Why do I share my earnings?

I personally enjoy finding out how others are doing with their niche sites, and so why not share how I’m doing? Perhaps if this was my full-time income and a full-time business then I may be a bit more reserved about sharing these details but for the moment there’s no harm. I also like to think that visitors to this site enjoy reading about those who earn a very modest income as well as those who are earning tens of thousands each month.

How much did I earn?

This month has been a great month and I’ve been able to diversify my income with earnings from Amazon Associates, the affiliate scheme run by Amazon. AdSense has yet again been my main earner and it’s great to see those sites I created 9 months ago coming into their own with very little work from myself for the past couple of months. I have seen some of the smaller sites tail off though and I will need to put more work into them if I want to get them earning again.

As you can see I’m almost back to my August peak for AdSense income and I think the Panda update in September did me a favour by clarifying my way of creating sites. I’ve been focusing on producing good content and have also done minimal backlinking, so my sites are very much focusing on organic SEO. Perhaps this has effected some of my smaller sites, but I’m happy with it that way.

When you add the Amazon income of £42.92 to the £387.32 from AdSense then my grand total for the month is £430.24 ($676.77) which is my highest total yet! Looking at the graph below you can see that I’ve gradually emerged from my massive dip and hopefully this will continue, but I know I’ve still got more work to do and really need to get some more profitable sites up and running to up this income as I’m probably at income saturation for several sites. I’m too well aware though that another Google update could come along and hurt my earnings and so don’t take anything for granted. So the name of the game is diversifying my income streams.

Focusing on affiliates over AdSense

I’ve enjoyed making AdSense sites but have been focusing on affiliate sites using Amazon Associates and Affiliate Window. I’ve mentioned previously how the sites I make for these are slightly different from AdSense monetised ones and so it took a little effort to get my head around that, but I think I’m on the right track. People who get onto my affiliate sites are already in the mood to buy so if I can get them onto Amazon via my affiliate links then I can earn a 5% cut of whatever they buy which if done right is much more than I would’ve got for an AdSense click. I am well aware that the bulk of my earnings are still from AdSense and there are still sites that work better with AdSense so perhaps I should shift some of my focus back.

One thing I did learn is that there is always smallprint, and Amazon.co.uk referral fees are capped at £7 per item and so it’s not worth marketing products over £140. A friend of mine bought 4 expensive speakers for a total of £1100 through one of my sites I’d been showing him, and instead of getting £55 commission I got £28, which is still good but not as great as I was expecting but perhaps I’m just being picky. Obviously I won’t be having this ‘extra income’ again and so I will be pushing to get more organic Amazon income next month.

The good thing I’ve noticed about affiliate sites is that even with less traffic I can still get sales as visitors are in the ‘buying mood’, where as if the sites were using AdSense I would expect far less clicks and income, so think about how you monetise your sites and what would work best. Some of my sites have solely AdSense, some have solely Amazon, and I’ve even been able to put some Amazon affiliate links on my sites that were already doing well with AdSense. Just because you’re doing well with AdSense doesn’t mean you can’t do even better by shifting some focus onto affiliate marketing.

Is this passive income?

‘Passive Income’ is used a lot for those who run PPC/Affiliate websites and after 9 months of this I can definitely confirm that it is not passive, and to say so takes away a lot of the hard work we do. It definitely takes work to do the following:

• Keyword Research
• Creating websites
• Creating content
• Ranking
• Selling

All these take time and effort and for someone like me who has a day job too this means working on evenings, weekends, etc.

The only thing remotely passive is getting clicks and sales. I love waking up in the morning and seeing that people have been clicking away or buying through my affiliate links and seeing that money come in doesn’t seem to equate with the work I’ve previously put in. Obviously if I wasn’t making anything then I would be a bit narked but money is trickling through and I suppose I can see that some of my sites are moving towards that ‘passive’ status where all the hard work has been done and they are on auto pilot. They are still getting good clicks and as the domains age that will hopefully get better. OK, so I do need to keep and eye on the sites but I have a couple that I can leave alone now so I can focus on newer sites.

I guess that means that some of my income in passively earned but only after lots of hard work if that makes any sense.

How have you done this month? Please leave a comment and let me know as I love hearing how others are getting on.

Google AdSense

I’ve been using Google AdSense as my main source of revenue since I started buiding niche sites in May 2011 and as you can see from my Income Reports I’ve been doing okay and averaging around £200 ($306) a month with a total income of £1642.32 ($2,559.98) for 2011. Compared to some other internet marketers this isn’t a huge sum but it is certainly something and I think it shows that I can make money from AdSense and can create sites that will get people clicking.

The sites I create often provide a user with information, usually for a service, and visitors will be tempted to find out more from the adverts on my sites. An example could be if I set up a site about ‘dog grooming’, I would explain what it is, how much it costs, etc and then AdSense adverts would also be on the site hopefully featuring dog grooming services near the visitors location. They will click on these links to find out more and I don’t really need to sell the link to that person. They found out enough information from my site and then instead of going back to Google and searching for local dog groomers they will click on the handy links on my site.

What I have noticed is that for an AdSense monetised site to be successful you need to have good traffic as it really is a numbers game. You cannot control what the visitors do once they are on your site and ultimately your revenue depends on the AdSense advertisers for a variety of reasons:

• Cost Per Click (CPC) – Although you will have targeted keywords for your site with a certain average cost-per-click, advertisers budgets do vary and if high payers drop out you will notice this and lower CPC ads will appear on your site. You may still get the same amount of clicks but you will be earning less.
• Click Through Rate (CTR) – You will have created a site with the aim of giving people enough information for them to want to find out more by clicking AdSense adverts on your site. If the adverts are poorly created by the advertisers or don’t give the visitors a call to action  or motivate them then they may not click them. In the worst case there could be no one advertising dog related products and you get zero clicks.

At the end of the day you have virtually no control over the adverts appearing on your site (emphasis on virtually) as this lies with Google and their advertisers and so I would say that you will need to play the percentages to guarantee an income from Google AdSense. Even if you do have a low CPC and low CTR, a higher volume of visitors will mean a higher income. Of course if you choose the right keywords, have a high CPC and nail your CTR then more visitors will mean great income for you.

Amazon Associates

With Amazon Associates I have had to change my strategy for creating websites as the focus is completely different for promoting physical products. When you create an Amazon affiliate site you need to realise that the visitor is probably in a buying mood and if you can get them onto your site then you will be on your way to making a sale.

With an Amazon Associate site you do not get revenue for people simply clicking links. If you get people to the Amazon site via your site then a cookie will be placed on the visitors browser for 24 hours, and if they buy anything from Amazon in that time, then you will get a basic 5% commission of the cost of that product with the commission percentage rising depending on the amount of products sold e.g if you sell 21 items in a month your commission rate goes up to 5.5%.

When I create this type of site I am not really creating a ‘niche site’ with highly researched information but more usually writing product reviews, product comparisons, etc and inserting links all pointing towards the specific product page on Amazon using a personalised affiliate link. I put these links in text like ‘find out more about this product’ leading the visitor to Amazon and hopefully a sale.

With Amazon you have more control over CPC and CTR, although those are not strictly terms applicable with it, and perhaps we should add ‘coversion rate’ into the mix.

• CPC – There is no cost per click with Amazon, but if the site visitor is in a buying mood and I am promoting a high-price item of £100 then my CPC could be 5% of that meaning £5 commission. This is certainly higher than most clicks on AdSense, but obviously it will involve 2 clicks from the user, one from my site to Amazon, and then one to ‘buy’.
• CTR/Conversion Rate- I have found that if I get a visitor to click through to Amazon then my sales conversion on my Affiliate links are at least 10%, meaning 1 in 10 people I send to Amazon will buy something which is pretty good I think and certainly much better than the CTR with AdSense.

My new amazon site has had 112 visits in 3 weeks, and from that I have had 65 affiliate link clicks through to Amazon and have made 9 sales of products totalling £10.66 commission. I’ve not had a huge amount of visitors but I am converting well and the income is much higher than if I had an AdSense site with only 112 visits.

The downside to all this is that SEO is harder for these tyes of sites than a niche Adsense site as you are producing less unique content and there is more competition so you have do work harder to differentiate your site from large shopping sites who are also selling these products. Focus on one type of item for your site and then don’t just stick to reviews, but also include  things like Top 10 lists, which will mean at least 10 affiliate links, and product comparisons e.g Xbox versus PS3 where you can create more content for your site, more keywords, more backlinks, etc which is all good for SEO. Don’t be content with just copying product reviews from Amazon as this will rank you nowhere and don’t waste money on plugins that will promise a fully-populated affiliate site as they will do nothing unless you have original content.

Conclusion – which is best?

I believe there is no right or wrong choice between Google AdSense and Amazon Associates as it all depends on the type of site you are creating. Are you providing information and a service or are you promoting a physical product?

• Information/Service – Monetise your site using AdSense and as long as you can get enough visitors and have done your research you will earn money. With AdSense you need visitors but do not need to sell to the visitor and so you can put an advert on any page and you will probably get some clicks. More visitors means more revenue though and a poorly researched niche will mean only earning pennies.
• Physical Product – If you are creating a site promoting a physical product then you will need to rank highly in the SERPS, but you can earn more per visitor depending on the products you are promoting and you will need fewer visitors to make a sale as they are already in the buying mood.

I would also add that keyword research for an affiliate site is easier than for a niche site as you can select a product you want to sell e.g ‘hairdryers’, put it into Google Keywords Tool, and then find out related searches and try and get a domain from that, where as for niche sites you have to come up with the initial topic first which is one of the hardest parts.

The best thing you can do is utilise both AdSense and Amazon and create a variety of different sites so you have a diverse income stream. This revenue is not cast in stone and many people have been affected by only focusing on one method. AdSense users have had their accounts blocked (for a variety of reasons) and US users have had their Amazon Associate accounts blocked due to state tax laws, and in both in both cases income dropped to zero. If you can spread yourself out you may still get hit but these actions, but you can lessen the blow by having other income streams.

Most of my niche sites monetised through AdSense are promoting services etc and so moving onto sites that promote a physical product has been a change and initially I didn’t quite get it. My AdSense sites don’t require me to be a salesman. I write content, insert my Ad code and Google does the rest, but with Amazon products I need to promote the products well enough for people to not only click on the link but also make a purchase.

I’m happy to say that I made my first sale yesterday and will be receiving 5% of a £42.99 product which works out as £2.15 income. It’s not a massive amount but it’s still nice to know that someone out there appreciated my recommendation and bought that item and hopefully once I build up traffic I will get more sales. With more sales also comes a better percentage too.

As I mentioned earlier I found the transition from AdSense sites to Amazon sites quite hard and have made a couple of dud sites where my lack of focus and understanding of affiliate sales meant they haven’t succeeded, but I decided to purchase Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course over the Christmas break to try and remedy that and I believe it was a great decision. I’ve read Chris’ blog for quite a while now so I know how successful he has been and was happy to make this investment.

Niche Profit Course provides step-by-step instructions in video format modules so you can build your own site from scratch.

I’ve been reporting on my income reports every month so I’ll continue this with a short report below and then move onto 2011 as a whole.

December Income Report

I’ll admit that December wasn’t a very productive month for me with regards to working on my AdSense sites but I’m happy to say that it didn’t effect them and my earnings grew again this month to £208.55 ($324.97) up from £149.29 ($234.25) in November. I did however spend more time on Amazon affiliate sites with a view to diversifying my income but earnings from these remain at virtually zero as I’ve found I need to put more effort as it’s not as simple as relying on clicks as I need to get visitors to actually want to buy a physical product. To remedy this I have enrolled in Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course and found it a really useful way of focusing on what’s important and it also came with the free bonus Azon Theme and that is well worth the money on it’s own as it’s especially tailored to making Amazon affilaite sites. If you don’t want to pay for the course then download the free Beginners Guide. I’m 100% confident I will make money using Amazon and I believe it will be worth the effort in the long run as another alternative to AdSense.

2011 Income Report

From something which started out as an experiment I think I’ve done quite well in my first 8 months and I believe I’ve learned quite a lot from keyword research to backlinking strategies. I’ve also earned a bit of money along the way too. I have earned this from making websites which target specific low competition keywords I’ve researched where I believe I can make a website which will not only provide useful information but which will also entice visitors to click on the adverts provided by Google AdSense.

I struck it lucky in my first few months and made an amazing start and couldn’t quite believe the success I was having but pride comes before a fall and the September/October Panda updates hit me hard and made me realise that I needed to improve the quality of my content and my backlinks as the methods I’d used were great for the short term, writing lots of content (but poor quality) and creating lots of links (but only focusing on one keyword), but these were not great for the long term with regards to the updates to Google’s algorithm. October was my lowest point with only £87.26 in earnings but the changes I’ve made as well as adding more sites to my portfolio have turned things around and it’s looks like I’m on my way back up (fingers crossed).

So in 8 months my earning from my niche sites have totalled £1642.32 or $2,559.98 which is great as this has all been earned in my spare time as I already work a 9-5 job and so this is on top of my salary and works out at an average of £200 extra earnings each month. It’s worth noting that this figure doesn’t include any of my outgoings such as hosting, domain purchases, etc and most importantly tax, which I will have to pay next January for the current financial year I am in, so for a true figure I should probably take a third off of these earnings to get a realistic bankable ‘profit’. I know some people don’t declare their online earnings but I am an honest fellow and hope that I can earn a lot more through my niche sites.

Roundup of sites I’ve built

The types of site I’ve built all come down to the keyword research I’ve put in at the beginning and what I’m aiming for. Some keywords have massive potential with a large amount of searches and a high cost-per-click (CPC), whilst others have fewer searches but less competition and I like to try and mix it up and have some variety with the sites I choose. I’m at a stage now where I have 3 different types of sites:

1. Sites that virtually manage themselves and have good regular earnings (30%)
   
2. Sites that need further development but have potential (45%)
3. Sites that are dormant with no traffic (25%)

Choosing which niche to target is not an exact science and you cannot expect to have a 100% success rate, and I would say that I’m happy with the percentages above which are rough estimates. I have bought some domains which have a good potential but I will admit that I have bought some on a whim which were very poor choices with minimal research, but the saving grace is that I usually only buy .uk extensions which cost less than £3 a year so these are quite cheap mistakes and with all my domain purchases they are low risk gambles.

I have been guilty of starting work on new new sites before I’ve finished working on the previous site, and I think that has been a downfall this year as I believe some of the type-2 sites with potential could have made me some money with a little bit more work, but they are not wasted as I can go back to them anytime and improve them. Most of them currently use the CTR Theme which is easy to install and configure with AdSense and although they have very little content, they are online, getting a few clicks, and will someday move up to type-1 sites.

Overall though I’m glad that I have sites that are now making money with very little effort as this was the aim at the start of the year when I first heard the phrase ‘passive income’.

Aims for 2012

It’s always nice to have targets so here’s what I would like to achieve in 2012:

• Earn £500 in a month – This will mean more than doubling my income but is definitely achievable and is something that I would ideally like to exceed!
• Put 100% effort into each site I make – I am guilty of moving onto a new sites before I’ve finished the current one I’m working on, so my aim is to finish the job I started.
• Earn £100 a month in Amazon affiliate fees. I currently earn zero from this scheme but I’m making new sites and would like to reach this level to make it worthwhile.
• Start saving my income – I’ve mentioned that I will need to pay my taxes at the end of the year so I need to start saving at least 30% of the payments I receive and put it in a separate bank account.

How did you do?

I know quite a few people who are following the same journey as me so how did you do and what are your aims for 2012?

Speak soon

I have a couple of domains that I was hoping to use for affiliate sites but I’m not too sure if they will work as I probably underestimated the competition in those niches, but the fact is that I’ll keep them going with some content on and see what happens. Luckily I am able to analyse the traffic they do get using free Google Webmaster Tools, and I can see that although I’m not ranking well for the main keyword, a few other keywords have popped up which I’m ranking well for and perhaps this could be an area I could focus on.

Counting my eggs affiliates before they’ve hatched

I guess my main problem with the affiliate sites is that I’m focusing on monetising them and embedding affiliate links before I’ve even done the hard work of getting the sites ranked. I’m sure that if I did things the other way around then more visitors would equal more clicks. It’s simple logic but I guess that eluded me in what is a new concept of niche site. It’s a simple and naive thing to do, just making a site and expecting visitors. So it’s back to basics for my affiliate sites, and a lesson not to get too ahead of myself.

Do you have any tips for making affiliate sites? What works best? Reviews? Articles? Recommendations? What works for you?

When conducting research for my niche sites I will look for keywords with a certain number of searches and a reasonably good cost-per-click value for the AdSense ads I will be placing on the site (I use the free Google Keyword Tool for this) and once I’ve found what I like I will built a site around those keywords.

How AdSense is meant to work for niche sites

These are niche and very specific sites so the people who visit my sites are not randomly surfing but actually searching for information on the niche I’m covering and as such I’m hoping that once they’re on my site they may decide to click on an AdSense advert which will be relevant to the niche and earn me some money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work, and that’s what I love about AdSense. If I’m searching for ‘cheap laptops’ then you can be sure that AdSense will display adverts for laptops, but this isn’t always the case as AdSense is a little smarter than that and has knowledge of all the other sites you have been visiting so if you visit my niche site on ‘cheap laptops’ you may actually be served with adverts that are completely irrelevant. An example is that when I use my computer after my fiance has then I will find my searches are littered with AdSense adverts for ‘shoes’ instead of those for ‘cheap laptops’ because Google uses Interest-Based advertising as well as Contextual advertising to determine what adverts to show me.

Why I turned off Interest-based Ads

To me it makes perfect sense to turn off interest-based advertising and only use contextual advertising on my niche sites as the whole method of choosing keywords based on visitor numbers and Cost-per-Click (CPC) and then creating a relevant website relies on that website serving ads related to that niche and the keywords I chose. It makes sense doesn’t it?

By looking at my Performance Reports>Targeting Types I can see that one of my sites does earn some money from interest-based ads but the majority of my sites earn nothing from interest-based and all their money from contextual, but the fact is that Google is still placing the interest-based ads on my site which means I am losing out on potential clicks to contextual ads which are not being shown.

The one benefit of interest-based ads to note is that the average CPC is often slightly higher than that of contextual ads but the CTR is half of what it is for contextual ads, so they are getting far less clicks which means the higher CPC counts for nothing.

You may want to check your own reports before disabling interest-based ads, and please realise that this setting will come into effect for your whole AdSense account and therefore all the ads no matter what sites they are on.

To opt out of interest-based ads do the following:

1. Sign in to your AdSense account.
2. Visit the Allow & block ads tab.
3. In the sidebar, choose Advanced settings.
4. Click the checkbox next to the Interest-Based Ads Preference so that it reads “Ads based on user interest categories are not allowed to show.”

By doing this and opting out you will decrease the number of ads competing to appear on your website and so if you’ve picked a niche with very few advertisers then you may decrease your potential earnings and few ads will be shown. This is a possibility but if you’ve done your research correctly then you should be fine.

Monitoring the changes

I think it’s important to keep an eye on your earnings along with clicks and pageviews to ensure that your sites are not effected by this change, but it’s easy enough to opt back in if you are adversely effected by only showing contextual ads. I only made this change yesterday but will let this run for at least the rest of the month to see what effect it has but I have a firm believe that it can only be beneficial and should increase my earnings and the number of clicks.

Could this one change earn you more money?

I’m not a super blogger yet and definitely not making a living from my niche sites but I am doing my best to make money in my spare time, after doing a full day’s work, and hoping that each month’s income brings me closer to being able to earn a decent income online. I know some people will look at these reports and think that my earnings are peanuts but I know others who appreciate seeing these reports as they show what an average Joe is earning and that’s it’s not all about getting rich quick.

What happened in November

After a poor October I stepped up a gear putting more effort into my current niche sites and made some big steps towards my aim to have 10 sites up and running by New Year. In fact I can reveal that I have 9 sites now which is pretty cool and I’m already seeing the benefits of having more sites. As I mentioned in my last post a couple of these might be duds and a couple have very little content at the moment, but that’s to be expected, but more sites means more chances at being a success.

A couple of these sites are affiliate sites, providing reviews and affiliate links to products available on Amazon, and this is an effort to diversify my income away from solely Google AdSense. This is an important lesson for everyone. Just as you shouldn’t rely on just one site for your income, you shouldn’t rely on just one income stream, as you can leave yourself vulnerable. What is Google went bust? Okay that’s unlikely but what if your AdSense account was deactivated? It sometimes doesn’t take much to fall foul of Google’s rules, so look at other ways to monetise your sites.

I think that getting these affiliate sites to rank and start earning will be a lot harder than with traditional niche sites, but it’s another experiment and I’m enjoying learning new things. I will also be using social media to promote these sites so there will be less reliance on search engines and more reliance on other means of promotion including guest posts.

The Numbers

In previous reports I’ve given a site by site breakdown detailing how much each of my sites have earned but now that I’m increasing the number of sites it’s not really feasible to keep doing this. Another factor is that I don’t really want to focus on individual sites anymore but rather on what the grand total income is and how far away I am from my goal of making a decent living online.

Last month was my lowest full earning month earning £87.26 (US$139.06) and saw a definite drop from my peak earning months, but I’m happy to say I’ve bumped my earnings back up thanks to improvements to a couple of my sites which has resulted in a better CTR (Click Through Rate) as well as  a new site that started earning immediately.

November 2011 Income = £149.29 (US$234.25)

It’s definitely a move back in the right direction and I’m hoping that in a few months I’ll be back to what I was earning in the summer months.

Plans for December

I’m going to be mainly concentrating on my affiliate sites this month as well as keeping my other sites ticking along. I suppose that’s pretty obvious stuff, but I’m also planning to put together a spreadsheet of my sites so I can keep better track of them and how they are performing. At the moment I just have it all in my head which was fine when I had one or two sites but now I’m getting more I really should keep a record of earnings, links, rankings, etc taking a little bit of the guesswork out of my work. Do any of you use spreadsheets like this?

Plans for the future

Yesterday in the UK we had union strikes about pensions, changes to working conditions, and the increase in the age of statutory retirement, which coupled along with inflation, low wages, etc means that the future isn’t very bright for a lot of us. It’s my 31st birthday on Saturday and at the current rate I will probably have another 40 years of working before I can retire and get a state pension which will probably be very little indeed. I’ve known for a while that I will need to make my own plans for the future, and save for a very rainy day, and that is why I’m even more determined to do my best to earn any extra income I can and at the moment that is from these niche sites and the endless possibility they provide. I can dream can’t I?

The need to diversify

I failed because I depended on one site and one method of income generation, and all the reading I have since made have told me the need to diversify to ensure that I’m less effected my any bumps and slip-ups that come along the way. Pro bloggers like Spencer Haws freely admit to having hundreds of sites, and building up to 30 new sites a month, which is only possible by hiring VA’s (Virtual Assistants), so I’m not going to be making that many sites but I’m still aiming to have at least 10 sites up and running by the New Year.

Why do some sites fail?

The fact is that not all of these sites will be successes, some will hopefully do well, some will do okay, and some will earn absolutely no money at all. There are plenty of external factors that effect the success of a site so that in some cases no matter how much effort you put your site will sometimes be a failure. Some of these include:

• Poor Keyword – If you didn’t research properly then you could be doomed for failure from the start building a site that no one has any interest in.
• Low Advertiser Bids – If you rely on AdSense then your site will only earn money if advertisers are paying and bidding on the keyword you are promoting. If a good paying advertisers drops out of the AdWords scheme then you could see your profits drop.
• Google Ranking – The truth is that initially you will rely on Google for 99% of your traffic. If Google doesn’t like your site then you are doomed.
• Competition – You may aim for #1 but that isn’t always a possibility. If you are in a competitive niche then ranking on the 5th page of Google isn’t going to get you many visitors.

Most of these come down to the initial keyword research you put into your chosen niche and so I find this the hardest part to do and the success of your site will depend on this. Don’t be too afraid of making mistakes though as this is still more of an art than a science.

Knowing when to quit

I got some good advice from Thomas Sinfield in a comment on my post 1 site or 10 sites? Decisions to be made:

What I tend to do is do the research on a heap of niches, pick a couple and work on them:

1. if I get average results I leave them to settle and focus on new sites
2. if they produce good results I keep working on them while starting new sites
3. if they produce great results I make them a focus and limit my time on new sites.

Not all sites are going to be big hits, even if they seem to all have similar research info. By building many small sites, it allows you to test 10 niches and see which ones naturally take off.

You can then either sell off the smaller sites, or keep them as littler earners.

It’s good advice and this is where knowing when to quit comes in. Once you’ve got some sites set up then it’s usually just a case of waiting to see how how they fare in terms of traffic and AdSense earnings. Your site may starting earning in weeks or it could take months to get off the ground and get indexed, but sometimes a site will do nothing and you should realise that it’s not worth putting any further effort into it and just leave it.

I have a couple of sites like this and they are usually a case of where I’ve rushed in and chosen the wrong niche. I will put those down to experience and not add anything more to them. The sites are still there though and who knows, I may get the odd click from the sites. A typical UK domain only costs £3 a year so it’s a small gamble, and worth the risk as you could stumble upon a great niche. By having many sites you can limit your exposure to this as hopefully the more sites you have the more chance you have of creating profitable ones. Obviously you will also create more duds, but knowing when to quit them will save you time and effort, and allow you to focus on your profitable sites.

Creating new sites quickly

Once you’ve done your keyword research it’s pretty easy to buy a domain, point it to your server, and install wordpress, but what then? Obviously you need content and initially I will start with one one article on the front page, along with a contact page, about page, and a privacy policy page. I think one article is enough to start getting visitors and get indexed. When you have time then you can add more content but it’s not worth spending too much time on other articles on a site that might not have any potential. Obviously there are arguments for having more content at launch but this is the way I do it, adding more content if I think the site is going somewhere.

I’ve written about awesome plugins for niche sites but I haven’t spoken about themes/templates for your site and the fact this there are thousands of themes out there and sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve installed themes before and spent hours editing the CSS and html only to have no visitors to appreciate the work that’s gone into it!

What I needed was a theme I could use for all my sites that was simple to install, simple to customise, and AdSense ready and I recently came across a premium WordPress theme called CTR Theme. I don’t normally pay for themes but this promised so much that I took the plunge and for $67 (£42+VAT in the UK) I bought it and have been very happy indeed.

The CTR Theme features it’s own admin panel where you can change designs (4 different styles included), change colour schemes, add all your AdSense codes, etc and it literally takes 5 minutes to get this sorted and have your niche site online. Also as it has an unlimited site licence you can use it on ALL your sites. Oh and changing the colour scheme on the admin also changes the colour of the AdSense ads so no need to change the ads on your AdSense account!

One of the smartest features of the theme is that it features ad randomisation, meaning every time a visitor comes to your site the AdSense adverts change location which can help reduce “ad blindness” and improve your click-through rate (CTR).

I think it’s best to mention that the links to the CTR Theme are affiliate links but this isn’t me trying to push the product as it’s genuinely something I use on my sites and recommend. It also comes with a 60 day money back guarantee so if you’re not happy then you can get your money back.

Here’s a video that runs through the features of the theme and shows how easy it is to install it on your sites:

Quicker setup = More sites

If it takes less time to make a site then it means you can make more and as discussed earlier I believe this is the best solution to making money and reducing your risk to fluctuations. I will continue to make niche sites in this way and if they show signs of potential then it’s time to develop them and try and make more money!

• Those like me who are trying to succeed but are making minimal earnings but learning as they do.
• Those who have succeeded and provide inspiration.

I like it that others are in the same situation as me but I also like knowing that there are also those who are where I want to be. Okay, I’m probably never going to be Pat Flynn but I’m sure I can learn a thing from them all and thoroughly enjoy reading their regular posts.

I recently stumbled across Spencer from Niche Pursuits, and this has to be my new favourite read and I’m learning a whole lotta new things about niche sites especially when Spencer is so transparent with his techniques. The thing you do notice is that all the top bloggers have completely different techniques for backlinking and ranking their sites which shows that there is probably no 100% set way of going about it and no magic formula or get rick quick scheme.

Anyway I thought I would share a list of those who I follow and have made their way onto my rss reader. I’m only including those who are currently active as some have stopped blogging so don’t make it onto here.

Smart Passive Income

Penny on the Floor

Make Money on the Internet

Leaving Work Behind

Niche Pursuits

Okay, so I’ve just gone through my list and I actually haven’t got loads of sites on there although I do follow a lot more people on Twitter and get tweets about their blog updates from there. So this hasn’t turned out to be a great post but at least it’s keeping things moving on this site after 2 weeks without an update.

If you have any reading recommendations then please comment below.