Sorry I’m a little late posting…I have been out of town visiting family and it was just too busy to do any work. It was kind of nice to take a break from IM. I thought about it a lot though like – where do I want to go from here? My head is just swirling and I feel like I am treading water right now. I am not going to make my original goal of quitting my job by next fall when my oldest starts school (unless there is some miracle…lol).

This is what I decided to do for now…I am going to revamp the top 10 or so sites I have. Redesign them, get new content, and properly promote them. I just read Pat Flynn’s new post on backlinking – it might help a lot of you as well. I’ve been reading and chasing around lots of different ideas and methods and I need to just stick to one.

Then, I am going to work on just two new projects next year. I have one domain that gets around 22,000 EXACT searches a month but dummy me has not put any content on it. It’s been sitting there just waiting. I’m feeling fairly confident that I can rank this one pretty high because the competition is not tough. This will be a proper niche blog using Niche Blogger strategies. There are opportunities to monetize with Adsense, Clickbank and other affiliate programs. It is a topic I know a lot about and feel like I could really help other people learn something. I think that has been what held me back…I don’t really trust an outsourcer to be able to write the content for that site but I haven’t spent the time to write the articles myself. I haven’t decided yet what I am going to do. I may outsource some and write the rest.

The other project is not related to niche sites in a direct way. It will be a site that hopefully will be a resource to help others make money online. That one will require a lot of research which I can probably outsource. Stay tuned – it will probably be awhile before I can get that one up and running.

Between those two projects, there won’t be a lot of time to mess around. I’ve been wanting to do more Amazon product review type sites, especially as we get closer to Christmas but I think that will just make more of a mess of things. I don’t need any more half-baked domains! That may be another future direction.

On to the earnings…. I didn’t make thousands like I had hoped (see my explanation here) but I did manage to make over $650 from costumes in October. The total I made on costumes since the summer when I started is about $850 or so. Not too bad I guess but surely I did not make a profit considering I spent a lot of my own time on those sites. Next year, I will pick maybe the top 10 performers and fill out the sites with more content. For now, I am tired of costumes! Amazon got a boost from costumes. I actually put up some quick HubPages just as an experiment. Got quite a few Amazon sales from one particular hot costume this year. Better than I expected. I’ll tuck that away for the future. HubPages might be good for doing product reviews instead of creating a whole web site. As far as I can tell, HubPages doesn’t take a cut of your Amazon earnings, which is great.

Obviously, I expect the total to drop back down again next month.