Oops, another bout of this winter’s crazy weather has me trapped at home, and my days all messed up. And I let this out initially unadulterated. Despite what it might have said a few hours ago, as a matter of fact, I did accomplish a thing or two towards my goal this week!

1. Blasted away with another six new mini sites while trapped here in the countryside.
2. Quite a bit of stats trolling, ending up with me killing off a handful of fairly high traffic, low-converting mini sites. Already seeing a pretty substantial uptick in per-click earnings from those changes!
3. Continuing my nanoblogging projects. I still overthink this process, but I’m getting better. Plus, I’m learning a fair amount on a few niches I’m interested in anyway!

Not altogether bad for suffering through the continuing doldrums of Winter 2010 with a massive head cold! ‘cept for that losing-track-of-a-day thing…

[What is this all about?]

There most definitely is money still to be made as an eBay affiliate. Last month was, by a long shot, my most profitable month as one.

photo credit: ethorson

That said, my future eBay efforts will likely not involve creating any more BANS sites. I’ll certainly keep my current BANS sites as they are as long as they continue to make a profit. For instance, I have one site that I literally have not touched since I set it up last November that has made me a couple thousand, and it is about to hit its peak season again. Why mess with it?

But I just do not much care for building sites the BANS way anymore. Nothing wrong with the software, but I have found ways I just like better.

Off On Tangents

I have gone off onto a couple different tangents as far as eBay affiliate stuff:

• For sites built to get search engine traffic, I’m using a great little product called phpBay. It lets me take a WordPress blog and quickly turn it into a store. With the billion or so themes available for WordPress, I can make it look however I want.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on using Adwords to drive traffic to eBay mini sites. I used the API version of phpBay to build mini sites specifically for PPC campaigns. If you happen to join Earn $1k A Day, I can’t recommend these three threads more highly to give you some truly astounding ideas along these lines:
  1. My First 1K day, now 2nd and 3rd
  2. Questions for Gary
  3. How I choose my keywords from ebay listing titles

  I’ve been following Gary’s system since midway through September, and am more than thrilled with the results I’ve gotten so far.

Tool Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations for tools I use I’ve found particularly useful as an eBay affiliate:

• Irregardless of the route you’re taking, finding a good niche is a given. I really like Hot Item Finder to find what is actually selling on eBay. I’ve hit on some truly oddball niches using it that have done very well for me so far.
• Some software to pull eBay listings and format ‘em with your affiliate links. Whether it’s BANS or phpBay or any of the other eBay affiliate scripts out there.

Those are really my only indispensables. Now that I’ve gotten into pay-per-click to get traffic to my mini sites, I’ll tack on two more, but if you’re not going into PPC right now, ignore ‘em:

• Keyword Transformer to let me easily set up keyword tracking.
• My membership at Campaign Blast. This site has really kicked me in the pants. I set up 44 mini money sites in around a week recently because of this membership. And will probably put up another 60 in the next.

End of the Day Job?

So, have I made enough to replace the day job yet?

Well, no. At least, not yet. But last month certainly reduced the multiples required to do so!

Seeing results really gets you motivated…

So I set a SMART goal of a cool 100 campaign blasts by this 28th of this month in early August, and what do you know, we’re creeping up on that date. With less than a week to go, I still have about 40 to go. What can I say? It was a lazy September…

That said, I easily have that number of potential campaigns to pick from mostly fleshed out in text files on my thumbdrive. But quite honestly, I may just make these last forty straight to quick eBay niche landing pages. My little experiment with them seems to be going well, with a few winning campaigns in the mix already and covering the experiment’s total ad spend so far. Cut some non-performers, optimize those winners, and I see some great things going forward.

While I got a half dozen done this afternoon, I didn’t get much accomplished on those last 40 tonight. My son insisted we build tunnels with blocks and race tennis balls through them for a couple hours. And who am I to argue?

That, and I left my thumbdrive with all my campaign info in my work PC, so I’m flying blind anyway.

I spent some time today setting up a handful of PPC campaign blasts to my latest group of phpBay mini sites, and in the process realized that what used to be a luxury is rapidly becoming a requirement: multiple monitors.

Here at the work, I have a decent single 19″ LCD monitor, which is wonderful if I’m working in a window or two. But if I get much more complicated than that it gets to be a pain to manage. At home, I have dual 17″ LCDs, which allows me to get quite a bit more done. 4 or 5 windows open at once becomes manageable. But it looks like I’m getting close to the point that a big middle third might not be such a bad idea. Today, while blasting away, this is what I had going on:

• TextPad, my favorite text editor
• the Adwords Editor
• a wonderful little spreadsheet that automagically simplifies the whole Adwords campaign process in Excel (picked up from the ever helpful Campaign Blasts forum)
• Keyword Transformer, an insane time saver if you plan on doing any PPC and would like to actually track anything
• Firefox to randomly check on the keyword landing pages that Keyword Transformer is giving me
• an explorer window or two

Trying to do this at work on that single monitor, at least rapidly, was a bit chaotic. Time spent finding and switching to the app that I wanted definitely took away that flow state I want to get into when I’m batching my way through a process.

Might just be time to do a little shopping when this month’s EPN payment comes in…

If you are running Adsense on any of your sites, you likely recently agreed to some new terms and conditions. And for most, I’ll bet you didn’t actually read through all those terms and conditions, now did you?

One change in particular warrants a little of your attention that I imagine the vast majority of sites are in violation of:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

photo credit: Air Force One

Jensense put together a quick template of a privacy policy that should do the trick. Being that I prefer to automate everything I can, I threw together an even quicker version that it doesn’t even require you to change the domain name in the template for each of your sites. Just upload to your site, put a link to it in your template (maybe call that link ‘Privacy Policy‘?), and you’re done.

If you’d like a copy: Save & rename this file to privacy.php. After all, no need to risk your Adsense account over something that can be remedied this easily!

Not getting much accomplished because of a little internal warfare, aka a heavy winter cold. It’s been ten days or so of this damn thing, but I think we’ve finally got the invaders in retreat.

I’ve decided to temporarily hold off on my grand plans until the fog encasing my mind lifts. After all, I hate to throw money at things that don’t make any sense when I’m thinking straight. But I’ve got quite a number of possibilities in my idea box, so I imagine shortly my domain stable is going to be expanding.

One thing I have been accomplishing is signing up for quite a few affiliate networks. It really is amazing how many different programs are out there. And the differences in payouts on the same programs from affiliate network to affiliate network is definitely something to look into if you are going to get into online marketing in any serious way.

The latest I’ve been messing around with is NetShops, which runs a network of online stores, all with pretty decent payouts (generally the 10-15% range). What I find really interesting is their datafeeds, and how simple they make accessing them. A little experimentation with these on the minisites (as well as the BANS sites) is definitely in order!

What the heck am I rambling about? Just my latest domains:

• Dreaming Vespa Dreams; after all, hasn’t everyone dreamt of wheeling around on a little European scooter, at least once? (In the immortal words of Eddie Izzard) ‘Ciao!’
• Not masculine enough for you? Well, just climb up into your Hunter Stand and get a little primal.
• But it sure can be cold out there this time of the year, so don’t forget to bring along a Cheap Generator to bring the heat (and the game) with you!

With each bit of success I’m adding another domain or two or three. I’ve recently decided that, at least for now, I will not take out any profit on any of the income my sites earn. Instead, I plan to just keep rolling everything beyond expenses into additional domains/niches. Each site seems to add another layer to this endeavor’s income snowball. So as long as I can get the individual sites even marginally profitable, adding more seems to be the smart route.

When I have that 1,000th domain earning it’s shiny quarter day in and day out, well, then I’ll decide what the next step is…

I’ve had a number of email/PM conversations since I started exposing myself my attempts at money making in public looking for my opinions on which route I think is the better to take: the full-fledged Build A Niche Store route or the quick minisite mashup route. My answer, every time, has been both.

THE NICHE STORE ROUTE

A well-executed, SEO’d niche store is a wonderful thing to behold. Steady $2, $3, $10, or even $50 commissions roll in with little or (better yet) no effort on your part. That is, AFTER the initial planning and customizing and SEOing has been done. A converting niche store requires a fair amount of effort up front if it is going to succeed, from keyword research to domain name selection to menu customization to look-and-feel to backlink building to… well, you get the picture. Putting up a straight-out-of-the-box BANS site on a broad, competitive niche and expecting the commissions to roll in is simply wishful thinking. It’s not that BANS development is back-breaking labor by any means, but there definitely is an initial effort investment.

THE MINISITE MASHUP ROUTE

On the other hand, the minisite mashups are great because they are so painless to set up. Do a little basic niche research (consisting primarily in determining if there exists enough products in the market for whatever topic you are looking at), paste a couple handfuls of decent keywords into a text file, upload, and a minisite is born. I do a few more tweaks, such as inserting some stat tracking code and setting up site-specific Adsense channels, because I want to see how much traffic — and from where — each gets. But even with those extra steps, I can still put up a mashup minisite in less time than it takes to steam a batch of rice. Overall, the performance on these mashup minisites is hit or miss. I have a few that paid for themselves – meaning, at least covered the domain registration fee – in less than a week. And I have a few that, if they continue performing the way they are now, I’ll be lucky to have them pay for themselves in a year (which earning just $0.63 a month will do). Most of their earnings come from Adsense, but I’ve also gotten a handful of eBay and Amazon sales as well, and it doesn’t take many of those to get that domain registration fee back!

SO WHY BOTH?

Like I said, I’ve had a surprising level of success with a couple of my mashups, whether from a random sale commission or eBay signup here and there. Nevertheless, the main drawback to the minisite over the fleshed out BANS site remains their earning potential. The award for consistency definitely goes to the BANS sites. I can count on an optimized BANS site converting regularly.

So why not just build niche stores? Because my time is finite. The true benefit of the mashups isn’t necessarily the trickle of money they bring in (though I won’t turn it down!); it’s the information I glean from their traffic. Once they are up and getting noticed by the search engines, noting those that perform gives me a decent indication of which ones will do well as a full blown sites versus those that may not be worth the effort involved. I simply have more ideas than time, so using something like the mashup to help decide where to focus is invaluable.

Oops, I spoke to soon in my last post — I totally overlooked a site I had picked up the day after Christmas: Tankless Bargains, focused on the tankless water heater shopper. So, needless to say, I didn’t make it through the holidays without a fix.

For that matter, I didn’t make it to the weekend either: Fireplace Finds just jumped out at me, and my mind went, ‘Ah, what the hell…‘

More mashing with these two, as I’m waiting until the upcoming release of Build A Niche Store v3.0 until I get back into BANS building. Plus, I’m just having a lot of fun researching niches and keywords and domains right now. As long as I can get them to average 63 cents a month ($7.50 per registration divided by 12) per domain, these sites become technically profitable.

If I can’t even pull that off, well, I’m really not trying…

I made it through the holidays without needing another fix. But what can I say? A new year arrives, the domain acquisition bug strikes again, and a new mashup site appears: Aromatherapy Deals.

Luckily, my New Years resolutions had nothing to say about avoiding picking up more domains. As a matter of fact, I haven’t made any New Years Resolutions at all. And I don’t think I’ll be resolving to do – or, more conventionally, not do anything this year. Instead, I’ll be making a few SMART goals. My mind is still clouded by massive amounts of sugar along with the various customary overblown holiday meals, so it may take me a few days to put pen to paper on those goals. But I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that having fewer domains being monetized in some way or another is not going to be on that list…