Well on Saturday I made the move to Jersey City, but I don’t have internet yet, getting it installed on Wednesday so this months monthly summary is going to be a few days late. Im dreading checking my email accounts cause I know its going to probably take at least an hr to go through 5 days worth of emails. Anyway my new place is pretty nice, it real empty right now cause I only have furniture for my room, so every other room is completely empty. I did buy a couch and am planing on getting a few other things. I’ll post some pics once I have things filled out.
Well since I switched my keyword on my main site (BlueSfear) from “Digital Art” to “Art” I have seen a decent drop in traffic. Yahoo and MSN no longer list my site at all for digital art and I’ve dropped a few positions on Google. But there is a silver lining. Today for the first time ever my site has been listed on page 13 on Google for the word Art. It took me 6 weeks but I’m finally listed, Yahoo and MSN still do not list me. Now I know thats not going to bring in any actual traffic, but what it does mean is Im on my way to page 1. If you compart the two, Digital Art receives about 600 search inquires/day while Art receives 20,000, thats a HUGE difference! I’m preparing myself for the long slow climb to the top 3 pages, my goal is 3 months and 5-6 months for page 1 position.
Having a really good website thats popular and brings in a nice income is great, but be careful, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. As a web entrepreneur I want to minimize my risks while maximizing profits and one good way to do this is to stay diverse. If I have to divide my time up between one site or multiple sites, I will always pick multiple sites and the reason is simple. If you spend all your time on one site and it fails, your sunk. You not only spent your money creating the site, but more importantly all your time. On the other hand if you spend your time divided between 3-4 sites and 1 or even 2 fail, you still have 2 sites that are successfull and making money.
Aside from less risk, I believe there is a greater chance of making it BIG with multiple sites. Putting all your efforts into one site will definitly benefit that site, but in my experience most sites never make it big or get even close. Unless you have a really great idea for a site or are able to get into a good niche early your site will mostly end up on the small to medium spectrum. Having multiple sites in different fields/niches allows you to see what works and what doesn’t. If one site doesn’t work because there are too many like it perhaps one of your other sites will hit it big in its field.
Lastly, diversifying your website portfolio will make you less susceptible to the ever crazy market swings of advertisers. This has happenes to me time and again. One month one of my sites is a cash machine the next its dropping pennies. Having multiple sites in different fields allows you handle these swings much better. One site might be up the other down, but if you just have 1 site and its down then your done.
I know, the PR update was a few days ago, but I haven’t had much free time so I’ll update you now. The PR update wasn’t anything big this time around. Most of my small sites got either PR3 or PR4. The only notable PR changes were on HalotheMovie.org which went from a PR0 to PR5. Very nice. And Best-freedownloads.com which went from PR6 to PR5, which was expected because of the mixup on the last PR update. The site should have never been PR6, but the last PR update on Google was a mess and alot of sites got higher PR then they should have. I was hoping Bluesfear.com would jump to a PR7 and/or Totaltutorials.com would move up to PR6, but neither did. I guess I need to get back to link building.
On a side note, MyspaceIcon.net has placed on page 1 on Yahoo yesterday and saw a nice traffic boost. Went from about 50 uniques/day to 300 uniques/day. Hopefully I can move up on Google as well. Right now Im on page 3.
I’m going to be moving in two weeks! Where? Jersey City. Why? Cause it cheaper than were I live now, its a bigger place and its ALOT closer to where I work (NYC) and party (Hoboken). But its been taking up all my time this month. I need to find 2 roommates, so I’ve been showing the place and interviewing potential roomies. Its a lot of work. I really don’t think I’m going to be doing much work this month on my sites, pretty much just trying to keep them updated.
On other news, my biggest site to date is in the works. I have just given my approval for the go ahead and made 40% payment. Which is about $1500, ouch! Anyway, it should be done in about 1-2 months. Its a lot of work and I really want to test everything out to make sure its perfect. Not going to say what it is exactly yet, but I think its a really cool idea. I’ll keep you posted.
I was thinking today how I could have had such a big drop in traffic last month. Sure LostShow.com was down about 80%, but that was expected since it was the end of the season. The site also isn’t even in my top 3, so that should only have had a 2-3% effect on the total traffic. Then it hit me, I changed my keywords on my main site, bluesfear.com. Sure enough I checked google, yahoo and msn and there it was. On Yahoo I had dropped from 11th to 19th and on MSN I was completely gone. Google on the other hand didn’t bump me at all which was a pleasant suprise.
Since I am targetting an extremely popular keyword now its going to take a while for me to get back to the top 3 pages. It took me a few months before using a semi-popular phrase, so this time around it will probably take at least 6 months before I get some decent positions. But when I do the traffic increase should be 10 times greater.
Sorry for the delay, I was away for the weekend and just got back home. Anyway, I decided to do things a bit different this month. Instead of posting traffic data for each site I’ll just post overall traffic, since I keep adding sites and the list keeps getting longer. Anyway here it is.
Earnings
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Google: $402.88
Yahoo: $224.06
Intelli: $98.32
Tribal Fusion: $315.49
Misc Earning: $636.50
Total Earning: $1677.25
Advertising Spent: $40.00
Total Profit: $1637.25 (8.7% Decrease)
Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Total Growth - 11.9% Decline
Well this month really bombed for me. Earning were down almost 9% and traffic was down almost 12%. June being the 1st month of the summer makes up for some of that decrease in traffic, also the fact the Lostshow.com was down about 80% of its traffic from the prior month added to the big decline. It was down 80% because the season finale of Lost was in May and the site exploded with traffic, now that the show isn’t on for 4 months the site has lost most of its traffic. Besides Lostshow.com, most of the sites either declined a little or increased a little. More declined than increased adding to the 12%.
Besides the traffic decrease, profits also had a big fall. This is mostly in part due to the major ad networks paying horribly compared to the month before. I had to start selling ad space myself to make up the difference. 9% sucks, but it could have been worst.
Well this marks the half way point to my goal of $20,000 for the end of the year. Right now I’m at $8,380.54 which is a decent amount behind the $10,000 I should be at. But I’m not worried just yet. I have a few sites coming out and also have some great Nintendo Wii domains that should come into play around October/November that should add a pretty nice chunk of change into the monthly profits. I’m still pretty confident I will reach or exceed my $20,000 goal.
On a side note, this blog continues to gain traffic, up about another 18% this month.