September Income Report Update – Dancing with Google

google-danceAs you can guess from the title my newer sites went into a bit of a (hopefully) temporary slap with Google. Basically all rankings were lost until the 5th page or further. Interestingly, this only happened to all the sites that were connected by adsense and google analytics. I only have been adding google analytics once I add adsense since I don’t really care before hand. Anyway, my older sites were left untouched in terms of rankings, though I do feel like the ecpm is slowly going down over time. Some of the newer sites that hit first page of Google and some cool rankings (one is #2 for a 25k+ keyword) are untouched. Now, I’m hesitant to add adsense to these other ones. What I just thought of while writing this post is maybe I will add adsense but not analytics for now. Actually, gonna do that RIGHT NOW and I’ll keep you guys informed if it google dances like the rest.

I’m not TOO worried about the Google dance, simply because I had a test site that I did not expect to make much from adsense and I added my adsense info to and a DAY AFTER it got a -50 penalty or worse. I then tried removing adsense, adding content, making more backlinks but it would never come back until 2-3 months later. Such long Google dances are something new for me since panda but hopefully I can count on my sites returning.

Ok so for now, a short break on the Google dance topic and I’ll reveal the income $’s for this month:
september adsense income$3,012 from adsense (ohhh a round number!)

$175 infolinks

~$200 clickbank (I’ve been trying some new offers that seem to convert better)

$110 amazon

$45 CPA offer

Total from niche sites: $3,542 (-$788 from last month)

$150 Hostgator

$53 Article Ranks

$222 TKA

$40 TBS

Total from this blog $465 (+$7 from last month)

Total for this month: $4,007 ($781 from last month)

So overall income is down almost 100% because of my newer sites that got sandboxed/penalized. So while I think only time will cure this (I’m estimating 2-3 months) I will do the following since I have 3 sites in this boat (I created 5 in total in early 2011, well about 20 sites but only 5 that I intended to make money with, the rest are for fun/testing).

The “codes” are for my own personal reference so I can remember the different treatment if they do happen to get out of the sandbox at different times (they all got into it on the exact same day).

1. Remove adsense (PH)

2. Add a lot of no follow links + more random anchor texts (PH, MA)

3. Do nothing (RN)

We’ll see if that changes anything, I will keep you guys updated.

AMR -$10 discount

I learned that there is a $10 discount for AMR currently so I updated the links on the site to reflect this, if you still don’t have AMR I really think it’s one of the best one time fee purchases I made for backlinking. Easily competes with a ton of monthly services :).

Other things I am working on

I’m about to start getting involved with iphone apps. I’m about to do marketing for what me and my business partner hope will be an app that will revolutionize store promotions for our town. Gonna do PPC using google + facebook ads and also will start doing “offline” advertisement (banners/posters). So ya, gonna have to work a lot on learning all that stuff this month. I’m looking forward to it, I’ll probably invest a lot of money in making this app a success but if it fails I think I’ll have learned a lot by then about PPC/sales pages/social promotion that will help in the future.

I’m of course going to continue with my niche sites and hopefully the Google dance will end this month, the fact that I was making $800 off some of these keywords while they were at #2 is really encouraging to reach #1. Also, I barely touch my old blogs that make the $3k or so from adsense right now. I’m still debating if I should work on them more. For one site with 2k daily visits I would really like to write a free ebook, create an email list and sell to it and test how that works. For the other one (this one has 100+ pages and 50k uniques per month), the information is getting outdated to what I currently believe should be on it and I would have to re-write most of the content myself which of course would take a lot of my time.

muay thay training go passive income!Also, I started doing Muay Thay this month. For those who do not know it’s a martial art and I’ve been going to the training gym 3-4 days a week so far for 1-2 hours. It’s really demanding but I’m enjoying it greatly. For 2011, I had a goal of reaching under 10% body fat and while I’m close 2011 is quickly finishing. At first I expected that eating a paleo diet and going to the gym twice a week would be enough but apparently not for me. I’ve been gaining a lot of strength over the year but losing those last %’s of body fat is stupidly hard! My coach told me he estimates you burn about 1,000 calories doing Muay Thay a week, that should help (and it is!).

Recap of October plans:

Work on learning/perfecting my PPC add campaigns/sales pages

Consider improving my older sites content, at least pick one of the two

Add a bit more content to the new “dancing” sites and apply the 3 different strategies from above, see if that changes anything.

Work on completing SEO hybrid with Becker 🙂