Gadooney.com

(Umm, wait, what? March is already gone? But February is just supposed to be starting up, not April. Good lord.)

Needless to say, March has been pretty busy, and the posting regularity here has suffered. I’m a bit of two minds about that. One of my minds obviously feels bad, and a bit guilty for not making more of an effort to post daily here. My other (larger) mind is just too busy to worry about such things, especially with so much going on. I picked up a ton of freelance SEO/content creation work this month, which is keeping me very busy. I’m still plugging away at my own sites as well, with further eats into time. Now I suddenly have two houses to get fixed up and on the market, on top of all that, so things have been a little hectic.

As far as how I spent the bulk of the month, I actually managed not to start up any more new sites. I didn’t create a ton of content on the existing sites, spending more of my time trying to build up external links, now that the sites are starting to get indexed in various search engines. I also invested a decent chunk of money and time into simply working smarter, buying tools such as Bookmarking Demon and the SEOBook.

I also started dabbling in promoting ebooks via Clickbank, and had pretty surprising success so far. I wanted to add some CPA products to what I was promoting, just to wean myself away a bit from dependence on Adsense and similar PPC programs. The ebook field is pretty shilly and I feel a bit dirty perpetuating it, but, in the end, if someone wants to buy a shilly guide to help them power level on World of Warcraft, well, more power to them, and I don’t mind getting a piece of that action as an affiliate.

I’ve been a little disappointed with my Adsense results so far, to be honest. It’s been a few years since I played heavily in that field and, like anything on the Internet tubes, things change pretty quickly. In the past the bar was much lower, as far as the ease of getting ranked pretty well for decent paying terms with a minimum of effort. Basically you could slap up a site, optimize the pages, and get enough traffic for it to be worthwhile, without ever really focusing on building out a deep site, submitting it to directories, getting external links, etc.

While that’s still somewhat the case, there’s simply more competition these days, and I’m finding that I can’t simply rely as much on quantity as in the past. So I’m slowing down a bit and spending more time fleshing out the sites, instead of just banging out content pell-mell. Part of it, too, is the realization that I have a lot to learn, having been away from the hardcore SEO scene for a bit, so I’m slowing down a bit in general, and trying to keep my eyes and brain wide open to new ideas and techniques.

Revenue-wise, it’s looking like I’m once again going to come in around the $1,000/net profit mark, after backing out hosting costs and money spent on Adwords campaigns. Which, again, is very welcome, but it’s still skewed towards my poker blog, with is responsible for about 2/3rds of that profit. It’s a bit of a glass half full/half empty scenario, as it’s not the worst thing in the world that I can start up a bunch of sites in January and have them producing $200-$300/month in net profit for me, but that’s not exactly quit your day job money, either, especially considering the amount of time I’ve invested.