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

Popularity: 20%

As is widely reported around the web, the adsense dollars dramatically dropped in January. I was getting clicks that were, on average, worth 20-30% of what I have gotten for them last year. This could be because of the US financial crisis or it could be that Google is taking a bigger slice of their pie and handing out less and less to the publishers - how bout a web writers strike… anyone? :P

Anyway, lucky for me, I was able to increase my earnings by

1. mupress parking more than 20 new domain names
2. flog two of my domains

   * StumbleMe.com - $110
   * ThemesWordpress.com - $50

   In my mind, these two domains are worth at least double that but I wanted to have a go a selling some just to prove to myself that the domains I’m registering are worth more than what I’m paying. I’ve got another domain auction underway and snazzed up my domainholics site to showcase my domains.

3. and… channel more traffic to the HottestGirlOnline.com site via a snazzy new youtube promo:

   It’s been rated 4 stars and has over 1000 views! - not bad for two hours of work :D

So what was my earnings for 2008? A good o’ total of $296.59. How sweet is that? Even though the adsense click value dropped immensely, one of my brand new domains is raking in at a healthy 45% CTR on average - HUGE! I’m hoping Feb will be an even better month - wish me luck! :D

Popularity: 6%

This is the very first of my earnings recaps. Upon popular request, I’ve decided to reveal a little bit about the adsense earnings of some of the sites I am experimenting with…

1. We Finance Loans ($6.04): This was only operational for less than two weeks and it’s already gotten back the domain rego fee!
2. Maltese Dogs ($8.81): Updated the title so that it displays better in the google serps aswell as giving it a new look mid-month. Hopefully this will break $10 next month :)
3. Hottest Girls ($5.46): I should really take the time to add more girls…

Hmmm… $20 doesn’t sound like much but bear in mind that this is ALL passive income. Also, some people ask why I don’t do more with the sites. Simple answer, for those that don’t know me too well, is that in my real life, I’m a full time IT contractor mercenary so this is just a little side hobby that I like to spend my free time on - hence my affinity towards sites that require very little attention and maintenance. Hopefully, my online assets will surpass my offline income and then I won’t need to pimp myself around no more and then I’ll be able to live everyone’s dream of spending my time with the family and doing a ‘job’ that I enjoy :)

As for the experiment with building a website entirely out of free articles, it has proven to be highly successful in my mind. The We Finance Loans website has only had around 50 unique visitors and it has already jumped to being the highest earner of the three sites.

Of the 14 articles that I posted up, only two of them have been indexed by google with these rest in the supplementary bin - Google bins pages that it finds as duplicates of another page that it already has in its index. Normally, the page with the highest PR wins, so in my case with a brand new domain, I was surprised to even have two articles show up! As the site ages and gets more backlinks (I’ve been really lazy on this front), this site can only get better - now.. how do I replicate this 1000 times…? :)

Popularity: 8%