I share this for 3 main reasons:

1. I want to keep myself accountable. By making my goals and plans public I have someone other than myself to answer to if I’m not working like I should.
2. It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
3. I hope to inspire people and show that it really is possible to earn income online. No gimmicks or schemes, just good old hard work.

What Happened in October

I’ve finally started to settle into a routine. I think I have a handle on how to balance life with kids and internet marketing. My schedule is still crazy, but I’ve learned how to squeeze work in anytime I have a free moment.

I may only get to work in 15 minute bursts, but those bursts add up.

At the beginning of October I identified my 2 key sites. Before, I had too much going on. I needed to simplify so that I could focus.

All of my other sites are are the back burner indefinitely while I build out these 2 sites.

The first site is the Clickbank affiliate site that I’ve been talking about for the past few months. 95% of my effort last month was on building backlinks. As you’ll see in the income report below, some of this work is starting to pay off. I also wrote a few pieces of new content, but the majority of my efforts were in getting the existing content to rank.

The other project that I worked on is my finance blog. Most of my time was spent writing content and networking with other bloggers.

This project is almost the exact opposite of my affiliate site in that 95% of my effort is on building content for the blog. I have not built a single backlink.

What’s amazing though is that finance bloggers love to link to each other. As I have worked to produce the best content possible, natural links have been coming in like crazy.

Last month, I mentioned that I had received around a dozen links so far. In October, that number increased nearly 10 fold.

Open Site Explorer is showing 106 links. Some of those are from major authority sites which has boosted my MozRank to 4.12. That’s pretty incredible for a site that is 2 months old.

At the end of October I added some monetization to this site. I’ll talk more about that below.

Income Report for October 2011

(Usual Disclaimer: Most of the links below are affiliate links. If you click on my link and sign up for one of these services I will receive a commission.)

Adsense

• This month: $45.47
• Last month: $45.99
• Change: -$0.52

Neverblue

• This month: $106.10
• Last month: $76.70
• Change: $29.40

The Keyword Academy

• This month: $11.55
• Last month: $11.55
• Change: $0.00

Clickbank

• This month: $143.91
• Last month: $50.20
• Change: $93.71

Media.net

• This month: $10.36
• Last month: N/A
• Change: $10.36

Total Income

• This month: $317.39
• Last month: $184.44
• Change: $132.95

Expenses

• Bluehost – $8.95
• The Keyword Academy – $33.00

Net Income for October 2011 – $275.44

I’m pretty excited about that! Earnings were up 72% over September!

The bulk of that growth is from my niche affiliate site. Anyone who says backlinking is dead, is crazy. Backlinks still work wonders.

Like I mentioned above I’ve started monetizing my finance blog at the end of October. I’m testing Media.net out. It’s a relatively new ad network that is showing some promise on this site.

Goals for November

Goals are pretty easy now since I’m only focusing on 2 sites.

Goal #1 is to continue building backlinks to my Clickbank site. All of the keywords that have brought sales are still on page 2 or lower of the SERPs. Higher rankings will almost certainly mean more sales.

Goal #2 is to continue writing content for my finance site. I may also do some split testing between Media.net and AdSense. Right now the traffic levels are really high enough to get any meaningful results so we’ll just see how the month goes.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with how October panned out and hope to continue that momentum through November!

I share this for 3 main reasons:

1. I want to keep myself accountable. By making my goals and plans public I have someone other than myself to answer to if I’m not working like I should.
2. It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
3. I hope to inspire people and show that it really is possible to earn income online. No gimmicks or schemes, just good old hard work.

What Happened in September

Holy cow! Can’t believe that September is already over. It won’t be long until Thanksgiving and then Christmas.

The boys are now 2 months old and getting into a bit of a schedule which means I’m getting some time to work on my business again.

Most of my time this month was spent on the new project I announced last month. I’ve really enjoyed launching this new site and getting involved in the finance community.

I’ve been blown away at how awesome the other bloggers in this niche are. They are extremely generous and love to link out to other sites.

With the site barely over a month old, I’ve already received around a dozen natural links – 2 of which are from very high profile finance blogs.

I will probably hit around 2,000 unique visitors and 5,000 page views this next month. I haven’t tried to monetize it yet. My main goal has just been to build traffic. Though, if traffic grows too much more I really need to get this figured out because I’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.

I’ve also continued to work on my Clickbank site. Traffic and hops are steady. Rankings are rising. I think this is going to turn into a very good site for me.

This competition in this niche is suprisingly low. There is definately $1,000+ per month potential here. And it won’t take a ridiculous amount of work to get there.

Income Report for September 2011

(Usual Disclaimer: Most of the links below are affiliate links. If you click on my link and sign up for one of these services I will likely receive a commission.)

Adsense

• This month: $45.99
• Last month: $78.18
• Change: -$32.19

Neverblue

• This month: $76.70
• Last month: $53.60
• Change: $23.10

The Keyword Academy

• This month: $11.55
• Last month: $11.55
• Change: $0.00

Clickbank

• This month: $50.20
• Last month: $0.00
• Change: $50.20

Amazon

• This month: $0.00
• Last month: $5.65
• Change: -$5.65

SponsoredTweets

Total Income

• This month: $184.44
• Last month: $157.98
• Change: $26.46

Expenses

• Bluehost – $8.95
• The Keyword Academy – $33.00

Net Income for September 2011 – $142.49

Once again, a small improvement over the prior month.

Most of this can be attributed to my Clickbank site with has finally started making a few sales. I really hope these sales stay consistent. I’ve always found it hard to maintain consistent sales with high-commission products – though that’s mostly because I’m not getting enough traffic to the site to even out the normal variances.

Adsense was down due to me abandoning what used to be my main earner. It’s just not worth my time to waste 3 months trying to get back into Google’s good graces with that site.

I still have a couple of small niche sites using AdSense that bring in a few dollars here and there.

I’ve also decided to dump Sponsored Tweets. The quality of the offers there are declining. Even the offers I did approve weren’t great. I kind of felt like I was whoring out my twitter feed.

I think advertisers are starting to catch on that sponsored tweets have a pretty low return unless it comes from a celebrity or one of the leaders in a niche.

Goals for October

Goals this month don’t differ much from last month. My main focus will be on my two sites with the most potential – my Clickbank site and my finance site.

The Clickbank site mostly needs more backlinking. Building backlinks gets old after a while, but backlinks are what this site needs most.

My new finance site needs more content. Like I mentioned above, natural links are pretty easy to come by so my main focus will be on writing quality content.

I need to also start thinking about how to monetize the site. My fear is that the more I try to monetize the bigger chance I have of driving away natural links. I’ll just have to find a balance somehow.

Hope you had a great September and I wish you a productive and profitable October!

I share this for 3 main reasons:

1. I want to keep myself accountable. By making my goals and plans public I have someone other than myself to answer to if I’m not working like I should.
2. It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
3. I hope to inspire people and show that it really is possible to earn income online. No gimmicks or schemes, just good old hard work.

What Happened in August

Another month has come and gone. With 2 new babies in the house the month of August has been a total blur. My life now revolves around their feeding schedule.

This has made working on my business difficult. Before I would typically have 4:00-6:30 am each morning to work. Now I’m squeezing in work anytime I have a few extra minutes.

Despite all of this August has been a reasonably productive month.

I’ve continued to work on my new niche site promoting a clickbank product. August yielded 454 unique visitors and 276 hops to Clickbank. I think I have a pretty decent landing page with 61% of people clicking though to the sales page. However, a lot of the keywords I’m ranking for right now aren’t buying keywords. So I’m seeing traffic, but no sales.

I’ve been primarily working on the backlink campaign for this site. Things have been going pretty well. I’ve moved into the top 20 for 2 semi-buying keywords with around 2,000 searches per month.

I’ve also moved into the top 30 for an excellent keyword that gets 12,100 searches per month and the top 50 for a keyword with 9,900 searches per month.

Even though I haven’t seen a sale yet I still feel good about this site. I have no doubt that this will be a $1,000+ per month site once I start to rank for some of my buying keywords.

My Reconsideration Request

In the July 2011 income report I mentioned that I had filed a reconsideration request with Google on my main earner. Well, I heard back…

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com/,

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.example.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

We’ve reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines.

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.example.com/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google’s search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines.

If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration.

If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

Bah humbug.

With this, I’ve decided that it’s time to move on from this site. I honestly don’t know what Google is looking for here.

As a last ditch effort I’ve moved the site to a new domain. I’ve seemed to shake at least a little bit of the penalty since it’s regained about 20% of it’s traffic. I’ll just let it fizzle until it dies now.

New Projects And Reviving Old Projects

Since I’ve decided to let my main site die I needed to pick up a few more projects to work towards growing my income again.

New Project is something I’m really excited about. It is in the ultra competitive finance niche. I’m not really worried about the competition though because I know that I can create some amazing content on the topic.

This site is going to be totally white-hat. I’m not even going to be doing any link building. It is going to be all about producing amazing keyword targeted content that attracts natural links.

What’s cool about working in a niche that you love is how easy it is to procude content. The last 3 days I’ve written over 10,000 words. It’s actually enjoyable to sit down a write a 2,000 word post on the topic. That is a pretty amazing feat for me since I usually hate writing keyword targeted content.

Revived Old Project is a large site in the outdoors niche. While I’m interested in the topic, I’m not exactly passionate about it. I’ve already got a lot of good content on it, but due to the niche I don’t think it’s going to attract a ton of natural links.

I’m using this site to test some new backlinking strategies. Though I don’t expect to see a lot of results for this site for a while since it’s the lowest priority out of the 3 sites I’m working on.

Income Report for August 2011

(Usual Disclaimer: Most of the links below are affiliate links. If you click on my link and sign up for one of these services I will likely receive a commission.)

Adsense

• This month: $78.18
• Last month: $45.73
• Change: $32.45

Neverblue

• This month: $53.60
• Last month: $79.95
• Change: -$26.35

The Keyword Academy

• This month: $11.55
• Last month: $0.00
• Change: $11.55

Clickbank

• This month: $0.00
• Last month: $0.00
• Change: $0.00

Amazon

• This month: $5.65
• Last month: $1.80
• Change: $3.85

SponsoredTweets

Total Income

• This month: $157.98
• Last month: $135.16
• Change: $22.82

Expenses

• Bluehost – $8.95
• Domain Renewals – $16.50
• The Keyword Academy – $33.00

Net Income for August 2011 – $99.53

So, a very slight increase over July.

The majority of the increase can be attributed to a small bump in AdSense income. This is primarily due to moving my formerly-main earner to a new domain. This brought a couple of my rankings back, but not enough to make a huge difference.

I’m not convinced that SponsoredTweets is worth the effort. I think advertisers are starting to catch on that twitter advertising doesn’t offer very good returns. Shoemoney mentioned this at the end of last year. Most of the opportunities offered to me aren’t very good and the pay is minimal. I’ll probably run it for another month then make a final decision.

A new source of income this month is The Keyword Academy. I had one referral last month that continued their subscription after the free trial period. I love TKA. It has taught me a lot about SEO and has a fantastic community. There are very few forums where high-earners openly talk about their earnings and the different methods they use.

Goals for September

Man I can’t believe it’s September already. This month I will continue to work on the 3 sites I have cooking.

For my niche Clickbank site I will mostly be working on the backlinking campaign. I’m testing out a complex layered link campaign with extremely diverse anchor text. So far I’m seeing fantastic results.

On my new finance site my main task is going to be producing amazing content. I want to get at least another 20,000 words up this month. I will also start networking with some of the bloggers in this niche.

For my outdoors site I’ll primarily be working on the backlinking campaign as well. Though I also plan to put some new content up as I come across low competition keywords.

As for this blog, I don’t have any specific goals. Like I mentioned in my relaunch post this site is more about being a personal journal for me. I’ll post as I work through new ideas and I’ll post progress updates to record my journey.

My main focus needs to be on my income producing sites. Afterall, this site will be pretty stinking boring if my business doesn’t see any growth.

I hope you had a great August. Here’s to a happy, healthy and productive September!

I share this for 3 main reasons:

1. I want to keep myself accountable. By making my goals and plans public I have someone other than myself to answer to if I’m not working like I should.
2. It helps me keep track of my goals and see what is working and what isn’t working.
3. I hope to inspire people and show that it really is possible to earn income online. No gimmicks or schemes, just good old hard work.

What Happened In July

Like I mentioned in my relaunch post, my main earner died at the end of June. Before being hit with a penalty it was on track to hit $500 from in July.  Without this site, my income was pretty minimal.

One of my big projects for the month was to go through that entire site and clean it up. Right after my site was penalized in May I submitted a reconsideration request to see what the issue was. The response was that the site violates Google’s quality guidelines.

Since I didn’t know exactly what the issue was I went through each item on their list and tried to look objectively at how my site compared.

After reviewing everything, I think I was penalized for:

I also had a contact of mine who does manual reviews for search engines take a look at my site. I made a few other changes based on her recommendations that I’ll talk about in a future post.

The reconsideration request was submitted on July 27th. It usually takes a week or 2 to hear back. Hopefully that will solve everything and I’ll see a big earnings jump for August.

My other big project for the month was launching the site I mentioned in the June 2011 income report. In that post I talked about a Clickbank product that I had my eye on for some time.

Since then I’ve fleshed the site out a bit more. I’ve added some good content that targets low competition keywords in the niche. I’ve also started my backlinking campaign.

I’ve already had 247 visitors and sent 82 hops to the product. No conversions yet, but I should see my first sale very soon.

Income Report for July 2011:

Adsense

• This month: $45.73
• Last month: $303.82
• Change: -$258.09

Neverblue

• This month: $79.95
• Last month: $132.90
• Change: -$52.95

Clickbank

• This month: $0.00
• Last month: $66.67
• Change: -$66.67

Amazon

• This month: $1.80
• Last month: $9.30
• Change: -$7.50

Total Income

• This month: $135.16
• Last month: $512.69
• Change: -$377.53

Expenses

• Bluehost – $8.95
• Domain Renewals – $8.25
• The Keyword Academy – $33.00

Income was obviously way down over last month.

It can be discouraging to put a lot of work into something and not see immediate results. That is one of the biggest reasons most people never make it when trying to earn income online.

Society programs us with the mindset of  ”You go to work. You collect your paycheck.” But in this business, you may go to work every day and not get a paycheck. Or it may be 6 months before you collect the paycheck for the work you’ve done.

I feel good about the work I’ve done this month even though earnings are down.

Goals for August

This month I plan to continue to work on my new niche site. I need to get at least 5 more pages of content up and a couple dozen more back links. I expect to see a couple of sales this month.

I should also hear back on my reconsideration request within the next week. If the penalty is removed, I’ll start adding new content to this site. If it’s still penalized then I’ll continue to work on it to fix whatever issues may be remaining.

I’ve also go some great content lined up for WallerBlog this month. I hope I can share some really great things with you.

One Final Note

On July 31, 2011 my wife and I welcomed our two beautiful twin boys into the world:

Ian Timothy and Noah Riley - July 31, 2011

Ian was born at 2:48pm – 5lbs 8oz, 18in long and Noah was born at 2:49pm – 6lbs 12oz, 20in long. Woohoo!

Now the people in this niche are passionate about what they do. I mean incredibly passionate. I’m pretty sure they could smell a phony from a mile away. This isn’t like some niches where you could b.s. your way though if you wanted to. You really need to know your stuff.

If you’re a regular reader then you know that I don’t like b.s. (If you’re not a regular reader then you should be! Subscribe to my feed!) I prefer to be a straight shooter and just tell it like it is.

It would go against my nature to just pull a bunch of junk together just so I could fill out my site.

That means I either have to pay someone in the know to write content for my new site or I have dive into the middle of this community and become one of them.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to find someone to write for this niche. It’s not like it’s underwater basket weaving. But, I always prefer to at least write the first bit of content on a new site.

I don’t feel like I can give my outsourcers good instructions unless I personally have some experience in what I’m asking them to do.

So…

When I’m Approaching a New Niche, Here’s The 3 Things I Do…

If I’m writing content that targets a demographic that is passionate about a topic I need to dive right into the middle of that group.

I need to understand the community – Who are they? What do they like/dislike? How do they talk (slang, abbreviations, etc?)

Youtube – Get on Youtube and find videos that people in your niche are posting and commenting on. Take your list of keywords and go to town watching every video you can.

Pay close attention to those with a lot of comments and a lot of ratings. These are the kind of videos that were able to engage people enough to generate some kind of response.

Read through the comments. See what kind of stuff people like. Are how-to videos hot? What about vlog (video blog) posts? Who are the key players in the niche? Look at who is posting a lot of video. Look at channel views and subscriber counts.

Try to figure out what makes these people unique. Why are people choosing to watch these videos over all the other videos on the same topic?

Blogs  - Search using very broad phrases that relate to your niche (e.g. ‘cars’ or ‘finance’ or ‘health’). What you are looking for are high-authority sites that are ranking for some of the most competitive terms in your niche.

Most likely these sites will be owned by big media conglomerates. However, if you do come across a blog, try to figure out what makes them so popular.

Then get on a blog search engine such as Technorati or Google’s Blog Search. See who the biggest bloggers in your niche are. Look at the number of subscribers, twitter followers, etc.

Again, the whole point here is to understand what people in your niche are looking for. What kind of content do they like? What type of personality seems to be popular?

Forums – The last place I go is forums. By this point you should have some insight into what people in your niche are hungry for. You’ve been exposed to the big fish in the pond. Now you need to go see what all of the regular Joe’s are talking about.

This is your opportunity to find a hole in the market. Are people talking about things in forums that the big fish aren’t talking about? What about personality? Maybe all the mainstream bloggers seem to have their act together while everyone in the forums have a lot of insecurities.

Look for a USP (unique selling position) that will make your site stand out.

With all of this, you are armed to become an authority in the space. Which is super important if you want to see real success.

You Need to Be Seen as an Authority

In order to market to a crowd you need to be seen as an authority. People will rarely buy something from someone they don’t trust. You can’t be an authority if you don’t know what you’re talking about!

In this new niche I’m doing everything I can to absorb information so I can be sure I know what I’m talking about when I create content. If I talk and talk and walk the walk then I can build my reputation as an authority in this niche.

I’m doing my absolute best to create compelling original content on this new niche site.

In my humble opinion, that is one of the biggest pieces to the puzzle of success in any niche.

You Need to Be Relatable

I think the second big key to success is that people need to be able to relate to you. People relate to other people who are like them. This goes back to the research I mentioned above. You need to understand who your target audience is. You need to be able to talk like they do and talk about the stuff that they talk about.

In this new niche I’m working on, I’ve noticed that proper grammar is kind of rare. So I’ve tried to place some intentional errors in my content. I don’t want these people to come to my site and be put off because I’m too proper or I sound like I have it all together. I want them to see me like they see a good friend. I want them to relate to me.

Your Thoughts

What do you think? Do you think that is being disingenuous or is it smart marketing? Is there a better way to do niche marketing?