First The Back Story…

In October 2010 I was getting a bit complacent with my online business and decided I needed to really ramp up my workload. To keep myself motivated I set myself a challenge to create a brand new $1000/month niche site income from brand new sites by the end of July 2011.

After a slowish start and quite the rollercoaster ride in the middle, I hit my target a month early and just this last month (July 2011) I have actually doubled it – making $2,000 in July from sites I had created since the start of the challenge.

While I will continue to maintain these websites, I have tossed up the idea of selling my two biggest earning sites from the challenge (about $1,500/month), which would result in a niche house deposit or pay for our move to Canada but soon realised that it would take too big a chunk out of my online earnings to be an option at the moment.

Which Is Why I Plan On Doing It All Again!

So I decided, that before I can consider selling these two sites (both in the same niche, so would sell together), I needed to have a couple more sites that were well on their way to taking their place in my portfolio.

This is why I am kicking myself back into overdrive and firing up a brand new niche site challenge that will hopefully see my with growing, profitable replacements by the time we pack up or lives and move to Canada for 12 months (which is March 2012).

So Whats The Challenge This Time?

I learnt a lot from my last challenge about what works and what doesn’t so I am setting some specific criteria to the challenge this time that will keep me focused and give me the best chance of achieving my goal again.

Here is what I am going to achieve:

• Create A $500/Month Niche Site Income From New Sites By March  7, 2012.
  

  Once again 8 months, but this time I have halved the target monthly income. I did this because my focus will be on building premium niche sites with a huge focus on quality over quantity. They will be build slower  than usual but with a focus on long term profit. This means that the focus will be on content before profit and while I may hit it lucky and reach my target monthly income (TMI) before March, if I do then I will just adjust my TMI higher.

• Achieved By 4 Sites Within The Same Broad Niche (Networking)
  

  A couple of things that I learnt from my last challenge was that to many sites spreads your focus to wide and also having a couple of sites in the same niche can be very beneficial for both interlinking and directing hungry visitors to more information. This is why I have limited this challenge to just 4 websites, within the same niche – and I won’t be buying any new domains until the challenge in completed.The domains were purchased earlier this week and I am currently getting the first one installed and themed up (ready for content).

• Start Building Next Site After Previous Site Is At Least 1 Month Old And Getting 100+ Search Visitors A Month

  I really struggle with working on multiple sites at one time, so when I have a couple of sites to work on, I like to spend a couple of days to a week on one site and then alternate my work onto another site (giving the first site a chance to find it’s feet in Google and just have a rest).So to make sure that each of the 4 new sites have a solid head start, I will work on one site at a time, get them ranking, begin the trickle of search engine visitors (minimum of 100/month), before I give it a chance to settle by moving on to set up my next site.

• Focused On Clickbank & Adsense For Income

  While my online income has really started to diversify between a growing number of affiliate networks, one that I have never really been able to master is Clickbank. Sure I get a $500 check from them every 3-4 months, but I’ve always had the goal in my head to see a figure like that monthly from then, so I was excited when I saw a lot of great products in their marketplace that were related the niche I was targeting.So I have decided to put a big focus on Clickbank for this challenge, but will also be adding my new best friend (Adsense) to these sites as well. 

  $500/month works out to about $17/day, so I either need a Clickbank sale a day or about 34 Adsense clicks (at 50c/click – guess). Hopefully with both networks it will make the goal a little easier.

Follow My Journey…

Over the next 8 Months, I am planning on doing regular monthly updates on traffic/income as well as hopefully sharing some juicy posts on some of the things I am learning along the way that will help you with your niche sites.

So if you want to keep up to date with what I am doing you can:

• Subscribe To StandOutBlogger By RSS
• Follow Me On Twitter
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Who Is CheckMyStats?

CheckMyStats is one of Australia’s leading affiliate networks, and before you instantly turn off because you are not Australian, they host a large range of affiliate offers for Australia, US and UK markets as well as other offers for a worldwide audience.

Currently with over 180 different offers for you to promote, their focus in on CPA leads, where you get paid for each person you refer who signs up for an offer.

The benefit for US affiliates in promoting offers from CheckMyStats is the strong Australian dollar (which means extra money in your pocket when it get’s converted into US$.

How I Use CheckMyStats

Currently I use CheckMyStats almost exclusively for my online surveys for money site.

If you have been following my niche site challenge, then you will have seen me mention this CPA affiliate network and seen my monthly income increasing from them each month.

Starting with $35 in November 2010, last month in May 2011 I made $210 through CheckMyStats.

This is solely through banner ads and within-post links. (You will notice the my site now has an email list – I have been using a different affiliate network for the list to compare conversion).

What Type Of Offers Do They Have?

As I mentioned earlier, there focus is in CPA offers, but they do have a few %/sale and CPC offers as well.

A few of the popular types of offers are:

• Paid Survey Companies
• Freebies
• Daily Deal Sites

I would estimate that about 60%+ of their offers would be able to be categorised in one of the above categories (all seem to offer $0.50 and $3.50/lead), but they do also have dating, betting, accommodation and a large range of other offers.

What About Payments?

When I first started using CheckMyStats each month I would receive a hand written check (which was a nice feel), but a couple of months ago I was asked if I could get paid via Paypal – which is how I have been paid for the last couple of months.

Their website states that they pay via Check, Direct Deposit or Paypal, but for international affiliates I am guessing Paypal would be the best option.

They pay on the 20th of each month (as long as your affiliate balance is over $50 (on a max 30 day term).

And here is something that I like:

Payment Assurance – We ensure Merchants place a deposit into their account so you receive commission payments in a timely manner.

My Final Thoughts On CheckMyStats…

My experience with them has honestly been fantastic. It is not one of my biggest earners, but they always pay on time and their communication is fantastic.

They constantly are sending my updates on the latest offers and rate increases, and whenever something is happening with an offer I am promoting (such as it being pulled), I always get an email letting me know.

So if you are looking for a CPA network then I do recommend you check out CheckMyStats and at least see if they have any offers suited towards your sites.

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!

First of all to my Australian readers, Happy Australia Day! I spent my morning (2:30am) watching our national football (soccer) team smash it’s way into the Asian Cup with a 6-0 win over Uzbekistan.

As a special Australia Day promotion, Zip Hosting (the company I buy my Australian Domains through – Formerly Hostess.com.au) is having a fantastic sale of their domains – 50% off. So I bought 4 fantastic domains and I plan on rolling them all out as I get some time.

However, today I wanted to touch on a topic that I have wondered about for a while:

Does Google Adsense On A Brand New Blog Affect Indexing And Ranking?

Now I’ve done a Google search trying to find the answer – but got conflicting answers. So what I have decided to do is test it out for myself. Two brand new domains. Two different niches. Two different strategies.

Here Is My Plan To Find Out!

I figured that the best way to test out this question is to take two brand new domains build them at the same speed, market them with the same effort – but one would be ad free and the other would start with Google Adsense and Clickbank products from the start.

I will keep the first site ad free for the first couple of months as it get’s indexed and starts to rank – and we will see if having ad’s on your new niche sites affects their ranking.

Let’s Introduce The Contending Sites:

Now I can’t tell you the exact domain names quite yet (I will introduce them without links later), because I want this test to be totally organic. But I can give you an overview of the site, the niche, my plans and keyword research info.

Both of these sites are (.net.au) domains, targeted at the Australian search market.

• Contender 1 (With Ads)

  Niche: Cruises
  Found a fantastic keyword domain that relates perfectly to a couple of Clickbank products. The added benefit here is that once this little test is over, I can link it with my Late Cruise Deals site.

  Keyword Research
  I got an exact keyword match domain for a keyword that get’s 95 exact Australian searches a day (according to Market Samurai), and here is an image of the top 10 competition for the keyword ( the red arrow is the .com.au keyword match)

  So a little bit of competition, but if another exact match can get on the first page with just 7 back links – I would think I could get on their too.

  Ad Types
  Now I already have one 300×250 Adsense unit up, testing a new layout/placement. And as well as that I have a clickbank banner in the sidebar and at the bottom of the page.

• Contender 2 (Ad Free)

  Niche: Mining
  Mining is big business in Australia (making up 8% of the GDP). So I found a two fantastic domains in the mining niche and one of them I will be using for this case study.

  Keyword Research
  I got another exact keyword match domain and this keyword get’s 145exact Australian searches a day, and here’s the image of the top 10 competition for the keyword. The red arrow is the .com.au keyword match and the second spot is the ‘Hello World’ post for the same website!

  

  I am loving the first two columns – basically none have a domain age and 70% have a pagerank of 2 or less. So I can’t wait to start ranking for this keyword.

  Ad Types
  This is my ad free niche site. So The focus is going to be on the content and taking two months to build the traffic.

  My ultimate goal for monetizing this site is private ad sales, Adsense and an ebook – but that will happen after this case study is over.

Why Would Advertising Effect Indexing And Ranking?

Now it may seem silly to think that advertising could effect something like ranking – there are a couple of reasons that I would like to put forward.

1. Google Sees You As A Spam Blog

   Now this one is a silly, but I’ve always wondered if when Google first indexes a site and already finds Adsense on it – they consider it a ‘made for adsense’ (MFA) site and give it less weight.

2. Affects Analytic Stats Negatively

   Your first couple of months are important. Since you will probably have quite low traffic, you need Google to know that it is quality traffic.

   If people are clicking through your ad’s without digging deeper into your site first, then they are lowering your ‘pages per visit’, and as well as that, a lot of people are turned off by ads and will leave immediately. While this may only be a small percentage of visitors, in the beginning with your low traffic – it could significantly affect your ‘time on site’. Both of which could possibly have a negative impact on your ranking.

3. Lower Click Through With Google Preview

   With Google’s instant preview design and layout is going to be a lot more important. I have found myself using it a couple of times (to weed out the spammy sites), and always looks for sites that have a lot of comments and limited ads. I am sure that once you start ranking then Google takes into account the amount of clicks (or lack thereof) that your site get’s compared to the sites above and below.

What Do You Think?

I’d love to know your opinion on this question.

Do you think that ads (especially Google Adsense) has an impact on the indexing and ranking of new sites?

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FranchiseBuzz is an Australian blog that I started late last year, worked for a couple of months and it grabbed some nice search positions and hasn’t had a new post in a couple of months – yet it has still be bringing in consistent income on a monthly basis.

Now since about February it is comfortably been making about $100 a month through Google Adsense. I had a very ugly theme with a lot of ad’s – but it was converting well.

$100 was nice, but at less than 5% of my total online income – I wanted more.

What I Did To Increase Blog Profit By 50%

1. Changed from the BlueSense WordPress theme to a much cleaner Librio theme (which was inspired by Mac OS X Leopard).

2. Placed a simple Clickbank review at the top and bottom of each post.

I spent a lot of time browsing the Clickbank marketplace to find what I thought would be the perfect product for the target audience and seems I was right with 4 sales in the last month.

So one month on from implimenting these simple changes this blog is now making:

• Adsense: $61
• Clickbank: $103

I just wanted to show why we need to be constantly be tweaking our blogs for maximum profit! There is still more tweaking to be done with this blog but I am happy with a $150 a month for a blog that I don’t post to any more.

Question:

What simple things have you implemented on your blog to see a great result?

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!