lurksteraz on August 14th, 2007
I just wanted to give a quick update on what I’ve been doing. I have been building more and more websites. In the past week I’ve added an additional 5 complete websites all in different industries. That brings my count to, well, a lot of damn sites to maintain. I’ve also resorted back to my roots of implementing many black hat techniques for natural rankings. I tried to go legit and not do any shady stuff, but when it’s easy to do it, why not.
Anyways, I’ve decided to also set up a few sites specifically for drop shipping products. I was able to work out a few deals with some vendors for unique products to drop ship. I figure this would be good for wife to at least process orders as they come through.
Unfortunately, I have to wait for payday to relaunch more PPC ads. Went broke on the first run of campaigns that hadn’t produced any conversions. When payday rolls around again, I’ll relaunch the campaigns with some tweaks that include a tests I’d like to run and see what happens. If these tests don’t pan out, I need to wait again for another paycheck just to fund them. That sucks! Luckily Adsense will be depositing in a week or so.
In other news, I seemed to have built up about 6 weeks of vacation and decided to take off. I’ve been planning my attack for building out an additional 25 domains. Shouldn’t take too long if I plan accordingly.
Well, I’ll make another post in a day or so, I’m typing this from my cube and don’t want the boss to what I’m doing.
lurksteraz on July 16th, 2007
Well, this weekend was like a coding marathon, and now I now have brain fry. Starting Friday night, I wanted to research some niches but the competition for some of them was too much. Then sometime after midnight, I ran across one. It’s one that I like, I can relate to and wouldn’t mind spending a little time on to test it out. And the best part is?, there are a decent amount of searches and nobody is buying ads in Google. Which by the way, I’d like to make a post on keyword search volume tools in another post.
I then went to look for domains and realized I had been sitting on one that would be perfect. Ok, so now I’m starting to put the pieces together.
Saturday morning, I start creating templates and trying to plan a layouts and mapping on how I want this to work. If visitors land on the site naturally, I want to have them flow through the site without abandoning for cheesiness. Good, I’m all set and have a plan.
Saturday afternoon, I start fine tuning my templates for scalability, so in the long run, I can grow the site out if testing and profits are in my favor. I then leave for a little while to spend some time with my wife and baby boy so they would remember who I am.
I return Saturday night and start creating category pages and product pages. I start thinking that this is taking forever, and that there could be a better a way to do this. I should mention that these are products from a Commission Junction advertiser. And since my account is new, I don’t have access to feeds(oi). From what I understand, you need to generate a certain amount of money first before accessing the feeds to merchants. So, if you’ve ever entered products in through CJ, you know my pain.
Sunday morning after entering a ton of products, I realize that I basically reinvented the wheel(ugh). For some stupid reason, I didn’t even think to use a database and dynamically pull in the products. My original thought process was to create maybe 20 or so product pages, and the next thing I know during the long hours is that I was side tracked and started entering way too many products out of excitement for just testing. Although this is good for the long run, but I could have wasted hours and hours of time on something that may not work.
Live and learn I guess. It’s early in the morning here in AZ, and I’m sure this post doesn’t make sense in some parts, sorry…. I just got into work and I’m tired.
lurksteraz on July 9th, 2007
I’ve run into a huge problem of organizing all of my affiliate logins, sites, analytics and much more. So, this weekend I decided to make myself a basic dashboard. I’m sure that I am a day late and a dollar short on this as people are probably thinking ‘yeah, so, I’ve been doing that for years’. Well good for you. Some people don’t always do this and I have found it to be super helpfull.
In my dashboard, I’ve broken out individual sections to contain Affiliate Logins, Analytics Logins, Textual Advertising Logins and Online Tools which includes keyword analyzers, PPC analyzers etc. I’ve also added one more section that’s not quite finished but close, but it’s a section built with AJAX that pulls in multiple feeds from other blogs that I can read. This is cool, because if I see something I really like or have an idea, I can quickly move around in and out of my different admin sections. I’m a big fan of K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid
Whether this is helpful to you or not, I’d highly suggest taking about hour to build one out even it’s a bunch of links on one page.
