Don’t Be Afraid of Getting Sidetracked
Most successful affiliates are willing to tinker and try new things, and usually have a few irons in the fire at any given time. While I highly recommend focusing pretty narrowly on your first site and not getting distracted, I also think it’s important to show you exactly what’s going on here, behind the curtain, as I work on assorted projects and sites.
I’d mentally earmarked much of December to getting this site up and rolling, so I didn’t have much planned other than that, even though I knew I’d have a lot of free time what with taking vacation time at work, the holidays, visiting the in-laws and having lots of otherwise dead time to fill, etc. My original plan, though, was to pre-populate the site with lots of content. When I decided instead to do much of that on the fly and let the site unfold over time, I ended up with some extra time on my hands, as I was pretty happy with how things were going at Gadooney.com and already had some future posts drafted, and was in danger of bombarding you with even more posts per day to chew on and absorb.
So I thought, “Hmm, maybe I should launch a new site from scratch, one focused solely on Adsense, so I can better illustrate that process and provide a clearer picture into how much time it normally takes a site like that to make any money, since it’ll take awhile to get indexed in any search engines.”
But what sort of site should it be? While writing about what you enjoy definitely makes site-building much, much easier, sometimes it’s nice to just bang out a smaller site with a well-defined goal, starting, and ending point. You find a potentially profitable niche, build it, create pages for each juicy keyword phrase, then move on. Months later, when you’ve largely forgotten about it, it’ll get fully-indexed in search engines and suddenly (hopefully) it’s generating $20-$30/month for you from Adsense clicks.
Which brings us to an interesting and important point. It’s easy to read the above sentence and think: “Umm, okay, high roller. All that work for $20-30? How the hell do you ever make any real money if that’s all you can expect to make? Give me a freaking break, I’d be better off begging for change on the corner.”
If it took me three months to build that site, then you’d have a very valid point. The potential income from it is way too low to make it profitable. But what if I could build that site and completely finish it in a week? What if I could do it in two or three days?
Suddenly there’s some real money to be made, sitting there on the table. Let’s pretend that you build five affiliate sites a month, and each individual site makes just $20/month from Adsense clicks, which means that each site only makes roughly .67/day. That’s just a click or two a day, for each site, if you’re targeting reasonably profitable terms.
For a full year, you build five sites a month, with each site generating a click or two a day, making $20/month. They won’t immediately get traffic and clicks, so we’ll factor in a delayed lag time of one month for each batch of sites, before they start eanring you any money.
How much do you think you’d make in a year, doing the above? A couple of hundred bucks? Maybe a little bit more? $500? $1,000?
You’d make $6,600 for the year. Keep in mind, too, that at that point you’d have 60 sites built, which would continue to earn $1,200/month, moving forward, even if you never built another page of content. All from building just five sites a month, each of which got just a few Adsense clicks per day.
To be fair, the above is much easier said than done, as your pages would move around in search results over time, sites would decay and fall out of the results and earn you $0 instead of $20/month, it doesn’t factor in any of your costs, yada yada yada. But the principle at the heart of it is a very important and valid one:
Gadooney Rule #2: Affiliates can make thousands of dollars a month from sites that only generate a few Adsense clicks per day.
But I’ve managed to get sidetracked myself, as this started with a discussion of having some excess free time and deciding to launch a new affiliate site. With all of the above rolling through my head, I decided to launch a new site targeting the CCNA/CCNP keywords that I’ve already discussed here.
Seeing no need to reinvent the wheel, I registered the domain name, adding it to my web hosting package, and installed the same Wordpress theme I’m using here, with a few minor tweaks to the color scheme. I also moved over some of the example content I’d used here and created a quick page on general Cisco certification stuff. All of that took me approximately 5 minutes.
The ultimate plan is to create 50 or so pages of focused content, for the related keyword terms with the highest estimated CPC. I’ll likely tweak the Wordpress theme and optimize the Adsense ads at some point, but there’s no reason to fiddle and obsess with that. My goal is to bang out all of the content by Sunday, with the site largely being done except for the tweaking and fiddling. Then I’ll move on to something completely different, largely ignoring the site until it actually starts to generate some search engine traffic.
Don’t Be Afraid of Getting Sidetracked and related information can be found in Adsense, Getting Started