Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

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