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.