I have started getting interested in my online business again. Mainly due to the fact that I am actually starting to get pretty competent at building websites and getting traffic to them through Google.
I have achieved fairly good results with little work and CashFlowInvestor.com.au (with no backlinking strategy) is getting over 2,000 visitors per month from the search engines. So now I am trying once again to build up my income online.
My New Online Goal
My new goal is simple. Earn $1,000/month online through passive sources. This means that I cannot earn this money trading dollars for hours I have to earn this money through sustainable businesses.
This $1,000/month will help provide me and my family with more financial security in the worst case scenario where I lost my job (God forbid!). $1,000/month doesn’t pay all the bills but it is $1,000 that I don’t have to earn from a new job straight away, I could also use this to save a buffer fund so we could live 3-6 months without any income coming in.
InfoLinks and Adsense
I have been using InfoLinks lately on a couple of my websites. After only 2 days of testing I have successful made $0.95. Not a huge amount but the traffic I have been testing it with hasn’t been huge either.
At the moment I am achieving approximately $4 RPM (revenue per 1,000 visitors) which is not great but it isn’t bad either. However, I am doing this with 12 links on each page (which I think is a bit spammy).
What has shocked me though is that a website that I only started 3 weeks ago, which has very little traffic (about 10 visitors/day) is actually already making me money. In the last 3 days it has made me $0.12. Nothing I can take to the bank as of yet, but if I continue to make $0.04/day then that means I would be making $1.20 for the first month of operation. I need a total of $10 to break even for this business (I paid $10 for the domain name) so lets see how quickly I can get into the black.
Just for now I have removed infolinks from CFI as I have an application for an adsense account pending so I will wait to see the outcome of that before I put the links back on the site. If successful I will definitely be testing some adsense placement on the site and comparing the earnings to infolinks.
Why Advertising?
I have never really gone down the advertising route in the past so what am I doing it now?
The main reason is so I can put all my focus into creating awesome content (and driving traffic) and let the money take care of itself. Then when I have a good following on my sites I will shift my focus to making more money from the traffic I am getting. But at the moment I need more content on my sites and advertising encourages me to do that.
I have just removed infolinks from CFI
IsItAGoodMovie.com Blunder
I let the domain name expire and as a result the site was down for about a month. It is back up now but my google rankings have plummeted and when I was once receiving over 100 visitors per day from Google I am now receiving about 5 visitors per day. I will need to do some backlinking in order to get this back up.
My Backlinking Strategy
There are hundreds of awesome backlinking strategies out there. My favourite is the one that Pat from Smart Passive Income shares on his blog.
1. Link to your site from web 2.0 sites (articles, guest posts, blogs, forums etc)
2. Link to those web 2.0 sites using directory submissions and other spammier (but quicker) link building strategies.
Ultimately this is exactly what I want to do. I want to build high quality links to my site from a variety of sources that help me to rank super high. But right now I just don’t have the time!
So my plan instead is to do the following
1. Write awesome content that people will want to link back to
2. Comment on other people’s blogs and get involved in the community – Hopefully this will get me some natural links
3. (my main linking strategy) Write articles for EzineArticles.com that are highly targeted to my niche with backlinks back to my site.
But isn’t article marketing dead?
Article marketing use to carry more power than it does now but it isn’t dead. If you are going up against very little competition (which I am) then a few quality articles submitted to article directories can actually help you get to the first page of Google.
There is one (secret) search term I am aiming to rank for which I believe is low competition. I recently wrote a quality post on this topic and I am currently not even ranked for this item. We will see how much link building strategy goes for this. If it works I will duplicate on other keywords. If it doesn’t work then I will reassess.