Niche Site Duel 03: Betta Care Monetization Strategy

I first started the Niche Site Duel about 5 months ago after hearing Pat Flynn’s successful story when building a niche site of his own. However, after the first few weeks, I ended up putting the project aside in order to pursue other goals – I just didn’t have a lot of time on my hands to dedicate 100% to the challenge. Now though, I’m ready to kick things up a notch, and my plans are to have Complete Betta Fish Care ranking well (on the first page of Google) by May 13th of next month.

But first, let’s look at how well the niche site is performing with only 4 published posts basically set on autopilot while the project was put on hold. To do that, we’ll take a trip through my Google Analytics account and then through the Market Samurai (ref link) rank tracker data. Once we’ve gotten a feel of how things are going, I’m going to talk about my monetization goals for the site and what I’ll be doing right now to boost income.

Betta Care Niche Site Results

It’s important to see where you stand at the present moment before you start making improvements to your site; this helps to better track growth, and it also gives you a clearer picture of what aspects of your site you need to work on most.

In this section, I’ll talk about where my niche site is standing right now and which areas I need to work on in order to increase overall results. (more…)

eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

When I wrote my last update over a month ago, I estimated that I would earn at least $412.92 for the month of January. If I met this goal, I would surpass my overall goal of earning $3 per article in any given month (or $339 a month – though one of my articles was removed, reducing my goal to $336 a month).

Well, as it turns out, my estimations were more than correct.

In January I earned a total of $420.29, which is about $3.75 per article a month and $13.56 a day. And, so far in February, I earned $368.44 (earnings were last updated Wednesday), which is about $4 per article and $16.02 a day. If this keeps up, I should make an all-time high of about $449 by the end of the month (and there’s only 28 days as opposed to 30 or 31)! Not bad for doing very little work as far as backlinking is concerned.

I’m also happy to see that my earnings are continuing to grow. If you remember, last year saw 3 months (Oct, Nov, and Dec) where my eHow earnings sort of leveled out and didn’t increase by much. That was when I started giving a few of my highest earning articles backlinks from content written on other Web 2.0 sites. If you compare now (or my estimated total income for the month) to my earnings in December 2010, my earnings increased by 64%. (more…)

eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery

It has been a little over a month since I last updated this eHow Experiment series – and oh do I have good news to tell you!

If you remember, last month I had one article sitting on the second spot in Google search listings, one on the third spot, and another on the sixth. The other two showing up in search results were sitting on the twenty-fifth and fifty-first spot in Google. Keep in mind that these were broad match results for each keyword phrase, instead of phrase match (the results from exact searches).

Well, I noticed that my eHow earnings this month had improved quite a bit lately since last year. Here’s a screenshot of my earnings from last year (2010). You can click on it to enlarge the image.

Last month, I was earning about $8.81 a day – $2.44 an article (eHow removed one of my articles by the way, though I’m not sure which one – now I have 112 articles published).

Now, let’s look at my earnings so far for this month (keep in mind that we’re only 12 days into the month and earnings don’t include what I accrued today). (more…)

Niche Site Duel 02: Tackling Content Strategies for All 3 Niche Sites

It has been a little over a few weeks since I first started the Niche Site Duel challenge – and, I admit, I haven’t written many posts for it. I’ve been mainly working on design, adding plugins, and writing crucial pages for each blog (about and contact pages, for example). Since I’m dealing with 3 niche sites instead of 1, the process has been starting off a bit slower than I would have liked.

Now that I’ve gotten the necessities out of the way though (with a few tweaks still left, but nothing major), I can spend more time adding content and backlinking my articles.

But before adding any more content, I need to first think about my content strategy. Specifically…

• What will I write about in order to maximize search engine results?
• How will I break down each niche into easy to manage subareas?
• What will I do to maximize returns (increase income) for each article I write?

(more…)

eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results

As many of you already know, 8 days ago I posted my first Goals and Achievement post in a long while, where I shared my goals of December. I wasn’t able to work much on my goals for the past week, since I’ve been working on launching my eBook and setting up a newsletter for Cash Campfire.

However, the 3 goals I have set for eHow (in case you’re too lazy to read the actual post) are…

• Increase my monthly income by $100
• Edit 15 articles
• Rank on the first page of Google with 10 out of 113 articles

Now, this might seem like a lot of work, since I have other tasks I also plan to complete, but I believe these goals are obtainable if I really push myself. To achieve these goals, it will require a lot of keyword analyzing and backlinking (so tons of writing on my end) to increase search engine rankings.

I’m not too worried about the editing, since eHow articles are generally short (400-500 words), and I’m so used to writing 1,000 or more word blog posts here on Cash Campfire and other content sites. (more…)

New Challenges, Loads of Fun, and a New Beginning

OK, I know. I’m crazy. But I have a serious weakness…

Photo by Brian Snelson (flickr)

When someone announces a challenge, I can’t refuse.

Despite the fact that I now have over 7 challenges going on and I’m generally incredibly lazy (not a good combination), I can’t deny the fact that the thought of competing in 7 different challenges is exciting – no, thrilling. And, hell, this might be the ticket I need to let go of my procrastination habits!

After all, knowing my incredible weakness, why would fate lead me to see these blood-tingling, electrifying, and all-so-too-good-to-resist challenges in the first place?

Oh, I forgot. Fate is often cruel; but I’ll lament later. Right now, fate is my new best friend. For right now, I’m ready to take action!

But, of course, I’m only making up excuses. The real problem lies with me taking in more than I can chew.

Yes, all this excitement has dwindled me down into a gibbering maniac who doesn’t make any sense. Let’s just look at exactly what I’m dealing with… (more…)

eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach

It’s been a little over a month since I updated the experiment. Even so, I’m really excited to say that I nearly met my income expectations!

In the last eHow Experiment update, I did some calculations and estimated that I would earn $279 or more in the month of October.

Well, guess what?

My predictions were nearly right – only $4.63 off the mark – and I managed to earn $274.37! (more…)

Niche Site Duel 01: Will I Rank #1 in Google with My Keywords?

It’s been over 2 months since Pat Flynn first announced the niche site duel against Tyrone Shum, where he planned to build a profitable niche site from scratch and rank on the #1 spot in Google search results with his keywords – without using paid advertising to get there. As many of you already know, he managed to meet his goal while only 2 months and 12 days into the challenge.

Well, now it’s my turn.

I wasn’t able to join the Niche Site Duel earlier (though I wanted to) because I was working on the eBook launch. However, I’ve always wanted to dabble in the niche site arena – especially while writing about my hobby and passion (I’ll talk more about this later). (more…)

Are You Ready to Join the Double O Club?

While browsing blog posts for the day, I came across an article called Time to Join the Double O Club by Felicia Williams. Needless to say, I was curious, since Felicia always shares valuable tidbits with her readers.

Photo by Refracted Moments (flickr)

Basically, the Double O Club is a concept (not an actual club) where you tack on two zeros at the end of a digit and use this number as your primary daily goal for the month. In Felicia’s case, she’s aiming to maintain club membership by making $100 every day each month. She would earn this amount by using a combination of upfront earnings and residual income.

I found the concept interesting and exciting, so I figured I’d join in as well. However, I’m only going to focus on residual income to achieve my membership, and I’ll start working for it in November.

Here are the income sources that I plan to utilize in order to acquire my Double O Club membership. (more…)

eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth

It’s been a while since I last updated the eHow Experiment. In case you didn’t know, I had started an eHow experiment on May of this year to see if I could maximize my earning potential with the articles already written on eHow. I planned to do this by maintaining a keyword density of 2% and increasing backlinks to my eHow articles. Truthfully, I haven’t done much article improvement in the past few months, as I was primarily working on this blog and the new eBook that I’ll be launching soon.

However, I did notice a massive growth in my earnings since the last time I updated the eHow Experiment about 5 months ago, and I wanted to share this growth with you. At the time when I first started this experiment, I was hoping to earn at least $100 on eHow. Now, I’m making over $200, and I haven’t added any additional articles to eHow (since they closed down their writing platform).

Here’s a screen shot of the progress I made this year on eHow in terms of earnings (click the image to enlarge it). (more…)