I Love This Blog, Really I Do

Posted on 3rd November 2008

The above is no joke, when I first started this blog I knew the articles were going to be fresh and distinctive. I knew people would enjoy my writing style and may even stand to learn something from the case studies I offered. This blog was going to be special, unfortunately somewhere along the lines I became busy with my sites and got so heavily involved with a mass reorganisation of my portfolio that I had absolutely no time for this site and its members.

Well last night I decided to end the drought and post some updates on what I’ve been up to. I have a lot to share and a lot to blog about so for this post I’m going to be brief and quickly outline some of the subjects that I want to cover in the coming days. (Yes Im going to post 3 new posts 1 every day from today). So heres the quick summary.

Post 1 - The Wallpaper Network

I’ve always been curious about desktop wallpaper sites, you know those cheesy looking sites that offer you an assortment of desktop backgrounds for your PC. You see so many of them on sale at DigitalPoint that they seem almost worthless.

Well earlier this year I purchased a project off a friend, some of you may remember me mentioning it on the forums. Those of you that didn’t, well in simple terms he had this grand old plan of buying loads of niche wallpaper domains like say ferrari-wallpapers.com or sea-wallpapers.com and turning each one into a site earning atleast $1 per day.

On paper the challenge doesn’t sound too difficult but it was going to be hardwork and I told him that the day he started. Anyway I continued with my life and a month or two later we were talking again so I asked him how it was going. To my surprise he had not only lost interest in the project but had also decided to off load the project which at that time was maybe 1% complete and earning a whopping $0 per month.

Now under normal circumstances I would have stayed away from this over ambitious attempt at earning money online, but there was something charming about this challenge, it had a point to prove and something very experimental about it. So like its previous owner I too was seduced and ended up buying the project for around $800. This included over 120 niche wallpaper domains and one master domain which represented the overall network.

Well the idea was simple enough all I needed to do was develop atleast 100 of these sites, and if each site earned $1 per day that’s approximately $100 per day extra income all on autopilot. Yes it sounds highly achievable but the real question is can it be pulled off ?

The answer will be revealed in my next post where I will be talking about the projects current status and what plans I have for it in the near future.

Post 2 - I Only Use Adsense

Yeah that’s right until now my method has been to keep things simple so I’ve really only used adsense as a means of monetisation. Things changed however in my recent portfolio reorganisation where I spent time trying different things. That basically meant using adsense along with another type of ad provider. I’ll be talking about my findings and how much of an increase I achieved by tweaking the ad providers and their placements.

Post 3 - PPC Coach Review

Another aspect of online marketing is the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. There’s nothing obscure or odd about using it but until now I’ve only delivered traffic to my sites via natural organic SEO. So what’s the problem ?

Well PPC was probably one of the last methods of internet marketing that I still didn’t fully understand. I wanted to fill this knowledge gap and more importantly actually use it as a method of driving traffic to my sites whilst they’re still new and working their way up the search engine rankings.

Using PPC to kick start a new project could be quite profitable, the only problem was that my experience with PPC stood at zero. I knew absolutely nothing about how it worked and how to do it correctly, that was until I signed up to the PPC Coach program (a well known PPC coaching program where many members are earning over $1000 per day profit).

I’ll be giving my review and assessment of what happened whilst I was with PPC Coach and how it could benefit you as it did me. A highly recommended program but not for everyone so watch out for the review.

Other Updates

Well I have plenty of other small juicy bits but I’m going to save them for later because this post is getting way too long, but one thing I will mention is that one of my science related sites got a mention in the BBC Knowledge Magazine.

Unfortunately it’ a US only subscription magazine so I never got to see the actual snippet. (Im sure it wasn’t anything special but I did get some emails from subscribers of the mag telling me they saw my site in it). So just goes to show what honest hardwork and real quality articles can do to help you get noticed.

The Forums

Oh and lastly after sending out a mass email on the forums notifying that they would be closed for private coaching members only, I recently decided to reverse that decision, leaving them open for the public but also giving the private coaching members a separate private forum for their needs. This means the forums are still kind of open to the public but with a twist.

So whats the twist ? Well from today the forums will be invitation only. This means you can only join if you’ve been recommended by another member or if you send me an email giving details of why you want to join. This hopefully will cut the spammers and of course the useless members who make one post and leave.

I think that pretty much covers everything for now, so watch out for my posts over the coming days and I hope you had a great halloween.