My 4 Hour Workweek

I’ll immediately point out that the title of this blog post is pure satire.  Contrary to what a lot of people would like you to believe, and what you know to be true deep down inside, creating a true authority site is not easy.  It requires a lot of hard work and patience.  It’s great to “follow your passion”, but the truth is, doing so is not some magical one way path to a proverbial pot of gold.

We all know this to be true, but it’s something I’ve recently experienced up close and personal.  You probably read a lot of blogs about people who have quit their jobs (or been fired) and have subsequently made an amazing living by starting a business online.

Unfortunately, that isn’t my story (and if you’re like most people, it’s not your story either).  This isn’t intended to be a “how to” post – it’s more a collection of thoughts I’ve been meaning to write about, so take from them whatever you want.

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Ever since Google rolled out its recent Panda and Penguin updates, the internet marketing world has been scrambling for new strategies, both with SEO and content creation.  The wildly popular mini niche sites are quickly becoming a thing of the past as website creators turn their attention toward something that is seemingly more stable: “authority” websites.

The term “authority site” can mean a lot of different things depending on who you ask, but the one element that we can all agree on is more content.  It’s difficult for a 5-10 page site to be an “authority” on a given topic, which is why people tend to equate more content with more authority (although this isn’t always true). There has to be a quality element as well, but that’s a lot more difficult to quantify.

For some of us, creating lots of content on a regular basis isn’t easy.  And if you’re like me, you like to work on multiple projects simultaneously, which makes it even more difficult to push out fresh content on a regular basis.  For one of my authority sites, I’ve found a way to get a lot of free, unique content so that if there are weeks where I don’t have the time to write an article (or simply don’t feel like it), I have options.  Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

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Next up in the Google AdSense Alternatives series is Chitika!  This is actually one advertising network that I’ve been using for awhile, almost as long as AdSense, because I was able to use it on my InfoBarrel articles.

As I go through and review these various alternatives to AdSense, I’m starting to realize that it’s going to be extremely difficult to ever match or beat the performance of AdSense. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to set AdSense as the “standard” because then everything else is going to appear very weak by comparison.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to like about Chitika, and I’ll go into all the details below.

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Time really flies as we get into the summer months – all you want to do is sit outside, enjoy the warm weather, and relax.   I did a lot of that May, as I saw my online business finally settle down and begin improving again.

May was a lot of fun in a “what the hell am I doing?” kind of way, as I splurged with a couple of fairly large purchases (for my personal life, not internet business).  I’ll explain more on that below.

Let’s dig into May’s report…

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As promised, I’m going to periodically update the progress of my case study as I attempt to bring a few of my niche sites “back to life” (you can read part 1 where I explain everything here). [Warning: This is a very short post!]

So far, it looks as if things are going well.  It’s always difficult to tell if changes are a result of efforts that I’m making, or some external forces (like Google algorithm changes).  Here’s a quick look at the improvements over the past couple of weeks.

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The “Google AdSense Alternatives” series continues! In case you missed it, I previously wrote about Media.net, and today I’m going to discuss Infolinks.

Much like Media.net, Infolinks was one of the alternatives I turned to almost immediately after losing my AdSense account.  I had seen it around on a lot of other sites in the past, but never bothered to try it until now.  My overall feelings are pretty mixed on this one, and I’ll explain why below.

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