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

The cellulite market is a subset of the Health and Beauty market. That means you can easily complement any work you do in the cellulite niche with another similar niche, like varicose veins, stretch-marks, etc… You can also broaden your reach and expand out to bigger markets like overall health and beauty. So you could start small and continue building and leveraging off the work you have already started.

The keyword ‘cellulite’ gets nearly 800 searches a day across all the search engines so it’s a fairly healthy word all on its own. A perfect phrase to target with a webpage or article marketing is ‘How to get rid of cellulite’ which is searched for about 120 times for a day. As you can see, if you target just this phrase and optimize it for the search engines, you could potential get thousands of visitors per month. Select from one of the many creams or lotions with an affiliate program to receive anywhere from $10 to $30 in commission.

Check-out the Cellulite Market Research Profile to discover more about this profitable niche.

The RC Car niche is full of buyers. You will find that some prospects are information seekers just looking for the coolest new car or gadget, but even these folks will likely buy at some point. It’s a great market for repeat sales as many hobby enthusiasts just keep buying more to add to their collection.

There are a ton of ways to segment the RC car niche. Currently, the remote control niche includes cars and many other vehicle types like helicopters, planes, boats … you name it. It would be much easier to build a site and achieve high rankings in the search engines for one of these segmented lists.

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This post builds off a previous article entitled, ‘PLR and the Search Engine Connection’.  You may want to review it first.

Presently, Google considers duplicate documents which are duplicate web pages (where the entire page is the same) AND query-specific duplicate documents (where only part of the web page is the same).

So, if even just text on part of the page is the same, the page may be flagged as query-specific duplicate content. This includes text like data feeds, product listings, paragraphs of text, and link directories with the same descriptions.

That’s pretty darn sophisticated if you think about it.

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Do you already have a site for internet marketers? Would you like to expand your reach? How about trying the web audio recording and streaming niche?

There are tons of webmasters out there who would like to bring their website into the realm of web 2.0 by adding multimedia to their sites. Audio is easy and inexpensive to create and even stream from a website. As most folks realize by now, audio works very well as a marketing message.

So do you think you can show webmasters and internet marketers how to record and stream audio from their site and make a profit?

Read the rest of this entry »