When I got home today from work I went to check my many email addresses and what do I see, an email from Google. From the title I could tell it wasn’t anything bad, so I rushed to open it. Turns out one of my sites have been individually selected for Google’s custom ad placement program. They wanted me to setup some 300×250 ads on the site and email them back so they could do a final review of the site. Now at this time I had Yahoo ads on the site which were doing pretty good. But this is Google contacting me personally and inviting me to their custom ad program, so I’m not saying no. I went ahead and removed the Yahoo ads (sorry Yahoo) and setup some Google ads. Now I’m just waiting for Google to respond. From what I heard, having custom ads on your site almost guareentees Google will not smartprice your site. So that means high quality ads with good click value.
I’m also wondering what the “custom” part of this program is. Will I be able to setup custom ads on my site that most people can’t? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out more.
Well the poker site didn’t live up to what the seller originally stated so I decided not to purchase it. The seller originally stated and showed traffic stats showing the site received close to 1,000 uniques/day. But since I’ve had the site for 2 days I can say without a shadow of a doubt its more like 20 uniques/day.
Heres the email I sent to the seller.
Hey, I have some bad news. I’m not going to be purchasing the site. Please let me know you mydomain.com username so I can send you back the domain.
The reason I’m not going to be purchasing the site is because I believe that traffic you said the site receives was grossly overestimated. I purchased the site on the belief that it receives close to 1,000 uniques/day. From the 2 days that I’ve had the site, I can tell that the actually number is probably around 20/day.
Heres why.
1) In my Awstats referral links, all I see are made for adsense sites linking back. Here the top 10 (but there are around 200-300 total)
- http://www.homelesssurvivor.com/#
- http://www.homeformule1.com/#
- http://www.sentryhill.com/#
- http://www.insuranceya.com/#
- http://www.homeinsurancej.com/#
- http://www.homesondisplay.net/#
- http://www.insuranceaa.com/#
- http://www.ccazinos.com/#
- http://www.aginghomeservice.com/#
- http://www.insurancequotese.com/#
Yet, when I visit any of these sites, I see no links back to the site. How can I be receiving traffic from these sites with no links?
2) I setup Google Ads on the site Monday night. Check when I got home from work on Tuesday, about 20 hrs after the ads were initial setup and saw 3 impressions. Surely a site that receives 1000 uniques/day would get more than 3 impressions in 20 hrs.
3) 99.9% of the traffic is 404 traffic that is trying to go to the forums which are no longer there. This makes me think that all the traffic the site recieves is spam bots.
Sorry, but I cannot spend $800 on a site that only gets 20 uniques/day.
You might be thinking, “didn’t you already pay?”. Well no, I didn’t. The day we did the transfer I was attempting to make payment through Western Union, but they require you to call in to verify its actually me that is sending the money. Well WU thought I was a crook and denied my money transfer. I was pissed. I then went to my local WU, but it was already 7pm and the store was closed. Even madder at this point, but the seller had no problem waiting till today. I was going to go today after work to send the money, but when I got home and saw the stats, I decided this site was worth about $50 not $800. So in this case, Western Union being a dick actually helped me.
The weird thing is that my AWstats actually show 700-800 uniques/day. But I believe these are spam bots or some sort of script running off these made for adsense sites.
So what did I learn? Always ask for referral stats before purchasing a site.
A few days ago I was browsing my usual hangout spots looking for a Poker site to purchase since I’ve been thinking about starting a Poker site for sometime now, but just never really gotten around to it. So I found a site 
http://www.poker-room-holdem.com, it has decent traffic, was over a year old and was a PR4. The starting price was $1000 with a BIN of $2000. I also saw that no one purchased it after a few days, so I PMed the person bidding $800. The next day I received a PM saying by bid was accepted. So today we did the transfer and I now have a new poker website.
Since I’ve never owned a poker site, I’m not sure where to start. I know poker sites make most of there money from affiliate programs so I’m going to have to do some research on whats good. I also want to fix up the site and SEO it better.
In other news, my Amazon stores have yet to make 1 sale. I’m extremely disappointed in this program so far. I know its been less than a week, but the stores are getting around 200 clicks/day, but just no purchases yet. What I think the problem is that when people go to checkout its not a smooth transision to Amazon site. I’ve read that people are using AOM to integrate amazon stores ( http://www.associate-o-matic.com) so I’m going to give this a try and see if it works any better. But so far these 2 Amazon stores I’ve setup are not working.
Well today I’ve decided to try my hand at Amazon’s affiliate program. I have a nice Wii domain that I have parked that gets about 300 uniques month, so I’ve decided to use this site for the test. This is only my second affiliate site, my other site which is hosting related has had only 1 sale since it was put up 3 months ago, so I haven’t had much success yet with affiliate programs. This site is Nintendo Wii Games and as you can see I setup a complete Amazon Wii store for it. Took me about 2 hrs total for the layout and getting everything setup. Right now with only 300 uniques/month I’m hoping for 2-3 sales per month. I was only making around $15/month parking it, so I won’t need many sales to pass that number.
I also setup a new Diablo 3 website. No content yet, but I just wanted to get it up since there have been a lot of rumors that Blizzard will announce this as there next game. I’m also going to be setting up a Starcraft 2 site very soon just incase the rumors were wrong and they have been working on this instead.
I read a thread on DigitalPoint today about PR update, I think I’ve seen about 10 since Jan 1st, but I checked and some of my new sites are indeed getting PR. Looks like its a big rollback from the last update when everyone gained PR. Just about all my sites went back to there normal PR levels. My PR7 went back to PR6 and a PR6 went back to a PR5, although I did have one of my PR6’s that gained last update stay at a 6, at least so far.
I think this is a good and bad thing. For one text link sales started to get ridiculas, PR7 links were going for $25-40 and PR6 for $10-15. Thats just way to low, it makes PR4 & 5 links so dirt cheap its not even worth selling. So hopefully the prices will go back to normal.
The bad is that I lost my PR7 
Oh well, at least now I have 2 real PR6’s. But you never know, it usually takes about 2 weeks for the update to finish, so things still might change.
Happy New Years! I just got back from my drunken night at Philly 
Heres my December results and the year end summary.
Earnings
- - - - - - - - - - -
Google: $1,143.87
Yahoo: $385.12
Intelli: $57.00
Tribal Fusion: $237.14
Domain Parking: $17.37
Misc Earning: $1054.47
Total Earning: $2894.97
Advertising Spent: $256.66
Total Profit: $2638.31 (0.3% Decrease)
Traffic (Growth of Unique Monthly Visitors)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Total Growth - 12.8% Increase (23,647 uniques)
Total Year End Earnings: $21,683.27
This month was so so. I saw a huge jump in traffic which should have translated to higher earnings, but due to Google’s policy change profits remained about the same as last month. Thats ok, cause traffic is more important anyway and the money will eventually come.
So I have broken my year end goal by over $1,600 which is very nice. For next year I’m aiming for $60,000, which is pretty high, but I’d rather aim higher and use it to motivate myself.
To give you an idea of where I was 1 year ago I had 2 websites with a total of 95,000 visitors/month and was making around $650/month. Today I have over 15 websites, 208,000 visitors/months and making around $2,600/month. Thats a 300% increase in profits and 110% increase in traffic. 