google, ignoring the value of Bing and Yahoo. It is not surprising given that Google holds a 60% share of the search engine market. It also turns out that the strategies I have been using to rank in Google (i.e. profile linking) is not welcomed by Google, but LOVED by Bing. As far as I know they don’t even care if the links are “no follow”. So, I have inadvertently SEO’d my site for Bing AND Google without even knowing it.

Of course things may change very quickly. The strategy hasn’t even been fully implemented yet and ranking algorithms in Bing and Yahoo could change over night. However, I think this goes to show that focusing all your attention on Google may not be the best plan for driving traffic.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the situation and optimising all my sites for Bing as well as Google. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Well, the transfer to another host didn’t go too well. The files were all uploaded but the site won’t load, so I had to point the servers back to my old host. I guess I’ll be sticking with them for another year. You win some you lose some.

I have some catching up to do. I have to get all my accounts in order so I can get some of my expenses back . It is boring work though. I also have to draw up some kind of spreadsheet about where I am submitting all my articles too. I just get so lost about how many articles are out there. The problem is that this weekend there is not much time to do it, so busy with other things .

Shameless plug alert!!!

OK, sorry about this but for anybody who was thinking about joining Wealthy Affiliate you might want to think about joining sooner rather than later. The monthly price is set to increase dramatically on 7 June. No word as of yet by how much but for anybody who joins before 7 June you will only pay the $39 per month fee, even when the price goes up.

More news as it comes in…

My yearly hosting subscription is ready to be renewed in 4 days, unfortunately for the hosting company I am going to part company with them and move the hosting for this site to my Hostgator account. It’s nothing personal, but hostgator sites are so easy to manage and are so much cheaper it is just not worth renewing the current hosting.

What this means for you.

All the files for this site are uploaded onto my current hosting package. I need to set up a site at Hostgator and point the DNS (Domain Name System) settings to the new servers on the hostgator account. I then have to save and transfer all the files from the old host, and upload them to the hostgator account so I keep all the current settings. It sounds simple and it should be simple; however, it inevitably means that this site will not be accessible when the DNS settings have been changed as it takes a little while for the new servers to be found. Once they have been found, and if I am able upload the old files to the new account, everything should be all dandy.

If something does go wrong and this site is not up and running in 2 days or more visit http://www.crushthecreditcrunch.com. It is a website-in-development but I can post any urgent updates if things go wrong.

I’ll see you on the other side…..

There is a history of debate in the internet marketing world about whether placing AdSense on your blogs and websites is a yay or nay approach to making money online. Some say that you will not make nearly half as much money with Adsense on your blogs compared to affiliate links. They are of course referring to blogs and websites that either have one or the other; but what about blogs and sites that have both?

The common argument is that if you place Adsense on a page or site that is also selling affiliate products the Adsense will lure the visitor away from clicking on your affiliate link, with a potential for some serious loss of revenue. However, I have been hearing different of late. When I first started setting up adsense sites when I first started internet marketing (2004) the revenue was mediocre to say the least. I have never bothered with it since.

AdSense and its development has come a long long way since then and the technology exists now to hyper-target your ads to every visitor to your site. This is particularly useful for sitemasters who are targeting an audience in a specific country. You will inevitably get visitors from countries where the product you are selling is not applicable or available in that country; the AdSense ads however target your ads to reflect similar offers to that visitors country or region, and even something completely different if that visitor has a browsing history.

The upside? That visitor from the non-targeted country was going to click out of your site anyway (the product was not relevant or available to the country they live in) so why not give them another avenue to leave your site? – the AdSense ad that is targeted specifically for that visitor. Visitor happy, you earn revenue.

The Downside? Sitemasters who decide to display AdSense ads must place a privacy policy on their sites. This is  no biggie, there are plenty of templates out there, but it’s one more thing that is likely to put people, especially newbies off. Another potential problem is that the revenue earned will be negligable compared to the affliate commissions earned. This is likely to happen if the ads are placed in a postition on the site where people are likely to click them over the affiliate links in the post (such as the middle of the post). It is here that careful consideration must be given to the placement of the ads.

I have decided to conduct a little experiment. I am going to place AdSense ads on all my sites (bar this one) that also run affiliate links. If things don’t work they can be taken down at a click of a button. It just gives me a little more chance of some revenue. Unfortunately I will not be able to give precise amounts of revenue earned through AdSense (it is against their Terms of Service), but I will give a rough indication of whether things are working the way I want.

AdSense Goals:

• 3 Sites – aiming for an average of £0.25 per site per day. (Yep, I know its low, but I can always change it). If this goal is met then I would be earning in the region of £22 per month.
• This figure will be reviewed every month.
• As stated above, I will not publish exact AdSense revenue but I will state if the figure has been exceeded or not.

Right, I am now off to place some privacy policies and set up some AdSense.

i’ll keep you posted.