[DAILY JOURNAL] - Going Full-Time

tomahawkeer said:
Great thread exsuit. Couple of quick questions. Do you have 20 seperate domains, or, are you doing as subdomains. Also, hosting wise, are you using shared accounts for each, or do you have a dedicated service someplace? Also, are they mostly WP?
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I have 33 sites now on 21 domains. Half of my first batch of sites were on subdomains (I was playing with WP MultiSite). Its quick to get sites up that way, but I find its much more difficult to get them off the ground. Will only be building new sites from now on on seperate TLD's.

I have 2 different VPS servers at the moment.

seolinker said:
Why so many sites ? Better create like 5 but all that 2500+ visitors brought you like mmm....$250 ? Simply they all splited between 33 sites and each one get what in average ? like 70 visits a month ? You got lucky and made 1-3 sales from some sites...
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I thought about this before starting, I see your point but decided smaller niches and LOTS of them was better for me starting out.

I would rather have 100 sites make $50/month each then 10 sites making $500/month each. There is more setup cost (domain an development), but the idea is that it will be easier for me to find a winning formula to replicate quickly (driving my costs down) at finding $50/month sites then creating $500/month sites.

Of course, once I hit 100 sites, I suspect some will be $XXX-$X,XXX in revenue, and some will be duds. I want diversity in niches, revenue sources and types of sites I build. I get it with my strategy.

Once I have a large network of small sites, the next step will be to go after high volume, high competition keywords. At that point I have a solid diversified revenue base AND a couple hundred developed sites that I own to help me with my SEO efforts :)
 


Love the thread. DIVERSIFY! Is what I always tell people asking me how I quit my job and surviving online.

Make 10 adsense sites, 10 Affiliate Landing Pages, 10 Amazon Sites, and so on and so on. It is better to have a hand in a TON of different sites making you money then your entire 100 adsense websites get fucked in the rankings and go down and your flat broke.

I did pretty much what you are doing give or take a few details. If you need help, hit me up man. Like your work ethic.
 
seolinker said:
Scheme, how many sites do you have now which are not duds ?
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That's the thing its hard to determine until you actually buy the domain and put in the work. I own a blog network that has about 25 profitable sites that I can have enough money to pay rent / food / bills and live on. All of them in different niches and all have different methods of making money, and completely unique.

My other is about 50 adsense websites that are "resources" I like to call them all containing around 8-25 pages of content, not blogs. That are helpful not spammy.

Those all require 3-4 hours a week to update and now I am focusing on e-commerce and affiliate marketing more and more as the whole blog / adsense sites are pretty much auto-pilot and not fun anymore.

I have gone through hundreds of niches, and hundreds of flops to get the 75 site core I have now. You are just going to have to work and find what works and what doesn't. Before I determine if it works I try 2-3 different layouts, 2-3 different ad networks / positions and after building links if nothing is there in 3-4 months I leave it up and let the domain expire. Try to avoid spending MONTHS trying to make something work....when you can move on and possibly find something better.
 
Scheme said:
Love the thread. DIVERSIFY! Is what I always tell people asking me how I quit my job and surviving online.

Make 10 adsense sites, 10 Affiliate Landing Pages, 10 Amazon Sites, and so on and so on. It is better to have a hand in a TON of different sites making you money then your entire 100 adsense websites get fucked in the rankings and go down and your flat broke.

I did pretty much what you are doing give or take a few details. If you need help, hit me up man. Like your work ethic.
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Scheme said:
That's the thing its hard to determine until you actually buy the domain and put in the work. I own a blog network that has about 25 profitable sites that I can have enough money to pay rent / food / bills and live on. All of them in different niches and all have different methods of making money, and completely unique.

My other is about 50 adsense websites that are "resources" I like to call them all containing around 8-25 pages of content, not blogs. That are helpful not spammy.

Those all require 3-4 hours a week to update and now I am focusing on e-commerce and affiliate marketing more and more as the whole blog / adsense sites are pretty much auto-pilot and not fun anymore.

I have gone through hundreds of niches, and hundreds of flops to get the 75 site core I have now. You are just going to have to work and find what works and what doesn't. Before I determine if it works I try 2-3 different layouts, 2-3 different ad networks / positions and after building links if nothing is there in 3-4 months I leave it up and let the domain expire. Try to avoid spending MONTHS trying to make something work....when you can move on and possibly find something better.
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This is what I'm going for! I'm falling behind in updates again. Massive headaches here, but will update tomorrow.
 
June 1- June 11, 2011
Been a BUSY week and a half. Here's the run down of what I've been up to:

Massive Data Loss
Had massive technical nightmares in the past week. Had an overdue invoice on my WindowsVPS (their fault, their CC processor wasn't working), after 3 days being overdue they deleted my VPS and all the data I had on it. I was stupid and never made backup of any of the files. I lost hundreds of hours of scraping and all my link lists that I use to do my backlink building for clients. MAjor pain in the ass. I was shocked the VPS provider didn't have backups of their servers either.

Anyways, I moved on, got a new VPS (from a new provider), and now have an awesome automatic backup system. Using dropbox + SyncToy + Windows scheduler I have all my VPS files backed up to dropbox nightly + downloaded to my local harddrive nightly. I also now have a plugin on all my sites that backs them up automatically to drop box (set to monthly as I don't expect them to change often).

Niche Sites
I lost alot of time to the technical nightmare above, but I did manage to settle on on plugin to help me develop my next set of niche sites. I was orginally looking for an Amazon store builder, but I ended up going with BlogSense. This publishing platform does everything and once I get the hang of it, I think I can use it to help me roll out all my niche sites, not just amazon.

After playing around with the amazon module I was able to get a nice template together and roll out 8 amazon stores. Have 5 undeveloped domains still, will try developing them over the coming days.

My first batch of niche stites are still "marinating", havn't made any break out movements in the SERPs yet, but am confident with time and continual link building they'll be ranking and bringing in traffic.

SEO/Backlink Services
With the loss of my VPS I was set back hugely and had to turn away some work. I did however pick up a local SEO client that will result in $3-400 in work over the next couple weeks AND picked up a client that has me on monthly retainer ($600 to start, will go up as he moves more sites over to me) that just require small consistent daly link building. If I can pick up a couple more clients like that I'll be in good shape!

That's my last 11 days in a nutshell!

June 1-June11 Income Summary
SEO/Backlink Consulting - $75
Affiliate Income - $34.98
AdSense - $3.63
 
Sorry for dropping the Journal guys - last few weeks has been rough for me.

On top of the pressure of starting my own business, was also faced with lots of personal "challenges" during June that set me back the last couple of weeks:

- was gone to Peru for a couple days for bachelor party
- broke up with the long term g/f
- got jumped outside a bar and me and best friend put in the hospital
- massive challenges with immigration trying to obtain a work visa (I'm currently living in South America)

Anyways - point of this is not for sympathy, more to point out the fact that one of the challenges of starting your own business is that there will always be elements that you cannot control, must learn to roll with them, cause if you let those personal challenges get you down, your business will fail!

I've been working 50% the last couple weeks while trying to put everything back in check, and now ready to go full force with my business again.

To catch everyone up - here is my June summary (with May comparatives).

June Income Summary
JuneIncomeSummary.png

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MY focus for July is to really hammer on my Niche sites. While they have earned almost $100 to date (in the first 90 days), I'd really like to get this income up in July. I have about 10 of the sites on the 1st and second page, but none in the top 5 for their given keywords - so hopefully the push this month will get them above the fold to get the traffic flowing (and income up!).

To catch up July - Work hasn't been that productive, but there are the stats

July 1 - July 12, 2011 Income Summary
Adsesnse - $3.58
Affiliate (amazon) - $2.56
SEO consulting - $64.00
Total - 70.14
 
It's always great to see these journals on-going. Most of the time they will be active for a few days, and then be left to die. Keep up the good work, and there is no doubt that if you do, it will pay off.
 
DWIGHTSHRUTE said:
It's always great to see these journals on-going. Most of the time they will be active for a few days, and then be left to die. Keep up the good work, and there is no doubt that if you do, it will pay off.
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yeah - i've seen many journals come and go here. I dropped this for a while due to some personal life stuff, but will try and keep this more frequently updated here as well.

Thanks for the encouragement! cheers,
 
DWIGHTSHRUTE said:
It's always great to see these journals on-going. Most of the time they will be active for a few days, and then be left to die. Keep up the good work, and there is no doubt that if you do, it will pay off.
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Looks like I have fallen victim to this stereotype!

I was out of country for almost 2 months, and been busy putting everything back together now. I actually recreated my journal as an ongoing blog (for those that care :P) - I won't be udpating this thread daily (as initially planned), but will provide weekly updates, as the input from the members on this forum is very valuable (and I don't expect everyone to come read my daily blog talking about how I'm making pennies/day :P).

Anyways, here's a link to my blog which will be (closer to) daily updates :P


 
I probably wouldn't have seen this journal if you hadn't posted yesterday but I'm glad you did. It's a good read and people should pay attention to the kind of work a body needs to put in to get some results.

+rep and good luck with your efforts
 
Well September was a good month. My affiliate revenues are still struggling, I think I am missing the boat with my niche selection, so going to try and build 10 new sites this month to see if I can start increasing those revenues.

Here's the summary for September

 
WOW - just read the entire thread and am impressed and stoked!

Sorry for the noob question, but how are you hosting all of your sites? Are you hosting at say, Blue Host or GoDaddy, for $5/ea per month??

Glad you've recovered and are back to it - keep up with the updates... I'm off to checkout your blog. :smokin:
 
Surfer Dude said:
WOW - just read the entire thread and am impressed and stoked!

Sorry for the noob question, but how are you hosting all of your sites? Are you hosting at say, Blue Host or GoDaddy, for $5/ea per month??

Glad you've recovered and are back to it - keep up with the updates... I'm off to checkout your blog. :smokin:
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Thanks - I started with a low end VPS to host my sites, but have gotten lucky with a recent project where I am building a network of sites for a client across many different shared hosts (blue host, crocweb, hostgator, zensix, etc) - while I don't make much money off the project from this particular client, I own all the hosting accounts so can use them all to host my growing network of sites as well. I have found some good deals on shared hosting (especially if you pay yearly) here: Shared Hosting Offers - Web Hosting Talk
 
Walden said:
Good read ex.

How are you finding blogsense?
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At first I found BlogSense overwheleming - the power adn number of options is incredible. Its not a "plugin", its a complete publishing platform (RSS, content rewriting, remote publishing, custom scrapers, keyword modules, amazaon modules). I havn't touched 90% of the stuff still. I've "mastered" the amazon module and now rolling out some pretty decent looking amazon sites into some nice premium magazine themes.

Surfer Dude said:
I assume you're using WordPress? If so, what modules are you using?
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Modules of BlogSense? I am using solely the Amazon module (for now).

If you are referring to plugins, just the usuals

- Yoast SEO (setup all my title/keyword templates so all my posts are meta optimized) - also customize the RSS feed to append links back to the original post, so that when I submit my sites to RSS sites, hopefully they get syndicated and I get some backlinks on autopilot.

- W3 Total Cache - speed up my sites

- Efficient related posts (or on my amazon sites IGIT Related Post With Thumb)

- SEO auto links and related posts - I turn off the "related posts" part of this plugin. The rest just automatically links random words (tags) in my posts and links them to other posts in my blog. Good for spidering.

- Auto tag ninja - when not using BlogSense (it has auto-tagging built in), I use this to get tags automatically based on my posts title/content.

Those are the general ones I use. I might add one if I need something specific for a particular site.
 
OCTOBER SUMMARY​

Niche Sites
Well October down, VERY disappointing month for my niche sites (they actually LOST me money due to some refunds of high ticket items on Amazon). That being said, traffic levels were all up, even though I havn't had any time to work on SEO for my own sites. Just going to keep walking the line, as the first two days on November scored almost $100 in Amazon comissions to put me back on track :)

SEO Work

For my SEO work I've been doing for clients, had some major break throughs. After 3 months of beating away on a (relatively) competitive keyword, I've cracked the top 10 - 3 times! I have 3 of my client's sites (which I built) now in the top 10 (one of them sitting at #2). Another couple weeks and should be dominating the top 5 results!

My niche sites are almost all ranking between #5-#20 for their respective keywords, so will try and push on them this month to see if I can capture any of those Q4 ad dollars before Christmas!

Developing my SEO Empire
I've been buying up high PR domains (just starting with expired PR2/PR3 domains - they are more in my budget) which I'm putting up around my network of shared hosting accounts (I have about 12 shared hosting accounts now from client work that I can use - IP/Nameserver diversity!). I'm hoping in a couple months to have 50-100 of these high PR domains that I can use at my disposal for clients and myself. Will make SEO efforts much easier and faster!

October Income
Still not a balla, but everything keeps moving in the right direction! I just gotta get my act together on my niche sites so they start paying some of the bills too!
octoberincome.png
 
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