Mid year review of my online business

Anybody out there? LOL

I have disappeared from this blogs for a couple of reasons, namely my Turkey Holiday, my grandma passing away and a couple of work distractions. I doubt anybody cares enough about this blog to want to know this but I thought no harm writing these excuses down for not blogging recently.

It is now the mid point of 2012. It is a appropriate time to review the progress of my online business. I hope you guys do the same because it is easy to be caught up in the day to day without taking the time off to reflect and to realign on what you are doing.

Update on old projects

Goal of earning an additional 5k per month: I would think this will be an epic failure on my part. I am nowhere near this goal as all the projects I have listed in my 'how to make money in 2012' post have stopped. The reason for stopping is to adapt to how has happened during these 6 months. More on that below

Amazon niche challenge: This project has been killed after I have given long thoughts about it. The SEO landscape has changed and the rate of change will get faster and faster. I am tired of building these niche sites that have very little change of surviving these algorithm changes such as Panda or Penguin.

I am NOT saying that you cannot make money with niche sites. You can still can if you watch the SERPs closely. For example, all the hosted platforms such as Squidoo are ranking well. You CAN make a quick buck throwing out a hundred or so of keyword targeted content. However, expect things to change. As long as you expect these changes and can roll with them, building niche sites is still a viable money making project.

However, I am tired of such changes. I want something more long lasting and sustainable. More importantly, I want to work on something that keeps my interests. With the Internet opening up more opportunities every single day, I want to work on something that is exciting and adds value to people.

Selling sites: With my amazon sites stopped, there are hardly any sites that I can sell. Most of the sites I have are meant to be kept, unless someone offers a really good price for them.

New projects

So, with these projects killed, what I am working on? Mostly on sites that I have an interest in but truth to be told, I am still finding my way as well. Below are some of the stuff that I am pursing currently:

Online magazine about small living spaces: I am developing an online magazine that attempts to help people get the best out of small spaces. I think this topic is becoming increasing relevant as apartments in big cities are getting smaller and smaller.

Structuring a real content is much tougher than I thought. Like in any physical magazine, I need to segment my site according to the different content types such as editorial, the regular stuff, the featured content, the gallery etc. That means drilling down and really understanding what your readers or potential readers might want. It is no longer enough to just lay everything in a blog site format.

Buying websites: I am still investing in websites to make money. I think this will be a very rich area in the coming years in terms of interest. Besides the actual buying and selling of websites, the content part of it will spark interest as well. In fact, I am writing a book right now about how to invest and run websites. This is from my personal experience of already spending more than 100k in this area. I think I am qualified enough to put a book on this subject.

Domain investing: I am finally starting to put in some real money in this game. Most people will think the domain investment game has dried up years ago but I beg to differ. Just like in real estates, the way to make money has changed but people can still earn amazing earnings buying and selling domains. It is of course no longer possible to buy single word domains are cheap prices but there are other ways to play this game now. I am going to write about domain investing in my early retire diary blog so you can take a look if you are interest.

So, back to you readers. How are your make money plans coming along in 2012?