First off, you may have noticed that this is my second post today - the first, discussed the basic principals of the Google Sandbox. The reason why I decided to touch on that topic was partially to preface this post. I’ve gone through my statistics and found that about 80% of my EPN sniper sites have been sandboxed.  This isn’t too serious of a problem, and I was expecting to face it on some level, although I didn’t expect to see 80% get sandboxed.

Here’s what happened…

My old formula for creating EPN niche sites was a lot different than my current formula. I would:

1. Find a niche
2. Set up a theme like WP Commerce Steel with PAGES as product listings
3. Add a Blog with Search 2 Post creating POSTS
4. In many cases, I would add up to 30 posts containing YouTube videos related to my niche with a short descriptive introductory paragraph, then I would stagger the release of each post over the next 1 - 2 months
5. I would submit the site to about 75 social bookmarking sites and up to 1000 free directories in order to get it fully indexed.
6. In some cases, I would go back and schedule a second round of 30 videos in the same way (this only works depending on how many decent videos there are in your niche. If you’re working in the Door Knob or Umbrella niche, there may not be a wide selection).

Now, in many cases, this was a huge recipe for success. In fact some of my “thin” sites that DIDN’T get deindexed were ones that I followed this exact formula on - specifically regarding adding the videos. Early in 09, I stopped adding posts of videos to my new sites, and those were some of the first to get slapped by G. Anyway, I believe this really helped me avoid getting sandboxed primarily because of the constant fresh content. In the early stages, there would be a fresh post to the blog daily with the videos I had pre-scheduled. Then after a month or two, when the site began to rank better, there would be more fresh content because there would be more traffic coming to the site and using Search 2 Post, which would add an additional new POST every time.

The downside to this plan, unfortunately, is that G decided that what I was doing was basically spam, which I don’t necessarily blame them for, and they proceeded to deindex about 90% of those sites.

In contrast to that, my setup process for the 100 EPN site challenge was as follows:

1. Research 20 Niches
2. Have articles produced for each of the 20 niches
3. Register 20 domains
4. Go through WP setup and config process for each domain
5. Add content and EPN listings to each site
6. Repeat 5 times until all 100 sites are complete

The failure on my part was in the planning stage. My main goal with this challenge was to replace my old deindexed EPN site with a greater number of new, correctly built sites that would be much more valuable as a long term asset. I feel that I was correct in how I chose to develop each site, as they are all fully indexed and I would imagine they will be so for a very long time. However, the thing I failed to think about during the planning stage, was the lack of fresh content, and the amount of time it would take in between building and deploying all 100 sites, and getting full gear into link building. Ultimately, the most important thing I learned so far from this process is that planning and testing is so important. For example, in retrospect, what I should have done was before embarking on this challenge, I should have created 10 - 20 of these niche sites in the exact same format to test what the results would be if I scaled the operation. The main reasons I didn’t do this were: I was extremely confident that the format would be successful based on what I saw from previous sites I owned, and also, I wanted to do this on an extremely large scale so that the payoff would be larger, faster.

IF I would have taken the time to do 10 test sites before starting in on the full 100, I would have learned that:

1. My assertions were basically correct, that fewer auctions on each page would not result in lower earnings.
2. Around 8 out of 10 of the test sites would rank excellent for their keywords for the first month, with little promotion
3. Between about week 3-5, 8 out of 10 sites (80%) would be sandboxed.
4. The remaining 20% of sites not sandboxed would lose some ranking as well, although keep a reasonable level of search traffic.

So if I knew then what I knew now, the main thing I would probably do different is stagger the release of content. Instead of publishing 5 articles at one time, I could start with maybe 2 articles and schedule 3 more over the next 30 days. Maybe also mix in a couple videos, or product reviews for additional posts I could deploy over the first two months. The second thing I would probably do, is instead of building the sites in batches of 20 and waiting until the bulk were fully built to begin heavily link building, I probably would do more of a 1-at-a-time approach where I would deploy 1 site at a time, and at the same time, accompany it with a few starter backlinks - like ezines, hubs, etc.

So the lesson here, is that while a massive effort is always a good move, when combined with careful planning and proven methods, the results will be even better, faster.

Overall Progress Update

So about 80% of my sites were sandboxed, which I would definitely call a setback, but I am certainly not down on the project, and I’m still quite happy with the results. Last month, I brought in just shy of $300  in EPN earnings from the 100 sites in this challenge. Slightly under what I planned, but overall still good. Also, based on the time when sites 60-100 were actually deployed, I can say that almost all ofthe $300 in earnings came from only the first 60 sites.

When I originally planned the challenge, I was targeting a minimum of $500 profit in September, but I didn’t account for almost 1 additonal month of time to get all 100 sites deployed. I didn’t even get sites 41-60 completed until the final days of August, so I had a lot of really green sites in September. One thing that did help me was the Google honeymoon period, for which many of my sites were ranking on the first page of SERPS for several weeks before being sandboxed.

Fighting Sandboxing

First things first. I put Google Analytics on the first 50 sites I deployed - hopefully it won’t come back to haunt me, but the reports show that as of right now, my overall traffic on those 50 sites is up 29% when compared to the previous 30 days, so despite a majority of my sites getting sandboxed, my overall traffic is still up.

One reason why is my initial link building campaign. I started off by developing ezines for sites 21-60 - several ezines for each site to be more specific. The great thing about this is that it’s almost a perfect counter to being sandboxed. Many of the niches I’ve targeted are not that competitive, and ezines can rank extremely easily, and they are able to pass on quite a bit of traffic to my sites, which results in a good deal of clicks.

Also, when looking at referring traffic over the last 7 days, I’ve noticed a trend that a lot of my sites are beginning to bring in a nice amount of searches for their main targeted keywords - from Bing. If Bing is already giving me top rankings, that means that Yahoo will probably be soon to follow.

So really, I could literally wait out the 6-8 month sandboxing period and still get plenty of traffic/clicks from ezines/hubs/infobarrels, and yahoo/bing. Then when my sites do get released from Google, things will spike and I should be in amazing shape…

…but I’m not going to do that.

Although there is no concrete way to get out of the sandbox, and almost anyone you ask will probably tell you to keep adding content and building links, I feel I have enough sites where I can split test different strategies and hopefully find a way to get out of the sandbox faster than 6-8 months, which I can then apply globally to all my sites.

The first thing I am going to do - literally today, is look over my EPN stats for the last 2 months, and select 3-5 of the best performing sites from that time period that are currently sandboxed. Then I’m going to go ahead and send a variety of new links (in moderation), and schedule a handful of new posts for each site.  I’ll monitor the progress a couple times a week, and hopefully something will click within a couple of weeks.

If not, I will take another couple batches of sites, and try really split testing by adding a larger volume of content to some sites, and add different types of links to others.

Last, but not least, I’m going to work on backing up my already-deployed ezine articles with additional links, so that they can enjoy top rankings while their corresponding sites are sandboxed, and I will continue to have a flow of traffic from every site.

At the same time, I already spent an hour today determining exactly which sites out of the first 50 sites are NOT sandboxed. I’m going to take these sites and begin sending more backlinks to them right away, so that I can hopefully start getting top rankings with a few. If I can get to a top 3 Google ranking for 5 sites by November, and 20 sites by December, I will be 100% satisfied.

This Month’s Earnings and QCP

As I stated above, I earned around $300 from these 100 sites last month. This month I am currently on pace to earn *slightly* less. I have a feeling I will actually come out ahead, and likely closer to $500 in earnings from these sites this month, but only time will tell. Overall these sites have been performing pretty well in terms of individual ECP, however I have some other older sites which get a large volume of clicks every day and have lower ECP, which I feel is probably driving down the overall value of the new sites. I strongly anticipate at some point in the next 6 months, I will be weeding out most of my older EPN sites and focusing only on the new sites.

Overall, my earnings under the new QCP system are down about 15-20%. As with most other people, I am still utterly confused and disappointed with the new system. I strongly hope it evens out at some point, although I don’t have high hopes. Probably the worst thing about the new system is  its hard to follow any kind of trend on a day to day basis, which makes it extremely difficult to optimize for the best overall result.

Every Thorn Has its Rose

Although there’s no denying that it sucks having a large amount of my new sites sandboxed, there are still some positives. The main one being that thanks to some analysis, I’ve determined exactly which sites aren’t sandboxed, and I can concentrate more of my efforts on those sites specifically, instead of a general massive effort on all 100 sites. This will help me test exactly what is moste effective, and at some point I will be able to apply the same methods to the rest of the sites, whenever they are un-sandboxed. I should be able to squeeze a nice income out of my non-sandboxed sites relatively quickly, which should at least give me a preview into what my earnings will look like 6 months from now, as well as help to recoup the investment I made in content and labor on this project rather quickly.

I will also be able to condense my findings into a proven method for researching, developing and deploying niche sites into a proven system that I can share with the readers of this blog. I’ve already learned a lot over the past couple of months from this huge undertaking, and I expect I will continue to learn new things almost daily.  When it’s all said and done, I should have a very solid system for making money online via niche sites.

Plans for the Future

This site is almost a year old now, and I also am nearing 100 RSS subscribers. Once I reach that milestone, I plan on getting back to some of the basics I had in mind when I created this site - namely, releasing free wordpress themes. When I hit 100 subscribers, I plan on doing a complete overhaul on my original WP Contempo theme, and re-releasing it. I also have plans in the works for more themes.

As for EPN, I doubt I will be investing a lot more time and/or money into new EPN-based sites for quite a while. I want to have a firm grasp on exactly how the new system works, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere close to that point right now. I have plenty of EPN targeted assets right now, to the point where I should be able to be making a comfortable full time income off of them within several months. I may double back and work on more sites in the future, but as of right now, I have no plans.

Based on the complete and utter chaos that is EPN, I’m going to be heavily shifting focus back to AdSense. I’ve been enjoying modest AdSense earnings for quite a while now, thanks to a handful of sites, and I want to expand on that, and fully learn the ropes to being successful with AdSense. My plan from here on out, is to work on developing a minimum of 1 x 100+ article authority site each month, using only AdSense as a monitization method. I’ve been following the teachings of the Keyword Academy very closely, and they, along with many others in the same crowd are all shifting their focus towards developing authority sites. I feel this is a no-brainer for me, as I already have several authority sites, and I own quite a few aged domains/sites with huge potential for growth. I think by adding 1 new authority site to my portfolio each month, I should rapidly be able to increase my overall MMO income.

I may take a big leap and start looking at Amazon as a source of revenue at some point as well. There are a lot of things I hate about the amazon affilate program, but the way things are going with EPN, it’s looking more and more like a solid alternative every day. I don’t expect to do much with this until I’m essentially done with my EPN snipers, but I do have it cooking on the backburner.

This is a topic that has been covered widely across the Internet on various MMO, Internet marketing and SEO sites, yet there is still a great deal of confusion over exactly what being “sandboxed” means, how to tell if your site is in the sandbox, and the differences between being deindexed, being penalized and being sandboxed. As this is an issue that I personally have dealt with on all 3 levels, I’m going to try to clarify the differences between the 3.

What is the Google Sandbox?

The sandbox is a system Google implemented in order to cut down on spam. It specifically targets sites on brand new domains. Often, when you deploy a new website - specifically for a niche with little competition, Google will give you a very high ranking as soon as you’ve been indexed. This is the honeymoon period, and more of a preview of things to come than an actual reality. After a week or two, in many cases you will go from a first page ranking for your keyword to being completely out of the rankings altogether. Generally, this is the point where you’ve been sandboxed. This is a period of time, which can last as long as 6-8 months, where you will not rank in Google for your keywords.  This doesn’t mean you won’t receive ANY Google search traffic, but you’ll likely rank mostly for very long tail searches and receive very little traffic daily. Google does this to give themselves an evaluation period. Spammers are inclined to set a site and forget it, where actual legitimate business are more likely to continue adding content to their site and building links. This helps Google separate the good from the bad. Once you’re released from the sandbox, you’ll likely enjoy very nice rankings for your keyword, depending on the level of competition.

What is a Google Penalty?

A Google penalty is a lot different than being sandboxed. A big difference - a penalty can be applied to a site of any age, not just new sites. In fact, I would wager to guess that penalties are probably more often applied to older sites. A penalty won’t completely remove you from the Google SERPS, instead, it will knock you back about 50 places or more, depending on the severity. Penalties are usually applied because of improper linking, or content issues.

What is a Google Ban?

Being banned from Google is the worst case scenario, and also probably the most difficult to recover from. A Google ban, or being deindexed by Google, means that you’re site has been completely removed from their index altogether. This can happen for a variety of reasons - but the root cause, in general, is that Google thinks your site is spam. You can go from hundreds of thousands of visits daily to 0 visits literally overnight. The only way to get back into Google’s index after you’ve been banned is to request a manual inspection of your site. Most likely if Google banned your site in the first place, it’s going to be pretty tough to pass a manual inspection… But it is possible.

How to Tell Whether Your Site is Sanboxed or Banned

This is where it can get a little confusing. If your site is sandboxed it is quite easy for it to feel like a ban, because you may literally be bringing in no search traffic at all, and be ranking for nothing. The easiest way to tell is by checking to see if your site is indexed with google. The very easiest way is to type www.yoursite.com into a Google search. If it is indexed, it should almost always be the #1 result. The most proper way to tell is actually to use the site: operator. So go to Google and type site:www.yoursite.com. This should return the total number of pages your site has indexed in Google - which if you’ve built a structurally sound site, should be close to the total # of pages in your site. If a site:www.yoursite.com search returns no results, this probably means you’ve been banned, as that would mean you literally have 0 pages indexed with Google. The only time this would not be the case would be if your site was still too new to be indexed by Google, however these days new sites can get discovered and indexed very quickly so this is most often not the case.

What to do if Your Site Has Been Sandboxed by Google

Unfortunately there is no concrete solution to getting out of the sandbox. The main things Google wants to evaluate from a site in the sandbox is whether they continue to build incoming links, and add quality content. So the most obvious solution to getting out of the sandbox is to give Google what they want - naturally continue to build links to your site, and try to add as much fresh content as possible. Doing this will almost always ensure that you WILL come out of the sandbox at some point, but still won’t guarantee it will happen in less than 6-8 months.

The best possible thing you can do is plan ahead. Put up a new domain with a page or two of unique content months before you actually build a site. This will give it time to age, and most of the time will help you completely avoid being sandboxed. Also, if the actual domain name isn’t extremely important, consider buying an existing domain name or site to use. Just be sure it hasn’t been penalized or banned. Buying pre-owned domains is a great way to hit the ground running with a new website.

I started out the month with a nice day of clicks. The following day, i found that while I still made a modest amount of money for Oct 1, all the money was coming from one site in particular which had an individual EPC of 0.23. My campaign level CPC was set at 0.06 for Oct 1, but none of the other campaigns had any earnings despite a large number of clicks. This was distressing, as I posted in my last post, but not the worst thing in the world.

October 2 stats became available, and things appeared to have began to level out.  My account level CPC was actually applied to more than 1 campaign. To be more specific, the account level CPC was applied to about 70% of my campaigns that received clicks. I was much happier to see stats like this, as they more closely reflected the preview stats I was viewing throughout September, and even better of course, my earnings also increased as a result.

I was hoping that things were just a little jumbled in EPN’s system, which would explain the bizzare first-day stats, and hopefully things would continue to improve daily until the system is fully on track. Unfortunately, when the Oct 3 stats were revealed yesterday, this was not the case at all. Shockingly, the stats were almost idental to the Oct 1 stats. I had an account level CPC, however all my earnings came from 1 campaign again, with an individual CPC of 0.34. The rest of my campaigns showed 0 earnings for the day. Basically it was a big step backwards, not what I was hoping for at all…

Today brought yet another different look as the Oct 4 stats became available. I opened up my campaign level report for Yesterday, and was extremely happy to see that nearly all of my sites showed earnings for the assigned EPC.  Only maybe 3-5 campaigns out of a huge amount showed no earnings - the extremely odd thing here: one of the sites showing 0 earnings for the day was the ONLY site which had any earnings on Oct 1 and Oct 3. Maybe some weird way of evening things out? Who knows?

Either way, the good thing is, today’s report was the closest yet to the preview reports I had enjoyed all of last month. Not that I won’t be surprised if I see something completely different tomorrow, but still, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen. Probably the best thing of all - as a result of the new QCP model, and the seemingly accurate reporting today, all of my sites from the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge received a healthy amount of clicks, resulting in the largest single-day earnings from the whole group yet. I’m really looking forward to seeing whether this trend will continue, as it will mean that I’m still on the right track with my experiment.

In related news, I’ve been periodically dropping in on the PHPbay forums and Official EPN forums, and I’m starting to see quite a few people having very similar problems as I have been. This makes me actually feel much better, as there is more and more evidence to indicate some kind of flaw in EPN’s reporting system over these first few days. I’ve seen people complaining of receiving several thousand clicks in one day - and showing sales, with a big fat zero in earnings for the day. I’m also seeing less and less people claiming they’re doing better under the new system. There were a LOT of people around the next claiming their earnings were way up under the new system based on the preview from last month/1st day earnings, but as the reality of this whole thing has begun to sink in, I think the bubble is bursting for more people daily.

Overall, I’m shocked at how rocky these first few days have been. I honestly didn’t predict anything near this level of inconsistency - especially since EPN made the situation out like they had been working on this system for over a year. I expected a seamless transition to be honest. The positives to take away are that:

1. If you’re experiencing problems, or seeing something completely different than last month’s preview report, you are NOT alone!

2. It’s still only a few days into it, and there’s a good chance that a few nuts and bolts need to get tightened. Since many others are experiencing the same problem, it’s more likely a global issue, and not something specifically related to the quality of your campaigns - that is definitely a good thing.

I’m not expecting much from tomorrow’s report, but I’m extremely encouraged by today’s and there are people who have faired a lot worse than I have, so I’m going to continue plugging away backlinking my sites and hope for the best!

So I started out this month extremely excited to see what the new EPN QCP payout structure was going to be. It’s been a turbulent year for me with EPN, and affiliate marketing in general. I started the year out on fire, thinking I finally had this IM thing completely licked. By late April, my ACRU Quality score tanked for no apparent reason - seriously - and I also started to see chunks of my niche site empire get deindexed by google, a few each month, all the way up to August.

Luckily, I got started with The Keyword Academy back in June, and totally shifted my entire paradigm on making money online - this was key, as I was quickly able to replace my bad web properties that had stopped generating revenue with new, solid properties, thus keeping my overall earnings the same, if not a slight bit lower. But considering the amount of my sites that got hit, and I also lost my 2nd best earner overall, I came out of July feeling good, which led me to conjure up my 100 EPN Sites in 30 Days Challenge. About 2 weeks into the challenge I woke up to find an email from Ebay in my inbox, announcing their new Quality Click Pricing structure. At that point, I figured I could either get really pissed off about it, or make the best of it and continue my challenge. I chose the latter. September was a good month for me. My EPN earnings were up about 20%, I completed all 100 new sites, and my earnings just from the new sites was probably near $300, not bad for the first month, and especially considering I did not finish all 100 sites until mid-September, nor did I do nearly any linkbuilding.

So I was feeling great about everything, and looking forward to the new changes with a positive attitude. After recoding a solid amount of clicks yesterday, I literally couldn’t wait to see what my first EPC would be. For the entire month of September, I checked my EPC daily. I had days as high as 0.40, and a couple as low as 0.05. Mostly, I was between about 0.08 and 0.12 per day on average, fine by me considering the volume of clicks I’m dealing with.

When I refreshed my EPN stats and the EPC had finally been updated, I was shocked by what I saw. My account level EPC had been set at 0.06 for Oct 1… Totally fine by me. The curious thing, was the earnings per campaign. On Campaign view, I could see that one of my sites was listed with a 0.23 EPC, and was showing earnings, the same earnings showed on my account level report. All my other campaigns showed an EPC of 0.00 and earnings of $0.00 for October first.  Now I’m still not freaking out about it or anything - I still made some nice money on the first, although modest, but earnings nontheless. The strange thing was that all month long during September, I checked my QCP preview almost every day and what I would see was basically the same thing - my EPC for the day would be set at the account level and every campagin would receive payment for each click based on that account level EPC. So every campaign would have the same EPC for that day listed on the Campaign report, and there would be earnings shown for that EPC x # of clicks that campaign received that day. The only cases where this was different was if there was an unusually large amount of clicks for a given campaign on a given day, which were obviously bot clicks - then the EPC would show 0.00 for that campaign on that day, but this literally happened less than 10 times total I would estimate - the entire month. So somehow, the report I saw today was completely different than what I had been seeing the entire month of September.

I spent some time  checking out some other EPN related resources today and found a couple people with similar problems, however there really aren’t that many great EPN resources out there these days, so who the hell knows? Funny, you can’t even comment on the EPN official forums anymore unless you link your Ebay account, which I personally don’t feel like I should have to do, because my Ebay account has absolutely nothing to do with my EPN activity in any way, shape of form. So I believe that that has led to less activity on the EPN forums than there normally would have been had everyone been allowed to participate. Funny how that works…

Anyway, the main thing I have seen is a lot of dissatisfaction from EPN affiliates for a variety of reasons - even people who’ve benefitted from the changes so far are still complaining. I think everyone can see how fragile this program is, and how things can shift on a whim and leave top affiliates with their pants around their ankles.

Overall, I’m a little disturbed by the first day of reporting. I really went into it with a positive attitude, but I’m not happy about the fact that the report I saw today was not the same as the report I was previewing for the last 30 days. I just cannot wrap my head around that one yet. I have a strong feeling that things will even themselves out - there could be a variety of reasons for the discrepancy - the program may be calculating the data from scratch for these first couple days, which could for some reason lead to not every campaign showing an EPC, or maybe I just plain misunderstood the whole thing from the beginning - but that still doesn’t explain how I was literally physically seeing something different on the same reports when comparing September to October.

The positive thing to take away from this - for me - is that at least I still received a modest amount of earnings for Oct 1, regardless of how it was displayed on the report. It could have been a hell of a lot worse. I’ve been hearing from countless other EPN affiliates who are extremely pissed talking about blowing off EPN completely and going another direction. Let’s face it - all of us who are EPN affiliates right now are so because we want to be. We want to be EPN affiliates because, at least at one point, EPN was a perfect format for product related affiliate offers, and in the past the payouts have always been excellent compared to other similar programs, like Amazon for example. Even when I was getting jacked around with my quality score early this year, I never really thought about jumping ship. There just isn’t a great alternative - at least nothing that will be that close. So to all the pissed off affiliates out there I say, shit, give it a month, let’s see what happens. In fact, give it a couple of months. The holiday season is coming up, it can’t possibly be that bad. If your shit tanks during the holiday season, then you know it’s time to jump ship, but you can’t pull all your Ebay ads after 2 days under the new pricing structure because your numbers are down X%. It’s not like Ebay is going to change what they’re doing because some publishers are pulling their ads, there’s people out there desperate to get an EPN account right now that can’t, so I highly doubt Ebay is going to feel the loss of a handful of affiliates - large or small. There’s always going to be more people who step up to take your place, and are happy with getting jerked around by changes to the rules every few months.

Personally, I’m going to keep my head down and continue working as if nothing has changed - I’ve got 100 new ebay snipers that I’m actively working on linking and fully expect to be making big money off them before the end of this year. Although I’m a little disappointed in the stats I saw today, I can’t say I’m surprised, and I’m not going to let it get me down. Worst case scenario, I’ll sell off my shitty thin EPN sites, and convert my 100 new quality sites to adsense… But there’s a lot of time left to make a lot of money this year, and I don’t intend to go down without a fight.

When I was planning this experiment, I realize in retrospect that I did not have enough of the smaller details ironed out. One crucial area that I don’t believe I gave enough thought to was hosting the sites. In the planning stage, I had a fresh Dreamhost account which I was planning on using for all 100 sites. After getting about 40 sites in and realizing how much work I was putting into it, I knew that it would be totally idiotic to put all 100 sites on the same host. I really don’t believe it would be that big of a problem, and probably a good 90% chance nothing would ever come of it, but in the disaster scenario where Dreamhost decides I’m using too much bandwidth or G realizes I have exactly 100 similarly structured sites on the same class C IP, I would be screwed. The thought of having to move 20 or more sites to a different hosting account is a frightening one based on the time I’ve already got invested into the project. The great lesson here, is that hosting is incredibly inexpensive. I found 2 new hosts to use, thus splitting my 100 sites up amongst 3 hosts. JustHost and FatCow Hosting are the two I chose, and after spending about 10 minutes searching for coupon codes I was able to get a full year of free hosting + free domain reg from JustHost, and a year of hosting and domain reg from FatCow for $66.00. So I’m really glad I switched my plan mid-stream and took the extra time and cash to split this up, as I think it will work much better for long term, and even allow me enough room to do another challenge like this down the road without having to go out and get more hosting.

Whenever you are buying or renewing domains or hosting BE SURE to Google coupon codes, as there are some very shocking deals out there just a search away, and you’ll end up saving a fortune. This is also great if you’re just getting started and don’t have a lot of startup funds to invest.

The BIGGEST downfall to using two additional hosting plans was that there were a couple small details in the setup process that were not quite the same as my initial process for the first 40 sites. I had a major issue with PHPbay which turned out to be a minor one, and I’ve came across a variety of All in One SEO conflicts. This is the top reason why I didn’t get the last batch of sites put up right away. Setting up the first 40 sites was SO smooth with Dreamhost that it was really dissapointing to be slowed down by random inconsistent server issues. But the good news is, that’s all solved and the sites are pretty well in the bag - I’ve got my buddy finishing up the last handful and I’ll run a final comb through them by the end of the week.

Earnings Update

So based on the time frame for which I got the first 80 sites fully deployed, I’ve really only got the first 40 sites aged to a point where I feel they should be earning money. I’ll preface this by saying that outside of exchanging links and a couple random ezines, I have literally built no links to any of the 100 sites yet. Regardless of that, a lot of the keywords I’ve targeted have little competition and I expect at least 75% of these sites to get a minimum of 10 unique visits a day within 60 days. But I digress… As far as earnings go, I’ve got 20 sites out of 100 that have earned me money so far this month, and my total earnings are from those 20 sites is around $200 right now, and I’m expecting to see $300 - $350 by the end of the month. Of the 20 sites that have earned money so far - 6 are from the first batch of 20, 2 are from the second batch of 20, 10 are from the 3rd batch, and 2 are from the 4th batch. The 6 sites from the first batch have produced the highest total amount of earnings from any batch. Overall, the most positive thing I see from these numbers is that I think my keyword research got better after the first 40 sites. Sites 41-60 are doing quite well so far, and I’m guessing sites 61-100 will be equally good, as I am already seeing clicks and earnings from them after a short period of time being live, and no backlinks. I think sites 21-40 were my worst batch overall as I was in a hurry to get them done, and didn’t put as much care into the selection process as I did for all 80 of the other sites. On the plus side, I’ve still got a couple promising sites from that group already.  So initially I was hoping to make well over 300 - 350 this month, but I didn’t get the sites completed on my initial timeline, and I’m pretty happy with the current results. Sorry for not posting a screenshot or anything, but at this point it’s not really worth the time, and I haven’t figured out a good way to separate my report so I’m only showing the 100 sites from this experiment. If I have a strong month next month I will strongly consider purging all my old EPN sites from my account so that I’ve only got sites from the experiment, which will make reporting much easier. I fully expect these new sites to quickly eclipse earnings from my old sites.

Which brings me to my next point…

EPN Quality Click Pricing and the Effect on Niche Sites

So while I’ve been keeping track of the progress of my sites this month, I’ve also been keeping an eye on the Quality Click Pricing Preview daily and the effect of each model on my earnings. For about the first 15 days of the month, my Quality Click Pricing numbers were far better than my current earnings - I would say averaging between 25 - 40% better for the 1st through 15th. Then, within a couple days the gap narrowed and about a week ago (or so) my current earnings surpassed the quality click pricing earnings. Then within the last 2-3 days, my quality click pricing earnings have shot back up again. It’s been interesting to watch, but I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that for most people, the level of earnings will probably be about the same once the changes are implemented. The current system has wild ups and downs, where the QCP model is much more stable and predictable. I am looking forward to the change with a positive attitude, and I am feeling confident that I’m on the right track. Overall, I fully anticipate at least a 15% - 25% increase in my earnings next month, and then a much bigger jump into November with the holidays coming. Most of this increase will be based on the fact that I will have all 100 sites deployed, and I will be agressively building links to maximize the potential of each site, which I really don’t expect to take very long for the vast majority of niches I’ve selected.

Link Building Strategy for Niche Sites

I’ve deviated from my original plan quite a bit here as well. I was originally going to systematically go through link building in levels for each of the 100 sites. So for example on sites 1-20 level one would be link exchange, social bookmarking and directory submission, where level 1 for sites 21-40 may be link exchange, ezine article submissions and a hub page.. Etc. Instead what I think I’m going to do is focus in more on 1 to 2 batches of 20 at a time, instead of all 100. So since my last 40 sites are still pretty fresh, I’m going to do a lot more work on sites 1-40 this month and into October, then switch gears and heavily target sites 41-80. Then hit up the last batch and go back around to work on slow movers in the first batch. My theory is basically that for a good percentage of sites in each batch, it should not take a large amount of backlinks to rank well for each niche. So instead of trying to send backlinks to each of the 100 sites right away and have a lot fewer backlinks pointing to each site individually, I’m going to try to lay it on a little heavier with the first group, hopefully get 1/2 to 2/3 of the sites in those 2 batches ranking in the top 5 positions within 60 days, and I will be earning a lot more overall, plus it will be easier to concentrate on a smaller amount of sites at a time as opposed to trying to manage link building for 100 sites at a time.

So I’ve already got a huge amount of content for article distribution for the first 40 sites scheduled to be coming in this week, and when that arrives, I will get going on another equal sized batch of content to double back for a second round of link building on those same sites. After that, I will probably start in on the second large batch of sites.

With the initial content I’m getting in this week, I plan to generate around 5 quality backlinks to each site in the form of unique article authority links - ezine, hub, squidoo, infobarrel, etc. I may also play around with running some social bookmarking on the articles once published. With the second batch of content the following week, I may try to use shorter articles and generate a higher quantity of links to each site.

I also may take a handful of sites and add more content to the site itself to see what kind of benefit I get.

The expanded link building campaign should almost instantly help me increase my earnings, and I plan on getting that rolling by Thursday. I will go into more specifics on exactly what kind of links I’m using once I have a chance to see some feedback on the overall performance and speed.

I expect to post again around the end of September/first of October to give a final report on my earnings for the month as well as some insight going into the new Quality Click Pricing structure in October. I think it is going to be a very exciting 4th quarter.

When I say “correctly”, I really mean it. I’ve painstakingly made sure to follow the same procedure in adding the right amount of tags, setting up everything in the proper order, using unique themes on every site, making sure my phpbay tags on every single page of all 100 sites are showing the best possible ads they can be. For example, if I’m selling purple widgets, and I’ve got an article talking about random name brand purple widgets, I don’t just want to put “purple widgets” into my phpbay tag, I want to put the exact brand of purple widgets I’m talking about in that PARAGRAPH into my phpbay tag so that relevant ads will show to my visitors and I’ll get clicks. So far I know it’s working because I have a modest amount of traffic and I’m getting a nice number of clicks. Another example is the themes  - I’ve gone into every single theme and removed the date from every possible template. I also make sure to change the h2 tags to h1 tags, if it requires changing the stylesheet, I do that, sometimes I even have to switch themes altogether after spending 20 minutes customizing one because it doesn’t look right. I’ve treated every site the same way and haven’t rushed any through at all, so the end result is going to be that much sweeter…

How I did…

When I last posted a few days ago, I was heading into the weekend fired up and ready to knock out all 100 sites before the end of the month. I had just finished an intense week of working on this project and really wanted to see it through. Unfortunately, I’m disappointed to say that I didn’t fully complete all 100 sites. It took me a little longer than expected to get sites 40-60 completed, and all the content was not completed and back to me by Monday as I was expecting - in fact I just received the last bit of it today, so no matter if I would have stayed up all weekend long, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway because that last bit of content wasn’t ready - which was really my own fault for putting off the keyword research for too long, and not doing it all up front like I should have. Right now I’m sitting at about 75 complete and the rest should be done by the end of the week. All in all, not a bad performance. When it all boils down, it doesn’t really matter if I complete all 100 sites in 30 days or 40 days. What’s really important is that in setting the bar high for myself, in the form of this challenge, I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot more work on my MMO projects than I normally would throughout the course of a typical 30 day period.

So while normally, if I would have pumped out 10 new sites in a month, I would have considered it a success - and way above average performance, in the span of 40 days between Aug 1 - and the end of this week I will have completed 100 high quality, solidly constructed niche sites.

The combination of setting a goal + proper planning + extremely hard work, is one of the biggest secrets to making money online. I’ve been at this for over 2 years now and I learn something new every day. I’ve had a lot of success in the past year simply because of the amount of trial and error I’ve put in. I’ve done everything from affiliate marketing via PPC to buying existing sites off of digital point. In regards to SEO and link building, I’ve really tried everything.  My main problem in the past was I was always looking for easy money, or easy links, and wasted too much time throwing different shit at the wall to see what would stick. Prime example - nearly 2 years ago, I first discovered the Buy/Sell/Trade room on Digital Point forums. Within the first 2 days I made my first purchase - a keyword rich .com domain name for $7.00. I slapped it online and put up about 30 posts with youtube videos related to the topic. Within 1 month I was making $50/month off the site via AdSense off the site with no additional promotion. Within 3 months, I was making $10/day. To this day it has been one of my most successful sites, and earns me hundreds - if not thousands of dollars each month. The downside to this story is that I spent the next year trolling the DP forums trying to find another “gem”. I’ve bought quite a few websites and domains, most have been complete shit, with a handful of really steady earners. I definitely haven’t lost money on the deal - in fact I’ve probably made quite a bit, but the point is I wasted a ton of time looking around in a forum sifting through peoples shit sites for sale, when I could have been making my own sites and building links. In reality, nobody is going to sell a quality site on Digital Point unless they have no clue what they’re doing, so while it’s possible to find good deals on there, and I definitely have, it’s a total waste of time because for every diamond in the rough, you have to sift through 100,000 awful sites.

Everything changed for me back in June when I discovered The Keyword Academy. I’m not going to go into a long sales pitch, but to make a long story short - the keyword research and link building methods they teach are excellent, but the main thing I’ve gotten out of it is organization, planning, focus and hard work. I completed the 100 hub page in 30 days challenge back in June, and I saw immediate results from that. TKA doesn’t teach anything regarding using EPN really, so I created this challenge to myself based on my own past experience with EPN.

Over the last 3 months, my perspective on making money online has completely changed. I’ve learned that while there are definitely a lot of ways to skirt the system and make quick money, they will never last. My focus now is on creating quality web properties that I will have for a long period of time, and will continue to get better and better with age. I also want to have as diverse a portfolio as possible -  these 100 EPN sites will probably be the last new EPN sites I make for a long time. Once they are properly backlinked I can probably make an easy full time income off them. Now that I’ve got them up, I’m going to be focusing hard over the next several months on getting them properly backlinked so that they will rank where they should be ranking and realize their full potential. I look back on a lot of the sites I had deindexed and think about how much money I was making off of them, and the sad thing is, a lot of them never even came close to capturing top rankings for their keywords and reaching full potential, so I’m going to make sure I do things right this time.

So here’s my strategy for the future…

At the end of this week I will have all 100 of my sites up. At that point, I’m going to focus on nothing but building links to those sites. I’m going to start out, like I did with the first part of the challenge, spending a lot of time planning everything out. I’ve got 100 sites, and I don’t plan to use the same link building roadmap for all 100. I’m going to split things up - probably in groups of 20, and take a different approach with each group, to see what gets the best/quickest results. I’ve already started link building for the first 20 sites I got up - I submitted them to social bookmarking sites, directories, and started Ezines for a couple. I’ll plan out a different course of action with the remaining 80 sites, which I haven’t really done any promotion on at all at this point. So hopefully in 2-3 months, I should have a lot of these sites close to full potential, and also gain a ton of knowledge of what kind of promotion techniques are most effective for this kind of site, as well as an intimate knowledge of the 100 different niches I’ll be working in.

I know this is going to work because I’m already making money off the first 20 sites. I completed them around the 7th or 8th of August and made about $40.00 total off them for the month. Not bad as far as I’m concerned. Some of the newer sites I have are even better keywords, and I’m already ranking on the first page for a few of them, with a nice number of clicks - and this is with 0 promotion. The only variables are how long it takes to get the majority of these sites ranking, and how ebays new EPC model works out. I’m cautiously optimistic about both things.

I’ll also be sending links via Hubs, Infobarrels and other 2.0’s during this process which should also net me some extra earnings, as you can never have too many hubs or IBs. I’ve got a lot of hubs right now, but much fewer infobarrels and I’ve found that the IBs are getting a MUCH higher CTR and earning me a nice chunk of Adsense, so I am really looking forward to expanding in that area.

Based on how well I do in the next 2 months or so with these sites, I’m going to probably start a new challenge - I really would like to do 100 adsense sites in 30 days. After that I will probably never do 100 sites in 30 days ever again… Unless I decided to try Amazon. But in all seriousness, I want to get a good amount of these built up and working for me as soon as possible, then hopefully get to a point where I’m maybe putting out 20-50 new sites per month - because I’ll be able to dedicate more time to MMO at that point. I’ve also got a ton of aged domains that I want to breathe some new life into and start attacking more competitive niches.

The main point is, from now on I’m going to approach everything I do with a well thought out plan. I’m probably going to spend a couple days working on mapping out my link building strategy for my 100 EPN sites before I take much more action on it - as much as I’m dying to get them producing right away. I know this will help me stay on task and squeeze the most out of these sites.

So while I didn’t fully complete my 100 sites in August, I’m only going to spill over by 5-10 days, and I will have 100 new sites up already making money… So overall I’m extrememly pleased and I can’t wait to get busy building links like crazy this fall so I can really explode my income and roll it back into making even more money.

Look for more updates soon as I continue to progress, I hope to have a lot of cool findings to share.

I’ve done a few minutes of poking around on a couple of my favorite blogs, and PHPBay/TKA forums, and I really have not been able to find too many negative reactions to the quality click pricing preview reports. I’m sure there are people out there who are going to get slaughtered, and are probably really pissed about this whole thing, but I think for the most part a majority of EPN affiliates are going to come out ahead in the short term, and the people doing the right thing will hopefully benefit long term too.

Basically, EPN is still so much more unstable than AdSense, it’s not even funny. You’re earnings can get pulverised overnight due to some crazy backend “algorithm” EPN uses to gauge the engagement of traffic you’re sending, or you (or I) could wake up one day to find our account “terminated” with no real explanation or hope of appeal. This is just the nature of being an EPN affiliate these days. Of course, EPN has a huge up-side as well - the payout (in my opinion) is much better than adsense, and it’s easier to get sites earning from day 1. If you’re going to succeed in the MMO world, you’ve got to take some chances, and as long as you do the right thing and don’t put all your eggs in one basket, you hopefully won’t subject yourself to getting burned so bad that you’ve got to pack up your shit and get a job at Arbys or something. As far as I’m concerned, I’m working as hard as I can to make quality sites that search engines like, and send highly targeted, motivated traffic to eBay, so hopefully that will be enough to keep me in business for a while.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the way this week went, and the promising preview report today was a nice way to cap it all off.

100 EPN Site Challenge Update

Nothing too groundbreaking to report on the challenge since my last post - except the fact that I’m now almost 100% sure I will be able to complete all 100 sites by the end of August (just 2 short days away). Here’s how it’s panned out. I was so far under water this week that I actually had to get some help from a friend to put up sites 21-40 (if I were on schedule, this would have been done nearly 2 weeks ago).  Luckily that went extremely smooth and all 20 of those sites are now live.

Keyword Research

I was able to use the time I saved to spend a full day researching my last 40 keywords. Believe it or not, I did not have all 100 keywords chosen before I started, and I would probably have all 100 sites up by now if I would have taken that approach. The good thing is I was able to see how the first 20 sites were performing as I was selecting additional niches, so I’ve been learning as I go, and I feel that the last 40 keywords I’ve chosen are extremely strong. Here’s a secret I found about halfway through: www.watchcount.com, lets you see ebay auctions in each category with the highest amount of watchers. I found this to be an excellent tool for niche hunting. I didn’t lift 40 great keywords directly from the site, but it was an excellent starting point and probably cut my research time in half, while at the same time assisting me in really uncovering some gems. A good starting point is always helpful in niche research, and especially for a project like this where I had to find 100 completely different and random niches, tools like watch count that provided a little inspiration I found to be invaluable. I also still used a fair dose of ebay pulse, amazon, a couple other random places, and of course I came up with a couple things right off the dome. I think it’s unlikely I will replicate this challenge in the future, but if I were to do so, I would probably have all the keywords prepared before hand. My original intent was to see how my first 20 sites went, then use that information when picking my second 20 keywords, and so on. I think it would have been a great strategy if I could have made this project  my #1 priority in August, but unfortunately it didn’t pan out like that. So with the insane amount of work this requires, I definitely think tackling the keyword research first is key.

Sites 41-60

I had a few hours this afternoon to set up the domains and hosting, get WP installed, get email accounts created, EPN campaign ID’s generated and get cracking on sites 41-60. I’ve streamlined the process so that I can get these things up as quickly as possible by doing everything in a certain order. For example I have 6 steps in the setup process that I do for all 20 sites at one time - this includes pointing nameservers, setting up add on domains, installing WP, etc. Once all 20 sites are ready for content, I have an individual setup process which is 15 steps, that I do for each site one at a time. I’ve noticed that the first 6 steps can be slow as shit because of things I can’t control like loading time, uploading files, etc. Once I get to the individual setup process I can bang out a site in as quickly as 15 minutes - maybe even a little less. What I’ve learned doing the first 20, and multiple niches in the past, is that by doing things in a certain order you can save a lot of time. Basically, I start with the WP configuration, then activate plugins, then configure plugins, then choose a theme, then configure the theme, then set up widgets, then add the content, then check everything for accuracy. I think by taking the time to fully document this in Word during my goaround with the first 20 sites, I’ve been able to streamline the whole process and actually save a ton of time.

So I’ve got 3-4 of sites 41-60 completely finished. I plan to do the rest of them tomorrow, and at the same time, do the initial setup process for the last 40 sites. That means registering all 40 domains, doing all the dns shit, installing 40 WPs and maybe even getting into the individual setup as far as I can - configuring everything, choosing a template, etc. I’ve been just short of being fully assured that the content for the last 40 sites will be ready by Monday, so my plan is to work my ass off tomorrow and try to get everything to the point where all I really need to do is add the articles and EPN tags to all 40 sites on Monday, and I’ll have completely achieved my goal. It’s going to be a seriously crazy couple days for me, but I’m really going to feel good if I can pull this off.

What’s really going to be nuts is promoting all these sites in September. I have a variety of strategies I plan to employ which will require even more content and work, and I’ll be doing some split testing, as well as testing a few backlink tools and services, so there should be some really interesting results coming out in the next few weeks, not to mention the switchover to quality click pricing in October. I’m really hoping that I can make most of my outsourcing costs back within 2 months and I’m considering doing a similar challenge with AdSense to diversify my portfolio of web properties.

I’ll be in touch one way or another at the end of August (or at the beginning of September if I’m too tired from working all weekend).

So you’re probably thinking I’m going to fall way short of my original goal of 100 sites in 30 days.

Actually, I caught my second wind this week and it’s going to be a race to the finish line. I got my second batch of content in right around the time I completed the first 20 sites, and was forced to sit on it for about two weeks while I was busy doing regular work for my web development company (day job, so to speak). So it really killed me that I had all this content sitting here and ready to go, pretty much costing me money by sitting in my inbox.

This week I got things back on track. The second batch of 20 sites has been deployed, and I have the content for the 3rd batch here, and ready to go - so I will likely have the third batch of 20 sites completed within the next two days. That will leave me with 40 more sites to go. The content for sites 60-80 is for certain going to be ready before the end of August, with the possibility of the the remaining content for sites 81-100 also being complete before that time as well.

So despite the fact that I got way behind, I will at least have 80 of the sites complete by the end of the month, and if the last 20 spill over into September, it will only be by a couple days.

Overall, I’m pretty happy that it’s actually coming to fruition. It’s been a grueling amount of work, and that doesn’t even include the content which I’ve fully outsourced.

The number 1 most challenging thing about this project is the keyword research. I’ve been following a completely new method for keyword research that is much more strict than my previous method. I literally spent 2 full work days doing research for the first 40 niches. Now, I’ve gotten it down to a science and can do it a little faster. Keyword research is always going to be the big variable in the niche site business, so I’m feeling really good about the niches I’ve selected, and also how far I’ve come since I started the research for my first 20 niches.

One thing that also made the research increasingly difficult is the format of site I’m using. Before, I could go after almost any product related keyword and slap up pages of product listings on ebay. A good example would be a keyword like - Abercrombie Clothing. When you do a niche site in the old style, you could literally have hundreds of product pages and format the entire site like a real e-commerce site - have pages for sizes, men’s and womens, pants, shirts, shoes, etc. This kind of thing would have worked stellar with my old system, and I had some very successful sites using that format in the past. The new format I’m using is a little different. I have far fewer auction listings, as few as 5 total per page, including sidebar links… So with a very broad term like Abercrombie Clothing, it would be really hard to display a diverse enough selection in the 5 auction listings to appeal to all the demographics of traffic I would receive for a keyword like that.  Basically, it made me have to dial way in on products, and make sure that I would be in niches where if a visitor comes to my site, the EPN ads will be laser targeted and relevant to all the traffic coming through. I think overall this is going to be really effective, and set me way apart from typical EPN affiliate sites, so I’m banking on some real long term results with these, and hopefully the extra care I’ve put into providing quality content on each site, and keeping everything completely white hat will get me there.

Update on first 20 sites

Luckily I did at least get those first 20 sites up quickly which has allowed them a couple weeks to “marinate” like I mentioned in my previous update, and I’ve been able to get a good feel for how everythinng is going so far. The sites began making money within the first 5 days in very small amounts, then the following week the numbers started getting bigger daily. Here’s a screenshot with a SMALL sample of a few of the 20 sites (heavily redacted):

I’m not going to be quitting my day job any time soo with these kinds of numbers, but the main thing I want to draw attention to is the number of clicks and EPC. I’ve only got one site that’s made money so far and has an EPC under 0.10, and it has a lot of clicks and sells a relatively inexpensive product, so I’m not surprised. But overall, of the sites that have made money so far, the numbers above are basically what I’m seeing - a fairly modest amount of clicks combined with a nice EPC.

What I can conclude from that, is so far, my method seems to be working. Visitors are coming to the site, finding highly targeted ads for the exact product they’re looking for, and clicking through to eBay to make a purchase.

The overall traffic for the sites varies - probably between 0-7 visits per day, on average, with a couple of the sites getting well over 10 visits per day, and 2 or 3 getting 15-25 visits per day. The niches I selected for the first 20 sites are not super long-tail, and the main keyword for each site will take a long time to rank for. In batch 41-60, I chose more long-tail and less competitive keywords which I’m expecting to see a good portion of that batch ranking for relatively quickly. So it will be interesting to see how everything stacks up.

The promotion I put into this first batch of sites so far has been pretty light. I did a round of social bookmarking submissions off the bat to make sure everything got indexed, which has seemed to pay off so far. I’ve submitted a good chunk of the 20 to manual directories (250 each), and I’ve submitted Ezines for 2 of the sites so far. So overall, not a whole lot of promotion - in fact, I’m glad to see the amount of earnings I’ve got so far ~$30 in 2 weeks from 20 sites, considering how little promotion I’ve done so far.

I actually wish I would have gotten more sites up earlier so I would have a better chance of recouping my outsourcing expenses in September. I was originally planning on trying to get all 100 sites done in the first 2 weeks, and earn a small chunk back in August, then earn a minimum of $1000 from these sites in September, which would cover a decent portion of the startup costs. At this point, it’s looking highly unlikely that I’ll reach $1000 from these sites in September, but it may still be close. The only real downfall is that I can’t start promoting sites  21-100 too heavily early on because I don’t want to bombard any of these sites with too many links early on, since the domains are all brand new. Luckily I will be able to focus a lot on sites 1-20 early in September and hopefully increase their earnings quite a bit. I wouldn’t be surprised to still reach at least the $500 mark in September and hopefully be on pace for at least $1500 in October, then reach the ultimate goal of $5000/month in November and December when online shopping really heats up.

One big variable is the switch to Quality Click Pricing, so I will be keeping a close eye on that.

Also, one thing I recently found - I set each site up with a unique Campaign ID which helps me a lot with reporting, but makes it difficult to create a report specifically showing the details for the campaigns involved with this challenge - hence the crappy screenshot above. If anyone has any suggestions on a better method for generating specific reports for a segment of my campaigns, I would be extremely glad to hear it.

Stay tuned, as I will post another update soon.

It’s almost like Deja Vu all over again… I remember writing a similar article on this blog last fall when Ebay announced their new tiered ACRU structure. In that article, I explained that there were good and bad things about the tiered structure. In a nutshell, the good points seemed to be that:

1. Ebay was mainly looking to weed out their worst affiliates and incentivised clicks. This would penalize the “Black Hat” affiliates and reward the “White Hat” affiliates sending quality traffic.

2. Affiliates sending quality traffic actually stood to benefit from the change, in some cases by twice what they were originally making.

Of course the negative was:

Ebay doesn’t give hardly any clues how they determine your traffic quality, and therefore, you can be on any tier of their structure without any clue how you got there, or any clue how to move up, or avoid moving down.

So the way this affected me is as follows -

I send basically 100% of my EPN clicks via niche sites. Not engaging in any kind of black hat techniques, or anything like that. In fact, I think if a human ebay representative were to review my portfolio of EPN sites, they would have a hard time finding any problem with anything I’ve got out there.

When Ebay first switched my account over to the tiered ACRU structure, I believe it was November of last year. For the next 4 months, I saw an increase in earnings of up to 400% monthly. I was in the $40 tier and everything was going great. (Note: this was during the holiday season, so I don’t attribute the earnings increase entirely to tiered ACRUs).

Anyway, come march, my quality score took a nosedive - down to the $10 tier, and my earnings fell back below what I had been earning before November 08.

The thing that really bothered me about this, is that I had hardly made any changes to my portfolio of EPN sites during that entire period of time. I began making so much money off EPN in the winter of 08, I became complacent and started concentrating on other revenue streams. So my question to ebay would have been -

“If I haven’t added any new EPN sites or made any changes to my existing sites in the entire span of 4 months where I had an excellent quality score, why all of a sudden has my quality score dropped dramatically?”

Unfortunately, there is no way to have that question answered. All I could do is continue working on improving the quality of my traffic and hope for the best.

Luckily, I did eventually bring my QS back up, and everything is back on track. I’ve had more trouble with Google keeping sites indexed than I have had with eBay this summer.

So what does this all mean?

My reason for a long winded story about my experience with the roll out of the tiered ACRU structure is that upon reading the email from eBay this morning, I got the exact same feeling I had when I read their email about the roll out of the new ACRU structure about 8 months ago, or so.

Basically, at first I thought: “Hey, I’m putting out better quality niche sites than ever, this should actually benefit me long term, as I’m one of the affiliates sending quality traffic”.

Then I remembered back to 8 months ago, when I basically had that same thought, and sure, everything was going great for a while… Until eBay pulled the rug out from under me and trashed my QS with no warning whatsoever, and I was left in a really bad position trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it.

So my feeling about this new change is that, it gives eBay the opportunity to keep touting the same line, that people doing the right thing will actually benefit from this…

But the reality is, it gives EPN the ability to completely dictate what they are paying out to affiliates without having to have any kind of transparency whatsoever. So basically they can slap their top affiliates with a 0.03 EPC one day regardless of any of the actual metrics involved, and the affiliates will have no recourse whatsoever. If you’re a Money Blogger using EPN as a primary source of affiliate income, you should definitely be concerned.

So overall, I’m not losing my mind over this, and (optimistically) I don’t think it will effect earnings for most affiliates that much right away. But at the same time, I mainly feel that this is another huge step in the wrong direction for EPN. It started when they moved away from CJ in favor of their own in-house system, and they booted thousands of affiliates with no warning or explanation, then they changed their ACRU structure in a way that allows them to completely dictate ACRU payout with no transparency, and now this, which seems even less transparent sadly.

Bottom line, this is why it’s so important to diversify what you’re doing. I’m dissapointed that this announcement came smack in the middle of my 100 EPN site challenge, but by the same token, I’m happy because the point of this challenge was to create better quality sites that could be monitized by a variety of different affiliate programs. So I’m going to continue right on doing what I’m doing, and if EPN turns to shit in a couple months, I’ll start removing the eBay ads in favor of other programs, and it will be their loss.

Speaking of the 100 EPN site in 30 day challenge, I’m about due for another update. I’ve still just got the first 20 sites up, but they are fully linked up and already bringing in money. I will have at least 20 more done by the end of this week, and I plan to have at least 40 more after that by Thursday of next week, so things are moving right along. So far, so good. Look for an update on that soon.

Edit: One key thing I forgot to mention… I took my EPC from this month to date and multiplied it by the total number of clicks I’ve received this month, and the total was only ~$7 less than what my actual monthly earnings are. This isn’t really that scientific as their EPC algos are going to change, but for a really, really, really rough estimate it’s not bad. There is little doubt that this change is going to dramatically affect anyone trying to make money blogging with EPN.

As I said in my last post, I’ve found that Google has been extremely tough on EPN sites lately, and I’ve even had a couple more get deindexed since writing it. I took that to heart while designing this challenge, and while it’s made things a lot tougher, a lot more work, and a lot more expensive - in terms of outsourcing, I believe overall that all 100 of these sites will end up being a valuable long term investment. The basic rule I had in mind is that I wanted to make each site so that it emphasizes the EPN ads, while at the same time, the site would still be 100% relevant and easy to monitize if using EPN was no longer an option to me.

Basically this means I had to add a lot of content to each site. In fact, every site has - at a minimum - 2500 unique, quality words of content. This is a huge jump from my previous strategy, where I would find some low hanging fruit, throw up a site equipped with WP Commerce Steel and S2P, and start making money. The problem is, I just wasn’t putting out a quality offering, and Google definitely taught me a lesson for doing so.

That leads me to my next key point - I decided not to use Search 2 Post on any of my sites, at least starting out. I’ve loved S2P since I started using it well over a year ago, however I’m really starting to get concerned that it may be one of the downfalls for a lot of my sites - this isn’t to say that it isn’t my fault for misusing it, but I want to test it fully before using it on every single site. I also want to see - earnings and ranking wise, if the absence of S2P really makes that much of a difference anyway. I’m starting to feel that sound keyword research combined with a properly built site will lead to positive results regardless, and s2p may simply not be necessary. But that’s the good thing about making 100 fresh sites, I’ll be able test a variety of different things and really narrow down what works and what doesn’t.

Another thing I’ve done is significantly reduced the amount of auctions I’m displaying per page. I’ve taken full advantage of the PHPBay sidebar widget, using on all of my first 20 sites - I am running between 1 and 5 auctions in the sidebar, and specifically configuring it to show certain auctions. Then I am also running between 4 - 12 auctions within the content of the page. So overall, I have less than 20 auctions running per page.  I’m really excited to see what kind of results I get with this, because it’s something totally different than what I’ve done in the past.

Themes - this is also something new for me. I’m going to be using a different theme on all 100 sites. Thanks to the great advances of WP that now allow us to select themes from within WP admin, it’s extremely easy to use a wide variety of themes.  I usually don’t spend more than 2 minutes picking a theme, as I feel the overall design doesnt matter. I just try to associate a color with my topic, and pick a theme in my color. I also make sure to remove the time from posts and archives pages - this is a key point I feel. You may think it’s really a bitch to go to all the hassle of removing the time from posts, but it honestly takes me like 30 seconds, and even for novice WP’ers, it isn’t hard at all once you do it, and I really think it’s well worth it. I also make sure to change H2 to H1 tags whereever applicable. This can be a pain in the ass sometimes as it can often call for the stylesheet to be updated. Again, once you do a few of these, all this stuff happens pretty quick.

Hosting - I’m still recommending Bluehost if you’re looking for a good hosting plan, but I wanted a fresh start with this whole deal. I happened to have a Dreamhost hosting account with 0 sites on it that I bought a few months back with a coupon code. Dreamhost is similar to Bluehost except doesnt have CPanel. Overall I’m happy with the results so far and the cost is about the same.

Content - I’m fortunate enough that I can outsource a large amount of the content, so that really helps a lot. There isn’t really much else to say other than ever site will have at least 2500 words of content, and it’s all good stuff.

Widgets - I’m pretty much running the same exact widgets on every site - PhpBay, Google XML Sitemap Generator, All in One SEO, Privacy Policy plugin, and SEO Smart Links. I think that’s all of them, but I will double check. By combining the sitemap, allinone seo and seo smart links, you really get a fast and sick seo benefit. I really love the way it is working out.

The Process

The process for this whole thing is really the key. I spent a lot of time mapping out how I was going to do all this. I have a master spreadsheet that lists all of my domains and keywords, and tasks I’ve done for each domain. I also have a setup process checklist which I will be sharing with you guys at some point soon. Both of these are vital. I’m doing this in batches of 20 - I start by doing my keyword research and finding 20 topics. Then I get the articles created for all 20 sites, then I register 20 domains, then add the 20 domains to hosting, then install 20 instances of WP, then create 20 email accounts, then upload the plugins I need to all 20 sites. Once I get all that done, and it is a beastly amount of work, I go to the individual setup process for each of the 20 sites which starts with configuring WP - Permalinks, URL etc, and ends with adding the content and auctions. Organization, planning and a good attitude is the key to being successful at this. It does take a long time, and it is a pretty mind-numbing process. I got my first batch of 20 sites up this week, my next articles are due in the next couple days, and hopefully I’ll be up to 40 sites by mid next week, and keep on going till I hit 100.

I will share a lot more details about the process as we go.

Promotion - My full promotion strategy is still a work in progress, however I know each site will be submitted to around 80 social bookmarking sites to start things off. I will also submit an ezine article for each site right off the bat as well. I will probably be writing all the ezines myself so I don’t bankrupt myself. I hope to get that completed for a large amount of these sites by the end of August. Then I will likely try a varied promotion strategy to see what is the most effective.

Also, I plan to fully monitor each site. I have analytics installed for each site, and i’ll be monitoring traffic, earnings, and rankings for each site. I haven’t fully mapped this out either, but I think at the end of every two weeks, or every month, I’m going to take the 5 top performing sites and 5 lowest performing sites and add additional content to them to try to 1-maximize the value of the top performing sites, and 2-prop up the poor performers.

Overall it’s already been a ton of work and I’m only 20% done. The good thing, is I can really see how this is going to be extremely beneficial long term, and having 100 similar sites in completely different niches is going to really allow me to test a lot of different strategies which I think is going to pay serious dividends in the long run.

Hopefully some people find this interesting and will stay tuned. I’ve got a lot more to share that I didn’t post here, and will try and post more often in the coming days. I’ll also hopefully have some earnings to post some time within the next several weeks.