I just want to say first off, sorry for not posting much. I admit I am not good at running a blog. 

I also don’t do a good job of moderating the comments. Unfortunately, I’ve got too many things going on so I’m just not as organized as I should be. Even though I get so many really cool comments, there’s always a few in there that are packed with a sting!

Unfortunately, those comments stick with me.

To give you an example, it seems there are a ton of people out there who don’t believe anything about anyone actually making money online. All I have to say is this is a business just like any other one.  So to think no one makes any money with it is about as ridiculous as you can get. I think most of the people who question everything about everyone making money online probably don’t look at this as a business venture. Obviously, it’s taken me some time to get to where I’m at and I’ve been fully willing to show that here. It’s not like this income just happened overnight. 

So anyway, since I know the earnings are what everyone’s interested in, I’ll get to that here in a minute. But I will be the first to admit that I’ve hit a wall with this for the last few months. It’s not like I’m complaining, ‘poor me I can’t get past $10,000 a month from this’, but I’m definitely stuck there (again, a great place to be stuck). 

I don’t know why, but I have a hard time with that number, it’s my ceiling or something.

It’s like how some people think you can’t make money online, I’ve always had this, “$10K a month from anything is a lot and that’s probably all I can make mentality”.  Even worse I find myself thinking, “wow that’s a lot so now I’ll just stop”. 

It’s funny because I can start 3 things and get them each to $10K a month, but it’s traditionally been very hard for me to get one of them past that.

There are a few reasons why I’ve not moved past that mark yet.  They’re kind of relevant to what a lot of people might be going through so I thought I’d talk about them.

For one, I decided to try to revive one of my other products. This was the first product I ever created and the one that got me into SEO in the first place. Most of the time I spent working for the last 3 months was working on that. 

I did do a little with these content sites, but mostly, I just added content to them.  I did next to no backlinking.

Part of my problem was that I thought I’d throw my computer out my window if I had to submit another article. I didn’t have a system for doing it. Even though I have a service I use (distributeyourarticles.com), it still takes time to copy and paste the articles into their system. I also manually submit them to ezinearticles.com 

I realized even though this only takes about 5-10 minutes to do, I couldn’t stomach it anymore.  I had kind of a mental block going on with the idea of outsourcing it (I think I actually thought someone else couldn’t do a good job of it, which is the lamest excuse ever), but finally took the plunge and do have someone set up to do this for me now.

I’m very happy about that and am busy having articles submitted for me.  I’ve also figured out a couple of other backlinking systems that don’t take much effort from me because I’ve found ways to get them outsourced.

It really is a great feeling to know that even when you’re not working your business is not just earning, but actually growing.  I’d like to remove myself from as much of the tedious, repetitious work as possible now and suggest when you start earning from your sites you do as well. I guess it’s kind of turned into my main business goal for 2011.

It’s too easy to get burned out like I did and then not grow. I would have done anything not to have to build backlinks and lost focus.  Which is exactly why I went back to that old product even though I’d probably be in a better place if I hadn’t spent all that time on it.

The content publishing business is so scalable that it’s a real shame not to keep growing it once you’ve got things figured out.  So if you’re stuck where I was do try to let go of some of the repetitious work.  It’s a nice feeling to give someone else a job, people really appreciate it and it’s so helpful to you.

So right now I outsource articles for article directories in bulk and then I get all the resource boxes organized for someone else to submit them.  So it’s not entirely hands free, but it’s getting much closer.

Obviously if you’re just starting out I don’t suggest this, it’s only once you have a system figured out. 

Please don’t take my success for yours, this is essentially a business model, and just like any other business, you’re going to have to figure some things out on your own and will get better and better with trial and error. So during that stage (going from zero to $1,000 a month) if you don’t have the money to spend just do it on your own. 

Anyway, here’s a re-cap of my earnings, from when I started this to what I earned in December…

Month                        Adsense             CPA                   Total

December           -              $82.44                   $0                              $82.44

January               -              $334.20                 $0                             $334.20

February             -              $473.12                $26.65                     $499.77

March                   -              $818.38                $167.87                  $986.25

April                       -              $1,196.77           $814.15                  $2,010.92

May                       -              $2,715.66             $1,430.50           $4,331.16

June                      -              $2,258.39             $2,525.28             $4,783.67

July                        -              $3,275.59             $3,142.88             $6,418.47

August                  -              $4,756.68             $5,670.15             $10,426.83

September          -               $4,395.73             $5,334.43            $10,426.83

October                -               $4,235.51             $4,048.30           $8,283.81

November          -                $5,033.08            $4,773.38           $9,806.46

December          -                  $4,949.60           $5,274.18             $10,223.78

As you can see, I’m still right around $10,000 a month with this network, but not really much more than that.  Honestly, I was really surprised I made as much as I did in December because these sites are not in the type of market you’d expect to receive a lot of holiday traffic in.  I don’t know why October dipped down so much, could be a lot of reasons, but it was still a decent amount of passive income to be making from sites I set up a year ago.  As you can see it did go back up in November and stayed up in December. 

Again, I really didn’t build any links to these sites. I did however add a little content to some of them. Mostly because I have a few freelance writers I didn’t want to lose and I knew they could use a few jobs to earn holiday money.  The extra content was something I could use anyway and was easy for me to get and publish on the sites so that’s really all I did between October and the end of December.

About 90% of the income is coming in from 4 sites now, but the rest are increasing so I’m putting in a lot of effort into building them up over the next couple months or longer. Here is the December screenshot for the CPA program. Sorry I’m not showing them all, some of them I can’t get at this point and really, if you still need proof from me after reading all the other Truth Reports a couple more screenshots isn’t going to help you J

CPA earnings for December:

Adsense earnings for December:

And here are the Adsense earnings which shows a little more as to the breakdown of where the earnings are coming from.  Two sites earned over $1,000 from just Adsense while 1 was very close; $976.19 and another was $653.52.  The rest were much lower.  But as you can see there are quite a few earning over $50 a month.  So that’s what I’m going to build off of in the upcoming months.

The nice thing is its pretty steady now.  Again, I didn’t do much of anything from about October until after the Christmas holiday.   I keep getting people writing in and asking if the traffic to my sites is dropping because theirs is, and well, no, it’s not. But that’s because I put in a lot of work to make my SEO plan stable.  I go after lots of different keyphrases, not just one, and use lots of different types of links.

I’ve also noticed a lot of folks saying my SEO course is over a year old; geez I guess it’s not the shiny, new thing on the block anymore so it must not be good.  And that’s fine, more for me and the ones who want to hop on the old SEO methods with me.  It’s a lot better than spamming the heck out of forums by building up 100’s of useless forum profiles.  Because Google’s never going to be able to sort that out of their algorithms (sarcasm here if you’re not getting it).

I’ve said it before, but the main stuff I use are directory links, article marketing a certain way, with the same article, just different resource boxes (with different links), RSS feed submissions, social bookmarking, 3^rd party sites, and contacting webmasters.  I also have good content on the sites and most of them have over 50 pages (or will soon). Each page is highly optimized because from my experience you don’t need near as many links to rank high when you’ve at least got your on-site sorted out.

I talked about article marketing in the last File, so this time I’ll go over a little about directory links.  There’s a lot of misinformation about directory links out there. Most people say they don’t work, but I don’t see that. In fact, I’ll even pay to have my sites included in pay directories. It’s definitely worth it.

As a trial, because I recently read that an SEO guy I trust thinks free directories don’t work anymore, I did nothing to a couple of my underperforming sites from this network for a few months except free directory submissions.  The traffic went up significantly.  I’ve noticed that anytime I put in a batch of free directories, the traffic always goes up and stays up, but this was a good test to make sure. So I’m confident it’s still working.

I do try to find services that submit to quality directories. I do write a lot of different descriptions and use different titles when I submit my sites.

So maybe that’s the difference between why I see free directories helping my rankings and other people don’t.   I really don’t know how one person can see such good results and another see no results, so there must be something different in the way we’re doing things.

Anyway, Directory Maximizer works if you take the time to set up your site in their account right (lots of different titles and descriptions and do your keyword research).  I wouldn’t use it as the only means for backlinking, but you can definitely add it to your backlink plan if you want to see results over time.

So that’s just one thing I do.  Again, the article marketing method I laid out in the previous Truth File is something I still do and will probably continue to do for the next couple of years if not more. And that’s because it works and doesn’t take hours to do.

Again, the goal with this case study was to get to $15,000 a month and well, I’m pretty confident I’ll be there at the end of Jan or if not, Feb at the latest. I’ll try to make a post here soon after and share a few of the things I’ve learned from this experience with you. Thanks to everyone who’s been following along.  As you notice, I usually try to answer the questions in the comments for a few days after I post so if you’ve got any, just include them at the bottom.

So anyway, thanks to everyone who still reads my blog even though I am one of the worst bloggers ever.  Waiting 3 months between posts is pretty bad; it’s good some of you try to kick me into gear with your comments!

All the best for a happy 2011!

Lisa

Here’s an update on the network I started last November.  Instead of creating a PDF file, I’m just putting it right on the site; hopefully it’s easier to read like this.

Just to re-cap, the network is about 20 sites. Each started with about 3 pages of actual content, plus terms, privacy, contact, and about us page and has grown from there.  The smallest sites have about 20 pages, the largest probably around 75 pages. 

I started building the sites in November of 2009 (so last year).

By December of 2009, although they were all small (and nowhere near finished), each site was ready to promote so I started backlinking to them.

Here’s a breakdown of the earnings since the beginning:

Month                        Adsense             CPA                   Total

December           -              $82.44                   $0                              $82.44

January               -              $334.20                 $0                             $334.20

February             -              $473.12                $26.65                     $499.77

March                   -              $818.38                $167.87                  $986.25

April                       -              $1,196.77           $814.15                  $2,010.92

May                       -              $2,715.66             $1,430.50           $4,331.16

June                      -              $2,258.39             $2,525.28             $4,783.67

July                        -              $3,275.59             $3,142.88             $6,418.47

So that’s a snapshot of my earnings from this network of sites that I started in November of last year.  I’ve put together two previous reports that have screenshots and some tips on how I got these results that you may want to read.  You can get those here and here.

Part of the reason I’m showing you this is so that if you’re stuck back where I was in December, at only $80 something dollars hopefully you’ll keep going because you’re on the right track.  As you can imagine, I’m very glad I kept going with this!

I earned $5,670.15 from the CPA offers and $4,756.68 from Adsense in August.

And this is all from the network of 20 sites I set up this past November. 

So the grand total for August was over $10,000 for the month; the exact total is $10,426.83.

As you can probably imagine, I was very excited to reach 5-figures per month from these sites! 

So the total time to get to 5-figures per month was 9 months.  Hopefully it will stay above 5-figures for September, but still, the fact that I got to that point after 9 months is pretty exciting.

It hasn’t happened exactly like I thought it would because as you can see from the Adsense screenshot below (each line is for a different site), I’m making most of this money from just a handful of sites.  I had to stop working on all 20 sites, and just pick a handful to focus on.

The problem is that if you start outsourcing or writing articles for 20 sites, you’ll go broke or wear yourself down too quickly.  20 articles outsourced only gets you 1 per site.  So you’d have to do that 20 times to add even just one article to each site (which doesn’t really get you anywhere).  If you want to add 20 articles to each site then you need to have 20  x 20 written.  That’s 400 articles and 400 articles costs a whole lot more than if you just focus on one site and spend your time there.

But anyway, I’ll take the extra income either way.  And I know there’s a lot more potential from this than the amount I hit last month since I have so many under-performing sites.  As you can see, I have a bunch of them that are only making about $20 a month or less…

So that’s the Adsense screenshot and here’s the CPA earnings …

Sorry there’s so much blanked out, but you can see the totals.

Now by no stretch of the imagination did I sit on the beach somewhere and all this money magically appeared. I worked very hard to get my earnings up to $10,000 in August from the $6,000 I earned in July. 

I spent a ton of time and money outsourcing content and building up links.  If you’re wondering how much I’d estimate about $2,500 or so in July was spent on these sites.  It sounds like a lot, but the thing is, I’ve earned all that money back and it should continue to generate a high income for me even if I stop spending on it.

Outsourcing that much content was a real learning experience. 

The total was actually much more than that, I’d say about double, because I have my main site that I also was building up at the same time. So in all reality, I probably spent about $5,000 (most of it on content) between July and part of August.  I actually stopped all my activities about half-way through August for a much needed vacation.  I didn’t really resume doing anything until the beginning of September and to be honest, I didn’t do much in September and I’m only just now getting back into things.  It may take me a while to get into a content outsourcing marathon like that again.

Again, I don’t recommend going out and outsourcing a couple thousand dollars on anything until you have a proven track record. And don’t even take what I’m doing as YOUR track record, because it really isn’t.   And do note that even I didn’t spend that kind of money until I was already making money with this project (I spent what I earned in June on this so it’s not like it was my life savings or anything … please don’t do that). 

Basically I outsourced content creation for my sites as well as content for me to distribute. Most of the money was spent on content for my sites (which is the way I suggest doing it).  For one, I’m willing to pay a higher price for the content I put on my sites.  And for another, I had a higher volume of content written for my sites than for article directories and other places you can add your content.

I really think this is important, and something to follow, kind of like a golden rule of content publishing.  You want to add as much value to your own sites.  The whole article distribution thing works, but you’re not out there to make someone else money, you do it to make money and build value for your business.

Plus once you have a site that’s gaining traction in the search engines, when you add a new piece of highly optimized content to it, you’re going to get top rankings for it much faster than when you add content to a new site.  That’s because you’re linking to it from within your already ranked site.  So it’s a huge short-cut and one of the fastest ways to increase your income.

I know I mentioned this in the last report, but I wanted to touch on it again, because I know the current trend for many in internet marketing is to just create a 3 page site and then walk away from it.  That’s crazy, especially if it actually earns you some money.  You’ll definitely make more if you research more keywords and write more content around related topics.

I should also point out that in most cases; I did not have time to build links to this new content.  I was very busy just outsourcing it, managing the writers, and then adding it to my sites.  So I didn’t have time to build links. 

At this point I’m realizing that a better system for outsourcing would really help me out.  I get all my content written, but there’s still a lot I’m doing on my own that would really be smart to outsource.  For example, although I have outsourced it in the past, I’m taking the articles for distribution and loading them into Ezinearticles.com and Distributeyourarticles.com on my own.  Just that takes a lot of time, and I really should find someone to do this for me.

Anyway, like I mentioned, I was little burnt out after outsourcing so much content and I did take a break. But I still earned a considerable amount in September … here are the totals from that month:

Adsense earnings were at $4,395.73 and CPA earnings were at $5,525.26 so that brings my September totals to $9,920.99. 

Which is under the $10,000 a month mark, but still pretty good.

So my earnings did dip a little. I think it could be the market I chose (maybe Sept is a slow month), I’m also constantly tweaking things, and I just kind of took a break.  I’m still very happy about this though and will keep working toward increasing the earnings in October.

So here are my Adsense earnings, each line is a different site. I have some sites earning next to nothing (because I haven’t had the time to promote them) and others doing over $1,000 a month just from Adsense.  I’ve got 3 at that point and if you’ll notice, 3 more now that bring in over $100 a month from Adsense. Those are the next 3 I’m going to promote.

Here’s the CPA total from this network …

So what are the keys to going from ZERO to 5-figures a month in 9 months with content publishing? 

I think there are 3 main rules:

1. You have to pick a niche where there’s money being spent.  Here’s how you can tell.

It’s great when the market you’re thinking of entering is advertised all over; TV, magazines, online, radio spots, etc…   Since you’re not going to create your own product (at least not at first and potentially never), there needs to be a lot of advertising opportunities for you to choose from.  Lots of Adsense ads with a decent payout is nice and so is having a number of affiliate and CPA programs to choose from.  I don’t like putting all my eggs into one basket so I wouldn’t suggest building a site around just Adsense.  It’s nice to have a few checks coming in every month just in case.

2. You need a ton of traffic. I am getting this traffic through the search engines. Some would say that’s risky, but I have sites I’ve built from nearly 10 years ago that are still at the top of the rankings and I’m betting they’ll stay there another 10 years. 

I’ll eventually start diversifying the traffic, but at first you need to master one method of traffic generation.  So if you’re going to follow in my footsteps you would want to master SEO.  Build your sites the smart way, with good, unique content and get lots of backlinks for tons of different keyphrases.

3. Work hard.  Don’t expect to make much of anything at the beginning. If you’re new to this, I wouldn’t expect to make anything for the first 6 months.  Just get a good site put together and start building links to it.  I’d say it might take 2 weeks to see any movement in the search engines from your backlinks.  So that means if you write and submit 5 articles to article directories and 2 weeks later you’ve only moved up 5 spots in the search rankings, you need to do more.

Don’t just sit there and expect if you do nothing you’ll move up 5 pages with your tiny efforts from before. 

That’s all your going to get from that. 

You need to keep working. 

It may take 20 articles submitted all over + 500 directory submissions + 100 social bookmarks + links from 2 squidoo lenses, a hubpages hub, 12 other 3^rd party sites, RSS feed submissions, and contacting dozens of other webmasters before you start getting a decent stream of visitors to your site.  Doing that might get you 5,000 unique visitors per month or more, but it just depends on how well you’ve optimized your site, the foundation you built with your keyword research, and the competition in your market.

Or it might take you 2 times the work I just mentioned or much less.  It’s hard to say, but if you’re not seeing traffic, you need to put in more effort.  Some of my sites start earning faster than others, it’s just due to the nature of the competition. 

But once you start seeing your traffic increase and your profits growing, don’t stop, keep working hard and you’ll be at a much higher income than you planned.

So those are the main rules to making income like this from my experience.  Lot’s of advertising possibilities in the market, traffic,  and effort on your part.

So from here, I’m still working toward my goal of $15,000 a month from this network of sites.  Honestly, I feel a little weird sharing my income stats even now so once I get past the $15,000 a month mark I might stop posting these reports. 

For now, I do hope they inspire you to get something like this set up for yourself.

I know I’ve been inspired when others post results of their success and in some ways it’s kept me going enough to get to the point I’m at.  So I hope this helps you reach your goals as well!

All the best…

Lisa

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about why people fail with Internet Marketing.  I guess since I’ve spent so much time thinking about it, this report just flowed right out of me yesterday. 

It’s geared toward people who aren’t succeeding with their Internet Marketing efforts. 

If you’re already seeing success, then I bet you’re already doing what’s in the report.  And if so, please take a minute to leave a comment for everyone else. 

If your not seeing success then I think this report will shed some light on why that may be.

Here’s the link to the report: Why You Can’t Make Money Online

Before I get into this, I just want to thank everyone who left comments on the very first Truth Files report I wrote. Because of that, I felt like I HAD to write this second update. 

I’m finding out it’s really more my nature to quietly do my own thing so keeping up with the InlineSEO.com blog is a challenge for me. 

And that’s why I don’t post very often.  

But due to the outpouring of comments and out-right requests (maybe even demands at times) for updates I’m trying to move out of my shell. 

So anyway, I’m finally posting the second update to my Truth Files Series. 

The first report I wrote (which you can get here if you haven’t seen it yet) covers the network of sites I started building in November.  By March I was earning about $1,000 a month from it.  I covered a little of what I did to go from about 20 small sites to $1,000 a month in that first Truth Files report.

In this one I take over where I left off, with April’s earnings, which turned out to be right at about $2,000 and go all the way through July, where you’ll see a significant increase.

The main points I’m hoping to cover in this Truth Files update are:

1. Autopilot income is possible, but it takes a great deal of work to create it.
2. It’s worth the leap to go from creating 1-3 page mini-sites earning a pitiful $1/day to creating something more substantial.  There’s virtually no cap on your earnings potential once you break free of the mini-site mindset. 

I’ve got screenshots for you and even a few pointers in this report.  I really think you’ll get something out of it if you take the time to read it. 

I know following earnings has been a fun way to keep myself motivated and I hope it’ll do the same for you.

So that’s it, if you want to see where I’m at now and learn a little of how I got there, read the update.  Without anymore rambling … here’s the link to the second installment … Truth Files: Update #2.

A few minutes ago, I finished writing a report that covers what I’ve been busy working on for the past several months.

You’ll laugh when you see the earnings screenshots, but the point is I’m showing you how this business really works. In this file I’m showing you a slow start to a network of sites I started building in November.

If you’re trying to earn from Adsense/CPA offers/Affiliate programs by driving traffic through SEO, you’ll see what a realistic expectation is.

I know I do things different than most, so just by that fact, I’m slowing things down. And I probably should burn this report rather than making it public, but I’m really tired of the hype that surrounds the Internet Marketing industry.

I just want to set the record straight on what it really takes to create Autopilot income, which is very possible, but as many will try to hide, does take work.

So if you want to see what I’ve been working on, read this report. It may also inspire you not to give up on your next project.

If people are interested, I’ll keep posting updates to the project. The end goal is $15,000 a month of autopilot income from the network of sites I built in November.

Again, you can read the Truth File right here.