Make Cash Online

Another month has gone by and I thought I could stick to the same format as the previous month. I’ll give a breakdown of what I earned with my sniper site project, which is only a side of my income for those of you who think this is all I have. It’s been an interesting journey doing this and I’ve learned a lot too.

Total Invested: $408.20 (47 websites)

I didn’t buy any domain names this month for the sniper project. In fact, I think I only bought 1 domain name the whole month and just bought a .info on a spur of the moment thing. I actually bought it to help figure out a little better how to work my Christmas authority sites.

Amazon: $701.30 (Total: $1794.39)

The odd thing here is that on the 25th of April, I actually started making this post. I was just going to add in the numbers at the end of the month. Well things changed. The first 20 days of this month I was flying and was above average. I was going to fly past the $500 goal I set last month, which when I initially thought of that number I thought it was a little high for me. Starting on the 20th of the month, I had like a week of below average and slower days.

What I initially wrote was that I did beat the $500 mark (I was expecting maybe $500-$540), but that I was disappointed because I was on track for much better numbers earlier in the month. But I ended up finishing up the month very strong. On the 28th I had my first day of $102.04 in commissions (after selling $1,457.44 worth of items). Breaking the hundred dollar day is always a nice feeling for a program, even though it’s not remotely close to daily averages. I remember when I broke the hundred barrier with Clickbank and Copeac (my CPA), it’s always a nice feeling.

For May, I really want to set a goal number of $900, but I’m not going to. I’m going to aim at $800. And the reason for that is that I can’t get past the fact that this might be a fluke month. The way I see it is that if it is a fluke, I should hopefully be able to squeeze in at $800. If not, I have no problem making extra money.

I’m still stuck in the 7% commission tier at Amazon, though I entered into it the earliest time for a month, so that is a plus. I doubt I’ll even come close to breaking out of that tier and into 7.5% in May. But I’m hoping I can in the future.

I have some hefty goals though. I want Amazon up to $1000/mth before Summer (before July). And this is sort of tricky because the summer is always slow and it really depends on a lot of factors. People are on the computer less, which means you have less time to advertise to them and they’re less likely to buy. I’d be very happy if I could hold onto a full grand each month during this time with Amazon, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

Adsense: $104.46 (Total: $521.03)

This is pretty much the same as it was last month, so nothing to really say. I haven’t been pushing Adsense and I’m actually second thinking it now. There are a lot of things going on with Google and them going on full assault. I was actually curious why Grizzly’s site wasn’t in the top 10 anymore for all his MMO links. Well, he had a post toward the end of April explaining why. And there was Ben from Make Money Online with SEO that had a ton of his sites indexed from one of his Adsense accounts.

The only reason why I have Adsense(AS) earnings is that I’m trying to diversify, which is extremely important. I ran into problems starting out having all my eggs in one basket and I’m not going to repeat it. It’s this desire to diversify that has pushed me closer to the AS system, but I’ve still been apprehensive about it. I haven’t gone full steam ahead at it and I’ve exhibited paranoia with it.

I was under the impression that the most likely punishment that you’d receive from AS would be a banning and I can deal with a banning. At $100/mth, it isn’t that big of a deal. With them deindexing sites, I’m actually pretty afraid now. A banning is no big deal, but having your sites lost like that is a slap in the face. At least if I was making several thousand with them each month I could have at least saved something in a bank account. But not at a $100.

I’m officially bowing out of AS, which I’ll probably do over the next month. I was planning on pushing into AS hard after I got my Amazon above a thousand, but I’m just going to bow out of it. I’ll move onto Clickbank and Commission Junction probably.

I know some of you are thinking “don’t give up. Just make clean sites that aren’t obvious MFAs.” I just can’t get around the point that I am trying to make money with AS. That’s really the point, I’m trying to profit with it. A site about coffee tables can’t be a friendly user site for reading. I just can’t do it. And even if I do, what’s stopping the big G from banning me anyway? If they don’t like something from the traffic or if I write something wrong; BAM, I’m done. It doesn’t matter if the site is thin or thick.

I’ve written in the past about Google on my old blog and I want to point out two posts in particular; my Google Analytics (Nov. 18 2008) post and my Adsense Sucks (June 29 2008) post. Even though they’re old posts, they still hold true and contain all the same opinions I believe.

Just to sum up why Google will always be quick with the ban hammer on AS is that it has a gambling business model. It’s pay per click. That’s the equivalent of paying someone to come in you store. It’s not necessarily good for business. Contrast that with pay per sale, where someone actually has to buy for you to make money.

Consider the abuses of the two different systems. With AS you’re going to have fraud when someone disingenuously clicks on an ad and is completely not interested in what they click. When I use the word fraud, it’s not legally fraud. For a program like Amazon, fraud is when someone uses a stolen credit card. This is actually real fraud and is criminal. The system that faces more “fraud” is the system that pays you for someone clicking on a link.

The amount of abuse that Google has to deal with must be unimaginable. The crap from people that click the ads, to the spammers that autocreate thousands of blogs within a period of an hour. As long as these people exist, Google will always have a quick ban hammer. They’ll even wipe out good people or those that are right on the border between good and bad. They don’t have any desire to be fair because fair means they’re losing money.

In the end, AS advertisers have to profit. THEY HAVE TO PROFIT. Pay per click is a failed business model if advertisers don’t make a profit because they’re not coming back without that profit. And the overzealous ban hammer is the means to insure that profit is created.

The other point I want to make is similar to the point in the Google Analytics post I made. Google is an information beast and just keeps digging, digging and digging some more for information. The problem that people fail to see is that Google has the power to use information against you. They can deindex you, which is what they are apparently doing now with your AS footprint on each site.

Like I said in the Analytics post, I don’t want Google to know shit about my sites. I don’t want them know what people are doing or clicking on. I don’t want them knowing where my traffic comes from. I don’t want them to know shit because Google views me as an enemy. Let’s just cut through the shit, Google hates us because purposely move up the ranks of Google to make cash. That’s all we’re doing. They hate us, and with the right information they can fuck with us.

Okay, that is enough of that topic…

The point is that I’m stepping away from AS and just moving onto other greener pastures. I’m not the biggest fan of Clickbank because I think they’re payment processor is outdated, but they can’t deindex my sites. Plus, the weekly direct deposits are a nice touch.

On Sniper Sites

There was something that I noticed about my sniper sites. Well, at least some of them. In April, I really went back and started spending time on some of my better performing (traffic and/or profit potential) sites. I started to add in more content and do back linking. And I started to notice some trends with some of the sites.

I’ve created an extensive look at it on my main blog area titled Sniper Sites to Authority Sites. I went into a little more on that page, so you can read about it there. My objective with my sniper sites was to select one keyword, get a keyword domain and dominate that keyword. That was my only goal.

What I noticed is that sites that have a more diverse range of keyword traffic (a smaller percentage coming from the main keyword) the better the site was and the more authority it has. When I added content (which happens to be static HTML and no pinging) the pages indexed on the front page or on the second page.

Conversely, the sniper sites that were doing well for the main keyword, but little else (majority of search traffic for one term), the less authority the site had and the harder it was to get new pages to rank. It took forever for the pages to index and when they did they were well beyond the 100th position in quotes.

The point, which is obvious, is that your site needs to have that diverse range of keywords coming in. It’s probably better to target a wide range of smaller keywords, while still pounding away at your main keyword, to really make a site with authority.

This was a nice revelation to see. Some of the sites are getting closer to some major niche keywords, so I’m excited about that.

I should also point out that a lot of my sites still need work, even though I’m spending my time working on the ones with potential right now. I’ll eventually get around to all this. Building 46 sniper sites is easy, but building them into bigger sites is a lot more work lol.

I’m actually trying to think of all the things I wanted to talk about and put it in this one monthly post, but I can’t think of anything else to mention. Hopefully next month, I’ll have something to post on the Christmas authority sites I’m working on.

If you liked reading this long post then you might be interested in some of the posts below:

1. March Sniper Site Update
2. Sniper Sites Update