My 4 Hour Workweek

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [January '12]

Eric G. — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:21:47 +0000

I can’t believe how quickly January flew by – it seems like just yesterday that we were ringing in the new year. In general, it was pretty good month. I saw some overall improvements, although there was one area where I struggled mightily (and I’ll explain that below).

The good news is, my biggest passive income project has continued rolling along nicely. I’m not earning the big bucks yet, but steady improvements are nothing to complain about.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to post a monthly income report for two primary reasons:

1) To be transparent, and show you what I’m actually earning as a result of the various projects I discuss on this blog.

2) To show you that it’s possible to work a full-time job, 40+ hours per week (I probably work closer to 50 hours at my regular job each week), and still have time to make money online.

I’m not earning enough to quit my day job by any means, but I’m always learning new things, which where the real value is (in my opinion). One of the biggest things I’ve learned as someone who works a regular “9 to 5″ job is that patience is key, and you really have to be willing to work hard and stick around for the results that may (or may not) follow.

Productivity Tip for January

January came and went faster than most people’s New Year’s fitness resolutions fade away, or it at least that’s how it felt. It’s always exciting to start with a clean slate – new goals, new ambitions, and a new year to begin tracking all of it. But one month in, you might find yourself back to your old habits, quickly losing sight of the goals you set within the past 30 days or so.

This month’s productivity tip is simple – revisit your 2012 goals. Rediscover what made you excited about a new year, and reestablish your plan to accomplish your goals if you’ve found yourself straying from the path. It’s okay to revise your goals, even one month into the year – just make sure they are fresh in your mind and continue working toward them.

January’s Income Report

Now, onto the good stuff…

[Read my write-up here]

As I discuss in my income reports every month, Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending site that I feel is my only true source of passive income (i.e. once I’m invested, I make money by doing virtually nothing).

As of the end of January, I was invested in 108 loans (+2 from December) and my net annualized return was 5.90% (+0.09% from December).

The thing I like most about Lending Club is that, while it’s obviously riskier than putting your money in an interest-bearing savings account, the additional return (i.e. higher interest rate) more than compensates for the risk (in my opinion). As of right now, these are the average interest rates for certificates of deposit (CDs):

[Source: http://www.bankrate.com]

Although Lending Club loans are more risky than CDs, I think they’re a good point of comparison, because both investments have a specified duration where your money is “locked up” so to speak. Even a 5-year CD only offers a 1.56% yield on average, which is substantially lower than what I earn at Lending Club.

If you’re interested in trying Lending Club, you can sign up with this link and get a free account. If you’re unsure whether this type of investing is right for you, you can deposit a small amount (loans can go as small as $25) and become familiar with it. If you have any questions about it, I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments (or feel free to contact me by e-mail).

Info Barrel Earnings Challenge

[Read about the challenge here]

As it’s been for several months, this has become a “back burner” project for me. The nice thing is, I haven’t put much work into it for nearly a year, and still continue to earn a decent amount of income from it each month (which is why passive income is so great!).

As of the end of January, I have written 134 articles (+2 from last month). Here are my earnings from Info Barrel for this past month:

January InfoBarrel Earnings Summary

Google Adsense: $46.57
Amazon Associates: $0.00
Chitika: $3.37
Other Affiliate Earnings: $12.30
Total: $62.24 (+$14.18 from December)

If you want to add InfoBarrel to your passive income portfolio, you can sign up for it here.

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

This past October, I started a case study where I’m documenting, step by step, how to create an AdSense-monetized, micro-niche website. Here are the parts I’ve written already:

Because the process of creating micro-niche AdSense and Amazon sites are similar (and some sites are monetized with both), I’m going to track them together. For my sites that are solely focused on Amazon products, I will still be following the strategies taught in Chris Guthrie’s Niche Profit Course. You can also read about my plan for Amazon niche sites.

As you’ll notice below, a lot more of my sites are now earning something, even if some of them are very low amounts (which usually means they only received 1 click). Although my AdSense income continues to rise steadily, my Amazon income completely tanked last month. It had nothing to do with traffic – traffic was the same or better than the previous month. The reason I hardly earned anything this month was due to poor conversion. Take a look:

I can’t emphasize enough how terrible this conversion rate is. I’ve heard people who have conversions up to 8-10% (which to me is remarkably high), but I would consider a decent conversion rate to be 4-5%. My conversions rates are usually below that, but never this low. Here are my conversion rates for the past few months just for comparison purposes:

December: 3.18%
November: 5.92% (holiday season shopping)
October: 2.72%

As you can see, January’s conversion rate of 1.26% is much lower. Nothing has changed on my Amazon-focused websites, so I can’t exactly isolate why conversions would decrease substantially other than “bad luck.” I was thinking that maybe conversions would be down because it’s the first month after the holiday season, so people are less in the buying mood.

I’m not sure how accurate that reasoning is though – when I look at my January 2011 conversion rate, it was a decent 4.13%. Does anyone have any ideas? Anyone else experience something similar?

Here are the stats for January:

# of Amazon & AdSense niche sites: 81 (+20 from December)

Note: Sites with no income in the current or previous months are hidden (just for ease of presentation).

* Site #21 is the site created for my public AdSense micro-nice site case study.

Total January AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings: $74.06 (-$49.26 from December)

Authority Website

As I detailed here, I’ve started an authority website that I have big plans for. Once again, earnings and traffic took a small step forward. During January, I only published one article on this site, so I didn’t spend too much time on it.

One nice thing is that I’m starting to build a decent Twitter following (over 1,000 followers now), which drives some good traffic to my site. I use a free plugin called Tweet Old Post that retweets my articles at random, once per day. This has actually had a pretty nice impact on traffic and social media activity.

Here’s what the site earned in January:

Google Adsense: $5.02
Other: $8.71
Total: $13.73 (+$1.79 from December)

Misc. Affiliate Income

Here’s the breakdown for January. [Note: This income comes from other sites not discussed/listed above, including this blog.]

Adsense: $10.08
Amazon: $0.00
ClickBank: $87.90
Commission Junction: $210.85
PayDotCom: $80.00
Private Advertising: $35.00
Market Samurai: $0.00
P90X Blog: $3.05
Other Misc.: $5.70

Total Misc. Affiliate Earnings for January: $432.58 (+$141.60 from December)

Income Summary

Here’s a summary of January’s earnings, organized by project/challenge:

InfoBarrel Earnings Challenge: $62.24
Amazon & AdSense Niche Sites: $74.06
Authority Website: $13.73
Misc. Affiliate Income: $432.85

Grand Total for December: $582.61 (+$108.31 from December)

Thanks to a bump in my affiliate income, I was able to overcome the issues with my Amazon conversions and have an overall increase compared to last month.

The Art of Batching Niche Site Creation

Eric G. — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:32:49 +0000

I discussed this briefly in my last AdSense case study post, but I wanted to dive into a little bit more detail. Batching is a familiar concept to many of you, especially those who have read The 4-Hour Workweek. Tim Ferriss references it constantly. For those who don’t know or remember, batching is a productivity technique that essentially helps you work more efficiently. Here’s a more technical definition:

Batching: The act of grouping together the performance of identical or similar tasks in order to, as a whole, complete the tasks quicker and more efficiently than if each task was performed separately at different times.

Naturally, I had to ask myself: “How can I apply this concept to niche site creation?”

Is Batching Niche Sites Even a Good Idea?

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to batching niche site creation, especially because this isn’t typically an activity you would attempt to batch. It may still not be a good idea depending on how you work, but I’m going to explore it anyway. Let’s start with a standard pros and cons list:

Benefits of Batching Niche Site Creation

Complete each step of the process more efficiently
Become better at each step of the process due to repeating tasks multiple times within a short period of time
Have multiple niche sites “in motion” from day 1 (domains begin aging sooner, sites can theoretically begin earning sooner)
Helps segregate each step of the process, which may make it easier to outsource bits and pieces

Downside of Batching Niche Site Creation

Lack of focus on one site due to juggling multiple sites at once
Risk of overwhelming yourself, leading to demotivation and incomplete projects

From what I can see, the pros definitely outweigh the cons, and if you’re careful, you can avoid the downsides mentioned above.

How Many Sites Should You Batch at One Time?

This is going to vary by person, because everyone has different levels of “free time.” If you have a full time job like me, you won’t necessarily be able to create large volumes of websites frequently. I would argue though that batching allows busy people to create a relatively high volume of websites.

Normally, if you’re creating a site one by one and you work a regular “9 to 5″ job, you might find yourself creating one or two sites per week (including time spent backlinking, etc.), if even that. So, in a given month, you might end up with 4-8 sites. That’s not bad, but you could be creating more by batching your tasks.

My Batching Schedule

Before I go into the specifics of each task that I batch, I wanted to give you a high level view of my batching schedule. In the past couple of months, my batch size has typically been 20 – in other words, I will create 20 sites at time and run them through my batching process.

Week 1: Research & buy domains – Because researching does take a bit of time (read about how I research here), I generally try to research 3-4 domains per day during this week.

Week 2: Perform my initial setup, order content, and add the content.

Week 3: This is the “break week” where I let my new niche sites sit, become indexed, and age a little bit. I don’t usually like adding backlinks right away because it may not appear natural to the search engines (others may disagree). During this week, I’ll usually perform some upkeep of other niche sites (adding more backlinks, content, etc.).

Week 4: Begin backlinking process – usually, I will do my backlinking process on 2-4 sites per day.

With this plan in place, I have no problem building 20 niche sites in one month. Sure, there will be upkeep in subsequent months, but when everything is going according to plan, that’s what “week 3″ is for.

The Tasks I Batch

Keep in mind that, outside of maybe a few exceptions, I will complete each task for all sites before I move onto the next task. If you want to read more detail about any of these steps, most were explained in my AdSense niche site public case study.

Research keywords & evaluate competition of those keywords
Purchase domains
Add domains to my hosting provider
Install WordPress on each domain (in this process I set up the name for each site)
Find and download 5 new (free) WordPress themes to use for the batch of 20 – Each batch of 20 sites I create uses 5 themes that I have never used before, so that each theme is only used on 4 niche sites (at most)
Install themes on each niche site
Modify themes as necessary (sometimes free themes will have links and other things in the footer that you may want to remove)
Configure basic WordPress settings
Install plugins
Configure each plugin
Configure on-site SEO (mostly through the WordPress SEO plugin)
Add informational pages (contact us, about us, privacy policy)
Order content - I start with 1 article per site (700-900 words each) and the article’s title is based on the keyword used for the domain
Add and configure AdSense ads (manually and with the help of a plugin)
Review articles and publish them on each site
Use The Best Spinner to spin PLR articles (found for free within The Best Spinner’s software)
Perform backlinking with Unique Article Wizard using the content I spun
Perform backlinking with Article Marketing Robot using the content I spun
Research keywords to use for secondary articles - I haven’t discussed this as part of my process, but I will usually order and add a second article to each site after about a month passes from when I’ve created the site and started backlinking it.
Order and publish secondary articles
Add backlinks to secondary articles using the same tools mentioned above
Repeat steps #19-21 as desired (some niche sites will have more content than others, depending on how the site is performing)

There may be some minor steps that I am missing or grouping in with larger tasks, but hopefully this more detailed list gives you a better idea of which tasks I batch and how my process flows.

How I Keep Track of It All

Once you’ve done this process a few times, you may find yourself with 60 or more websites, each at different stages in the process. It would be nearly impossible to track this from memory, so I of course use an Excel spreadsheet that I created.

Below is a screenshot that shows some of the spreadsheet template, but for those who are interested in seeing the whole thing (and maybe using it), you can download the Excel file (for free, without opting into anything) by clicking here or by clicking the image below.

I’ve left an example in the template for you to see how a couple sites looks when each has varying levels of progress.

Conclusion

Is there anything you think I can do to make this batching process more efficient? Do you have any feedback on my niche site tracking tool? I’d love to read about it in the comments!

Also, if you found this article helpful, I’d greatly appreciate a share on Facebook or a retweet via the buttons to the left of this page!

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The Art of Batching Niche Site Creation

Ranking on Page 1 of Google…Without Doing Anything

Eric G. — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:51:26 +0000

I realize the title of this post sounds like I’m about to try and sell you a product…the good news is, I’m not! I actually just wanted to share with you a quick story about how one of my niche sites landed on the first page of Google and received an ad click without me doing much of anything.

Although I uploaded a WordPress theme and added my usual plugins, this site was ranking on page 1 before I even added the content.

While you can’t plan for this in any way, I thought it might be interesting to take a deeper look at this site and the keyword that it targets to see if we can learn anything…

When you’re working very low competition keywords, you sometimes come across surprises. Either a site ranks on page 1 so quickly that your head spins (as one of my sites did in this case), or you can’t seem to get to page 1 if your life depended on it, despite the seemingly low competition. It’s hard to replicate because each keyword has a unique competitive environment, and for some reason, Google seems to like certain domains more than others. It’s a mystery to me, but I thought I could lay out for you the characteristics of both my domain and my keyword’s competition, with the hopes that we might learn something useful.

Here’s Exactly How it Happened

Just so we’re clear on what happened with this site, I’m going to walk you through it step by step:

1) Purchased the domain

2) Installed WordPress

3) Set up some on-page SEO elements (title, meta description, permalink structure)

4) Installed WordPress theme (this was the theme I used, although I think it’s irrelevant to what happened)

5) Set up my standard pages (privacy policy, contact page)

6) Set up my Google AdSense ads (You might be wondering, “Why did you set up the ads before you added any content?” There’s no particular reason why I did this – it’s just the order that I do things.)

Once all of that was done, I took a break, and during this break, I was looking through my Google AdSense data for the day. Looking down the list of sites that received clicks for that day, I saw something really strange – the site that I had just set up had already received a click. How is this possible? For a moment, I was worried that maybe I had accidentally clicked on my own ad, but I’m usually very careful about that.

I decided to investigate, by first looking at Google Analytics to see if there was any traffic recorded on that site. I wasn’t expecting much – I didn’t even think Google Analytics would be tracking the traffic yet, since I had only installed it on the site within the past couple of hours.

Sure enough, the site already had 3 organic search visits, all from my target keyword. Upon Google-ing the keyword, I saw the site sitting right in the #8 position. I’ve heard of pages ranking quickly on established blogs or article sites, but never with fresh domains that contain virtually no content.

Analyzing the Keyword, Domain, & Competition

Unfortunately, I can’t reveal the actual domain and keyword to you, for obvious reasons. I will, however, reveal everything else.

The domain is an exact match keyword domain, with a .net extension. There are no hyphens or any other words added beside the keyword itself. Here is the basic information about the keyword:

As you can see, it’s not a high volume traffic keyword, but it’s also not extremely low either. As for the competition, let’s take a look at the top 10 results for the keyword (it’s actually only 9 in this case), as analyzed by Market Samurai:

Clearly, the competition is very weak (which makes sense – how else would the site get to page 1 so quickly?). Specifically, these are a few things I noticed (for all statistics, I am excluding my site):

3 of the sites are PR0
3 of the sites are less than a year old (this is the DA column)
2 of the sites have less than 10 pages of content on their respective domains
4 of the ranking pages have 0 backlinks (these tools almost always underestimate the amount of actual backlinks, so it’s possible that these sites have more than 0)
1 of the ranking domains has no backlinks at all
Only 2 of the ranking pages have the target keyword in the URL
Only 4 of the ranking pages have the target keyword in the meta description

Without even doing a deep analysis, you can look at this chart and see right away that competition is weak. It’s not too common to find keywords that have 2,000+ exact local searches with page 1 competition like this, but hopefully this little exercise gives you an idea of what to look for. If you want to read more about my process for researching keywords, you can check it out here.

Conclusion

If sites like these can rank with no backlinks, then logic tells us that slightly more competitive keywords can rank with few backlinks. For small niche sites, it pays to do good keyword research, because as you see here, it allows you to put little effort into SEO (which we all know is extremely time consuming) and still be able to rank highly in Google.

Have you had this happen to you with any of your niche sites? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Ranking on Page 1 of Google…Without Doing Anything

AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 6)

Eric G. — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:21:04 +0000

Although this case study seems complete (the site is currently on page 2 for its targeted keyword, but on page 1 for secondary keywords), it’s actually just the beginning. The purpose of this case study was not just to create one stand alone project. After all, what good is one micro-niche AdSense site that will probably never earn more than $50 in a given month?

The exciting part of this case study was not the case study itself – I know it was helpful to a lot of people out there, based on feedback I received, but the excitement is yet to come. This case study was merely a springboard to much greater things and hopefully positive learning experiences.

In case you haven’t been following along, I’ll start off by linking you to the previous parts of this case study:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Research & Initial Setup
Part 3: Setup, Configuration, & Design
Part 4: Content & Ad Placement
Part 5: SEO / Backlinking

With the foundation of the information laid out in each of these sections, there are a few objectives I hope to accomplish…

Replicating Success

When I first started out trying to make money online, I remember someone telling me something to the effect of, “If you can find a way to make $1 a day, all you have to do is do that 100 times and you’ll make $100/day.” Whether or not $100/day is your goal isn’t the point – the point is, if you can be successful with something small, you’d ideally like to be able to scale that same success into something much larger.

I’ve gone through the process of creating one niche site (the site for this case study) which I believe has the potential to earn at least $1 per day. My goal (this was one listed in my 2012 goals) is to have 250 niche sites created by the end of 2012. If I can indeed average $1/day for each site, that would net me $250/day, or about $91,000/year. I think we can all agree that this amount would be great. Now, I can’t expect every site to be successful, but I still think this is an achievable goal.

Efficiency Through Batching

Creating 250 niche sites is no small task (although I already have 70+ created, so really, I have about 180 left to build). To be successful, I need to find a way to work more efficiently. Although I outsource content creation, I still do most other things myself. To me, the key to efficiency with these sites is batching - grouping similar tasks and doing them all at the same time (not necessarily simultaneously, but within a relatively short period of time).

I’ve found that a good number of sites to batch (for me) is 20. For each of these sites, I will batch everything I can – even something as minor as installing a plugin. In other words, I will install plugins for all 20 sites before moving onto another step in the process. Certain steps of the process take longer than others, of course. For example, I can’t research 20 keywords/domains all in one sitting, and I can’t backlink all 20 sites in one sitting. I can, however, focus on that one step before I move onto anything else.

I may write a more detailed post about this in the future (going in-depth on what tasks I batch, along with some tips for better batching), but the basic logic behind batching is that by grouping together similar tasks, you gain some efficiency.

Repeating a task causes you to become better and quicker at performing that task. When I’m doing something for 20 sites, I guarantee you that it takes me longer to perform the task for site #1 than it does for site #20. The amount of efficiency gained will vary by task, but when you combine the time savings from all the different tasks you can batch when creating 20 micro-niche websites, it’s substantial.

Finding a Backlink Strategy that Really Works

When you’re trying to test the effectiveness of an ad or a landing page, the primary thing you need is traffic. Traffic allows you to split-test different components, like titles, colors, images, and more. With enough traffic, the results become significant, and they allow you to implement changes that lead to more conversions – i.e. more money in your pocket. But what about testing other things, like backlinking tools? It’s impossible to do it with one or even a few sites, because there are too many variables. Each website and keyword has a unique competitive environment, so one backlinking strategy will affect different sites in different ways.

But what if you could test out different backlinking tools across 20 sites that target similar competition keywords, have similar quantities of content, and in general, have very similar characteristics (aside from niche/target keyword)? What about doing this across 40 sites or more? What I hope to do is use my large quantity of niche sites to get meaningful data on which backlinking tools are effective with low-competition niche sites like the ones I am creating.

While I will probably ultimately use multiple tools to rank my sites, I still want to know which tools are more effective, so that if one is significantly more expensive than the other, I can evaluate if it’s worth keeping one or both tools, or maybe get rid of them altogether and try something different. My first test, as explained in part 5 of the case study, is to evaluate the effectiveness of Unique Article Wizard vs. Article Marketing Robot. Right now, I have 10 recently created sites that only have backlinks from UAW, and 10 similar sites that only have backlinks from AMR.

After a few months, I will see if I can determine which one is more effective, or if they have similar results. If so, AMR will be the better choice because there’s only a one-time fee to purchase the software (vs. the monthly charge from UAW). Either way, I will report the results once I feel they are meaningful.

This is only one example of some testing I will be doing – I also plan on testing other backlink tools in the future. I believe that having a large portfolio of niche sites will allow me to really compare various SEO tools.

More to Come!

While these are a few of my objectives, I’m sure there will be more to come. The value of creating a large portfolio of sites goes beyond just hoping to earn $1 or more per day from a single site. For example, of these 250 sites, I’m sure I will look to build up at least a few of them into more “authority-style” sites. Obviously, this will require a lot more work, but it’s still something I am keeping on my radar for the future.

What do you think of my plans for these micro-niche sites? Are there other things you can think of that I can do with these sites? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 6)

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [December '11]

Eric G. — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:04:23 +0000

If I had to pick a word that sums up my past couple months of online work, it would be this: irony. Both December and November were highly productive months, yet somehow, they have led to two of my lowest consecutive earning months. December is somewhat understandable – while it’s generally a good month for Amazon affiliates (because of holiday shopping), it’s often a bad month for just about everything else.

Nevertheless, passive income projects are all about future income, so I’m less concerned with the past. I’ve added a lot of income-producing properties to my portfolio over the past couple of months, and it’s only a matter of time before I start to see the benefit of it all.

Let’s get into the details of December!

As I mentioned last month, I like to post a monthly income report for two main reasons:

1) To be transparent, and show you what I’m actually earning as a result of the various projects I discuss on this blog.

2) To show you that it’s possible to work a full-time job, 40+ hours per week, and still have time to make money online.

I’m not getting rich (yet), but I’m always learning new things, which to me is where the real value is. One of the biggest things I’ve learned as someone who works a regular “9 to 5″ job is that patience is key, and you really have to be willing to work hard and stick around for the results that may (or may not) follow.

Productivity Tip Learned from December

I think I’ve touched on this in the past, but it’s worth mentioning again. I like to call this productivity tip, “do something each day.” It can be applied to a lot of different things in life – for example, a 2012 goal of mine related to fitness, follows this productivity tip.

When we procrastinate, we are often just delaying the start of a task, not necessarily the completion of the entire task (although consequently, if you don’t start something, it stands to reason that you can’t finish it either). If you have a broader project or goal in mind (something that spans over a long period and involves many different tasks and/or steps), do something for it each day. Even if it’s just 30 seconds of work. This tip gets you out of your procrastinating mindset and forces you to start on a task. More times than not, if you do 30 seconds of something, you could can just as easily let it flow into 30 minutes. Before you know it, you’ve completed a lot more than you would have normally completed.

I may write a more detailed post in the future on this productivity tip (and I highly doubt I’m the first person to think of it), but this is basically it.

December’s Income Report

Now, onto the money…

[Read my write-up here]

As I mention every month, Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending site that I feel is my only true source of passive income (i.e. once I’m invested, I make money by doing virtually nothing). As of the end of December, I was invested in 106 loans (-3 from November) and my net annualized return was 5.81% (+0.17% from November).

[The comparison image I usually show each month was not available.]

Info Barrel Earnings Challenge

[Read about the challenge here]

As it’s been for several months, this has become a “back burner” project for me. The nice thing is, I haven’t put much work into it for nearly a year, and still continue to earn a reasonable amount of income from it each month (that’s the beauty of passive income, right?).

As of the end of December, I have written 132 articles (same as last month). Here are my earnings from Info Barrel for this past month:

December InfoBarrel Earnings Summary

Google Adsense: $39.06
Amazon Associates: $6.95
Chitika: $2.05
Other Affiliate Earnings: $0.00
Total: $48.06 (-$9.95 from November)

If you want to add InfoBarrel to your passive income portfolio, you can sign up for it here.

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

This past October, I started a case study where I’m documenting, step by step, how to create an AdSense-monetized, micro-niche website. Here are the parts I’ve written already:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Research & Initial Setup
Part 3: Setup, Configuration, & Design
Part 4: Content & Ad Placement
Part 5: SEO / Backlinking

As you’ll see below, although it appears my income didn’t move since November, you’ll notice that one of my better sites lost its top ranking for most of the month and its income dropped significantly from November. Most other sites, however, improved, and I’m starting to see a lot of my new AdSense sites get their first clicks.

Here are the stats for December:

# of Amazon & AdSense niche sites: 61 (+20 from November)

Note: Sites with no income in the current or previous months are hidden (just for ease of presentation).

* Site #21 is the site created for my public AdSense micro-nice site case study.

Total December AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings: $123.32 (-$1.44 from November)

Authority Website

As I detailed here, I’ve started an authority website that I have big plans for. Earnings and traffic in December were slightly increased over October. Also, I’ve received random requests to write guest posts for this site, which I have taken advantage of. Even though I prefer to not publish guest posts on My 4-Hour Workweek, I love the opportunity to publish them for this authority site – after all, it’s free content for me (and I of course allow the author to include a link or two back to their site).

Here’s what the site earned in December:

Google Adsense: $5.59
Other: $6.35
Total: $11.94 (+$4.28 from November)

Misc. Affiliate Income

Here’s the breakdown for December:

Adsense: $4.63
Amazon: $6.76
ClickBank: $60.97
Commission Junction: $175.00
PayDotCom: $0.00
Private Advertising: $35.00
Market Samurai: $0.00
P90X Blog: $8.62
Other Misc.: $0.00

Total Misc. Affiliate Earnings for December: $290.98 (-$162.24 from November)

Income Summary

Here’s a summary of December’s earnings, organized by project/challenge:

InfoBarrel Earnings Challenge: $48.06
Amazon & AdSense Niche Sites: $123.32
Authority Website: $11.94
Misc. Affiliate Income: $290.98

Grand Total for December: $474.30 (-$169.44 from November)

On its face, December appears to be extremely disappointing, however I don’t really view it that way. The decrease compared to November can almost entirely be attributed to the lack of affiliate earnings that this blog (My4HWW) generated throughout the month, which I am completely okay with.

The most important thing to me is that my passive income projects continue to grow and increase in earnings, which they have. While it’s nice to earn money from this blog, that has never been my primary objective. Ultimately, I’d like the income from my passive income projects to completely overshadow anything I earn from this blog.

The Obligatory 2012 Goals Post (And a Look Back at 2011)

Eric G. — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:55:12 +0000

Happy New Year! For the past week or so (and probably for the next week or two to come), you’ve been beaten over the head with everyone else’s goals. Now it’s my turn!

There’s nothing wrong with the overwhelming amount of “goals” posts out there – I love reading others’ goals and resolutions, even if we all know that 25-50% or more of these goals won’t be achieved throughout the year (as much as we’d like to believe that isn’t true). To me, having goals is more about the journey and the path – even if you never arrive at your destination. No one likes to fail, but I think the value of goals is that they help keep you on track. Even if you don’t fully accomplish a goal, you can still be successful.

A Look Back at 2011

It’s always good to reflect on your previous year’s goals so that you can see where you were successful and where you may have strayed from the path you originally set out on. Personally, I do better with short term goals (i.e. goals for the day, week, or even month) because I often lose sight of the broader goals. I still think it’s important to have long-term goals, but it’s equally important to remind yourself of them, and to make sure your shorter-term goals are helping you achieve the longer-term goals.

Anyway, here is a brief look at how I did with my 2011 goals:

1) Dominate and enjoy my new “9 to 5″ job – I can’t determine whether I failed or succeeded here. On the one hand, I did “dominate” the job in the sense that I was very successful for my first year, but the enjoyment wore off rather quickly. There may be some changes coming soon regarding my status with this job, but I’m not yet at a point where I can share it.

2) Start a new authority site that will eventually earn $2,000/month – This goal was partially achieved given the fact that I started the site and have it fully up and running now. However, I failed in that this site has only been earning around $10/month. Part of this is due to the fact that the niche is competitive and I’m still only on page 3 for my primary keyword. I’m definitely not giving up on this though, and still plan to grow the site in 2012.

3) Lay the foundation for my own “real” business – I can confidently say that I did not achieve this goal in 2011. This is still a long-term goal, but very much “on the back burner” for now.

4) Continue delivering high quality content on My 4-Hour Workweek at least 1-2 times per week - Success! This was one goal that I definitely achieved. Regardless of how busy I was throughout the year, I didn’t feel comfortable going a week without posting something on this blog. This blog is one of the main reasons I stay motivated with my online projects, so it’s important that I maintain regular updates.

5) Finish my Amazon Niche Site Challenge by the end of 2011 – This was a failure, not because I stopped creating niche sites altogether, but because I shifted my focus to AdSense-monetized sites. I am still creating Amazon niche sites, but not at the pace I originally planned. There is still a lot of money to be made with Amazon-monetized sites, however I’ve found it’s easier to find keywords that work with AdSense, which allows me to produce new sites at a faster rate.

6) Earn $100,000 between my online income and offline “day job” income – This was a failure. I think my offline income was fine, but my online income definitely failed to live up to my expectations.

As you can see, my success with 2011 was mixed. The good thing is, I did something related to each of my goals, which allowed me to progress further than if I didn’t have the goals at all. While this is nothing to celebrate, it still shows the value of having goals in the first place. I’m not one to dwell on the past, so let’s move forward with 2012 goals!

2012 Goals: Simple, Challenging, and Achievable

You’ve probably heard about S.M.A.R.T goals before, and while I think those are great criteria for creating good goals, I like to simplify it even further and aim to create goals that are simple, challenging, and achievable. The reason I want simple goals is because I have a tendency to lose sight of long-term goals (as mentioned before), and I believe that having simple goals will allow me to keep my eye on them better.

Challenging goals are important because your success will be limited by how much you push yourself – if your goals are all “slam dunks” and easy to accomplish, you will be limiting your success.

Finally, I want achievable goals because I believe goals are only motivating if you really believe you can achieve them. I could set a goal to play for a Major League Baseball team in 2012, but the reality is that I probably wouldn’t even attempt it due to the fact that I don’t view the goal as achievable.

Here are my 2012 goals:

#1 Earn $100,000 between my online projects and offline “9 to 5″ job.

I didn’t achieve this goal last year, so I’d like to go after it again this year. $100,000 is an arbitrary number, but I view it as a milestone for one’s annual income. To reach this amount would mean that I have truly pushed myself to go above and beyond where I’ve been in the past.

#2 Have 250 niche sites created by the end of 2012.

I already have over 50 created, so I’ll actually need to create less than 200 in 2012. Most of these will be AdSense focused, however I am still creating Amazon niche sites as well. This is no small task when you don’t have a dedicated VA and you work a full time job, but I’m going to prove that it’s still possible to do. As a side note, this goal is going to be an instrumental part in me achieving goal #1.

#3 Create a Facebook fan page for this blog.

It’s somewhat insane that in our social media-obsessed culture, I still haven’t created a Facebook fan page for My 4-Hour Workweek. I do have a Twitter account with a decent following, but never really got around to creating a Facebook page. The benefits of having one are obvious, provided you stay active and actually interact with your fans. More than just creating a fan page, I’d like to add a unique element to it, such as sharing good, available niche site domains much like I did with the “newbie niche site month” in the past.

#4 Do some form of exercise every single day in 2012.

This is what I mean by keeping things simple. It would be unrealistic for me to run 5 miles every single day or even attempt to complete P90X again (as much as I’d like to). However, I think I can manage to do some form of exercise every day, whether that’s running 10 miles, or simply doing 10 push-ups. Each day’s exercise amount will depend on how busy I am, but by keeping this goal fairly flexible, it’ll allow me to stick to it on a daily basis.

#5 Earn $100/day across all online projects by the end of 2012.

This goal will go hand-in-hand with goals #1 and #2. If I am earning $100/day online by the end of this year, I will consider the year a fantastic success. It’s not that $100/day is a tremendous amount of money, but if I can get myself to the point of earning $100/day, it will mean that $200 or even $300 per day will be a very achievable goal in 2013.

That’s all for 2012!

As you’ll notice, I only picked goals that were very measurable. At the end of the year, it will be easy to determine whether or not I’ve succeeded or failed with each goal. Obviously there will be levels of success and failure…for example, if I am earning only $98/day by the end of 2012, I will technically have failed goal #5, but at the same time, I’ll have accomplished a lot during the year to get to that point.

What are your goals for 2012? What do you think of my goals? Share your comments below!

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The Obligatory 2012 Goals Post (And a Look Back at 2011)

AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – SEO / Backlinking (Part 5)

Eric G. — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:05:59 +0000

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think this is the most important step of the process. Despite all other efforts, if people can’t find you on Google, your micro-niche site is destined to be a failure. Search engine optimization (SEO) is merely the process of tweaking a few things on and off your site so that Google views your site as more relevant for a particular keyword or keywords.

On-site optimization, although important, is easy (especially with various WordPress plugins out there). Off-site optimization (primarily building backlinks) is more time consuming, and probably what will make or break your site’s rankings on Google. In this section of the case study, I will show you what I’ve done with my site’s SEO.

How to Make SEO Easy for Yourself – The Secret to Success

If you’ve tried to learn about SEO, you’ve no doubt found that there are literally hundreds of informational products, software, and other tools available, all claiming that they will help you “reach page 1″ on Google. If you get caught up in this SEO hype, you could find yourself spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars before actually doing something productive.

Here’s what I tell people: Lots of products work. The key, however, is that you put yourself in a position for your SEO efforts to be effective. In more competitive niches (or with more competitive keywords), there isn’t a whole lot you can do – your SEO efforts will need to be strong, and it will take quite a bit of time. For micro-niche sites, however, the secret is very simple: Do good keyword research and find keywords that are not too competitive. If you follow this one piece of advice, you won’t need to stress about which link building software to use, or which informational product to read and follow. Go ahead and re-read my article about keyword research to see exactly what I mean.

I will tell you about which link building products I’m using for my site’s SEO, but don’t feel like these are the only products that work.

The Tools I Am Using

For micro-niche sites, it’s important to me that I’m able to somewhat automate the backlinking process, because otherwise it will simply take too much time or be too costly to create backlinks for several sites. Although this case study is focused on one micro-niche site, I am applying all of these principles to over 50 different micro-niche sites, and I don’t currently hire a VA to help me manage each project (even though I do outsource the content creation). These tools aren’t cheap, but when they’re used for multiple sites, the per-site cost is actually quite reasonable. For example, one tool mentioned below costs me $67/month. However, because I am on pace to create 20 sites per month, this cost is actually only $3.35 per site, which is remarkably inexpensive for one site’s backlinking efforts.

Unique Article Wizard

Unique Article Wizard is a tool I’ve used ever since I began following the backlink strategy tracked with my Ultimate Backlink Tracker tool (free spreadsheet that I created). This is a web-based tool that basically has you provide an article, and then variations of each part of the article (i.e. multiple versions of the title, as well as each paragraph). It can be time consuming to rewrite each section of the article manually, however, there’s a tool I discuss below that makes this much easier.

Then, once the article is all set up (i.e. you’ve provided rewritten versions of each section the article), UAW will automatically submit your article (that is, “unique” versions of your article) to 500-1000+ article sites (varies depending on category). To make sure the process looks natural in Google’s eyes, I set mine up to to distribute 15 per day, for a given article. Assuming it’s going out to 1500 article directories (the # of directories will vary), this means I’ll be automatically building about 15 backlinks per day, for 100 days. Now, Google will take its time in finding these backlinks (or may never find some of them), so it will actually look more natural than it may seem.

Within each article you submit, you can provide a resource box, where you can place two different URLs (it may allow more, but I think 2 is recommended). Then, with each URL, you can vary the anchor text. Because the resource box allows for 2 URLs, each article I submit to UAW works as a backlink to two different niche sites, which makes the backlinking process quicker for me when I’m trying to do backlinking for many sites.

Anchor text variation is extremely important if you want your backlinks to appear natural to Google. With that in mind, I generally vary the anchor text 6 times for each URL, with each article I submit to UAW. Only 1 of those 6 is my target keyword, and 3 of the 6 aren’t even keywords at all. To show you what I mean, here are the 6 anchor text variations I used for this particular niche site:

moving in together
moving in together before marriage
moving in together with kids
this site
click here
www.movingintogether.net

The purpose of #2 and #3 are to help me rank for a couple of my secondary keywords (for which I have written articles) and #4-6 are thrown in there to make the backlinks appear more natural. I just started this process in UAW a few days ago, so I wouldn’t expect to be ranking anywhere yet.

Unique Article Wizard costs $67/month, which is expensive. However, if used properly, it’s actually very worthwhile. As I mentioned above, because I am currently creating an average of 20 sites per month, the backlinking efforts via UAW only cost me $3.35 per site. Now, these backlinks alone can put you onto page 1 of Google if you research your keywords properly, so you need to always keep that in mind.

Article Marketing Robot

When I set out to come up with a system to backlink my niche sites, I wanted to see if there was an option out there that didn’t require a monthly fee like so many backlinking applications do. Based on my research, Article Marketing Robot seems like one of the best options. This software does what a lot of other monthly fee backlinking sites do, except that you only pay once for the software.

AMR requires a little bit of extra work on the front end, but once it’s set up, it’s very easy to use. Essentially, you have the software automatically create accounts for you on over 2,000 different article directories. Once those are set up, you can add articles with spin syntax (more information on spinning below), and the software will automatically submit unique versions of your article to the various article directories in their database. Much like UAW, you can set up a schedule to only submit a certain number per day – in my case, I am having it submit 20 per day. Also like UAW, you can set up a resource box with 2 links (recommended), and that resource box also uses the spin syntax, so you can vary your anchor text as necessary.

The Downside of AMR

In the interest of full transparency, I will admit that this software is a little confusing to use at first. If this is your first time building backlinks with articles and you’re not at all familiar with spinning, you should probably wait to purchase this. The good thing is, the software comes with a very useful guide, and there is also a helpful forum that has lots of active participants. For anything I’ve had trouble with so far, I’ve been able to pretty easily find the answer.

To me, it’s worth going to the initial trouble because this software doesn’t cost you anything on a monthly basis (over a period of a couple years, this becomes significantly cheaper than anything else). However, this is one of those things that will only be as good as its user – if you use it correctly, it’s great software. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you probably won’t get much out of it. The same can be said with just about any tool though.

Does It Work?

I’ve only recently started using it, so I can’t say for sure yet how well it works. Based on what I’ve read (on the Warrior Forum and other places), many people call this a “must have” piece of internet marketing software. What I plan on doing is taking a batch of 20 niche sites, and backlinking 10 exclusively with UAW and 10 with AMR just to compare the results. Obviously, it’ll take at least a few months to gather any meaningful data, but once I have some sort of verdict, you can bet I’ll report on it here. So far though, I do like Article Marketing Robot (again, with the one-time cost being a huge advantage).

The Best Spinner

I have been using The Best Spinner for well over a year now, and can honestly say it’s one of the best internet marketing tools out there. Because article creation is one of the easiest ways to get “free” backlinks to your sites (and for sites with weaker competition, this is about all you need to do to rank the site), The Best Spinner is very useful. It allows you to spin (i.e. build in synonyms and rewritten sentences) an article so that you’re given unique copies of the article with each spin, which you can use for your backlinking efforts. The quality will only be as good as the spinning you do – so if you do it quickly and don’t really care much about how you choose your words, your spun articles will probably look poorly written. If you spend some more time on it, your spun articles will actually look really good, and you won’t feel like you’re clogging the internet with poorly written content (even though these backlink articles will probably never be seen by anyone).

One feature I really like, and this is one that I think saves you a lot of time and/or money, is the directory of pre-spun PLR articles (organized by niche). Basically, the software has a database of hundreds of PLR articles already spun and ready to be used. If you consider that you might normally pay $3-5 for an article to be used for backlinking, this is literally hundreds of dollars you’re saving just with this one feature (see screenshot below). Now, be careful, because sometimes the quality of these articles isn’t the best. I usually do a quick proofread, and sometimes makes some changes to the title, before using one of these PLR articles.

The Best Spinner is $7 for a 7-day trial, and then $77/year after that. It may seem like a steep price, but if you look around, you’ll see this software is used by everyone (mainly because it makes your life so much easier if you backlink with aritcles). For a free alternative to The Best Spinner, I’ve heard this works pretty well: Spinner Chief. I haven’t used it though, so I can’t really say much more about it other than the fact that’s it’s free.

Backlinking Without Spending Money?

I’m sure there are many of you out there who just want to create backlinks and not spend a lot (or any) money. In my opinion, if you are only planning on creating one or two niche sites, you probably shouldn’t pay for backlinking tools/software, mainly because it’s difficult to justify the cost. However, if you have longer term plans of creating a larger portfolio of websites, I do think it’s difficult to do your backlinking without the help of these tools.

And I’m definitely not saying you need to use the tools I recommend here – there are a lot of great tools out there that, when used properly, will yield similar results. I’ve written before about my beliefs when it comes to investing in your business, and this is an area where it really holds true. It’s all a waste of money, however, if you aren’t dedicated and willing to put in the time to reach your goals.

With that said, there are a lot of ways to build backlinks without spending any money. I’m planning on writing a massive post at some point to list all the places I know about to create backlinks for free, but for right now, I will link to an older post I wrote that gives you several options for creating free backlinks (warning: it was written over a year ago, but a lot of it is still relevant).

On-Site SEO: Easy, but Important

Although on-site SEO is far less time consuming than building backlinks, it’s still very important. There are a lot of WordPress plugins out there that will make this even easier for you – the one I use (it’s free) is WordPress SEO by Yoast. There are really 3-4 key items for on-site SEO (and then a bunch of other factors that are important but not as critical)

Using your keyword(s) in the title tag of the site () because this is what will display on Google.
Using your keyword(s) in the meta description of the site, because again, this is what the search engine results will display.
Using your keyword(s) in the URL structure of your site (or page within your site).
Using your keyword(s) within the body of your site’s content.

All of this is summed up very well in the image below (this image is taken from SEOmoz who wrote a great post about on-page optimization:

Conclusion

Whatever you do, don’t forget about the first thing I wrote in this post – for micro niche sites, good keyword research is going to be your magical gateway to success. Backlinks are extremely important too, but how you build them (assuming you stay away from shady methods that Google doesn’t like) becomes less important if you are working with keywords that have low competition. If you’re in a more competitive niche, your approach will be different, but this post was meant to focus on niche sites of the “micro” variety.

What are some tools you like to use? Share them in the comments! (Also, if you have any questions about my backlinking method or the tools I am using, please feel free to ask!)

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AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – SEO / Backlinking (Part 5)

How to Know When to Give Up (with Niche Sites)

Eric G. — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:51:37 +0000

If you’re anything like me, giving up on a goal or project is extremely difficult to do. You’ve invested a lot of time and probably some money as well, so you’re determined to see it through. With niche sites, most of the work is already done before you can see whether or not the project is a failure or success, so it’s tricky to determine when, if at all, to quit.

Ironically, failure is an important step to success, so knowing when to quit is extremely important, because it will impact your ultimate success (that is, if you eventually to become successful).

A Note on Profitability

In general, your decision to create and maintain a niche site should be based on its profitability – either current profitability or expected future profitability.

You might ask – “How can I determine this? Couldn’t the site technically earn money forever?” Yes, technically that’s true. You don’t want to wait around forever to get your money back, however. After all, if I told you that you could build a site today and recoup your costs in 10 years, would you really feel it’s worth your time to build that site today? Probably not.

My Criteria

With the micro-niche sites I’m building, in order for me to build a site and continue maintaining it, I want to make sure the site is profitable after one year. One year is a logical time frame for me, because that’s how long I register my domains for. The site won’t require any money until year two (when the domain needs to be renewed), so there’s no harm in giving the site one year to become profitable.

Fortunately, you should know if your site will be profitable in a year before you get to the one year mark. I’d guess that in anywhere from 2 to 6 months into the site’s life, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how profitable it’ll be in the near future.

Here’s the cost structure for one of my typical micro-niche sites:

Domain cost (avg. cost, this varies): $8

Initial content cost: $17

SEO/Backlinking cost: $5 (in a future post, I will explain this cost)

Total = $30

[Note: I am excluding hosting costs because all sites are on one host, and this price remains fixed regardless of how many sites I build...on a per site basis, it comes out to a very small amount per month.]

With this cost structure, in order for my site to be profitable after one year, it must earn at least $2.50/month. As you can see, it doesn’t take much for a micro-niche site like this to become very profitable.

One important note: This “cost structure” doesn’t include one big item – my time. In this case though, even though my time is valuable, I am assuming that if I weren’t building a niche site, I’d be watching TV or some other non-income producing activity.

Okay, So When Do You Give Up?

This is where things get interesting. Let’s say, after 1 year, your site only earns $25. By our criteria above, we’ve failed, because the site wasn’t profitable after one year.

However, assuming the site requires no additional work to maintain, should we give up on it? Not necessarily. If you believe your site will also earn $25 in year two, you shouldn’t give up. Although this isn’t a lot of money, the site will only require you to spend $10 or so to renew the domain. What this means is, your site will be profitable in year 2.

If you earn $25 in year 2, and only spent $10 to maintain the site in year 2, your decision has earned you a profit of $15, without requiring any additional work.

When making the decision to give up, you have to ignore the factors that won’t change – i.e. the money you’ve already put into the project, that you can’t get back. (For the economics students out there, these are called “sunk costs.”) Your decision needs to be based on future costs and future expected earnings.

Figuring out whether or not to put more time into a site (i.e. adding content or backlinks) is a bit trickier, since it’s not purely a mathematical question. If, after a year, your site has earned less than $30 (using my example above – keep in mind this amount could be different for you), and you’ve added a decent amount of content and made a good effort with SEO/backlinks, your time is probably better spent finding a new keyword and building a new site.

But Wait…It’s Still Not That Simple

You didn’t think it was this “black and white,” did you? Of course not! If you’re considering giving up on your site, you have to also ask why your site is failing (or will potentially fail). There are a few main situations you’ll see:

1) The site’s ranking isn’t high enough for your target keyword - If you’ve done a fair amount of SEO work and the site isn’t ranking, and you’ve passed your “time to quit” threshold (for me, the one year mark), I would give up and spend your efforts elsewhere. We all know that backlinking is perhaps the most time consuming part of building a niche site, so if you’re not earning due to ranking, it’s probably best to move on.

2) No one is visiting the site – You’re confused. Your site is ranking in the top 5 for your targeted keyword, yet very few people are visiting your site. This is a classic case of poor keyword research (or perhaps you picked a keyword that was seasonal or based on a current event that people no longer care about). If your target keyword isn’t bringing you traffic, it’s time to give up. And make sure to do better research next time.

3) You’re getting lots of traffic but earning very little – This situation leaves room for hope. Where there are visitors, there is potential for income. Have you tested different ad placements? Have you tried a different (more attractive) theme? Perhaps you’re using AdSense to monetize the site, but because it’s a product-based niche, the site would be better monetized with Amazon affiliate links. The bottom line is, if you’re receiving good traffic but not earning much, you should first find a way to better monetize that traffic before giving up.

Conclusion

If you’re struggling to earn money with your niche sites, hopefully this post will help you determine if and/or when to give up on your site. Remember, failure is an integral part of success. If you can identify failure better (or more quickly), you’re one step closer to success. And each time you fail and give up, be sure to know why. That’s valuable information for future projects.

What do you think? How have you determined when to give up, especially with niche sites?

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How to Know When to Give Up (with Niche Sites)

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [November '11]

Eric G. — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:37:32 +0000

November was a very productive month for me, which is a nice change of pace from the many past months where all I have to say is “I didn’t do much this month…” As with most passive income ventures, the efforts of this month probably won’t hit my bottom line for at least another month or two, but it’s a great feeling to put in the work and feel confident that you’ll reap the benefits at some point in the future.

Anyway, keep reading for November’s income report…

For those who are new to this blog, I like to post a monthly income report for two main reasons:

1) To be transparent, and show you what I’m actually earning as a result of the various projects I discuss on this blog.

2) To show you that it’s possible to work a full-time job, 40+ hours per week, and still have time to make money online.

Productivity Tips Learned from November

I’m not quite sure “productivity tips” is something I’ll write about every month, but I do find myself always finding new ways to get things done. For me, a good “getting things done” tip always has an expiration date. Maybe it’s because I haven’t found the right strategy or because I simply get bored with a regular routine, but I’m always trying to find new ways to focus and stay on task.

The key for me this month was this: simple to-do lists, hand written on paper. This seems so elementary and simple, however it has done wonders for me this month in terms of sticking to what I want to get done. Having this hand written list on my desk at all times keeps me on task. If I find myself thinking “what can I do now?” I simply refer to the list and get to work. The worst thing you can do from a productivity standpoint is not have a plan – this just leads to lots of time wasted as you scramble to decide on what to do next.

I’ll add another tip to this one: keep the to-do list very realistic. With to-do lists, I used to find myself getting carried away, listing 10 things to do in one day when realistically I could only do one or two. The end result would be that I’d be discouraged by not being able to make a dent in my to-do list, ultimately decreasing productivity. I try to be realistic now and keep the lists very short and simple.

November’s Income Report

Now, onto everything that makes me money…

[Read my write-up here]

As I mention every month, Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending site that I feel is my only true source of passive income (i.e. once I’m invested, I make money by doing virtually nothing). As of the end of November, I was invested in 109 loans (+4 from October) and my net annualized return was 5.64% (+0.15% from October).

Here’s an image from my Lending Club account summary that shows my performance compared to other Lending Club investors:

To this day, I still only invest $25 in each loan – this allows me to diversify my risk as much as possible. I honestly think every portfolio has space for these types of investments, so in my opinion, there’s no reason not to give it a try.

Info Barrel Earnings Challenge

[Read about the challenge here]

It feels weird still calling this a “challenge” considering I have shifted my focus elsewhere for the time being, but I still firmly believe that article writing is one of the best sources of passive income, especially for someone who is just starting out.

As of the end of November, I have written 132 articles (+1 from last month). Here are my earnings from Info Barrel for this past month:

November InfoBarrel Earnings Summary

Google Adsense: $50.09
Amazon Associates: $2.49
Chitika: $5.52
Other Affiliate Earnings: $0.00
Total: $58.01 (-$1.05 from October)

If you want to add InfoBarrel to your passive income portfolio, you can sign up for it here.

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

In October, I started a case study where I’m going to document, step by step, how to create an AdSense-monetized, micro-niche website. Here are the parts I’ve written already:

Despite my fear that some of my sites were going to have significantly reduced rankings going forward due to some algorithm changes Google made, November’s earnings were pretty consistent with October. I will point out that these micro-niche sites are a current focus of mine, as you’ll notice I’ve been creating them at a fairly quick rate.

Here are the stats for November:

# of Amazon & AdSense niche sites: 41 (+20 from October)

Note: Sites with no income in the current or previous months are hidden (just for ease of presentation).

* Site #21 is the site created for my public AdSense micro-nice site case study.

Total November AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings: $124.76 (-$4.23 from October)

Authority Website

As I detailed here, I’ve started an authority website that I have big plans for. Earnings and traffic in November were fairly consistent with October. As I’ve mentioned before, this project is something I’m working on very slowly, and it’s not my primary focus. With that said, I’m still adding to it little by little – things are headed in the right direction.

I did not complete my goal for last month which was to finish the eBook that I was going to use as a giveaway for the site’s e-mail list opt-in. I wrote most of it, but it still needs a little bit of work.

Although I’ve said in the past that I eventually plan on revealing this site’s URL, I’m having second thoughts about it. I’ve read stories lately about how other bloggers have seen their sites negatively impacted once they’ve made them public – everything from copycats to just plain thieves who rip off the content word for word. If I find that I can offer real value by disclosing the site, I’ll do it at some point, but until then, I plan on keeping it private.

Here’s what the site earned in November:

Google Adsense: $4.00
Other: $3.66
Total: $7.66 (-$1.16 from October)

Misc. Affiliate Income

Here’s the breakdown for November:

Adsense: $5.35
Amazon: $0.00
ClickBank: $172.85
Commission Junction: $100.00
PayDotCom: $40.00
Private Advertising: $35.00
Market Samurai: $48.50
P90X Blog: $3.02
Other Misc.: $48.50

Total Misc. Affiliate Earnings for November: $453.22 (+$47.40 from October)

Income Summary

Here’s a summary of November’s earnings, organized by project/challenge:

InfoBarrel Earnings Challenge: $58.01
Amazon & AdSense Niche Sites: $124.76
Authority Website: $7.66
Misc. Affiliate Income: $453.22

Grand Total for November: $643.74 (+$41.05 from October)

While it’s always nice to see an increasing month, I’m still well below the level I was at a few months ago, so I won’t feel satisfied until I exceed that level (i.e. $1,000+).

7 Things That Annoy Me About Internet Marketers

Eric G. — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:03:38 +0000

Internet marketing as a whole is a pretty amazing phenomenon, if you can even call it that. Few things in this world have allowed people with no experience or formal education to hop on a computer and make a living, sometimes without a ton of effort. Low barriers to entry have allowed a diverse mix of people into this space, and while the stories of success stand out, most people don’t make it.

I’ll be the first to admit: I love internet marketing. Even as someone who doesn’t make a lot from it (yet), it intrigues me. With that said, there are plenty of things that outright annoy me about internet marketers. It’s not to say that these things are done by all internet marketers, but I’ve seen them more than once or twice. Let me know if you agree…

7 Things That Annoy Me About Internet Marketers (in no particular order)

Let me preface this list by saying that I understand why many of these tactics are employed – they’re effective. I’m not arguing against good marketing principles…just simply pointing out what annoys me about them.

1) Free super informational webinars with limited space! A lot of webinars provide some good content, but as we’ve quickly figured out, the webinar is the current trendy vehicle for the traditional sales pitch. Provide good content, tease some premium content, close the sale. At the end of the day, it’s just a fancy sales pitch hyped up by over-the-top promises and “limited space.”

2) The threat of not recording a webinar. This one cracks me up every time. You’ll read things like “I’m not sure if we’re going to record this webinar, so you’ll want to be there!” or “I’ll try to make a replay of the webinar available for those who can’t make it, but no guarantees.” Of course you will have a replay of the webinar! It’s your sales pitch! Why would you want to restrict people who want to view it after you’ve already done it?

3) The product launch “mistake.” This one is always a gem. The internet marketer sends you an e-mail about the product launch, and you think, “Okay, I got the e-mail, I’m not interested, so this is the last I will hear of it.” Wrong. Later that day, you’ll probably receive an e-mail that says something like “Oops, I screwed up. We had some server problems so I’m not sure if you were able to get in, but click this link and you’ll be taken to the fully functional landing page.”

4) The product launch fake deadline. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read “PRODUCT LAUNCH – CLOSING THE DOORS IN 24 HOURS” only to later read something like, “SURPRISE! WE’RE EXTENDING THE DEADLINE TO SIGN UP BY AN ADDITIONAL 12 HOURS.”

5) The obligatory “the money is in the list” post just so they can link to Aweber. I have already written about this, but it’s worth repeating here. I understand the value of e-mail lists, but I’m convinced that internet marketers write about them only so they can put an affiliate link to an e-mail list provider (which is a recurring commission, because you pay monthly or annually typically). Granted, there are some people out there who provide great tips and strategies (and those people deserve to use affiliate links), but then you have a large handful of internet marketers who tell you “the money is in the list” but fail to actually offer anything useful or actionable.

6) Fake product reviews. Doesn’t the word “review” imply that the writer of the review has actually experienced the product? You would think so. Unfortunately, there are tons of internet marketers who “review” products with which they have absolutely no experience.

7) Catchy titles that fail to deliver. Having a well-crafted title/headline (to a blog post, article, e-mail, ad copy, etc.) is a core principal to internet marketing as a whole, and smart internet marketers will use this to their advantage. If your title doesn’t draw someone in, they won’t read the actual content – that’s the logic behind it. Unfortunately, you find a lot of garbage following catchy titles. You’ll read intriguing titles like “How I Made $1,000,000 with 5 Minutes of Work” only to find that the 5 minutes was the time it took to purchase and redeem a winning lottery ticket. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it’s not far from what I’ve seen online.)

Conclusion

This is mostly a tongue-in-cheek post and not intended to be an attack on internet marketers. Most of these “annoying” tactics are effective, and if they are used in conjunction with a good product or useful content, we can tolerate them.

What do you think about these? What annoys you about internet marketers? Share your thoughts in the comments! (Also, if you liked this list, I’d definitely appreciate a share on Facebook or retweet!)

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7 Things That Annoy Me About Internet Marketers

My 4 Hour Workweek

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [January '12]

Productivity Tip for January

January’s Income Report

Info Barrel Earnings Challenge

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

Authority Website

Misc. Affiliate Income

Income Summary

Popular Posts

The Art of Batching Niche Site Creation

Is Batching Niche Sites Even a Good Idea?

How Many Sites Should You Batch at One Time?

My Batching Schedule

The Tasks I Batch

How I Keep Track of It All

Conclusion

Ranking on Page 1 of Google…Without Doing Anything

Here’s Exactly How it Happened

Analyzing the Keyword, Domain, & Competition

Conclusion

AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – Where Do We Go From Here? (Part 6)

Replicating Success

Efficiency Through Batching

Finding a Backlink Strategy that Really Works

More to Come!

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [December '11]

Productivity Tip Learned from December

December’s Income Report

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

Authority Website

Misc. Affiliate Income

Popular Posts

The Obligatory 2012 Goals Post (And a Look Back at 2011)

A Look Back at 2011

2012 Goals: Simple, Challenging, and Achievable

#1 Earn $100,000 between my online projects and offline “9 to 5″ job.

#2 Have 250 niche sites created by the end of 2012.

#3 Create a Facebook fan page for this blog.

#4 Do some form of exercise every single day in 2012.

#5 Earn $100/day across all online projects by the end of 2012.

That’s all for 2012!

AdSense Micro-Niche Site Public Case Study – SEO / Backlinking (Part 5)

How to Make SEO Easy for Yourself – The Secret to Success

The Tools I Am Using

Unique Article Wizard

Article Marketing Robot

The Best Spinner

Backlinking Without Spending Money?

On-Site SEO: Easy, but Important

Conclusion

How to Know When to Give Up (with Niche Sites)

A Note on Profitability

My Criteria

Okay, So When Do You Give Up?

But Wait…It’s Still Not That Simple

Conclusion

Online Passive Income and Blog Update [November '11]

Productivity Tips Learned from November

November’s Income Report

Info Barrel Earnings Challenge

AdSense & Amazon Niche Site Earnings

Authority Website

Misc. Affiliate Income

Popular Posts

7 Things That Annoy Me About Internet Marketers

7 Things That Annoy Me About Internet Marketers (in no particular order)

Conclusion