articleranks 250x250 December Niche Site Challenge Results!Well in my November results I mentioned that the word to describe November was HECTIC. If at is the case, then the one word I would use to describe December was HOLIDAYS!

December has been a month of relaxing and family, and while I didn’t get a whole lot done on my niche sites – I did see progress, which is a great thing.

So let’s start with the income breakdown and then I will will go into a couple of the exciting (and painful) things that happened in regards to my niche sites in December.

December Niche Site Income

I’ll start off with the money side, because we all know that is what everyone wants to see. I spent the majority of my time working on my survey website – and that shows in the results (so let’s start with that one).

Surveys Niche Site

Total: $99.16

Campers Niche Site

  • $14.29 – Adsense
  • $50.23 – Ebay

Total: $64.52

Greenhouse Niche Site *(Sold Middle Of Month)

  • $8.16 – Adsense
  • $4.08 – Ebay

Total: $12.24

Late Cruises Site

  • $0 – Adsense
  • $0 – Commission Junction
  • $0 – Clickbank

Total: $0

$175.92 – December Niche Site Income!

So, we had another nice increase income from the previous month (Over 50%), and that was with less input – so that is promising).

Read below for the nitty gritty of the month!

Successes, Failures & Thoughts From November

  • Sold My Greenhouse Niche Blog

    I guess the most exciting news is that I sold my niche blog. This was exciting because it in itself was enough to make me 5 times more this month then my niche blogs made last month (I didn’t include the sale price in the figures above because I do not consider that passive income).

  • Created A New Niche Blog

    To keep the ball rolling after the sale of my greenhouse blog, I decided it was time to introduce a new site to my fold. So I spent a bit of time setting up Late Cruise Deals (got an exact match domain), and it is already starting to get some traffic (but no income as of yet).

  • Survey Site Is Improving Nicely!

    My survey niche site came just a few cents short of cracking $100 income for the month – and I am ecstatic with the growth in come that I am receiving from CheckMyStats and am hoping for an increase again this month. It received  401 visits last month so that is close to 25cents a visitor (which is a fantastic return), now I just have to work on increasing the traffic to the site.

    Search engine traffic makes up about 55% of all the traffic (with direct traffic [power of a keyword domain], EzineArticles and StandOutBlogger making up the rest). With my main referring keywords being:

  • Google Is Still Acting Weird For My Campers Niche Site

    Over a month ago I talked about how my Camper Trailers For Sale site had been on a bit of a roller-coaster ride with Google.

    It will be ranking terribly for most of the month, then for a couple of days almost all my pages will shoot to a ranking of 1-3, I will get a fantastic boost of traffic and income – and then they will drop again. The only thing I can put it down to is the amount of clicks I am getting on my Ebay links. Since I am using the eBay RSS feeds, I would get more clicks on my Ebay links, then I did visitors to my site (they obviously would right click each eBay listing and open multiple). While this was great for my eBay commission – it might seem suspicious to Google. So I have culled back the majority of my eBay links this month to see if I can stay ranking when they boost me back to the top again.

Aside from that I had a fantastic Christmas with my family, and just a great time relaxing and spending more time with them.

My Plans For January

Well I can see January taking a similar flow to December, with the first couple of days being quite chilled, and in a couple of hours my wife, 6 month old daughter and I are jumping on a plane to spend 5 days in Sydney on an internet free holiday :).

However, when I get back, I will be jumping straight back into it all.

Now I am not going to go into details on the plans I have for each site (because we still have a bit of packing to do), but I will once again let my Campers Niche sit and settle, and focus on the Surveys and Late Cruises niche blogs.

I have been doing quite a lot of article writing lately (hoping to ramp that up even more) and I just wanted to quickly highlight a couple of great tools that I have been using:

Spinz.me

If you have tried manually spinning articles, it can be hard to think of synonyms for your words as replacements. Spinz.me is a free website that allows you to highlight a word in your article and it will then come up with a selection of great substitutes, that you click and then submit and it adds them to your article.

This is a real time saver if you prefer to manually spin articles. For those who want a more automated method (and not free), then consider a program such as Mass Article Control.

Article Ranks

Then once I have the article spun, I then submit it to ArticleRanks which is has literally hundreds of blogs that are looking for your content (and the benefit is you can have keyword links in the middle or your articles – not just in the footer) and it then drip feeds your article onto the blogs within the category that you choose. The benefit here is that you are getting 2-3 links a day for a couple of weeks – from one article.

I guess it is a little like the Free Traffic System, but a lot easier to work with and allows more links, plus I have had a lot more backlinks show up in Market Samurai because of articles I have submitted using Article Ranks.

Just reminding you that I will be away for the next 5 days, so if you comments do not get approved or replied to – that is why.

Would love to hear how your niche sites are going!