Well, as you may have gathered, I haven’t had much to blog about recently. In fact, a lot of the blogs I read seem to have gone quiet too except for the recent excitement over the AdSense Secrets alleged scam. The reason I haven’t had anything to blog about is because I haven’t been doing anything particularly new - a lot of my current projects are still work in progress:

The site I’m having done at RentACoder isn’t going particularly well and I’m close to cancelling that.

The site I’m doing for a colleague at work is going very slowly as it’s turned out to be a bigger job than I thought. Turns out that the membership script I bought is appaulingly badly scripted and I’ve had to totally re-write parts of it. Unfortunately this was the lesser of two evils - the other being write the script from scratch myself! Anyway, that is nearly done now, and it’s working quite nicely.

The adult niche site I set up in Feb continues to go from strength to strength with over £275 earned this month. I really can’t believe the success I’m having from this! I’m now trying to rinse & repeat this on another niche to see if I have similar success and, to that end, put a new site live earlier this week.

The niche site giveaway experiment was a success. Certainly a lot of people downloaded the free site and we covered our costs by up-selling the article packs. Next stop on that route is to repeat the formula but try to sell the niche site rather than give it away!

In the offline world, my flat purchase still hasn’t happened and I’m getting more and more frustrated by the day…!

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Well still nothing too exciting to report from me - I’m still going through a period of creating new sites.

The big site I’m having done at RentACoder is coming on nicely but still a couple of weeks from completion.

The tipsters venture is going at a snails pace, largely because my first customer still hasn’t chosen a domain name, although I have been developing the nuts and bolts of the site locally. Off the back of this, I also have a second customer lined up who wants their own tipping site. The idea is to simply offer him the same site with different graphics etc - nice and easy! Both of these will be run on a revenue share basis.

The new site I put up last month has now made over £110 ($220) this month, which has massively exceeded my expectations. When I get some spare time, I’m going to try to find some similar products to repeat this formula on.

Finally, in conjunction with an old online friend, I’ve knocked up a little niche site based around a few unique articles she had written. We are going to give this away to our mailing list for free, with a small up-sell of some extra unique articles on the same topic. Depending on how this is received, we may do a similar thing on some other topics, perhaps changing for the initial site too with a limited number of copies for sale. It’s a bit of an experiment, but also a thank you to our mailing list, so we’ll see how it goes.

Offline, my flat purchase has been delayed again, very frustrating indeed

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Apologies for the lack of updates this week; I work in the betting industry and this week it has been the Cheltenham Festival - the biggest week of the year for the industry with predictions of £600m+ in turnover ($1.2bn) across the 4 days - so things have been somewhat busy in the offline world. I’m also in the process of buying a flat so that is taking up any spare time (and money!).

Anyway, on the online front, here’s a quick summary of what’s going on…

• The new site I launched almost a month ago is starting to make money. I was beginning to think it was a dead dog, but it’s suddenly started earning with £55 ($110) made in affiliate sales in the past 4 days. All visitors are from an AdWords campaign with an Avg CPC of 2p. I’ve had 45 clicks costing me 84p ($1.68) so a very nice return so far!
• The site I had an idea for and then comissioned through RentACoder is chugging along and seems to be going ok. Following my Top 10 Tips for Buyers on RentACoder has paid off as I seem to have a decent coder.
• New site - I’ve got an idea for a new site which I hope to finish this week. It’s in a very competetive market and, again, UK focused but I think I have a unique slant on it. The idea is to code a “wizard” type site where users can enter some details and it will choose the right product for them (to buy through an affiliate link of course!). I hope to get this finished by next weekend.

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Don’t get me wrong, I love Text Link Ads (TLA), how easy they are to use, the money I make from them each month and their excellent support. It’s a great way to monetize a website. BUT! It still irks me that they take a whopping 50% of every sale. It also annoys me that you have no say over what price your links sell for.

This got me thinking that maybe I could sell links directly off my websites…so I tried doing just that!

(more…)

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I released my first new site for some time today. It’s for a niche adult product (ooo err!) with a ticket price of £70 (~$140). I will receive 25% commission for any sales through the affiliate scheme I have chosen.

The plan is to initially drive traffic through an AdWords campaign - the good news being a CPC of 2p gets me on the first page of Google results so, if I can convert even a small percentage of traffic, I should see a nice return. Looking at it another way, I will only need 1 visitor per 875 to make a purchase to break even!

One other thing about the site is that I am only targeting the UK market, so using a .co.uk domain name and AdWords campaign to only target UK searchers on a very tight group of keywords in order to keep advertising costs as low as possible.

In time, I hope to get this site up near the top of Google, so the next stage will be search engine submissions and links from my high PR sites in order to get in indexed quickly, followed by trying to get some good back-links.

Phew! It’s good to be back in the game!

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