Last month I decided to join Ebay's Affiliate Program, mainly to try to squeeze a little more money out of my sites. I installed the script to my main site by researching my adsense revenue on pages that were not generating any revenue to see if they can be better monetized.
So far the program has amassed me a total of $1 dollar. This is not much, however I have only added it to 10 pages which is a very very small segment of my site.
The Ebay's Affiliate Program payout structure was originally based from sign-ups and successful bids, but last week they announced that are going change it to be Pay Per Click (Quality Click Pricing). Now this would be very interesting to see how it performs against Google's Adsense. I am not 100% convince this will make me more money than Adsense but it will help increase my ROI on non-performing pages.
Optimizing your advertising realestate is very important to ensure that you have the very best opportunity of making some money from your sites. I have been blindly using Adsense for over 5 years and only recently realize that only proportion of my sites page actually make money from Adsense and there are other pages that just eating bandwidth and not generating income.
100 Website Experiment
It has been really an exciting month for my 100 website experiment.
Some important statistics:
1. Highest paying day since joining Google Adsense
2. Highest paying month since joining Google Adsense
3. Highest traffic month
It is amazing how a few tweaks here and there can do wonders for a site. I am absolutely floored by the results however I am skeptical whether this will continue. I am hoping it will continue for the next 6 months. If it continues at this rate I should be well into my 100$ day within 6-9 months.
Sometimes you need to perfect and do something really and not half ass effort before trying to replicate. I think my biggest issues have been complacency and not spending the time on something that I should have kept at it. Also the mentality of thinking it will be easy was a big no no.
Free Money Experiment
Pureprofile paid again, 50$ which is fantastic.
Conclusion
As you can see I am no longer going show much I made each month as it probably has been rather pointless.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for June 2009. 97 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 3
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in May? $194.76
It has been nearly 18 months since I started this experiment and I am no closer to that 100 websites or 100$ a day mark.
Things learnt so far.
1. Replication is not that simple. It takes more effort then just putting a site and hope it will make money. There are factors at play and need to be wary of them
- Competition
- Keywords
- Popularity
2. Competition is fierce. If you tackle a particular niche that is highly competitive you will most likely not do well unless you really know how to rank well in search engines and how to do SEO.
3. Marketing a site is important. Cannot just hope that a crawler will crawl your site. Especially if it is in a highly competitive niche.
From these lessons learnt, I will be taking a different approach in how to tackle this project and concentrate my efforts of dominating the SERP for one particular niche and then extend it to 10 niches.
If I can start making 50$ a day on this one site then I should be able to take to 100$ with new sites. Until I figured out how to dominate a niche then there is no use building multiple sites on different niches as it will be a waste of effort. Once I can perfect one then it should be possible to create more sites.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for May 2009. 97 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 3
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in May? $150.31
Total Earning $1838.76
Days project been running? (484 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.58
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for April 2009. 97 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 3
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in March? $108.28
Total Earning $1688.45
Days project been running? (484 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.49
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for March 2009. 98 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 2
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in February? $79.69
Total Earning $1580.17
Days project been running? (456 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.47
How fast a month can passed.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for February 2009. 98 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 2
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in January? $84.17
Total Earning $1500.48
Days project been running? (428 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.51
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for January 2009. 98 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 2
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in December? $102.20
Total Earning $1416.31
Days project been running? (397 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.58
Happy New Year to everyone.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for December. 98 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 2
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in November? $120.96 (+$28.59)
Total Earning $1314.11
Days project been running? (366 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.59
Well it has been officially 366 days since this experiment have started and has been very slow going. Hopefully the next 12 months will be better and greater and can get a few more of my sites running.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for November. 98 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 2
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in October? $92.37 (-$20.99)
Total Earning $1193.15
Days project been running? (336 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.83
Last month I was able to launch my second site. Which fantastic thing for this experiment. Only 98 websites to go.
Well after months of searching and researching I have decided to go with SoftSys Hosting.
I have registered with their Silver Shared package which gives you
- 2 Hosted domains
- ASP.NET
- MSSQL/MYSQL
- Heaps of other stuff
- 70$ Annually
After signing up and making payment, I instantly received an email regarding all the configuration. So I promptly uploaded my site, database schemas and application. My first impression of the product it is pretty good value for money for what been offered.
Issues
However I had some issues in regards to their MYSQL 5.0. All of my pages was loading extremely slow. After raising a ticket, their suggestion was try Microsoft SQL Server. So little flusted and annoyed about this, I decided to migrate my DB to MSSQL. Took a few hours of rewriting schemas and reworking my base code to handle the new database.
I had my fingers crossed, hoping that all my work was not in vain, I tried it again and pages loaded up really fast, fantastic. I was relieved, cause I didnt want to go find another host and do all the leg work again.
Positives
There technical Support has been brilliant. They were prompt and polite in resolving my issues. I had to admit though, at one stage I was about to ask for a refund cause I could not connect to my website, but after a few emails we finally manage to figure out the issue, and they promptly fixed it (DNS misconfiguration on their end) and everything appears to working fine.
One of the things I like about SoftSys Hosting, is there control panel. I love DotNetPanel, it is an amazing application providing everything I need to do via one interface.
Summary
For the price I am paying is very reasonable, hopefully they will stay good, so I can start implementing my 100 website experiment.
If you want to join you can sign up here SoftSys Hosting (Affiliate)
Just short of 30 days I have decided to disabled Kontera from my sites. It did generate some revenue, but frankly it didn't create anywhere near the revenue Google Adsense provides. In some ways it was probably detrimental to my earnings. Not sure any relationship but my entire revenue for the last 10 days has been very bad.
The eCPM is $1.21 compare to $22+ Google Adsense which is just unacceptable for the type and quality of my traffic.
However there is lots happening with the Financial crisis but even the expected revenue generated was amazing low.
I have not removed them permanently but at this stage they are disabled from my application until I can justify putting them back on.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for October. 99 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 1
How many sites pending for release? 1
Earning in September? $113.36 (+$19.47)
Total Earning $1193.15
Days project been running? (305 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.91
Other Income
Kontera Earning $2.04
In my monthly report I have added a new section that will show any new generated income recently added to the sites. I am currently experimenting with Kontera to see whether it impacts my main earner.
I finally took the plunge and added Kontera to my websites. I have always relied on Google Adsense. However in recent times with the fluctuating of revenue I does make sense to perhaps try another advertiser in hope to increase my revenue.
Many people say if you do not diversify than you headed into trouble waters, I don't particularly agree with this. If you look at all the great entrepreneurs in the world, most get rich with one particular asset class. Look at Donald Trump he made his fortunes with Property, Warren Buffet shares and Bill Gates - Microsoft. I think people tell you to diversify to be safe, but sometimes concentrating all your efforts into one thing may potentially pay dividends.
I will let this trial to run for about 30 days and see if revenue has decrease or increase with Kontera.
Want to join Kontera - http://www.kontera.com
If any of you have had experience with Kontera and Adsense please drop a line and let me know how it is going.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for September. 99 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 1
How many sites pending for release? 1
Earning in August? $93.89 (-$23.33)
Total Earning? $1079.79
Days project been running? (275 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.93
I have made some good progress in getting my second site setup. I have registering my domain name and am in the progress of finishing the final layout for my site. Only thing left to do is find a new host.
Anyone know of a good ASP.NET hosting? If you know any hosts who meet the following criteria shoot me a message.
- One Account which can support multiple domain - multiple roots (no code redirection)
- MySQL DB
- ASP.NET 2.0/3.5
- FTP Access
- Roughly 10$ a month per domain
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for August. 99 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 1
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in July? $117.22 (-$3.06)
Total Earning? $985.90
Days project been running? (244 days)
Daily average earning ? $4.04
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for July. 99 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 1
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in June? $120.16 (-$15.83)
Total Earning? $868.68
Days project been running? (213 days)
Daily average earning ? $4.08
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for June. 99 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 1
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in May? $135.99 (-$3.33)
Total Earning? $748.52
Days project been running? (183 days)
Daily average earning ? $4.09
I have change the experiment to exclude my personal blogs, until I am able to monetize them, as at this stage there is no real SEO or work done on them.
I am in the progress of completing the final code build of my template and should be able to start building new sites in the next 3-4 months.
Currently I have rebuilt most of the code in ASP.NET, so the new platform should enable rapid development and creation of new sites.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for May. 97 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 3
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in April? $139.32 (+$72.43)
Total Earning? $612.53
Days project been running? (152 days)
Daily average earning ? $4.03
I didn't change a thing but earnings just shot up this month.
Welcome to the 100 Websites Experiment Report for April. 97 Websites to go.
How many sites created? 3
How many sites pending for release? 0
Earning in March? $66.89 (-$57.79)
Total Earning? $473.21
Days project been running? (122 days)
Daily average earning ? $3.88
As you noticed in my previous posts, it has been going pretty slow but I have some ideas I will try to ramp up in the next coming months.
