Happy New Year + Adsense Micro Niche Site Blueprint Coming Together + Full Year In Review

Above is from Fruit's Basket, which was about a cursed family who, when hugged by someone of the opposite gender, would become an animal of the Chinese Zodiac. I only saw a bit of the anime, but the manga was one of my sister's favorites. On with the post.

I was planning on waiting to do this post until I had fully cemented my plan, but I figured I'd do a New Year's post before it became old news.

So, with that said, Happy New Year! New Decade for that matter! I have learned so much from the six months or so of internet marketing I did starting back in July of this 2009. I was surprised by how far I've actually come. When I first started getting into this stuff I had just checked out Project Payday and ended up trying their system, which is a freebie trading system (I'll do a Project Payday review one day, for now just type the site name in). I lost a TON of money by fooling around and forgetting to cancel my trials under them. I didn't have a job back then either, but I started with ChaCha after a while and managed to earn $400 in about a week and 2-3 days to zero my debts from Project Payday. While ChaCha was great, I still wanted a better way to make money, so I started lurking in internet marketing type forums and learned about GDI and ACME People Search, which may just be where this whole thing started.

I failed miserably with ACME (and didn't try just GDI, but I probably would've failed at that too). I still have my account and pay the $10 GDI fee cause I plan on revamping that campaign, but it wasn't until August or September, when I found out I had made super sponsor at the ACME People Search forum (which means Tissa Godivatarne would give me a free pass to several things, most notably the $40 per month Wealthy Affiliate membership for one month), that my luck really changed. I found out and subsequently joined Wealthy Affiliate and sucked it dry of information. I was inspired after reading Wealthy Affiliate, and I began to REALLY understand internet marketing. I'm sure a lot of people end up paying for hundreds of ebooks, but luckily for me, I was first exposed to WA for free, so I learned about the scams and treachery and about how to REALLY make money online.

I absorbed it for a while, and then started taking steps to make it happen.

I remember my original plan was to hit keywords hard and start pumping out site after site, and then I figure I would get around to backlinking things later. But I then realized domain names in bulk were pricey. This was also right after I'd started reading Ben's stuff over at makemoneyonlinewithseo.com (no link cause you can just copy/paste, and I want to try saving some link juice for one very important link later) and I thought if I just threw out a ton of sites, put Adsense on them, I'd make money. While trying to figure out a quicker way to make money for absolutely no cost, I set up a blogger blog and a squidoo lens, and managed to get One Week Marketing and learn how PotPieGirl's famed system works. The blogger blog I built was pretty much a flop until a few weeks ago, when I fine tuned it and started making it look less like crap.

By September I had a lot of content and my Squidoo lens up, and I was backlinking slowly but surely. Unfortunately, I wasn't making any money. So eventually I got fed up and borrowed money from my mom to put into a PPC campaign. I made a sale the next day, direct linking to a that same crappy squidoo lens and bidding on 5 or 6 keywords. Then, later that week, I made a sale from my Blogger blog.

This is when I realized it really did work. Unfortunately, since that time I have been struggling to find capable niches, or build backlinks that stick, or any number of other things that get me off topic and unfocused. By the time I reached November I started learning more about CPA and getting into this frenzy about learning new, faster techniques, but I just ended up hoarding all the information I could and not applying any of it. I had so many ideas I was just paralyzed. I tried going back to basics a few times, but it's hard to shut yourself out of your routines and go forward in a completely different way.

But I guess everything comes in cycles. Towards the end of October I had slapped out 3 or 4 articles, direct linking to a merchant page, and I had been getting a consistent sale every week or so. It was pretty cool. By the end of the year I'd made over $200 on Clickbank alone. My Adsense earnings reached $50, and in CPA I had another $25. It was a far cry from my goal of $1000, but looking back now I feel like I'm in the place to really ramp it up, and reach my goal of $3000 per month MUCH sooner than September, if I buckle down. Check out some of my progress below (I was so proud of those days I had two sales in a row- wish the streak had continued though, lol)
How have you changed this year, if you were involved in internet marketing before? Has your income gotten much larger, stayed the same, or have you been losing ground?

On Another Topic...

Well with that out of the way, let me move on to explain my current plans.

Starting monday I'm going to start a very simple plan to put up 3 micro niche Adsense sites per day. Main layout will be 5 pages of (personally)well written, unique content, a Privacy Policy, Contact Us, and About Us page. I think I'll also link to my first 10 or so in some of the forums I frequent for not only backlinks but to show how I'm laying things out and either help people or get help. These will be on the free blogging platform you see before you (blogger), though I'll either switch accounts after my first ten, or make my Adsense blogs private (probably switch accounts though, so don't think you'll be jacking my niches!)

Niche research will be done by browsing categories of ebay pulse and Amazon hot topics, that kind of thing, and then narrowing focus if I find a really nice niche. This is probably my week spot, because I'm never sure how specific I should get.

My blog themes will be mixed and matched and changed up to get a feel for what works best, and while I don't think Google would punish me so long as I keep these sites white hat, I don't want to leave a footprint like the guy that did the Xfactor Masters Course etc. so people will know it's me when they come across one of my niches. I'll start with the theme I'm using now. Ad placement will also be similar (a 336x280 above the post, and right below that, 5 text link, and in the right sidebar a skyscraper)

After actually creating the site, I'll only initially use Onlywire to bookmark it, and then, depending on how I see my rankings going, I'll add some Free Traffic System posts or blog commenting or profile links.

So in total, each side would probably take around 2 hours or so. I'm hoping I can pop out 3 a day and just keep going until the end of the month, then I'll reevaluate and mix monetization etc. I've done one practice site (a kind of failed Clickbank site) and it has made me a couple of bucks over the past three months (part of this was because I messed up my ad placement and didn't go back to check on the site and realize it was messed up until 2 months later)

I'll, of course, post my results (if any) and keep everyone in the loop.

Now then, there are only two links I want to put in this post, and these two links are ones you should really check out.

The first one is a really moving project done by Kat Tierney. Basically it's setting an internet marketing goal (hers is reaching $100,000 this year using free methods to start) and working together for encouragement and support to reach these goals. Check out the 100k Challenge at the link. She actually has another site on SEO you could check out called SEOTime. Click for her Search Engine Optimization site.

Okay, so I have three links- this next one is an AWESOME article directory (okay, not that awesome, but I own it- well my mom does- I bought it for her for Christmas; I'm pretty cheap, lol) called ArticlesVerse. It's done using a wordpress plugin, so it may not seem that awesome, but it IS, trust me! Write some articles, backlink them, register and put in your Adsense code for revenue share. Now. The link is the words: write articles for money (even though I'm never going to rank for that keyterm since the on page SEO is crap for it, but meh, I guess I'll just keep building links).

So in summation: I'm running a new Adsense Project that will make me money. I had a great year (sorta). SEOTime and the 100k Challenge are awesome. And write articles for me so we can make teh moniez. Peace homies,

Broke