You will often find a guide that claims to teach you how to rank #1 in Google for a competitive term in less than 48 hours or some other outlandish claim.  Those who have been doing this for a while spot the issue with these guides immedialy, but people new to SEO are less fortunate.  The author typically shows examples of terms they rank for and normally includes proof.  For example, they may show that they rank #1 for the term widgets sale, which when searching Google shows over 18 million competing pages.  What they don’t tell you is that the exact search results (search in quotes) for this term returns less than 2,000 competing pages, and more importantly than that no one is searching for their term.

I have seen countless “guides” sold at the warrior forum claiming to offer you a magic formula for ranking for terms like this and it boggles my mine why the authors aren’t called out on it.

Anyway, in my opinion this isn’t Polite SEO (whatever that is ;)  Sorry for the rant…

Chris

As of this writing, I am 60% closer to paying my mortgage each month, with EPN (eBay Partner Network) still my highest earner by a mile, followed by Clickbank, CPALead, then by Google AdSense.

What is working for me is precisely what was working for me last time I posted.  I currently have about 12 niche sites with unique content and I built them using Mony Tree and phpBayPro (primarily Mony Tree).  These 12 sites are monetized solely by eBay.  The absolutely only links out on these sites go to eBay, which of course results in my 7 day cookie being dropped on the visitors system.

Many have complained about eBay since they took over their affiliate program from Commission Junction last spring, myself included, but at this point I really have nothing to complain about.  Their reporting is a bit finicky and during what they show as your earnings during the month don’t always equal your actual earnings.  I am willing to accept that though because the EPC of these sites is exponentially higher than those monetized by other methods.

I am certainly going to try and blog more, but will make no promises.  Over the course of the next few weeks I am going to show you some examples of niche marketing that are working for me.

Chris

Check it out here

Things are going well here.  I will update in a few days.

Chris

Obviously, this brings us back to the importance of varying your monetization methods.  Google can decide at any time to basically turn off all traffic from Google Search.  Fun stuff.  Kind of bummed today, so this will be all.

Halfway through the month I have had 5,200 clicks with my total commissions at $189.  Hopefully this trend will continue.  Despite stating a number of times that I am going to finally promote my eBay sites I still haven’t done any promotion for these sites.  My best performing Mony Tree site earned $99 (from 3 sales) a couple of days ago, which is definitely my best day yet.  I have not had an ACRU (new eBay registration) for the month, which is a little odd.  These numbers are certainly nothing big, but I am personally esctatic that I’ve done as well as I’ve done this month without doing any promotion and without a $25 ACRU.  This brings me to the reason I haven’t promoted my eBay sites.

Prior to building eBay stores I built traditional content sites monetized with AdSense.  I still do this when I find a great niche.  About two years ago I bought a domain name with the intent on building a content site.  I knew absolutely nothing about keyword  research, competition analysis or anything else.  The only thing I really did know is that Google apparently pays $5+ per click in this financial niche many “gurus” claimed it really is easy.  I put the site up and waited for the money to roll in.  Of course it never did because the primary keyword the original site targeted has 200,000,000 exact match (search with quotes) competing pages in Google.  Lesson learned.

In January of this year I completely overhauled the site.  I did extensive keyword and competition research, had 10 high quality articles written and built the site.  I promoted it using article marketing (only 3 articles submitted), directory submissions,  bookmarking demon & 3WayLinks.  I didn’t even think about the site after doing this and forgot to keep up with the stats etc.  Well last week my AdSense took a huge jump and it came from this site.  Previously the site hadn’t earned $0.01, and suddenly it started earning $8-10 per day.  Come to find out the site is ranked 3rd for the primary keyword and 4th for a keyword that I wasn’t actually targeting.  This keyword has 180,000,000 competing pages!  I still can’t believe it.  This is my greatest SEO achievement to-date.  This really got me off track a bit, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Once I saw my AdSense at that level (which is still weak compared to many), I couldn’t bear to lose the rankings so I started an extensive article marketing campaign for the site in an effort to retain the current rankings and to rank for some of the other keywords.  After all, the money I earn from Google & eBay funds the expansion/scaling of my business $10 / day is an extra $300 to use for content etc.

Josh Spaulding released a free report called the $5 Formula (which has an in-depth article marketing strategy).  The report does require you to opt-in, but it is absolutely worth it.  I don’t receive anything for recommending it.  I have implemented the strategy with the site discussed above and now believe every word of the report.  Grab it here if you’re interested:

$5 Mini-Site Formula

That is really all for now.

Regards,

My earnings from the eBay Partner Network for the month are right over $100. Nothing earth shattering, and a significant decrease from my commission junction earnings last month. I am hopeful that the decrease in earnings is due to the transition to EPN and that May will bring a $300+ month.

Here are my EPN Stats for the month:

Total Clicks: 4,328

Total Sales: 25

Total ACRUS (eBay registrations): 1

Total Sites: 12 Mony Tree Sites, 1 Build a Niche Store Site

The nice thing is that I still haven’t done any significant promotion for any of these sites.

My goals for May are to finally start my promotional work for each site. I am going to promote 2 sites at a time starting with the first two I built. I intend on submitting a minimum of 20 articles per site for article marketing and continuing to bookmark them using Bookmarking Demon. I will keep you all updated.

That is all for now.

Regards,

Hopefully my eBay sites will continue the momentum and my earnings will continue to increase.  I just wanted to give an update, that is all for now.  Have a great weekend.

Regards,

The actual process of changing the sites, both Mony Tree and BANS, from CJ to EPN was absolutely painless.  Thanks to the hard work by the staff at MT and BANs, all that was required on my end was to change the unique ID for each site.  I had all 10 of my sites changed within 15 minutes.

So, I am a stat junkie and of course logged into my EPN account 5 or 6 times the first day to make sure it was tracking properly.  The first day I didn’t notice any clicks at all but was told that it takes a while for the system to update.  Long story short, today is the 4th day since I made the change and clicks appear to be tracking fine (568 clicks in 4 days).  I haven’t made a sale yet though!  So we shall see.

These sites are always lagged a bit due to the nature of the auctions on eBay.  The only way to receive an immediate commission from one of these sites is if the visitor to your sites uses “Buy it now” or if they win a 1 day auction (not many 1 day auctions).  So according to my stats I should hopefully see some sales come in over the next few days.

I will post an update soon.

Regards,