Gadooney.com

I promise. Content coming soon. Just insanely busy at the moment.

(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.

While I’ve had the whole week off from the day job, the vast majority of my time has gone into trying to get two houses up to speed and ready to sell, so I haven’t had much time for affiliate marketing work. What time I have put into the sites has been more in the vein of monotonous drudgery, as far as updating WordPress on all the sites, getting some new plugins set up, making sure all the .htaccess files are good to go, setting up each site in my admin console at Google Webmaster Tools, yada yada yada.

Now that the sites are getting some search traffic, the real work really starts, as far as scheming up ways to build links, working harder to squeeze as much money as possible out of what traffic the sites are getting, and other fun stuff.

Back to the monkey manual labor. Whee…

Sorry for the lights going a bit dark in these parts of late, but real life has been kicking me in the butt of late, and I’ve had more important stuff to wrestle with than all of my silly web schemery detailed here.

On the bright side, things have settled down and the time off was good for me, as far as recharging the batteries a bit. I’ve got some new content in the works here, as well as a few site reviews and other stuff to roll out over the next few days.

Wait, is it March already? Jebus. February just sort of slipped away from me. Buh bye, February.

I have to admit that I don’t look forward to these detailed monthly recaps, especially as they get a little more cumbersome as I keep adding sites. It seemed a good idea initially, as far as a proof-of-concept that silly monkeys like ourselves can make money online, but I wonder about the execution, as I end up making broad swipes at it without lots of detailed stats.

Something to ponder, and I may look into a better stats tool that can pull and parse data from all my sites and report it in one central location. I can sort of do that via stats packages on the dedicated server, but it’s a fairly blunt instrument and a bit hard to pull out data solely from my affiliate sites, as there are additional non-affiliate sites on the server.

In very broad brush strokes, I didn’t get as much content out in February as I’d hoped to. Real life sucked up a lot of my time and I got a little more bogged down in a few experimental projects than I’d planned on. I also launched a few more new sites, which always eat up a decent amount of time, as far as fiddling with layouts, getting the initial content up, and all that jazz.

Traffic continues to climb, though, pretty much across all the sites, and the last week or so has been pretty encouraging on the Google front, as the first wave of sites I launched are finally picking up some decent organic search traffic. I’ve also been pretty pleased with the two “meatier” sites I’ve launched recently (Vroomchatter and FlipThyHouse), as they’re both pretty quickly picking up traffic and an audience, and have decent legs for the long-run, as opposed to some of the shillier stuff I do with niche sites devoted solely to certain keywords.

As far as monthly income, here are the raw numbers:

Google Adsense: $94.02
Text-Link-Ads: $43.00
ReviewMe: $100.00
Commission Junction: $105.87
Direct advertising buys: $200.00
Partnerlogic (poker affiliate program): $361.48

Total income: $904.37

That’s down from ~$1,100 in January and, again, skews heavily towards my poker blog. It’s kind of dumb to piss and moan about makingnearly a grand from silly typings on websites, but it’s a little disappointing that I haven’t been able to move the Adsense needle faster.  Granted, a lot of that is due to the sites just now making their way into search engine results, so there’s that to keep in mind. Probably 90% of the work I’ve done thus far is geared towards Adsense traffic, which will hopefully bear fruit later down the road.

Plans for March are pretty much the same old boring routine, as far as getting lots of content into the hopper, fleshing out and optimizing exsiting sites, yada yada yada.

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.

A bit of a pitiful weekly recap, as time is still very much at a premium of late. All family members are finally back up to speed and feeling well, though, and my daily routine is getting back to its normal groove. Even when I had time to work the last few weeks I was having a hard time focusing, so not too much to show on the productivity front.

I did manage to get out a three part post on generating traffic to your site while waiting for search engine results to kick in:

• Instant Traffic Sources Part I: Forums
• Instant Traffic Sources Part II: Outbound Links
• Instant Traffic Sources Part III: Blog Comments

I also got a good bit of work done building out Vroomchatter.com, and have been pretty pleased with the traffic and results so far. That site is a good example, too, of the vagaries of the world of search engines, as for some reason it’s getting lots of Google traffic despite the fact that it’s a brand new site that shouldn’t be indexed yet. I’ve had that happen with a few new sites, that initially get indexed and get traffic despite the fact that they’d normally get sandboxed and have to wait a few months until getting fully indexed. Typically the traffic lasts for a few weeks, then they get sandboxed, so it’ll be interesting to see if the current traffic lasts.

Plan for the next few weeks is still pretty much the same old routine, as far as continuing to build out content on all the assorted sites. Hopefully I’ll be back to a more regular posting schedule, both here and elsewhere.

This week was sort of a wash on the affiliate front, despite getting off to a good start last weekend. My wife came down with a bad stomach virus late last Saturday, and she ended up spending about 36 hours in the hospital, mostly getting rehydrated. When she was finally on the mend, our pet rat (we don’t have kids so the little sucker is essentially our surrogate child) developed a bad abcess, which the vet treated, but the infection spread.

Wife is fine and completely back up to speed but it’s touch and go with Sherman, unofficial holder of the title of World’s Coolest Rat. He’s a tough little guy so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that he can fight off the infection, with the help of antibiotics, and so far he’s holding up pretty well. He’s worrying me because his appetite is off, but he’s also normally a huge pig, and decereased appetite isn’t that unusual with the antiobiotics he’s on.

On top of all of that, the home inspection on the potential investment property was last week, in addition to meeting with mortgage lenders to hammer out loan details. All of which was dumped on top of my day job, which involves a 30 mile commute, which gets a bit difficult when shuttling sickos to and from the hospital and vet.

So yeah, not much progress on the affiliate front. Can’t really say it bothers me all that much, as there are definitely more important things in life than whether or not  cranked out 172 pages of affiliate content last week. If anything, maybe that’s the best lesson I could babble on about here. I tend to get locked down into my routines, constantly chasing dollars and concocting new schemes, trying to balance all of that and still be a good husband and rat-dad, but reality checks are nice, as far as what’s really important.

Don’t get lost when chasing money around. Extra money is nice, especially if it’s part of a larger plan to buy you the space and time to live life to the fullest, but you likely don’t have to look very far, each and every day, to find much more valuable things that you shouldn’t be ignoring, for any amount of money.

January turned out to be a pretty crazy month, with all sorts of suddenly jumping up and demanding attention. I’d hoped to crank out tons of content but I ended up spending more time switching sites to the new dedicated hosting plan than anything, which was necessary and a good thing moving forward but doesn’t produce much in the way of visible results.

Below are the monthly numbers for assorted metrics such as content created, traffic, and income. I originally intended just to report that stuff for this site but I realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to look at all of my affiliate sites as a whole. Since much of the affiliate marketing gospel I preach here is to diversify and work on multiple things at once, it seemed silly not to report on the collective efforts.

I’m also lumping in results from my poker blog, which is going to skew things a bit, as it’s been around for awhile and generates traffic and income accordingly. I went back and forth on whether to include it, but I’d rather this be an accurate journal of what affiliate marketing can do for you, over time, than a selective account that includes some of my sites, but not this one, or that one.

As far as the sites I’ve currently got in the active hopper as of the end of the month (in addition to this one), here goes:

• Cisco Certifications
• Flip Thy House
• Oddsnark
• Patio to Pool
• Pig Iron Malt
• Science Fiction Robots
• Sound of a Suckout
• Vroomchatter

Across all those sites, I posted 165 pages of new content, for an average of a bit more than 5 new pages a day. I’d like to bump that number up in February, but I can live with it as a baseline, as I’ve already touched on the fact that January was a bit of an anomaly, as far as everything going on.

As far as traffic, the sites collectively got about 25,000 unique visitors for the month of January. That metric is out of whack, though, because the poker blog and Oddsnark skew it heavily, since those got about 95% of that traffic (and a lot of the traffic is junky in nature and not targeted nor good, but that’s another ball of wax). Moving forward, I’ll be able to pull better month to month traffic numbers for each site, but switching hosts makes that hard this month, as I wasn’t smart enough to capture all of the old data before making the switch.

Here’s a breakdown of affiliate income for the month:

Google Adsense: $73.98
Text-Link-Ads: $65.00
ReviewMe: $50.00
Commission Junction: $201.79
Direct advertising buys: $300.00
Partnerlogic (poker affiliate program): $441.45

Total income: $1,132.22

Expenses for the month were as follows:

Dedicated server hosting with HostGator: $175.00

Domain name registration: $80.00

Total expenses: $255.00

Net affiliate income for January: $877.22

Which is both good and bad, as far as the bottom line. It’s nice to make money, but the bulk of the profit came from my poker blog. If I simply looked at the new sites I’ve launched, it’d be a much skimpier profit, like $100 or so. To be fair, though, almost all of my efforts on new sites have been focused on building sites that are focused on search engine traffic, and those won’t start bearing fruit until they get out of the sandbox and are fully indexed in assorted search engines.

Overall, I’m fairly satisfied with how January went, but there’s definitely room for improvement in February. I simply need to crank content out and fight the urge to launch new sites or fiddle with existing ones. I also need to be a bit more mercenary about my time, as the schedule is going to get even more hectic if I’m also fixing up a house to flip on the side, in addition to all my other schemery.

Okay. No more new sites. Seriously.

I managed to pretty much immediately break my no-new-sites-focus-on-what-I’ve-got-in-the-hopper vow and launched a new house flipping site (still very raw, so pardon the mess), as our offer was just accepted on an investment property, which I’ll hopefully be rehabbing and turning around for a profit in a pretty short time span. I’d planned on keeping a log of my efforts in that arena, largely for myself as a tool to track expenses, personal labor invested, etc., but my scheming mind realized “Hmm, why not just do it as a public blog and incorporate ads and what-not, as surely people are searching on such things, with Adsense advertisers in place.”

I’ve been really happy with the NASCAR news site so far, both in early Adsense results and in its general rounding into shape. Not so happy with myself as far as letting some projects linger on instead of just finishing them and being done, but such is life sometimes in the affiliate world. Well, no, I need to be better about setting hard deadlines, and sticking to them, instead of falling back on the mantra that as long as I’m working on content of some sort, for some site, it’s all good.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I end up shorting myself on at least some psychological happiness of wrapping up a project, stamping it done, and moving on. I’ve gotten pretty used to the notion of keeping many juggling balls in the air simultaneously, but there’s no law writ in stone that says I must work that way, especially when I find myself muttering “Man, it’d be nice to finish something up, instead of always feeling as if I’m slacking off in this area, or that area.”