I’ve been taking a bit of time off. My VA needed 2 weeks off due to family issues and I did not feel like doing much else because right now I’m waiting on seeing the results of my web 2.0 networks (that I gave a preview to in last month’s income report) and their effect on rankings. So far simply doing article submissions and linking directly to my websites still seems the best, at least for quick rankings. A problem I see since panda is that a I see a lot of fluctuations in rankings compared to before. Before, I would stay at a certain rank (whether #1 or #4 or whatever) and stay there for a week + before seeing ranking changes. Now I see a lot of fluctuations and it’s harder to hold onto #1 rankings. Originally my strategy (back in 2010) was to target a lot of keywords that had 2k to 20k or so searches even if they had poor CPC because I figured traffic would be good. However it just seems like a lot of effort to hold unto #1 rankings in those for the past months which is why I started targeting much harder keywords that should have higher rewards back in April/May or so when I had restarted doing keyword research. Anyway, I feel for these new keywords doing web 2.0 networks while time consuming should hopefully end up being useful, we’ll see. As I said, so far the newer websites that I simply did article submission to directories/networks are ranking higher then the ones I did web 2.0s to (those web 2.0s have a lot of article links to them …).
Anyway, here’s the income report for June:
$3470 Adsense
$80 Clickbank
$203 off Amazon affiliate sales
$91 Infolinks
$3,844 total from my adsense blogs.
$ from http://thelinkback.com
$40 sale of AMR
$107 UAW
$71 Article Ranks
$315 TKA affiliate payment
$533 from this blog
$4,377 total.
The numbers are lower this month since I did not receive any hosting commissions unlike last month, hostgator is slower in sending affiliate payment.
Anyway, this month I’ll probably be submitting almost all my sites to more article submissions (directories, Article ranks, UAW etc). I haven’t really done many backlinks in June and mostly put my time into working on this blog and looking for new backlink services.
Linkamotion
Linkamotion looks like a great service. I saw some good reviews on it so I decided to give it a try. It’s $47 per month and allows unlimited backlinks. Though they cap it at like ~350/month or so per project which basically means a domain, however I would not send more backlinks to the same domain per month anyway honestly. All articles can only have one backlinks but only need to be 100+ words. You can also submit spun articles as long as they are HEAVILY spun., basically every word with 2-4 alternatives for optimum chances of them getting approved. The articles are manually approved and then sent to their Pr2+ blog network. Obviously, being able to submit spun content to a high PR network sounds great so I’m looking forward to the results.
Backlink source comparison test:
I’ve also started 5 new websites in the same niche that I will rank for the same keywords using different services. I will be ranking the main domain for 2 keywords and one inner page on each of these domains for another 2 keywords.
Site 1) UAW
Site 2) AMR
Site 3) UAW+ AMR (basically to see if UAW is worth keeping for the extra non article directory sites it has over AMR)
Site 4) Linkamotion
Site 5) Not sure yet, maybe a web 2.0 networks that receives backlinks from a variety of sources like I’m currently doing for my main sites.
The main point of this experiment is to see how effective UAW is since it’s quite an expensive monthly payment vs the one time off fee of AMR. The websites are a bit about 1 month old now so I’ll probably start doing these backlinks by the end of July.
I’m still aiming for $10k/month by the end of the year, I think the websites done in May are about ready yo be heavily worked on now and hopefully will rank high enough by the end of the year to reach my goal :). I’m planning on traveling a lot in about a month, visit Europe and Sourth America for weeks or months (if I enjoy it) so I might have to do a bit of extra work before I leave so I don’t work more then 2-3 hours a day ;).
hi Alex thanks for the update..
when you targeting much harder keywords, what all your articles are about? same keyword?
i mean how you structure your site when its goal is to promote only 1 big keyword?
thanks!
Just 5-10 articles or so with keywords related to the main one, ideally with some searches but the goal of the website is mostly the keywords from the domain name.
thanks Alex , and when you promote each article, each has its on keyword?
how does the sub articles promote the main keyword of the domain? just because of linking between the articles?
thanks a lot!
btw enjoy your trip, i’m sure you’ll have great time! hope to do it also in january with some adsense money 🙂
Hey cool stuff! You’re making like 3500$ from adsense. That’s cool. What are all your niche sites that help you earn 3500$.
I do not reveal the exact domains, I’m not particularly concerned about competition for my main money sources but if you show one website with adsense/analytics you see all of my sites.. I don’t want my newer sites to be revealed :).
I had a website with a friends adsense account that was making $5-10 a day that I wanted to share but now it’s constantly google dancing between #2 and unranked for it’s main keyword for a few months now, so odd. It changes ranking every week or 2.
Anyway I said it in the past but 90% of my money comes from 4 websites or so.
Alex how can i check for someone adsense sites if i have 1 site of him?
all the time when i find good niches with great sites, i’m wonder how i can check what are the other sites that this person own…how can you check what are the other sites if you have 1 site?
thanks
http://spyonweb.com
When you do a search on here, sometimes it shoes the Analytics of another site the person own, but it also shows a list of IP addresses — what are those? Are they recent sites the person you’re searching has visited?
I think it’s ip address of the web host. Shared accounts (especially hostgator) have a ton of websites hosted on the same IP.
Could you please add adsense to thelinkback.com, of course only so we can see how it performs on this site, not to check out all other sites with the same adsense id…(nooo… we would never do that… after all, IM’ers don’t ever spy on each other, right?) 😀 sorry, just kidding around m8
However, if you could add it with a new adsense account so your network does not get compromised… that might be nice to see. I suppose you didn’t add it for this reason (and because this site is more about affiliate income)?
well I don’t have adsense on this website because frankly I do not think it would convert well and also because the point of this website is 100%provide information and when I suggest products if they seem like something you want to try, you give it a try and I get affiliate income. Adsense would just distract from the blog and make it look less professional I think…
agreed. this blog is value giving and professional. not to mention making a dece affiliate income
Alex if you tried to promote some keyword with UAW/AR and AMR and it still not in first page – from some reason lots of links or so doesnt get indexed (according to yahoo)
what is your strategy than? i saw you writing about profile links and blog comments, what else? also were you find all those profile links sites and blog comments sites?
thanks a lot!
Well I already said in the past I do not think profile and blog comments help much, I tried it a few times and since panda get very mild results. I’m only testing them now to help indexing of article services. If I’m not on the first page using UAW/AR etc first off I wait a month or two and try other backlink services and see if they help. Time is very important, and over time if I still do not reach the first page then the competition might just have been poorly evaluated and it might simply be too hard.
what do you think about TKA 2.0?
I think it’s something that most people should have figured out by themselves to be honest… Just building websites around random keywords is not very fufiling to anyone. My biggest website is a health website, it took a long time to take off compared to my other ones but I worked on it as a passion because health topics (nutrition) are very important to me. Over time I found good keywords for it and wrote a lot of the articles myself for a long time because I enjoyed learning more as I wrote it. Today that website accounts for 50-70% of my income by itself.
Alex do you target more than 1 keyword for each article? if so how you find your other keywords to the article? also are you checking competition of the other keywords also or just adding LSI keywords without checking anything else…
and one last thing, as for your writers , what you tell them just to add the other keywords also in the body?
i know its lots of questions but would be great to hear those answers…i’m afraid that most of my articles are targeting only 1 keyword and that it will give me lot less traffic…what would you do in that situation?
I almost always target more then 1 keyword per article. Usually they are just variations of the first one (singular, plurial, sayed in a different way…). So it’s very natural to mention all of these in an article and I just make sure to mention the main keyword 2-5 times.
Whatup dude,
Been checking out the site every so often.
I’ve been thinking about getting into article submissions recently…
It would be cool to add article ranks to your testings to see how that measures up as well…
Hey :).
Yup article ranks would be a good candidate, I’m 100% sure it’s effective right now but it would make a good comparison with the other services. However, for those familiar with market samurai… They have their new software out in alpha/beta right now and it’s meant to be a very good article distribution software (and for anyone who use MS… even if I do not currently… It’s an amazing software). I got in the beta 2 days ago so I might use the 5th domain to compare those results with AMR and UAW. I’ll try to think of another way to add AR to this list to compare it with the rest.
Hi Alex,
first, thank you for providing so much useful information for newbies and helping them to earn their first SEO bucks.
You said 90% of your money comes from 4 sites. I was wondering how much exact searches those 4 main keywords gets per month (per keyword)? If you can tell me…
All the best,
I can’t really say, it would be too long to calculate since most of these sites target 20+ keywords. It’s not the amount of searches that matter anyway. My #2 site might have 200 people on a given day but it has such a high ecpm that it beats my #3 and 4 site that usually get 1k+ on a daily basis (and beats them by triple the amount of $ …)
No diversification? This is bad. What if you receive adsense ban?
Yes I want to diversify going forward but I am not worried about an adsense ban.. It would really suck but if you go by the mindset of providing websites that offer value to your visitor why would google ban you…
I wanted to ask you how many pages with content you have up and running to get 3,8k/month? I think this is a very overlooked question, since only google gets insane cpc’s for ads on its site, while adsense publisher can estimate around 1$ cpc on average, if they do their homework… so the question is: how many pages of content do you have , and how much traffic do you have in total? Please share this info, I saw it shared nowhere else – everyone is talking about how many sites they have, and how much they make, but noone says hey I am having X pages of content that receive y traffic in total and make me 4.8k/month. Like I said, because of the “search for high cpc keywords” approach which is totally wrong. Noone seems to ask this kind of question… I was stupid enough to go the same way and think with a few keywords I could make a fortune, if the cpc is high enough, but the truth is, a cpc of 60$ will MAYBE get you 2-3$, while a cpc of 2 will most definitely give you 1$. So not few websites with high cpc, but many websites with an “ok cpc” will make a fortune… Please share more information on that approach, esp. your statistics! 🙂
I shared it a few times on this blog, I have about 125-175 pages of content across my main 5 websites. Something you are forgetting though is that CPC is only one thing… CTR and monthly search volume are much more important. Even with all these pages of content a large % of my income (maybe 80) is from 10-20 pages total. Why? Because they are on subjects that seem to have a higher CTR and also because some of these receive 10k+ monthly search visits.
I must be blind, sorry. 🙂 Yea, ctr and traffic is more important then cpc, thats what I actually was trying to say, since most ppl seem to focus on the high cpc idea which is quite wrong… as long as the cpc is over 1$, its all ok if the other factors that you mentioned are good (or better:)) I must say I am surprised though that 80% of your income of your main 5 sites is from only 10-20 pages total…
Thanks for sharing your experience Alex!