Weekly Recap

Man, can I get a do-over for February? Or at least have the month back, as I’m not sure exactly where it went, but it’s largely gone-gone-gone, with seemingly little to show for it.

Or, you know, lots to show for it, depending. One thing I forget at times is that I’m essentially starting over with all my affiliate work, after all of my casino and poker related sites came crashing down in the wake of recent US legislation whacking that industry mightily. I fall into the trap of viewing everything through that lens, as far as rushing, pell-mell, to try to make up the money I was previously making, and viewing anything less as a failure.

Which is pretty damn dumb, especially when I spend so much time here preaching patience, acknowledging the fact that it takes much time for your efforts to bear fruit, as far as getting indexed in search engines, acquiring customers, and building traffic. Beating myself up for not instantly achieving beaucoup traffic and riches is, umm, not very realistic or helpful.

At the same time, there is a balance, as far as pushing yourself to constantly get pages and sites out there. Especially if you’re blessed/cursed with a day job and are doing the affiliate stuff on the side. The difficulty is in find a balance, and giving yourself credit for all the things you did accomplish, instead of focusing on what didn’t get done.

In that light, while I cranked out very few pages of content this week, much work was done on Pokahblog.com and Oddsnark.com, as far as getting them ready to open up to a beta test experiment of sorts. I’ve been playing around the idea of being able to offer a community, group blog on assorted topics that’s open to any author, but one that still offers them a chance to potentially make money via Adsense and affiliate programs.

As the owner/admin, I’d basically make the site go, optimize and promote it, provide a way for authors to make money, and give them an easy way to post content. Which is a fairly compelling idea in many ways, as it solves the primary problem for me (getting content onto optimized sites) and for bloggers (having multiple outlets for the content, including commercials ones designed to make them the most money possible). It’s also a potentially nice outlet for people wanting to dip their toes into the affiliate waters but who aren’t quite committed to signing up for a hosting account and setting up a website themselves.

So those are in beta testing now, as I just opened them up a few days ago. Still some kinks to work out but I’ll be curious to see how the experiment turns out. The key, methinks, is going to be whether or not the sites can achieve a certain critical mass, as far as building up enough traffic that authors can see a tangible return for their work. I think it’d be a pretty compelling pitch if someone could jump in, post a lot, and make $50-$100 month from their content, but it’s going to take a lot of traffic to make that a possibility, and a lot of patience from early beta testers.

As far as my personal stuff, I continued to pick away at assorted sites. Still not getting much love from search engines but that’s par for the course at this stage. I’ve got a few new schemings up my sleeve, which I’ll likely detail here soon. Plan for the rest of the month is to bang out some content in assorted places, but, as always, who knows if that’ll end up being the case.

Weekly Recap and related information can be found in Adsense, Ramblings