Weekly Update #8 (July 21-27)
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 10:21I believe this was my best week of passive income earnings so far, with my weekly total coming to $282.42 – almost exactly $100 more than I earned last week. I had good earnings in all three of my major programs, and I attribute this to some pretty dramatic shifts I’m seeing in my SERPs. In my monthly report this weekend, I’ll show the SERP changes in more detail, but for now I’ll say that I believe most of the jump is coming as a result of the forum profile building I’m doing using Sick Submitter.
Here is the breakdown of my earnings this week:
AdSense: I earned $95.54 this week from AdSense, with my daily average up to $13.65 (last week it was $9.88 a day). This puts me back above where I was before the Google Algorithm change in early June, and hopefully it will stay at or near this level for a while now.
ClickBank: Interestingly enough, I had fewer sales than usual – only five sales – but my earning were strong at $155.07. What is really exciting about the ClickBank sales is that I have two websites finally starting to break into the top ten, and I had my highest sale ever from one of those two websites – earning $66.55. If I can get those two websites to take the top slots for their targeted keywords, my ClickBank sales should really soar in the near future! My daily hops are averaging 115 a day right now.
Amazon: Good news here too, with five sales that put me into the 6% commission bracket and $26.25 earned for the week. These sales have really motivated me to try to focus nearly all my website building efforts on building Amazon sites in the next couple of months, with the hopes that I will have between 30-40 sites live by the time the Christmas shopping season rolls around (currently I only have five websites that I built last month that are targeting Amazon products exclusively).
Other Affiliate Sales: I got a surprise payment from Squidoo this week of $5.56. I say surprise because I’ve always built my lenses for the purpose of getting backlinks and affiliate sales, and never for earnings in their own right. But I guess I have been making small earnings each month that finally pushed me over their payment threshold!
In terms of work progress, I have been doing mainly keyword research this week for the sites I’m supposed to be building this month. My son is with his father this weekend, so I am going to work hard this weekend to try to get as many sites built that I can.
One downer this week, however, was that I got banned from UAW! I have been having my VA do my UAW submissions and I log into check them daily. I knew that UAW wasn’t “VA friendly” and that there was a risk of this happening – but I wasn’t sure of how big of a risk. My VA uses proxies which she cycles pretty regularly, and I’ve been changing my IP address frequently as well (because of Sick Submitter), and a couple of days ago I was greeted with this message when I tried to log into the system (click to see a larger image):
I sent them an email explaining the situation (that I’m not “sharing my membership with the rest of the world” – just my VA) and requesting they reactivate the account, but I got no reply. Oh well. I was only using the $1 trial and I got many submissions put out in the past month, so I can’t really complain. I might try signing up again in the future using different account details, but for now I will probably move onto a different system. The upside is that I now know what triggers the system and how not to have it happen again for if/when I sign up with UAW again!
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Dan N says:
July 28th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Congratulations on such great earnings Michelle! It looks like your strategy of mixing the income channels pays off.I’m sorry to hear you have been banned from UAW; I’m sure you could get back if and when you’d deem it necessarily, so don’t let this stop you.I was wondering though, how are you going to build AND promote AND rank so many Amazon sites by the end of November?You said you already have 5, which means that you’d need to have 30-35 sites live in one month in order to have some chance of ranking at least some of them by the time the Christmas shopping season rolls around.This seems to me like a real tour-de-force, but if somebody can do it, then that person is you.
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Michelle says:
July 28th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Thanks Dan. In terms of the Amazon sites, I’m hoping to get another five done this weekend (bringing the total to ten), and then do only Amazon for my sites for August and September. So hopefully by mid-September I’ll have 30 or so done. In terms of ranking, I would want these to be ranking as well by mid-November, giving me about two months to work on them. I’m encouraged by how well some of my recent sites did in terms of their initial rankings – several started out in the 30-40 range and are now moving into the 20′s after less than a month live. If you do good keyword research, you should be able to have your sites rank quite high initially – those who specialize in Xfactor method and similar can often get them to rank on page one from day one. What I will probably do is see how my sites are ranking by mid October, and then really focus on those that I think I can get to rank well by mid-November to early December. Hopefully with 30+ sites by then, I will get at least half of them ranking well by then!
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Ruth - Web Career Girl says:
July 29th, 2010 at 2:39 am
Love seeing your earnings improve. Sounds like you’ve got some really solid sites. I have had some great weeks with Amazon in the past too – the conversion rates are fantastic sometimes so this is what I’ve decided to focus on. Reading your comment above, I think that keyword domains definitely are important, but for Amazon reviews I also think it helps to include lots of long tail LSI keywords. Because people will get very specific when they’re looking to buy, searching for the complete product name etc. I think this makes it a lot easier to get traffic (at least I’m hoping – this is the method I’m going to use). Are you going to build groups of sites like “pressure washer reviews” and include reviews of different types of that product on each site for your 30+ sites?
Ruth – Web Career Girl recently posted..Found A New Place- Now Trying To Work Out A Plan of Action
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John says:
July 29th, 2010 at 6:25 am
I feel like a broken record, but congrats again on your earnings! I have a couple of questions: yay! drum roll please….
1.) When buliding these Amazon sites-do they host it for you or do you pay? I looked at my Amazon Associates account and i click on the tab for aStore and my url is http://astore.amazon.com/wwwhub…. when i first signed up i did through hubpages so know i have this funky url.. is there a way to change it to your liking? and make multiple ones? I don’t like that Amazon only holds cookies for only 24 hrs, I believe. It’s good for what you said though for last-second shopping and i am sure Christmas season will bring a lot of that! 2.) My biggest cavaet is web site design. I am tempted to purchase those Socrates types of deal (i am not!) when I feel like it’s almost a waste of money and I can just create my own WordPress site and try to figure out a good squeeze page, or what not. What is your method? Do you know of a good free template out there for like selling a single product that doesn’t look so much like a blog site? Do you use freebies or purchase one of those MFA type of templates from a site that sells them? thanks a ton!
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Lisa says:
July 29th, 2010 at 7:14 am
Great job! I’m totally with you on the Amazon sites. I have about 10 right now and looking to build more all geared towards the buying season (holidays). I’m going to focus on Amazon for the next six months. If I have some free time I really want to create some clickbank sites though – probably focus on that after the holiday season. Sucks about UAW! Are you mainly building backlinks (for older blogs) with Sick?
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Michelle says:
July 29th, 2010 at 10:32 am
Ruth – Thanks for the tip about LSI words. For most of my sites, I choose a general topic that I try to get an EMD for – for example, “portable camping lanterns” and then write specific product reviews as well as create other keyword pages as well – so for example, a page on “Bissell camping lanterns” plus pages on things like “green camping lanterns” (not real examples, of course). Generally I aim to have at least five pages of unique content, along with disclaimer, about me, privacy pages, etc. – although 10-15 posts is often better. Good to hear you have seen good results with Amazon too. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this Christmas season goes!
In terms of your questions – 1) You need to build your own sites in general to promote Amazon products. You can either purchase your own domain and hosting, or try promoting products using free sites like blogger, hubpages or squidoo. I really recommend going the first route. With many of the free sources, they can decide to take your page down whenever they want and you will lose all your hard work, so I think it is best to invest your energy into websites that you have complete control over. When you are logged into your affiliate account and you visit an Amazon product page, you should see an option at the top of your page to create a link to that page – that will be your affiliate link. I’ve never used aStores, so I’m not sure what is involved with those links. It would be nice if the cookie lasted longer than 24 hours, of course, but I think you can still do well with Amazon.
John – Thanks – positive comments are always appreciated!
2) I’ve been contemplating purchasing Socrates as well, but right now I just use free WordPress themes. There are thousands to choose from, of course, but in general I’m following the design recommendations you will find in this great post by Dave:
http://www.makingmoneyontheinternetfree.info/how-to-make-money-with-amazon-an-affiliate-marketing-guide
I think if you read that post in its entirety, you’ll have a good outline on how to build your Amazon empire.
Lisa – Let me know how Amazon works for you, how many sites are you hoping to build in total? In terms of Sick, yes, right now I’m just using it on older sites. I’ll probably start throwing small amounts of links to my newer sites in the next month or so, but I like to build other kinds of links to my new sites first (using EzineArticles and LinkJuicer) before throwing profile links at them.
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Jennifer says:
July 29th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Great earnings Michelle, I have some good news to share too. My earnings are steadily increasing with Google Adsense and Amazon. I am using the Google Keyword Tool often and it working wonders for me.. Congrats on your earnings and may they continue to increase.
Jennifer recently posted..Google Adsense
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Michelle says:
July 29th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Jennifer – Thanks, and it’s great to hear your earnings are moving forward! It’s always exciting to see another person succeeding – I’ll be visiting your blog often to see how things progress!
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Jennifer says:
July 29th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Thanks Michelle..I am thinking about getting a website because I want to increase my traffic and have my own domain. What hosting company in your opinion is the best to get with??
Jennifer recently posted..Google Adsense
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Michelle says:
July 29th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Jennifer – I did some research when I started out and decided to go with HostGator, and I haven’t had any problems with them and would recommend them to you. They have provided great support whenever I have had problems (such as when a few of my websites got hacked – they got them back up and running within hours). There’s an affiliate banner at the top of this blog if you want to use it, BTW.
One thing you need to consider is whether you want to get a basic or resellers hosting account. If you are only going to be hosting a few websites, you probably can get by with their basic hosting plan which allows you to host an unlimited number of sites on the same IP for something like $8 a month – which is a really good deal, IMO. But if you are going to host more than say 5 or 6 websites, I suggest you consider getting a resellers account instead. Some of the benefits of a resellers account are that your websites will have many different IP addresses (IP diversity is a good thing, especially if you plan to link any of them to each other), and each will also have a separate hosting login account – making the sale and transfer of any website you own easier down the road. But it’s also more pricey too – $25 a month, although given that I have nearly 50 websites now, that works out to less than .50 cents a month for me to host each website using my resellers account. Hope that helps!
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Joseph Archibald says:
July 29th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Great earnings for this week Michelle, so very well done on that!
Regards to UAW, I’ve used them on and off now for about 18 months. I did also outsource to a lady in India a few months back and provided her access to my UAW. About a week later I got the same ban as you just did. I simply claimed that I was on holiday at the time and was using my laptop whilst abroad (which I actually was anyhow) and they re-instated my account. I believe that they do not tolerate anyone other than the account owner from using UAW so you gotta be extra careful with this.
Further to this, as it happens India (or at least parts thereof) have a system whereby they utilize a range of IP address and not a static IP for normal broadband connections. I know for a fact that UAW also will ban those who use dynamic IPs cos they believe that this means a number of different users are utilizing the same UAW account. Again however, if you explain the fact that you use dynamic IPs (for whatever the reason) to them then they tend to be lenient.
Regards
Joseph
Joseph Archibald recently posted..Making Money from Travel Websites 2 and this Months Income
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Michelle says:
July 29th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Joseph – Thanks, and it’s good to hear about your experience with UAW. I probably shouldn’t have told them in my email that my VA was using it as well, but oh well, live and learn. I’m not too worried, since I’m going to use the money I was going to spend on UAW this month to take SE Nuke for a five week spin instead. And as Dan suggested, I’m sure I can sign up again for UAW using other account details (plus a new IP address). At least I know what triggered the ban – I’ll be sure not to do that again!
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PersonalSynergy says:
July 29th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
I love these little updates, the details are very helpful and they motivate me to keep driving myself forwards. I’m subscribed to get google alerts, any time google comes across a page which mentions “passive income” they send me a notice, and like 90% of the pages i go to, are the same repetitive nonsense “passive income, think how great it would be to not have to work” especially since i’m looking for the details. Thanks again for your posts
PersonalSynergy recently posted..The New Beginning – August 2010
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Michelle says:
July 29th, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Thanks PS – and good luck with your “new beginning.” I’ll be checking in from time to time to see how things are going!!
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John says:
July 30th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Thanks for that link Michelle. I’ll read and study it later
Also, I’ve read about Heat map theme.. that looks pretty good and tailor ready, but $35 a year subscriiption for access to forums and different templates..
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Dennis says:
July 31st, 2010 at 12:20 am
Hey Michelle,
Nice earnings. Looks like things are starting to click for you via clickbank. Thats the place to be. Once you get to the top 3 you wil be good to go.
About UWA, well its their loss.Move on to something else.
All the best
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