Banned from adsense Now what

This is kinda of creepy.  I used Wesley as an example in my last post on how to make 100 with adsense is easy but maintaining it is hard to tell you guys that the current niche model is flawed. Well, he just said in his latest post that he got banned from adsense.

http://www.chasingpace.com/change-is-coming/

Wow, do I have the ability to predict the future?
Not really. Just some real experience and the wisdom to know that history always repeats itself.

You see. Wesley is a typical person who will be successful online. He is hardworking and he is intelligent. He is the one who will get starry eyed when he first heard of making money online. He will also see some initial success and make some good money for himself.  Unfortunately, he will also see trouble when the rewards are just coming because his foundations are all wrong due to what was preached in the online money making world.

It is not his fault that he got into all sorts of trouble such as being penalised by Panda or getting his adsense account banned. In fact, I argued that this is to be expected. I have seen this cycle of success followed by troubles many many times, including on myself!

We suffered through this because our foundations are wrong.

We chase keywords instead of real markets
We chase backlinks instead of real visibility to our customers
We chase clicks instead of real engagement
We chase money instead of value

There was a lot of comments advising Wesley on how to get a new adsense account. That is not the problem.

The problem is our business model. The sooner we fight our way to a real model, the better it is for us. If you are starting in your niche site journey today, remember not to take shortcuts.

There is nothing wrong with building niche sites per say as long as you don't forget the fundamental of providing value in the marketplace. Niche content is nothing more than spotting an area where there is an opprtunity to make the information more accessible or available to the people searching for it.

Use the gift of SEO wisely. Don't use it on the wrong foundations. If you do things right, you don't have to worry about getting banned from adsense or any of the other nonsense in the online money making world.

More to come about this if you interested to know how to really make money online.

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How much money can you make online - Income report 3

You might think that this is going to be my absolute worst income reports given that my amazon account was banned. Well, turns out that things might not be as bad as you thought. Continue to read on to get all the juicy details! LOL

You can keep your amazon earnings even if you are banned

It turns out that I might be able to keep the amazon earnings that I have earned before the ban. Initially, I thought all my amazon earnings will be gone, based on my experience with adsense. However, after looking at the payment table, it seems like I might still be getting a cheque for my dec earnings. Here is the screenshot that I saw:

I haven't received the cheque but the above gives me hope that I will be. This means that all my previous income reports are still valid. Thank god!

I am also going to include a new income item called private advertisers. It is cutting out Google and going straight to the advertisers who might have an interest to advertise on your site. It is quite commonly practiced for big sites but I thought I can have a go at this income stream as well.

Below are the numbers

Adsense Income Report: USD699

A sharp fall from the the USD948 in Jan. This is mainly due to 2 reasons. First, one of the adsense accounts were banned which means a reduction of USD100. Second, there were less days in Feb so the earnings were affected as well.

The good thing is that I have switched this site that has the banned adsense to media.net, which is a new CPC based advertising network similar to adsense. The surprising thing is that their ads are surpassing adsense for this site and I expect it to earn much more.  I will not include media.net earnings in this report but I might do so for the next one. Depends on how comfortable I am with disclosing another earning source.

Amazon Income Report: USD324

I am going to include what I have earned from amazon in feb given that there is a chance I will still be paid. The amount is not large but it makes for a nice meal.

I have not given up on amazon yet. I have already created another account and am using it on 2 new sites. For the amazon niche sites with my old code, I am using skim links. So far, it is already tracking my revenue in March so I will probably use that.

Private Ads Income Report: USD800

This is going to be tricky to prove because all the advertisers pay me directly through paypal. Taking this part from all my paypal transactions will be a pain so I am not going to do it. Either you trust me on this or you don't.

This USD800 came from 3 advertisers. You can compare this to adsense and you know how getting private advertisers can be lucrative. To get these advertisers, you will need which niches have them in abundance. Finance for example is one. Furniture can be another.

To be attractive to private advertisers, your blog needs to have a certain level of PR and traffic. It also has to be look real and not like a spammy site. I am not an expert on this yet but I am learning the ropes. So far, it has been quite productive for me : ).

Total Income: USD1823

Again, not really near my target of 5k but this is a full time income now, especially when you convert it to Singapore dollars, which is around SGD2296.  It is a low income but I know folks who made less than that here in Singapore.

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How much money can you make online - Income report #2

Welcome to super late income report for Jan 2012. Nothing much happens as the income for Jan has maintained on the same level as Dec although the composition has changed. Let's take a look shall we:

 (in case you are not aware of what kind of earnings I am tracking for this income report, please refer to the explanation here: income report #1)

Adsense Income Report: USD948

Almost made it to 1k last month with adsense. Remember that my 2012 make money goal for adsense was to hit 1k for 2012.  Looks like I can achieve that without doing anything else. This will leave more time for amazon which I am still struggling with.

That being said, I did order a new homepage backlink service for site 1 that you see below. In Feb, this site seems to be coming back from Panda and I want to see if the addition of new powerful links can help to bring this site back to its USD400 per month record.

Yes, I am not always supportive of using backlinks but in a competitive industry such as cosmetic surgery, the competition leaves me with very little choice. I will report back on how effective this homepage backlink service is once it has passed a month.

Click all images to enlarge

Amazon Income Report: USD412

As expected, amazon earnings fell after Christmas. In January, the income dropped from USD630 to USD412. Ouch! The good thing is that the composition of the amazon earnings has changed from being concentrated in a few sites to a larger base of sites due to my 50 amazon niche site challenge. With time, I am confident that this new network of amazon sites will make serious money as I have not seen money coming in so fast with such new sites.  Give them a year and see what happens : )

Click the image to enlarge

Total Income: USD1360

So,  not much happening. This is how it is my friends. There is a delay effect in making money online and my results show this.

During the Oct-Nov period, I basically did nothing due to the panda update affecting my motivation.  As a result, nothing happen in Jan as there was no work done before that. Conversely, all the stuff I am doing now will only reflect in the results in the coming months.

If you are stuck in the same siutation of not seeing results even though you are putting in the hard work, then be patient, The results will come!

Have fun making money online.

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How to get an adsense account without waiting for 6 months

This is a short post on how to create an adsense account fast or to get multiple adsense accounts.

How to create an adsense account fast

Typically, a new blog needs some time to age before it can be used to apply for a brand new adsense account. It needs to have content being added constantly and it must look good enough to pass a visual inspection. This will probably take you around 6 months. If you don't have the patience, here are some shortcuts that you can take:

• Borrow an aged blog from a friend who has no adsense. Use that to submit for adsense application. If it is the average personal diary type of blogs, it should get approved prtty fast. 

• Write a few good quality articles on hubpages or infobarrels.  Make these long and genuine. Use your hubpage or infobarrel ID as the application website. This has a higher chance than a new blog.

• Google for the term "get adsense approved". There is a service provider there who can help to get new adsense accounts within 2-3 days. I have tired it and it works. I don't know how the guy did it but he always delivers the accounts without problem. 

How to get multiple adsense accounts

The above works for multiple adsense accounts as well. However, you do need a real person to receive the cheques for these additional adsense accounts.

Again, there are a couple of ways to do this:

•  Use your family's name but try not to use the same address. You can use your office address as the mailing address for your family members accounts. 

• You can set up a company. The best form is the limited partnership. This protects your personal  assets from any legal liability that the company might incur. At the same time, it doesn't have all the huge paperwork that a limited company has. 

Hope this helps for people 

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How to make money fast with adsense

In this article, you will learn short cuts to making money fast with adsense by using the authority of either your current site or web 2.0 sites such as hubpages or infobarrels. This is my response to an email request by a reader (Yes! I am 7 readers now!) about how to make fast money with adsense. I have done this before so I am going to share my experience. 

Specifically, this is what was asked:

"(what is) the easiest way to start earning some income with adsense in the quickest time possible and therefore I would like to choose keywords that will rank almost immediately in the search engines?  To do this, should I write articles on Web 2.0 platforms such as Hubpages and Infobarrel to earn an income with adsense (and possibly affiliate products) so they get ranked quicker and higher OR should I create subdomains or subdirectories on a generic domain that I already own OR should I start a brand new site and purchase .info domains? "

There are actually a couple of questions mixed in the above statements. Let me separate them out so that you can see the more targeted answers to each:

• How to choose low competition keywords that can ranked immediately or within a short time frame?

• What is the best platform to do do this?

Let me answer the second question first.

What is the best web 2.0 sites to make money

Riding on the authority of existing sites is the best way to rank quickly for low competition keywords. As long as the platform has authority, it doesn't matter if they are yours or they are public article directories suchas hubpages or infobarrels.

My preference is in the following order:

• Your own authority site: You have 100% share of the revenue as well as control over how the ads are displayed. However, do make sure you really have an authority site with age and value passing backlinks. If all you have is a generic domain that has little content or age or backlinks, I suggest you skip to the next option.

• Write articles on web 2.0 properties: Bear in mind that these properties do come and go in terms of authority. Now, the best web 2.0 is squidoo. During my amazon keyword search phase, I came across so many squidoo lenses that ranked well for 3-4 word keyword phases. They used to have some form of penalty but that seem to be lifted now. So, squidoo is my preferred choice in terms of using web 2.0 properties to make money, followed by infobarrel and a new platform called Wizzley.
  

• Brand new site and sub domain: A sub domain is treated the same way as a new site so no difference to the two in terms of authority being passed. I will not choose this option if I want to make money fast.
  

How to make money fast with low competition keywords

This is going to be the juicy bits about how to select long tail and low competition keywords to make money fast. If you are a beginner, you might want to make some notes here as I go along.

Ride on the keyword authority that the platform already has: An existing platform will have existing rankings for certain keywords. Your job is to find out what keywords is, say infobarrel, ranking for and create  related keyword sets around them. This way, you are hijacking the authority of the platform and passing them to your keywords.

Here is how you can mine the keywords of existing paltform:

• If it is your own site, use google analytics. Go to traffic>keywords and sorted them according to the number of visits. This will give you a nice set of keywords as the base to develop more related keyword sets.

• If it is a web 2.0 site, use SEM rush. Just go to Semrush.com and key in the url of the web 2.0 site that you want to write articles on. This is what you will see.

 

Click to enlarge 

• The Free version only allows you to see 10 keywords but you can use this coupon "89MW-YR43-HFNJ-K94M" to get a free trial for 2 weeks. Download all the keywords in an excel sheet during the free trial period so that you don't have to spend money to continue the subscription. I don't know this coupon code still works as I used it during the Nov period.
  

• If the promo code does not work, you can still use another service called alexa.com. Again, go to the site and key in the url of whatever web 2.0 property that you want to write on. Click on the 'get details' button and once you are on the new screen, click on the 'search analytics' tab. This is what you will see. 

Click to enlarge

Attack multiple lower volume keywords in one article: Don't expect to rank for any specific high traffic keywords. What we want to do is to group a bunch of related long tail keywords in one article. You should include as many long tails as you can in the article as long as they answer the same search query.

For example, if you are writing an article on how to win a free air  ticket to japan, there will be lots of related words such as winning free air ticket to japan, free air ticket to toyko, i want free air ticket to japan etc. All these are long tail related keywords that will come naturally if you focus on a (i) uncompetitive article title and (ii) hijacking the authority of the platform as mention above.

Choose keywords with urgent need: Choose topics that have a urgent for people. These topics attract people who will click on an adsense ad if it offers the solution they want. A topic such as 'winning a free ticket to japan' can attract more clicks than 'decorating ideas for a nursery room'.

A even better group of keywords are what I called desperate niches They are the people whose lives will be affected if they don't find a solution soon. People who are will sick, people who need money now, people who are unemployed, people who house have been foreclosed, people who have lost their beloved ones etc. These are examples where people are desperate for solutions and they will click ads with abandon if you can attract them.

Link your articles together: Finally, do write a couple of articles together in the same niche and link them up. This will help a bit in helping them to get long tails. The linking can be in a straight arrow format like this:

Article A > Article B > Article C > Article D

Article D will hopefully get the most juice and draw in the most traffic.

If you do the above right, you should make adsense money fast. There is no need for backlinks if you pick the right keywords that have low competition and are riding on the platform's authority for certain keywords. If you don't know what is low competition keywords and how to find low competition keyword,click on those articles to read them first.

Hope this article helps you to make money fast with adsense.

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How much money can you make online - Income report #1

Welcome to the first income report on aaronchua.com. I had to think through this carefully before revealing how much I am earning. I am not comfortable disclosing all my income but I want to track my earnings goals in public for greater accountability. In the end, I decided to disclose only the income source that is relevant to my 2012 make money targets.

This is what will be included:

• adsense earnings from my cosmetic surgery niche
• all my amazon earnings
• proceeds from sale of websites

These will be excluded

• adsense from non cosmetic surgery niches
• other ad networks such as infolinks, contextweb, media.net etc
• other affiliate networks such as the wordpress theme affiliates
  
• private advertising

I hope that disclosing the earnings will keep me focused on achieving my 5k income target through the 3 income sources that I mentioned above.

Ok, so without any further ramblings, here is my income report for Dec 2011.

Adsense: USD680
I currently have 3 sites making this amount from two different adsense accounts. The first screenshot shows the adsense earnings from an account that belongs to my friend while the second screenshot is my own account. No surprise here as I have already mentioned that my adsense income from the cosmetic surgery niche has fallen from USD5k to about USD600.

Amazon: USD630
Dec was a good month for amazon in general so I expect this number to drop in Jan. From this amount, about USD149 came from the amazon niche site challenge.

Total: USD1,310
Well, not exactly a full time income yet as I still have some way to go before hitting the 5k mark. Sometimes, it is hard to motivate yourself with such low earnings but you know you need to put in the work first before seeing any concrete results. Saw another 2 good domains today that I will probably buy and create a site on.

Love to hear your thoughts and your progress, my beloved 5 readers!

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Make money with adsense tips

Time to answer the questions that one of my new readers raised regarding how to make 1k with adsense post. If you have not read that, please do so that you can follow the discussion here.

1: Is there any good example of a high earning adsense site out there that you know of (does NOT have to be yours, just want to see some successful one)

Universetoday.com. Earns more than 10k per month from a niche that has super low commercial intent and CPC. 

2: How many articles and keywords do you target on an adsense site where you would like to earn $1000+ /month?

This is a two tier approach to how I target keywords to make money with adsense. On the site level, I will target many new product keywords. In the site that I used in my case study, I targeted 100 new product keywords with 100 posts. The reason for doing so is that you never know which keywords will convert in terms of adsense clicks so you need to over target.

On the second tier, I target many long tails within the post itself to rank for many variations of the main keyword for that article. For example, if I target a term such as ABC treatment in the post title, I will target long tails such as prices of abc treatment, how much do abc treatment cost, abc treatment reviews, side effects of abc treatment etc. 

This two approach is how I gathered rankings for thousands for long tail keywords. Sum together, they can bring you over 1k per month. See my case study on using a software to find longtail keywords.

3: How often do you post new articles on your adsense sites?

During the first few months of a new site, I posted about 2-3 articles per week to gain trust. After six months, my posting schedule will become slower to the tune of around 1 post per month or every 2 months. The longest I have gone without a post is around 4 months.

4: could you recommend 2-3 niches with possible keywords in, where 1 site could earn around $500-1000/month?

I would say almost every niche can make you 500-1k per month. Keywords with low cpc needs lots of volume and vice versa.

My recommendation is to look for niches where new products are always introduced regularly, especially in markets where women and children are the main type of people searching for them. These group of people tend to click more.

So, good examples of such niches include beatuy products, toys, coupons, recipes etc.

5: could you recommend any high quality service provider that offer good adsense sites? where one could buy new high quality adsense sites with good keywords research = high search low comp etc for decent price?

Flippa is your friend although you need to do lots of due diligence. You can read my post on how to buy websites to make money.

I will also sell sites for sale from time to time. The 2 that I sold recently are good examples, They used to make about USD150 per month but the new owner has raised to about a couple of hundreds now just by backlinking the keywords that are already making money.

6: how much backlinking do you do to each site/article?

The favourite question asked by all : )

You need to first know what is the purpose of your backlinks. Backlinks can help your site by getting search engines to  do deeper and more frequent crawl for your site. They can also help by giving relevance through the anchor text.

I am not a supporter of the latter. I think you just need a few good links to get your new site indexed and to achieve better crawling. By learning how to target uncompetitive keywords and longtails, I don't need that many backlinks. I don't care about rankings of particular keywords. The only thing I care about is how much traffic the search engines are giving and that need not necessary means you need to rank for high volume search terms.

Most of the keywords that I target in my case study site have no backlinks at all.

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My adsense earnings down for 2011

If you want to know the ups and downs of an average guy who is trying to make a living with adsense, this is the post for you.

I started making money with adsense in Sept 2009. I remembered my first month earning was around USD7. Despite the small amount, I saw the potential and was excited by the fact that I can generate money just by writing content.

Adsense success stories

Since that USD7, I am been working hard to build my adsense sites until earlier this year. This is how my adsense earnings look like from just focusing on one niche. The earnings are from Sept 2009 to June 2011 and doesn't cover my other niches:

Sept 2009: USD7
Oct 2009: USD35
Nov 2009: USD88
Dec 2009: USD73

Jan 2010: USD270 (My bamboo blinds site became top 5)
Feb 2010: USD68 (My bamboo blinds site dropped out of SERPs)
Mar 2010: USD100 (My first cosmetic surgery site starting to get traffic)
Apr 2010: USD 198 (First cosmetic surgery site becoming stronger)
May 2010: USD 170 (May update, suffered a drop in some keywords)
June 2010: USD220
July 2010: USD220
Aug 2010: USD390 (Cosmetic site starting to rank from high traffic keywords)
Sep 2010: USD 630 (Cosmetic site ranking in top 3 for some keywords)
Oct 2010: USD860 (Cosmetic surgery site keep on increasing its traffic)
Nov 2010: USD1458 (Started 2nd cosmetic surgery site and 2nd adsense account; earned $70)
Dec 2010: USD 1100 (Christmas month so less traffic)

Jan 2011: USD 1900 (1st cosmetic site $1400, 2nd cosmetic site $300)
Feb 2011: USD 2500 (1st site $1800, 2nd site $700, started 3rd cosmetic site & 3rd adsense account)
Mar 2011: USD 3000 (1st site $2000, 2nd site $900, 3rd site $100, bought 4th cosmetic site and applied for 4th adsense account)
Apr 2011: USD 3950 (1st site $2500, 2nd site $1100, 3rd site $20, 4th site $300)
May 2011: USD 4500 (1st site $2600, 2nd site $1200, 3rd site $200, 4th site $400)
June 2011: USD 5200 (1st site $3200, 2nd site $1200, 3rd site $300, 4th site $400)

How to earn 5000 with adsense income
The above shows my journey on making USD5000 with adsense. It wasn't easy especially in the beginning when the rewards was so little compared to the efforts I was putting in. However, I did learn a lot about creating a passive adsense income. The main lessons were:

• Focus on the site that is making adsense money now to increase the earnings. Forget about other sites that are not doing anything for you.

• If you are making money in one site, create more sites in the same niche. You will make money faster because you know how to tackle the niche, how to write the content and what keywords are easiest to rank for. 

• The increase in adsense income comes in jumps. Your earnings will be stagnat for a while but when it jumps, you can really see the difference. 

My adsense earnings dropped!
 This story will have a happy ending if things continued this way. Unfortunately, they did not. I lost about 80% of the 5k in a matter of months after June. Let me explain:

• July: 2 of my 4 adsense account were disabled. That means a lost of USD700 as the 3rd and 4th cosmetic surgery sites were on these 2 accounts.

• August: I sold my second cosmetic site to raise cash in anticipation of buying a new property in District 9, which is the most prime area in Singapore. While it felt great to be able to afford my new home, the lost of USD1+k was not something that I want to see. 

• Oct: The dreaded Panda 2.6. My first site dropped in rankings like a rock and now only earned USD600 compared to the USD3k it was earning before. 

Due to the above chain of events, my adsense earnings from this niche fell from USD5k to USD600.

Risks of adsense income
I have heard about such adsense horror stories before but to experience it first hand is something else.

With adsense, there are 2 main risks: the risk of getting your adsense account banned and the risk of losing your rankings and traffic. I have experienced both in the space of a few months and the impact can be quite shocking.

In fact, if you are from Asia, the risk of getting your adsense account banned is quite high. I have a couple of friends who have also suffered from such decisions and most of them are at a lost of what to do next.

This is why I am shifting my perspective on how to create that 10k in passive income. It is also one of the reasons why I putting more resources into making money with Amazon. While making money from Amazon still carries the risk of losing your rankings, at least you are now not at the mercy of the adsense team. Taking out that one risk is already a much better value proposition from my point of view.

Passive income goals for 2012
Was it fun losing money like this? Of course not! I don't think many people can take discouragements like this but I decided to push on in creating a passive income stream.

Although I am definitely not able to make UD10k per month this year in passive income, it will continue to be my goal for 2012 and 2013. If you want to know what is my detailed plan, stay tuned for my forthcoming posts on how to make money in 2012.

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How to build niche sites after Panda 2.6

Ever since google panda has affected many niche site owners, there have discussions talking about whether the niche sites are still viable ways to earn money online.  I think it all depends on your definition of niche sites. If you think niche site is all about putting up a few pieces of outsourced content targeting a keyword, then believe me when I say this model will not last long. You might get away with it for the short term but Google will catch up with you one day.

For me, niche sites does not mean low quality. It only mean focusing on a smaller topic but giving it the maximum value that you can. So, how does a high quality niche site look like? This is what I will be exploring in the coming months.

It is not a secret that my sites were affected by Panda. My income dropped by 5k which is not a small sum by any means. This got me into thinking about how to build sites that can last. The best way to learn is to build them and this is what I will be documenting here as I begin my journey to building quality niche sites.

The first thing is to have a clear idea on how to be valuable. In many IM circles, quality means longer articles. That is not the only way. I can point to sites that doesn't do this but can ranked really well in the search engines. My method is to learn from these sites.

My goal for 2012 is to build 10 high quality niche sites. I have a couple of ideas but not enough to build 10 sites at once. What I will do is to spread them over the one year period. I will build more when I have more ideas but it will not be like what I did in the past. Just mechanically building sites without them being an interesting or unique idea.

The first idea I have is to build a niche site in the design niche. If you are similar to this niche, you will know that there are many gallery/showcase type of sites that provide readers with inspirational design ideas in particular areas such as business cards, logos, websites etc. I have spotted a few untouched areas and I will be building a site in this manner. The value proposition is this case is clear: to be the leader in the new design area that other designers will like to look at for inspirations and ideas.

Here is a hint for you if you are interested in building such niches. Go to any design blogs and look at their articles that collects different designs for inspirations. Each of these articles is actually a separate niche that you will do well by building a full site for it.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-final money making lesson

This post will conclude my step by step guide to making USD1000 with adsense with a new site. I have not achieved it but looking at the trend, I will hit it by next month. For those who might be new to this site, my goal was to take a site from USD0 to USD1000 within 9 months. The experiment started in Oct 2010 and should conclude by June 2011. However, looking at the data, I will get there in 6 months, rather than 9.

Here are the first two posts in this adsense experiment:
How to make USD1000 with adsense
How to make USD1000 with adsense - money making lesson 2

Ok, for those who wants some evidence of my earnings, here is Feb income

Click to enlarge image

As a reminder, here is my earnings for the previous three months:

Dec: USD87
Jan:USD470
Feb:USD780

So, I have shown that you can hit USD1000 with just one site, within 6 months. It all comes down to picking low competition keywords and knowing how to promote them via backlinks.

Let me state here that this site that is pulling in this amount is not a spam site by any means. All the content are high quality articles that have been written after considerable research. I believe in building assets that will last, rather than writing crap and getting the ban from Google.

Again, this is not the only site that I am working on so it is not even a 100% effort. If you repeat this process 10 times, the 10k per month income is not a dream. Question is do you have what it takes to pull through the earlier days to enjoy the fruits for your labor.

In fact, to show you that the results can be duplicated, I am starting a new site in the same market as this site. My goal is to hit USD500 with this new adsense site by June 2011 and USD1000 by Sept 2011. If I can accomplish this, it should be proof that making money online is a real possibility.

I am currently busy with building 2 big authority sites in the makeup and watches niches. I found some good writers who are passionate about these topics and formed a partnership to create these two sites. I want these 2 sites to be leaders and recognised in their niches so that they can another powerful source of income for me. These are currently not ready yet but once they are, I am more than happy to show them to you.

In terms of site investment, I made one this month in the wine industry. Again, domain investment is very new to me so I am taking it real easy and learning the steps. In my next article, I will focus on how to make money by buying sites that are already established.

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How to earn 1000 with adsense-money making lesson two

Time to post an update on my experiment to reach USD1000 per month with an adsense site. For those who might have missed the post on how to create passive income with adsense, the link will take you to the first post. In summary, I have begin working on a site that has been dormant for a number of months. I started working seriously on it since Oct 2010 and my goal is to hit 1k in adsense by June 2011 (a total of nine months). What I did from Oct-Dec was to add 100 backlinks from postrunner and to add about 25 articles on my sites that target new keywords (new products). In my first update, I also reported on what the site is earning in Dec. Since there was a few days remaining in Dec in that update, the full income is shown below:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

So, USD83 for Dec from a site that I worked on for 3 months. Not too bad. I still remember my first 100 per month took me about 5 months and comes from 5-6 sites. To have this result in a shorter time and with just one site assures me that I am moving in the right direction.

So, what I did I do in Jan? I added 25 additional articles to the site that target new terms. I also started to backlink keywords that are beginning to show promise using buildmyrank. It was a lot of work but the results have, quite frankly, improved beyond my expectations. I initially expect about 150-200 in Jan. The results kind of flew past that:

(Click on the image to enlarge)

USD467 in Jan, from USD89 in Dec. That is a jump of about 500%, which is quite an astonishing growth. So, what did I really do to have this result?

The main driver is learning how to use emering products in your niche. For me, I managed to find 2 TV shows in my niche that talks about new products in every show. What I did was to look at the symbiosis for the show in advance and write new articles that review these products. Because the keywords had very little competition, my site managed to obtain first page rankings for almost all the new keywords that I target. When the showed aired, my traffic jumped and adsense clicks increased significantly. If you hit a really popular product, then you will see the spike as shown in the image above. That day alone, I got USD60 in adsense.

The good thing about targeting new product keywords, rather than news, is that some of them will proven to be long term traffic drivers as consumers begin accepting the products. That is how my site continue to enjoy the increased traffic even after the shows have aired, although the traffic levels will not be as high as when the products just aired.

All this points to an important lesson that I want to highlight here. You need to have processes for your online business. These processes must aim at your highest value adding activities. For this site, the highest value adding activities is new keywords discovery. I know that the more new keywords I target, the more revenue the site can generate. So, I created a routine whereby I will watch the symbiosis at certain nights and force myself to write articles that target these new keywords. Once this process has been established, it becomes a sureway fire to make more money. Without this process, I could have become lazy and the site might not make as much as it does now.

Of course, I intend to hand this process over to my outsourcer once I created a process for her to duplicate what I did. That is how you can scale your business. Do one thing yourself and once you know how it works, formulate a process to hand it over so that you can continue to do other higher value adding activities.

The above points to the fact that most online marketers don't have a business process. That is something I want to talk more in this blog because I feel that most IM blogs do not talk about the business management side of IM. However, to be successful, you need to apply management techniques to really grow your business. It is all about formulating business processes which gives you the biggest value and that recruiting outside help to scale these processes.

One of the thing that I am will be doing more this year is investment into established sites. I know how to make money now so for me, i am willing to buy sites that have traffic so that I can apply my current processes and resources to these sites and grow them. Through this approach, I will definitely hit my 10k a month goal this year and 30k a month goal next year. I have already bought 2 sites and in future posts, I will detailed how I select sites to buy and what to do with them once you have bought them over.

So you find this useful. Do leave a comment as it gets lonely here without them : )

Until my next update, go forth and make more passive income!

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How to make 1000 per month in adsense with 1 site

This is will be my journal as well as step by step guide on how I intend to create a new authority site and take it to USD1000 in adsense by end of June 2011. It is definitely a very realistic timeframe and I hope that whatever I have written here will help somebody who is struggling with adsene in general. That being said, I am not the expert. There are better adsense gurus out there such as Griz and Court and Mark and the xfactor guy.

I have taken sites to USD1000 using adsense programme before so this is not new to me. In fact, my passive income goals for 2011 is to take 10 such sites to 1k, which will net me a 10k per month passive income. A year ago, this target seems so far away but now, I feel that it is within reaching distance because I have the knowledge and resources now that I do not have 1 year ago. Hopefully, you can be as successful as well.

Ok, back to the topic of how to make 1k per month in adsense.

Here is how I would go back doing it. This is not the only way but is the way that I found to be effective for me.

Step 1: adsense niche selection
After dabbing in countless niches over the past year, I realise not all niches are created equal. By this, I do not mean just in terms of money making potential. Rather, some niches are just difficult to expand on as a useful adsense site.

For example, a product based site should not be an adsense site. Not only can a affilitate site make more money but is more useful for the searcher as well. If you are searching for an ipad cover, you want to go to a site that offers you the chance to buy an ipad cover. You do not want to go a site that rambles on about how useful is the cover, where can you buy it etc. I rather put an affilitate link in my ipad cover article after reviewing a couple of designs. That is what a product site should be offering. So, my criteria for choosing an adsense niche has been narowed down to the following:

• information based
• have new products being introduced constantly (will explain why later)
  
• the niche must have high CPC in general (over USD1 per click)
  

Step 2: Set up the site and post a couple of articles on it
After you have done your niche selection, pick a couple of easy keywords to start with. If you do not know how to analyse competition for your keywords, check this article on how to build authority site. In it, I described a simple way of doing so.

Step 3: Build 100+ backlinks
With the keywords selected, write the articles and post them up. The next step will be the challenging part where most will give up. It is time to build backlinks. I recommend post runner as one of the best backlink system out there. It is a network of blogs owned by different people so you get a wide diverse range of places to promote your articles. For experience, if you want a strong site, you need at least 100 links so be prepared to get busy. Write the guest post articles that promote those you have written for your site and post them to the postrunner system. This might take 1-2 months.

Step 4: New post that target new products
After the 100 links, your site should start to gain a little trust from Google. If not, you might need to wait 1-2 months more. Anyway, it is time to start writing for your site again. This time, we will write only about new products that have been introduced in our niche. The reason is simple. New products have little competition in the search engines so it is easier to rank. There are 2 benefits to doing so:

1. Once these articles start to rank on the first page, your site will gain more trust from Google. The more pages you have that is ranked, the more trust your site will be. That is how authority sites are built and is the approach that is advised by Griz.
2. You will also start to see traffic very early on if the new products can generate interest. This means that you can start to make money much faster compared to targeting lucrative keywords that have lots of competition. You can still do so but it means you will need to wait for a long time before seeing any results.

That is why in my niche selection, I only go after those niches that have new products that I can target constantly. In fact, I make sure that there is a couple of sites that will provide me with such information so that I don't get stuck on trying to find new products. I just go to these sites and write an article about whatever is new. If the new product has been featured on mass media, even better as it will likely generate traffic if you can rank for it.

Step 5: Backlink your most profitable articles until they are number one
Once you have finished the articles, allow them the site to just sit there for a month. After that, analyse which pages generates the most traffic. That will be your winners and it is time to backlink them until their keywords reach number one.

That's it.

I am using the above step to build a new site that will give me 1k by end of June 2011. I have already selected the niche and I have already at step 4 with it. Currently, the site has 25 articles and each article makes between USD3-5 dollars on average without me doing any backlinks for them. My intention is to finish up the 100 articles first, which will net me about USD300-500 per month and analyse the data to see which keywords to backlink. Once I have backlinked my most profitable keywords, the entire site should yield me USD1k.

So, I will be reporting back here on the progress of this site every month. (Btw, this is not a main thing for me. I am starting this new site to see if my approach is sound. I have other more important projects that are making me money now so treat this as an experiment.)

Currently, here are the stats for Dec (until Dec 21). The numbers in brackets represents last month's figure.

adsense: USD55 (USD8)
adsense impressions: 1,100 (140)
articles live: 25 (5)

So, overall, the site is off to a good start. The numbers might be low now but I think the growth will be good. Let's find out if that is the case. See you in the next update on my experiment to take a new site to USD1000 in adsense by end of june 2011.

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