Well, there isn’t much to say except that July was worse than June 
Although I’ve read July is the worst month for internet sales so we’ll see (that and Google kicked my a$$ with Mayday…)
I’m just plugging away at my Halloween sites. I sold another 3 costumes from one site this week (same person ordered 3 things) so I am hopeful I can make a little something with all this work!
The interface inside CJ confuses me – I think I have the right number. I have two sites I earned from in July but I can’t get the details to show up in the same report. Maybe because the costume sales are advance sales? I don’t know but I wrote down what I thought I earned in commissions (even though I haven’t been paid yet).
| Adsense |
$305.75 |
| Clickbank |
$79.98 |
| Amazon |
$9.01 |
| eHow |
$23.23 |
| eBay |
$12.09 |
| CJ |
$28.80 |
Indepdendent Affiliate
|
$10.00 |
| Automate Angela’s Links |
$5.00 |
| Chitika |
$0.42 |
| Infolinks |
$4.14 |
| CPALead |
$1.43 |
| Zazzle |
$45.98 |
| TOTAL |
$525.83 |
I thought I would provide a quick update to how my Great Halloween Experiment is going. I have ended up with 31 domains. About 12 of them I bought last November when I heard about Brian Johnson’s success (no, I did not pay for his coaching that is going on now…). The rest I picked up in June. All but two are laser focused on specific costumes. The other two are more of “authority” domains – along the lines of “fairy tale costumes” instead of “little bo peep costume” (just an example).
The two authority domains are being set up mainly as autoblogs using WPRobot. I bought the Commission Junction plugin that they recently released. It allows you to randomize how the auto content is generated. This is my spin on what Brian teaches. He doesn’t use autoblogging. I will also be adding a few new articles too.
The remaining 29 sites are being setup as Brian has described in his free materials. I paid to have the front page articles written as well as someone to research relevant links to go in the blogroll (so you don’t have all affiliate links). Once I see which sites are doing the best, I will add more unique content.
I am a little nervous about using Adsense on these sites. Brian sent a message that Google de-indexed a bunch of his sites that were running on a dedicated server (that is how they knew they were all his). He admittedly violated one part of their TOS and feels that being too open online (providing URLs of his sites) is what eventually got Google’s attention somehow. He thinks that it was an isolated case of Google cracking down on him, not his method. So, I am still debating on using Adsense. I’ll wait to see which sites do the best and maybe add it on later making sure I have a lot of unique content and value. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yms4j3Rws28
Results So Far
- All 31 sites are indexed
- About 5 are “done” as far as the building the site – I haven’t done much promotion yet.
- I posted the front page articles on all the sites except the last 8 that I am waiting on right now from Burn Your To Do List. I will go back later to add the images and links.
- I am keeping a giant spreadsheet to keep track of which tasks have been completed. Must have!
- 3 sites are ranking on the front page and 3 on the second page as of 7/23 (I am going to record rankings in my spreadsheet every Friday) 8 more are ranking on lower pages. Many of the sites don’t have anything but the Hello World post or just the one article posted. Only a couple have any backlinks right now.
- 2 costume sales this month so far! (BuyCostumes.com has an awesome affiliate program – you can keep commissions even if someone returns their purchase!)
On Promotion
I’m thinking of picking up a couple of automated backlinking programs I’ve read about recently. Haven’t had a chance to look in depth at them yet but I will keep you posted. With this many sites, I will not have time to mess around doing things manually.
I’ll do another Halloween update in a few weeks.
I just heard about Cherrypicker, a new SEO software created by Ryan Deiss. He’s giving it away for free. As you can imagine, I think he is getting ready to launch something but hey, it’s free software (and a free report). I played with it last night – it’s very much like the SEO module of Traffic Travis. It gives you up to the top 30 results of the keyword phrase along with the number of backlinks to domain or page and page title (which Traffic Travis doesn’t show). You can also see PR and number of pages indexed. It’s very basic software – not fancy at all. I’m also not sure how it’s pulling the results because I checked some of my own sites that I know are on page 1 but they didn’t show up. But some of my other sites did. I have no idea – they are some of my Halloween sites so maybe it’s some weird Google thing with my sites bouncing around since they are new.
Anyway, check out Cherrypicker and see what you think. It makes a nice little addition to Traffic Travis or Market Samurai.
I knew it was going to be bad. Really bad. I put off even looking at my total this month because I didn’t want to know! I was on such a high last month with my $1000 and now – CRASH and BURN – $582. OMG. That’s even lower than the beginning of the year. After looking at the statistics, I was REALLY surprised to see that my total impressions in Adsense went UP from May by about 2,500 but the total number of clicks went DOWN by about 300 clicks! I was averaging $15 a day in April and May but it was only $9.50/day in June. I am perplexed – I don’t have numbers broken down by site so it could tell the story could be told in those details.
Not only did Clickbank and Adsense take a hit but the product I sell is now out of season til fall when school starts again (only made a couple of sales).
Well, all I can do is keep working, right? I am madly working on 30 Halloween sites and hope that pans out for me. I was right in grabbing domains before the launch of the Halloween program by Brian Johnson. Lots of the other TLDs from domains I purchased are now gone.
I’ve outsourced the main content to the Burn Your To Do List crew and got the first batch back. I also outsourced some research on getting related links for my blogroll. Brian recommends linking out to other sites to show Google that you aren’t there just to make money. Always cloak your affiliate links and link to other sites. I’ve got my checklist and trying to get these puppies going. Three of them are already ranking on Page 2 with only the Hello World post. Good thing, I hope!
Hopefully I’ll recover a little in July!
| Adsense |
$314.15 |
| Clickbank |
$100.00 |
| Amazon |
$3.46 |
| eHow |
$19.05 |
| eBay |
$5.20 |
| Linkshare |
$0.00 |
| CJ |
$17.70 |
| Automate Angela’s Links |
$5.00 |
E product
|
$7.98 |
| Independent Affiliate Program |
$27.30 |
| WPRobot |
$7.00 |
| Infolinks |
$3.01 |
| CPALead |
$6.16 |
| Zazzle |
$44.75 |
| PayDotCom |
$22.00 |
| TOTAL |
$582.76 |
By now I’m sure everyone has heard about the changes Google made last month, now infamously known as “MayDay.” While I understand they are trying to weed out the trash, I was affected but inconsistently so I’m left confused as to what to do next. My Adsense has gone from averaging about $15/day to maybe $8/day. My awesome Clickbank Sniper site that has been at #1 for months and months has been bouncing around and is currently found at #11!! I was making about $150-200 a month with that site and well, let’s just say I’m only at $20 so far for June – and this is the big season for the niche!!! My hops were cut in half and I’m only getting traffic because of two Ezine articles I have that rank well and convert to clicks well. I may try to add some more articles to the site and see what happens. Admittedly, I probably don’t have enough LSI words on that site so maybe that will help?
Other sites of mine didn’t budge and I don’t feel like they are any better or worse than the others. No matter, my traffic is way down across the board due to long tail words not ranking.
In the meantime, I heard about Brian G. Johnson’s Halloween Affiliate coaching course which is coming out tomorrow. Anyway, I bought about 10 Halloween domains last year after the holiday with the intention of catching the wave this year. I learned that Brian’s course is launching tomorrow to the tune of $499 so we can safely say I won’t be purchasing it. This is the link http://halloweensuperaffiliate.com I’m not an affiliate so if you do buy it, please send me a little kickback LOL I sat through a couple webinars with him last fall and got the free report so I have the gist of it. Halloween is such an awesome niche – talk about hungry buyers! So I spent this weekend combing keywords looking for new domains. I wanted to get some good ones before the course launches – I already had a couple that were swiped out from under me over the weekend so people are really starting early. I now own 29 Halloween domains. I must be INSANE! So now, the whole summer I am going to focus on getting all these sites up and running. Hopefully, I can get my system going with the first 5 or so and them just crank them out. I will probably outsource some of the writing to my Burn Your To Do List crew.
I also coughed up some money today for Jon Leger’s Keyword Snatcher. This thing is pretty sweet. What is does is gets keywords that Google doesn’t show you in it’s keyword tool. It scrapes the suggestions that drop down when you type into Google’s main search box. Take a look at the video on the sales page for Keyword Snatcher and see what you think. Also, he is only selling this for one week so you have to act fast if you want it. That way, there won’t be too many people with their hands on this great tool.
I’m going to combine using Keyword Snatcher with my Halloween domains and see if I can’t get some of that long tail traffic for words that other IMer’s won’t even know about!
Once I get these Halloween sites going, I’ll use the Snatcher to help me put more related posts on my best performing sites. This is all one big experiment so I will be sure to report back in November on the thousands of dollars I made 
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