Make Cash Online

I decided that I’m going to end the sniper site project and stop talking about it. This isn’t because I want to shut you guys out or anything like that, I just think they have run their course. I’ve pretty much extracted everything I could from them (knowledge) wise and they’re just going to continue growing. Plus, I don’t like to talk about the cash I’m making when it reaches a certain point, so that is another reason I suppose. I’m going to give all the numbers this time to conclude everything.

I actually had a very slow start to this month with Amazon. Weekends are usually slower since less items are shipped on the weekend, in particular Sunday. But things did push forward and things worked out pretty good. I’d like to say that the previous month was a bit of a fluke. The fluke being that I earned significantly more per sale on average than this month. But I made up for that little problem with a much larger volume of sales.

I had some very nice days this month. I had a few big sales days where I had 10-11% conversion rates, which are nice. I also had a $140 day. Amazon only pays you for shipped items and you’re given stats for sold and shipped. You get above average days with money because there will be a build up of items that sold, but haven’t been shipped yet. Typically this happens right after a weekend.

And that is why I got a little disappointed with the end of the month because it ended on a weekend and Memorial Day on Monday, which meant shipping items wasn’t high enough. So I had the following staring back at me today:

1 sale away from 7.5% tier. It’s very annoying because I have over 50 items waiting to be shipped and I missed out on the new tier, which would of earned me more money. If I hit that tier and shipped a little more of my items waiting to be shipped I would have made over $1000.

My Adsense earnings are ZERO this month because I immediately removed them from all my sites at the first of the month. The only place that currently has them is a hubpages account. That’s it.

I also didn’t work for what is about a week this month. I ended up pinching a nerve in my neck/shoulder area and it was very painful. Don’t worry, this wasn’t a result of working on a computer. I woke up at 3am with this pain in my shoulder and it was horrible. By the time morning rolled around I figured out what that pain was and it was nerve. At times it was pretty rough and other times it didn’t feel to bad. During the good times I tried to work, but that seemed to later aggravated it, so I just stopped working. I suppose that is a big benefit of working online; money still flows when you have to take some time for yourself.

Alright, here are the numbers:

May:$876.50
Apr: $805.76
Mar: $457.18
Feb: $320.02
Jan: $256.23
Dec: $149.33
Nov: $145.90
Oct: $141.02
Sep: $73.16

Total Revenue: ($3226.10)
Total Expenses: $408.20
Net Total: $2817.90

*Numbers may be off a few dollars from what reported month-to-month in previous months.

When you add it up like this over all the months, it doesn’t seem like a lot of cash over what works out to be 9 months. But the biggest gains have been coming in the last months and it is turning into something that produces a decent amount. I’ll allow you to be the judge of whether this is something that you would like to try.

My Conclusion:

If I had the choice to do this again, I would definitely take it. The thing you have to understand is that out of these 40+ sites, a lot of them aren’t even ranking. There still needs to be a lot of work done to them. But I do have plenty of sites that do rank and I have a few that are shining.

The experience of doing this is sort of the real value. I’ve had the pleasure of dipping my toes into 40+ different niches all at once. I’ve been able to see niches that are quite easy to rank for and others that just take time. I have sites that don’t convert and I have others that convert well. The value here is really about the niches and the keywords I know of now.

The hard part many people run into is finding a suitable niche to play in. It simply takes time to develop a profitable website, but a niche needs to be profitable too. If you’re investing 6 months into a site, you have to make sure that it is going to pay dividends by the time you get there. The sniper sites have given me that leverage because I know what is working.

A nice aspect of the sniper sites is that you can always take the good ones and build them into an authority site. There’s no limitation that states a sniper site always has to be one. Whatever starts working for you, just build it up.

You can’t properly manage 40+ sites and I’m literally running about 100 when you add them all up. You just can’t watch them all. I don’t think over the long run pumping out tons of sites is the best way to go. But I think pumping out some, finding niches and sticking with what works is a good way to go.

There is very little risk with sniper sites (if you avoid Adsense) because you’re bound profit. It’s just the law of averages. You’re bound to hit winners. And at $10/domain name it isn’t that big of a deal.

I stated in another post that if I was to redo this I would probably change up my objectives a bit. The goal for me was to just to rank for the main keyword and that would be it. If I was doing it again I would probably aim for 3-5 main keywords. I’ve found that those sites seem to work better when you decide to build on them. That’s really all I’d do different. I guess I wouldn’t go with Adsense (which was my intention starting out). A lot of my sniper sites have “filler” content, which isn’t keyword oriented, but just informational crap designed to fill a site up. Without the filler crap, I could target real keywords and get a few bigger ones ranking.

I guess that’s really all to say on the subject.

And to Come

I won’t be specifically updating about the sniper sites anymore, though I’ve been going back and filling out some of the sites with new keyword oriented content and backlinks. This is to help some of the ones that haven’t had the chance to really perform for me. Plus I’m also forcing myself not to buy anymore domains and play with the sites I have now.

I’m mainly going to focus the site on building authority sites and my journey with that. I have my Christmas ones that I’ve been working on since February. I’m also working on a few of my sniper sites that I’m building into authority sites. We’ll see how that works out over the next few months.

EzineArticles

It has been over 7 months since I submitted my last article to EZA. This has been something of a challenge for me because I’m a recovering bum marketer.  “Hi, I’m Chris and I’m a bum marketer” HI CHRIS! Well, 2729 articles are sitting in that account right now. I decided that I’m going to start throwing articles back on that site, but not with the intention of driving traffic off of it (bum marketing). I’m just going to use it purely for SEO purposes only. I just need as many different link sources that I can and I unfortunately can’t continue ignoring it.

I ended up cutting them out because they went totally anal and downgraded me. I was platinum for a while and they sent me back to basic plus (lame). But I don’t care anymore. I know I’ll have to write longer content for them. I guess that means 400 words or something. I’m reluctant to write long content for sites that don’t let me put the link right in the middle of the content.  I’ve begun to start hating the resource box because I don’t view it quite as valuable (for SEO) and I no Google can tell the difference. Thousands of pages of content and the outbound links are all in an HTML table at the end of it. They know.

Well, I’m hoping for 400 is enough. I don’t know how anal they are. Plus, I should advise people that you should stop going for the bare minimum of 250 words. I know that blows and I’m not the biggest fan of it, but GoArticles recently deleted all content under 300 words. And since GoArticles email is practically spam box worthy I don’t think a single person heard about it (I certainly didn’t).

I’m not saying that this will happen with EZA because they have a review process (quality control), but don’t think for a second that they wouldn’t purge every single short article if they thought it would help them. But less likely with quality control. Any site that allows you to put up content without review runs the risk of being a deleter. I’m not saying go out and write epic long articles for other sites. Fuck them. Find a happy medium I suppose.

I suppose if there was any lesson from this, you don’t need EZA to get anywhere in this business.

Plans for June

I’m going to keep it pretty simple and the plan is to work Amazon hard. I’m currently going back through all my sniper sites, writing 6 new keyword oriented pages of content and backlinking all that content. And with 40+ sites that takes some time. I plan to continue doing that and working on my Christmas sites. That’s really all I plan on doing this month. I hope to score over $1000 for the mth with Amazon. I would normally aim higher here, but it’s pushing into summer now. People are on the computer less and that puts a damper in sales.

The reason why this will be my last month working Amazon hard (for now) is that I learned very early on the necessity of diversifying. I’m not saying I won’t be working on any Amazon related sites after this month, I just won’t be investing the majority of my time in this. When I started out I went exclusively with Clickbank. I built that income up to something that was decent and then Clickbank crapped out. And anyone that knows CB knows that they don’t have the best payment processor. It’s old and craps out at times. When it is working, it is great. When it isn’t working, it sucks.

Obviously you can’t start out in this business doing 5 different affiliate programs all at once. You’re throwing your energy into way too many directions. So the rule I ended up creating was once you get something up to $1000/mth, start pushing another program hard. It’s just so you don’t have all your shit tied up in one program and you actually work one particular affiliate program hard enough to earn something decent. I’ll continue to push Amazon, but it won’t be all day everyday sort of thing. (maybe in the fall time it will be)

Planned affiliate programs:

• Copeac
• Clickbank
• Market Health

So I’ll probably start into Copeac first since they’re pretty good. My income with them has been down since I stopped writing articles for EZA, but I picked up some domains a few months ago to help leverage what I’m promoting. They’re a CPA and I mainly stick to items that people actually whip out their credit cards for instead of things like email submits and shit like that.

If you’re looking for a CPA I definitely recommend them. I receive my check every month. I have nothing to complain about.

Next I’ll start working Clickbank hard. And even though I mentioned above their problems it isn’t that big of a deal when you don’t have to rely on this income. If you treat it more like a bonus than it is much easier to play with. And that is at least the plan. The one thing that Clickbank does get right is that they pay. They have weekly direct deposits, which are a nice touch. And since I started out with this program I find it much easier to sell.

Market Health is something I’ve had for quite some time now. I haven’t made anything decent with it. I might get a few sales a month and that’s it. I don’t have any particular goal to get this up to $1000/mth.  I’d be happy with just enough to pay my student loan min payment each month ($400). And they do pay directly into my Paypal account, so it’s really easy for me.

It would be sweet if I could get through all three of these programs by the end of August. Highly doubtful, but I could definitely build a solid foundation for them in that time. All I know is that by September I need more time for Christmas preparation.  I just really need to be on that and that’s HOPEFULLY the plan.

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

1. March Sniper Site Update