Kirsty
Fri 12 Jan 2007
Hey guys,
It’s been ages since I’ve updated on my progress but it seems like a lot has happened lately. December was a great month with a couple of discoveries - Linkworth and selling text links directly. I sold one Linkworth link in December for $20/month (before the %25 cut) and decided to up my price to $30 and just got an email today saying I’ve sold another.
Selling links directly has helped me rake it in over the past few weeks. It’s great motivation to get back to basics by focusing on Travoholic.com, my main site with the best content, most traffic and highest PR that is therefore the most appealling to people looking to buy links.
Adsense was under $100 yet again for December but has picked up loads in January and if I don’t finally break that $100 mark this month I’ll be surprised. Plus I’ve sold a couple of t-shirts! My niche site http://www.waitangidaylondon.com which I built for an event coming up on February 3rd has let me down severely in the Adsense and affiliate departments (despite getting pretty good traffic and pageviews of 150+ and 400+ daily respectively) but I’ve managed to offload a couple shirts in a couple days for a whopping $6 in profit. Not much but it’s always nice to get that first sale to know a program actually works!
Speaking of which… I bought some travel insurance via an affiliate link (through Clix Galore) on one of my sites and have yet to see any commission reported. That’s a bit of a concern, especially since the people at the insurance company have been pretty slack at getting back to me. Oh and one more thing… I just realised last week that my Hostelworld.com affiliate program was a bit wonky making bookings through my site impossible. It’s fixed now and has never been a major earner but it’s still frustrating. I’m up to about $170 with them at the moment too so every sale, no matter how small or few and far between, will push me towards the $200 payout and losing two months sucks big ones.
That’s all for now,
Kirsty
January 12th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Hi Kirsty
Your sites look really smart and are simple to get round, but you might want to look at ways to promote interactivity.
If there is a way for a comment form to be placed at the foot of articles that would be a smart move.
Not only will people pass on tips to others, that you don’t have to find, it increases the amount of text for search engines to get their teeth into.
Also people write comments using phrases that are similar to those they would use in search engines - so the two neatly dove tail.
And ultimately it is free words for your site, just like I’ve done here.
Any questions just shout.
Craig
January 12th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
It is nice to hear your recent success. I think you just need to be both patient and persistent.
January 16th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Thanks for the comments. Craig, I totally agree with you that my site is the type that would be well suited to accepting comments and having a bit more interactivity. The comment thing is something that I’ve had on my mind for awhile but the problem is that I’ve got 1000+ pages and they’re all .htm files. I’m trying to solve a glitch that will allow me to process those pages at .php and then add the code to each page. Or one day I might stick the whole site into a CMS like Joomla but that’s a scary though since I have no idea what I’m doing. So for now I’ll keep adding content myself and hope for the best! Cheers.