Here are a few projects I’m currently focusing on now. I try my best not to spread myself too thin, but unfortunately I’m usually juggling a couple things at once.
My Affiliate Site Army
I have a small army of websites making money through Adsense, Ebay Partner Network, Amazon, and some various other affiliate programs. All of these sites are very niched and make up around 75% of my online income.
I’m not passionate about any of the sites in this category, they were just created to make money. I’m starting to slowly diversify away from building niche sites like these and will be focusing most of my effort on establishing authority branded businesses and sites that I actually have some real interest in for now and into the future.
While I like the money these sites generate, I can’t see any longevity with continuing this strategy. The reason behind this thinking is due in part from the recent Google Panda update. It slapped the hell out of some of my best sites…best in content (I guess Google didn’t think the same) but also revenue. For the majority of 2010 and early 2011 I was earning $7,500 monthly from these sites. Post-panda I’m lucky to pull over $4,500. Basically a $100/day drop – I’m still getting over it.
If you’re just starting out I highly recommend getting your chops wet with affiliate niche sites. They are easy to create, earn, and learn with.
They have built a solid foundation for myself and have served their purpose well. Right now for the most part they are just being maintained, expansion is at a minimum. I might get the inclination to overhaul the best ones in the future and see how they fare.
I’m currently tinkering around with one of my favorite sites that got hit by Panda. Doing a lot of on-page SEO, beefing up content, and I’ve removed a lot of thin posts that pulled no traffic. Linkbuilding with manual blog comments, guest posts, and article marketing. We’ll see what happens when Panda is re-run and hopefully I can pull it out from Panda and conclude my studies a success.
Edit July 30, 2011: The recent July 22nd Panda Update has been a tiny bit favorable to the site I have been experimenting with. Some of my main keywords are crawling back and it’s making a small improvement in traffic. I am thinking that my long-tail got hammered the hardest.
Passion: None.
MarketersCenter.com
This is a relaunch from an old service business I created when I first started out. I started planning the relaunch around late 2010 after becoming pretty complacent with what I was doing with my niche affiliate sites. They were earning me a good amount of money and I found myself just farting around all day because of it. By relaunching Marketer’s Center I not only created a new diversified income stream for myself, but its also created a new challenge that I can enthusiastically occupy my time with.
Marketer’s Center offers linkbuilding services to webmasters who are looking to increase their search engine positions. I pride myself on not only the effectiveness of what Marketer’s Center offers but also the great customer service that’s enabled us to grow this business over time. We have 13 employees and will expanding even more very soon.
I can’t reveal much because of the competitive nature of this business, but I have some pretty cool new services being launched within the next few months and will post on them when the time comes.
Passion: Linkbuilding and SEO
Great post here man, I hope you get to build the authority site (target a good niche) and then you make more money. I am devoting my time to something like that too and hope it becomes successful soonest!
Sheyi