Mike’s Blog - My Internet Life

About a week ago I decided to sell the Lost site I bought last year.  I bought it for $400 and sold it for $375.  The site was www.lostshow.com.  I have been neglecting it for about 6 months and traffic has been slowly decreasing due to no updates.  I figured theres only 1 or 2 season left of the show anyway and the show has definitely peaked at this point.  I figured I sell it now before this season ended.  I made a decent amount on the site, but about 4 months ago Google dropped the site from page #1 and I haven’t been able to get back and I didn’t really want tto put any effor in trying too either, so I figured selling it was the best move for me.

Update on MMOBay.net.  Its been a fantastic month.  Its been under 1 month and we have over 375 registered members and have had well over 100 auctions already.  Very very shortly the site is going to break the 1000 uniques/day mark, probably today. 

About a year ago I had hired a firm (Carbonon - carbonon.com) to create a site for me. 11 months have now passed and the site is no where near complete. I fired them 2 days ago and requested a 50% refund. They refused. So I have created another site, http://www.carbonon-scammers.com where I have written a review of their service. You can read the full story there.

If you wish to help me out, please comment on this on your blog linking to http://www.carbonon-scammers.com with the text “Carbonon” or “Carbonon Tech”. I want http://www.carbonon-scammers.com to show up as #1 site whenever someone searches for their company name. Thanks.

Its been a busy 11 days since I launched my new auction site. It started out very slow but I think things are picking up now. In the first few days I was only getting 1-2 people registering and only a couple of auctions, but within the last 3-4 days I’ve been averaging around 9-10 signups and around 3-5 auctions per day. My goal was to have 100 members by the end of the month, but at this rate I’ll have over 200. Currently traffic is around 500 visitors/day and climbing by around 50/day.

How did I get the site going in only 11 days? Easy, I spend a LOT of money. I’ve spend around $2,800 in advertising for this month and most likely will spend that for the next 2 months until I hit 1000 members. Once that happens I will probably cut my budget back to $2000/month.

In other news, I was taking a look at some of my other sites and noticed that I have a new #2 site. My myspace site has overtaken by photoshop tutorial site by about 3,000 uniques last month. Looking closer I’ve realized that I was making very little of the Myspace site, less than $150/month. Thats horrible for the amount of traffic its been getting. Currently I just have Yahoo ads on it, but I’ve decided to try some affiliate programs and signed up to Adultfriendsfinder. Yes, its a adult site, but being a Myspace site its pretty crappy to begin with, so I don’t think adult ads will make it any worst. I’ll try it out for a week and see what happens.

On Sunday I setup a adwords campaign for my new site. It took about 3-4 hrs to get setup, a few days before I created a list of about 50-60 keywords I wanted to target, then she did some keyword expansion and I ended up with around 700-800 phrases/words. My budget for this campaign is about $1000/month, which gives me about $33/day to spend. My first day was on Sunday, we launched the campaign, then 3 hrs later my budget for the day was spent. For my first day I got around 55 clicks at an average CPC for $.56 cents.

From what I’ve heard/read adwords works on ratings, when you start a new campaign you have an horrible rating, than over a few weeks it builds depending on a number of factors. If things go well your rating goes up and Google gives you better ad placement which in turn cost you less. So $.56 cents/click wasn’t too bad for my first day. I decided I would just let it run on day 2 to get some more stats, then yesterday I did some optimizing. I dropped some crappy keywords that were costing me a lot but weren’t very targeted and decreased by bid on some words where I didn’t have much competition.

Day 3 & 4 have seen some improvement, I now averaged about 95 clicks/day at a CPC of $.32 cents. Not too bad. Theres still probably some optimizing I could do to get it even down lower and hopefully in a few weeks my rating will increase and I can get that down even more. I’m hoping to get it down to $.20 CPC.

Having a low CPC isn’t everything, besides people visiting my site, I want them to signup. I’m going to let this campaign run for the rest of the month, if I see a low conversion rate, I will then increase my bid on some more competitive keywords in the hopes of a higher conversion rate.

Its that time again

Earnings
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Google: $1,212.10
Yahoo: $243.43
Intelli: $123.95
Tribal Fusion: $349.41
Amazon: $121.20
Misc Earning: $892.00

Total Earning: $2942.09
Advertising Spent: $362.00

Total Profit: $2580.09(5.5% Increase)

Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
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Total Growth - 4.6% Increase (10,059 uniques)

Pretty good month. Both traffic and earnings increased, even though my advertising budget almost doubled.  But I’m still a little disappointed since I have yet to break the $3,000/month barrier.  I feel like I’ve been stuck around $2,500-$2,800 for way too long.

Also I went to have my taxes done, it was pretty much what I expected, I owe around $2,500 to the gov.  I’m planning ahead for next yr, since most likely I’ll have to pay a lot more.

My Amazon affiliate site was growing very nicely during March until Google sandboxed me, now my site is a no show in the SERPs.  It’s not the first time I’ve had a site put in the box, most of the time it takes about a month or 2 to come out, although one of my sites was sandboxed for about a yr, so its really a crap shoot.  Since the success of my first Amazon Affiliate store, I’ve opened a second store about 3 days ago.  I’m probably going to continue creating AStores since they’re very easy to start and take very little upkeep.  As I said before I use Associate-o-matic.  Its $99, but well worth it since you get unlimited licenses.

When talking to people that really don’t know much about SEO I found it hard to explain how it works until I came up with my little SEO game. Basically what I do now when explaining it to friends or possible clients is to think of it as a game. When selecting your keyword or phrase, depending on how much competition there is for that keyword you assign it a value.

So for example “Web Hosting” would be 10,000 points, while “Best Web hosting in New Jersey” would be 450 points.

The points represent how many points you need to obtain a page 1 ranking in Google. Note these are just arbitrary numbers and don’t really mean anything.

Now, there are many SEO techniques you can use to obtain your page 1 ranking. Heres a simplified list.

1) On-Site SEO - 500 points
2) Off Site SEO - 5 - 1000 points

#1 basically consists of the work you do on your site. Good page titles, SEO friendly URLs, domain name, keyword density, inhouse links, H tags and meta tags.

So if you perfectly SEO your site, you get 500 points. Now when going after keywords/phrases that don’t have much competition, doing this might be enough to get a page 1 ranking. In the example above you can see the “Best web hosting in New Jersey” only takes 450 points to get a page 1 result.

However going after a more competitive keyword/phrase like Web Hosting takes many more points.

#2 basically consist of all the sites ranging from PR0 - PR9 that link to your site. So for instance if a site that is PR4 links to your site using your keywords you might get 15 points. If they link to your site without your keywords you might only get 10 points. Getting a PR8 site to link to yours with your keywords might give you 500 points. So you can see that getting high PR sites are worth it.

In our example above, “Web Hosting” is a very highly competitive keyword, so even with perfect SEO, your going to need a lot of sites with good PR to link to you before you get a page 1 ranking. So as you can see its sorta like a game where you try to get as many points as you can and the more points you get the close to page 1 you get.

Again, these numbers are not based off anything and are completely arbitrary. Its just a easy way that I’ve been using to explain how SEO works.

Today I purchased another site, http://www.3dsmaxtutorials.net, for $850. The site is only a month old so it has no PR, but it does have 8 new 3DSM tutorials which has been submitted to all the popular tutorial directories, which is bringing in all the traffic. Right now the site is getting around 800 uniques/day and making around $10/day with Google, although I can’t confirm that since I just put my ads up 2 hrs ago.

I purchased this site mainly for the reason that it would be a great addition to my other 3D Tutorial site and since that has been very successful for me I thought I’d give it another try. To domain name is good, I can definitely SEO it and hopefully within 2-3 months be on page 1 or 2 for the keywords. Having the other site which is #1 in Google will definitely help this new site since I’ll be linking to it and I already have a long list of contacts that have 3D sites, so I can easily email everyone and get them to link to it as well. I should be able to make my money back within 6 months if all goes well

I recently sold my site http://www.webhostingservers.org, basically for the fact it wasn’t bringing in any money and it would be too much work for me to try to make it successful. It was making next to nothing with ads and I had only made 1 sale since I started the site 4 months ago. This is partly due to the fact it was only getting around 200 uniques/month. But since this site is completely unrelated to all my other sites, linking to it wasn’t bringing in much traffic. It did have a PR4, which was nice, so I could have sold a few links, but I decided to just get rid of the site and concentrate on my other sites. The site was sold for $100 which isn’t much, but that $100 did pay for a text link ad on a PR8 site. I actually bought it for 3 months, which cost me $450, but it was a high traffic site that was related to my site, so $150/month I think is worth it. Hopefully when Google does its next PR update I will gain a nice boost.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, but I’ve been working on a website for a client.  About 2 weeks ago I received an email to create a website for someone.  Now I get emails like this every once in a while, but usually nothing ever gets moving.  The last time I did a website for someone was about a year and half go and it was horrible.  It was one of those things where the clients input made the site look absolutely horrible.  I tried to make the site look nice, but then he would show me a site from 1994 and would say make it look like that.  But you do what the client wants, so he ended up getting a ugly looking site, but he was happy with it so thats fine with me.  But this time the client really liked one of my designs and wanted me to create something similar for his company.  So I gave him my price and they accepted.  So thats basically thats want I’ve been working on for the last week.  Have the design done, just need to code it now.  Its actually been a very smooth experience this time.  Not to many changes, they like the design, pretty straight forward, which is good cause it saves me time.