I took a lot of time this week fighting to have my site not get taken off by my host. Apparently my databases on all 6 of my sites were about 6 gigs each. It took a lot of research to figure out what was going on. But the plugin pingback optimizer was the culprit. I finally got that problem solved.

I’m also having tons of more articles written for all my sites. On my main site I’m having my VA write 5 articles a week and I’m also adding 6 a week for the forseable future. So we’ll see what happens as far as traffic goes. I want to get that site going with at least 500 articles and 5000 visitors a day minimum.

Onward and upward ya’ll….

week 40

week 39

It’s interesting I read a post recently by Jackson over at http://jacksonsmarketingtraining.com/blog/whats-a-quality-site-to-google and he talks about really minimizing the amount of links per post or page. I think it depends. If you add unique content often (which I do), interlink a few times per post as well as link to outside sources (all of which I do) then you shouldn’t have a problem with google. I’ve been adding about 9 affiliate links per post. But in my sidebar and footer I also link to about 7-8 authority sites and inside each page (within the copy) I’ll link to yet another authority site. Maybe that’s why none of my sites have been screwed with by Google. Plus my aff links all have a .htm or .html extension so it looks like an internal link anyway.

That’s about it guys. Still rolling along. Hope you all had a great Easter!

There comes a point in every business where things either turn for the worst or the better. It’s interesting because when most people saw their rankings get jacked overnight, my visitors slowly increased. I believe it had a lot to do with KRA pro. I’ve been adding lots of themed related keywords to my articles and I think this has helped. But also I increased my daily visitor count (on my highest trafficked site) from 543 to 846 per day. That’s 303 MORE visitors per day. And this past week I’ve been averaging over 1,000 visitors a day by a large margin. Many days I’ve seen over 1,200 visitors. Now having lots of traffic is fine and dandy but it has to be the right kind of traffic. That’s where I need to keep improving. I’m showing up for terms that are defintely not buyer terms.

I also have been playing around with bookmarking demon. Man I’ve got a lot to learn as far as how that program works. It’s very powerful but not easy to use.

If things keep going as well as they are, I should hit over $1,300 this month. Not too bad considering it’s 100% clickbank. I earn a few dollars a day with adsense but I’m not actively promoting those sites.

I’ve been adding more content to my main site and now my 5 others are getting close to a hundred visitors a day. When I first started my sites, I made the mistake of looking at the “phrase” match on my keywords. Big mistake.

I’d highly suggest adding in article links to your pages. I use the free version of pretty link to track all this data. It’s taking me a long time to set up the whole thing but well worth it. I just made a couple sales from links that people clicked that were just standard links. I suggest adding as many “different kind” of links to your affiliate pages. Disguise your links in as many ways as possible giving users every possible chance to click on an interesting link. On my main site I get about 30-40 text link clicks per day. Since I offer a newsletter I always open them up in a new window, but that’s just me.

In any event here’s my screenshot. Hope everybody is doing well today and looking forward to summer!

The building of the sites is still going well. My main site is now averaging 692 visitors a day. Today I’ve had about 850. Pretty soon I’ll be up to over 1,000 visitor a day on that puppy I know it. The problem is my conversion rate is crap. It’s like .008 percent or something. Oh well I’m just going to focus on getting more and more visitors to it. I’m averaging about 26% ctr on that now instead of the measley 13% I had up until I worked on improving it. I’m learning that the “right kind” of traffic is critical. I obviously need to work on that a bit.

I’ve been playing with Bookmarking Demon a lot lately. Although I like the program, it’s not easy to use. I think it’s very powerful just not that easy to use. Once I figure it out, it should be good. I hate these training videos they all have. They don’t teach me “the best way” to use their programs they just tell you what each button does. I want to watch a “here’s how I use bookmarking demon” video.

I highly recommend building authority sites. I’ve been thinking a lot lately how I want to “google proof” my business as well as have 4 different types of sites (clickbank, adsense, amazon, CPA) while maintaining the authority sytle. My goal is to eventually have 10 in each category that have 500 pages of quality content each. I’m thinking it might take me 5 years to reach that goal but in my humble opinion, authority sites are the only way to go. On my main site that has only 80 articles in it, I wrote an article two weeks ago for it and was indexed and ranked on page 2 in less than 5 minutes and I’ve been there ever since, with zero backlinks. I think I’m number 13 for it. Not too shabby with no backlinks.

Other than that I have some more content being written for my sites that I’ve been very impressed with so that’s going well.

So many tools not enough time to use them. Oh well, onward and upward…

I pretty much abandoned my adsense sites. Having 7 clickbank sites is well enough for me. Don’t get me wrong, when I get big time I’ll have a bunch of adsense, amazon and CPA sites to compliment my Clickbank sites. But that’s going to have to wait till the future when I can hire more guys to do more work. I never was a good multi tasker. Perhaps it’s a guy thing.

I bought Bookmarking Demon recently and am quite impressed. I’m currently going through and spinning all the titles, urls and descriptions in order to get the best use out of it. For my main site I have 70 articles to spin. It’s quite a project. I was able to export over 3,000 links from Pingback Optimizer that I will use in Bookmarking Demon. I’ll create a new account on there to bookmark those guys.

Still using Sick Submitter and a virtual server. That’s going well too. I need to buy some more packets soon.

I’m working with a writer as well to add about 20-30 new articles to my 7 sites. I’m doing it piecemeal so I shouldn’t have a problem paying for it with business fundage.

My worker is working out excellent. I’m so lucky and blessed to have him. Now I just need 5 more of him and we can really start making some money like Clayton or Michelle.

I’m also still in the process of spinning and adding every single one of my articles to AM Robot. I have a list a mile long of tasks I need to get done. I could seriously use 10 full time workers. You ever feel like that?

Here’s my piddly little earnings screenshot.

This week I’ve been focusing mostly on adding all my spun articles to AM Robot. I also setup pingback optimizer as well in order to get the most out of my backlinks. I figure I’m going to have to do some more pings to make sure all my backlinks get indexed. That’s not my idea of fun.

I’ve also been changing all my links on all my pages through Pretty Link. I’ve also attached a clickbank tracking id to all my links as well. I’ve designated ad spots for each page, identified each one by number and then created unique links for each one and put them into groups. It’s a lot of work and I wish I had originally setup my sites this way. But once it’s done I’ll be able to track:

1. How much each site is earning
2. How many visitors each site is getting
3. Visitor CTR
4. Which pages earn the most money
5. Even which links bring in the most money

I realize the 2nd item on this list is something everybody tracks but they usually leave it at that. I’m a fanatical about tracking. Once I get some steady numbers I’ll be able solely focus on the pages and links that are brinking in the most money.

I haven’t been able to really use scrapebox much but I plan to harvest a lot of blogs to comment on. If anybody has some footprints that work well for that, help a brotha out!

Traffic to all my sites is increasing and so are newsletter signups. On my main site I’m averaging about 550 visitors per day with about 13 return visitors per day as well. The problem with that site is that I’m showing up #1 for terms that are searched for a lot but they’re not “buyer” terms. So the “type” of traffic is not ideal but I’m not complaining. I just have to refocus my efforts more on buyer keywords.

As for my other sites I’m getting about 60-70 visitors per day now. My goal is to get 1000 visitors per day per site. That would be 6000 visitors per day. I should be able to make a few bucks off of that I reckon.

I’ve also been working hard on increasing CTR on my main site and will be doing this as well for all my other sites. Since I’ve been working on increasing CTR, I went from a 13% average CTR to about 23% CTR. This is huge for me as it could mean more cash in my pocket.

Anyway that’s about it. I started the month out pretty strong but it’s been fizzling the last few days. Oh well I’m just going to keep working hard until I get my full time social media, seo job that will start soon.

This past week I’ve really been working hard at adding all my articles to AM Robot. I can’t believe the amount of pingbacks I get for each articles thanks to AM Robot. I’m quite impressed with that program. In light of that, I bought pingback optimizer when it became available again. On my main website I had about 4,000 pingbacks that had to be indexed. I only have about 290 links to that site right now using Yahoo Site Explorer. Even if I can get half of them indexed and counting for me in Google I should see some good results. I’m wondering how long it’ll take to see a traffic increase. I’m guessing a month or two or less hopefully.

I’ve also been working on getting all my links setup in Sick Submitter. For all 6 sites I typically add about 50 links a day each. I don’t like doing blasts, I think it’s unnatural and looks weird. I take the slow and steady approach. So far so good.

Also I got a fun little plugin called Pretty Links. It allows you to track, organize and optimize all your affiliate links. Typically on an article on my site I might have a banner link (300×300), an H2 link above the fold, some in article text links, a link in the header at the beginning of the article, perhaps a link below a video and a graphical footer link. They all might be in an article that has 1,000 words or so.

Currently I’m getting about 13 to 15% CTR on my main site. In my opinion that’s horrible. I want to get around 40-45% CTR if I can. I get crazy cause I like to track EVERYTHING so I can improve optimization. This means I have to go through every page on all 6 of my sites and change the links. It’s worth it to me because there’s no use building traffic if you’re getting a low CTR. I might as well improve the CTR of existing traffic.

I would suggest you take a look at your business and see about doing the same. It’s totally worth it to test and track all the headlines and links you can. Pretty Links is great, I’m very impressed. I just use the free version for now.

Sales have been decent this week. Not what I would have liked but steady improvements is what I’m most concerned with and I defintely see that.

I’m a little worried with this new Clickbank Master account I have. I was able to have CB waive ther requirements on all the new accounts I created. I already have sold more than 5 products from 5 different credit cards on all my niches so I was glad they waived that. So now I have to make sure that my main money site makes enough to pay my outsourcer while the other accounts become more consistent. I’ll just cross my fingers and hope for the best.

When I first started I dove right in to getting an outsourcer taking a leap of faith. I had no idea if I was going to be able to earn enough to pay for a full time worker. Since I just went for it, it’s always worked out. I’m trusting I will keep increasing sales in order to pay for him.

The thing I like about seperating my cb accounts is that I can easily figure out how much each site is earning along with how many hoplinks per visitor I’m getting for each site. This will allow me to better optimize my sites to increase my hop links.

I’m just curious, what kind of percentages are you guys getting? I’m getting anywhere from 15% to 30% of my visitors clicking on my affiliate links. I’d like to get that up to about 50% if I can.

If anybody has some creative ideas of how you “entice” people to click on your links, I’d love to know.

I’m also working on learning how to use scrapebox to harvest high PR blogs to comment on. So far no such luck. I like the tool but haven’t found those gems yet. I don’t even care if they’re in my niche really.

I’m also really wanting to buy pingbackoptimizer.com because I have thousands of pingbacks for each of my sites that aren’t indexed by Google yet. I could do something manually but would rather wait until that product is available again. Anybody have clues?

I’m also working on doing some interesting social bookmarking with my sites using Delicious. You can find out more about this strategy here:

http://www.inlineseo.com/tactics/authority-tagging/

Other than that I’ve been pretty hard at work everyday. I’m still waiting to get my full time job from my old employer. When that happens I’ll use some of that money to hire another full time worker. Not sure when that’s going to go down though. I’m guessing in the next few months.

Need I say more? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

Today I finally completed doing the on page seo for all 6 of my sites. That was such a tedious soul crushing task and I couldn’t be more glad that that is done. I’ve also gone ahead and created a “master” clickbank account and created 6 sub accounts and tied them all together. This is going to be very helpful to me to be able to track how each website is doing, how many hops, conversion rates etc. As an affiliate, when you have 1 clickbank account with all your sites in there it’s hard to test, track and optimize. That meant I had to change my hoplinks on all my sites. As of this writing I have only 1 more to do. I have TONS of hoplinks because I have tracking id’s on them so it’s taking me forever. It feels like it’s time wasting work, but it’s helping to organize my business.

On my page tracking I use webstat.com free version. I love it. I can’t justify the price though for the paid versions. The only problem is that the free version only tracks 20,000 page views per month and I finally hit that mark with my main site. So now I’m searching for free alternatives like

http://piwik.org/

http://getclicky.com/

https://www.goingup.com/

To be honest I don’t like how any of them output their information. Webstat is so great for that reason.

My outsourcer has had to take care of his sick wife recently and worked only part time hours this past week. He’s great and this is the only time this has happened. So I’ll see how that goes. When I take this next job I’ll be able to hire a 2nd outsourcer here shortly. It shouldn’t be too long before the business itself should be able to support that outsourcer by itself. Exciting.

As a reminder, have you started doing your taxes for 2011? I created about 10 write off “categories” for all my expenses and at the end of the monty I print out my statement and work out all my taxes. It takes me about 15 minutes at the start of each month. If you haven’t gotten into the habit for this year, it’s still early. Come the end of December, you’ll be glad you did.

I’ve created my 7th clickbank “passion” site as well. Took a lot of time and I’ve only written 2 articles for it so far. With all that I have going on, that’s going to be the least of my worries for now.

I have to do some keyword research big time for my adsense sites, there’s going to be much more time now that I’m done with my current on page seo project. Now it’s time to focus on backlinking and conversion rates for my pages.

After this next week I’m going to have to buy a couple tools to help my backlink building process. I know that blog commenting is something I want to do, even though this is something not many people focus on much anymore because of the spam. But I believe I can offer value and do it right. I just need to find a good blog commenting tool. I tried comment kahuna and was less than impressed. I’m divided between http://blogcommentdemon.com/ and http://www.fastblogfinder.com/. I’m leaning towards “the demon” but we’ll see. I’m also going to purchase a couple other tools I need. One of them being scrapebox (still on the fence with that one though).

Things have otherwise been going well. I’ve made a sale on 7 of the last 8 days which is nice. I’d like to see a sale every single day. It’s just a matter of hard work and time, that’s all. My outsourcer is just excellent. He’s so on top of things and I feel really blessed to have him. I use odesk to manage his hours and it’s just perfect. I don’t mind paying the small odesk fees as they offer a lot of services I’m really happy about.

Thanks to Michelle I know have a writer that I’m really happy with. Right now she charges I think it’s around $5 per article. I’m going to be sending her lots more articles to her today.

I’ve recently been offered a position at my old company. They need somebody with my skillset and I think I’m going to take the full time job. The first order of business is to hire a 2nd full time outsourcer. Fortunately the job is a work from home type of situation and they’re extremely flexible. Right now my wife is basically holding the fort down while I get this internet business up and running so this will be a welcome relief for her. Since my main priority is to get my business earning lots of money, the minute this job takes away from that, I’m out. The most important thing to me right now is this business.

I’ve also been working heavily on my 7th clickbank site. That’s the one where I’m very passionate about the niche. It’s going to be fun to start getting involved in it.

I’ve been hearing recently many people have been affected by the google change lately. To be honest I hadn’t even heard about it, until I read some other blogs. I guess the sites that were affected were newer sites that didn’t have manay pages on them. That’s what I’ve been hearing. My traffic on all my sites fortunately has steadily been improving so I’m glad I wasn’t effected.

I’ve also recently been informed of a new forum (similar but not) to the Warrior Forum that’s being run by Yolanda from http://www.paidinpassive.com/. Her forum is at http://www.paidinpassive.com/forum/. I recently had a chance to sign up but been SO busy I haven’t had a chance to participate yet. As soon as this coming week is over and I can be done with my current project I plan on helping out in that forum when I can.

It’s Sunday and I’ve got more work to to!

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend…