Down The Rabbit Hole

Hello good people!

Well it’s been a while since I posted, a week and a half actually. Sorry for dropping off the face of the planet like that.

The earnings slump has continued, fluctuating between $20 and $35 a day with the odd $17 dollar low day here and $50 high day there…but for the most part the disaster has remained steady.

So far this month I’ve brought in about $1,240 in adsense earnings and $213 in amazon commissions ($1,453 total) but remember the bulk of that came in the first 5 days of the month ($534 in adsense and $63 in amazon commissions for about $600…the rest of the month brought in the other $853 over all 26 days!).

What’s going on?

Well Google announced another Panda update about a week ago…less a new algorithm update and more a “database refresh” of the last update; whatever that means. I won’t get into this new Panda update, mostly because it’s depressing and I’m tired of talking about the evil that Google does.

So what gives? Where did I go?

There’s a couple of reasons why I haven’t been posting much lately. First one of the startup companies that I’ve invested in is reaching a sort of critical stage before public launch and I’ve been putting in a lot of time helping out with some of the programing and web development.

Second, there’s so much going on that it’s hard to make heads or tails of it. Google is in the midst of some really serious changes, with the latest algo change, the new Search + your world crap, the new privacy policy that has everyone up in arms, and a seemingly serious change in the entire direction of the company away from search and towards increasing revenue by directing traffic to their own sites…it’s becoming harder and harder to be able to predict how things will shake out.

So I’ve been sitting back and trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing…

Take my sites for example…

Let’s take a random day of December (last month)…let’s say the 14th (right in the middle of the month). That day I had $136 in adsense income and $43 in amazon earnings for a total of $179 on the day off of about 3,600 page views.

Not bad.

Now let’s look at today (1:00 in the afternoon Chicago time). So far today, I’ve had 244 visitors to over 600 of my websites (oh yeah, I’ve got around 600 sites now – I’ve been building steadily over the last couple weeks) resulting in 5 clicks and $1 in earnings.

That’s not a typo.

It’s almost too depressing to talk about!

Did my sites get deindexed? No! I’ve randomly spot checked my sites and they mostly seem to be indexed still. And my new sites are getting indexed just fine…but the traffic is just gone.

I think this has to do with how Google shows results now. Do a search, most of the SERPS are either advertisements or links to sites google owns like youtube or any of the others. Then there’s usually 1 or 2 for the actual manufacturer.

Where do we go from here?

So here’s what I’m doing.

1. I’m steadily building new sites in the same mold as the old sites. Over the next 1-2 months I’ll be able to see if they get indexed and start getting traffic.
2. I’m going to set up a whole new webhosting account on a different IP address in case Google has somehow flagged my servers. Then I’ll throw up a couple hundred sites and wait a month or two to see if the sites get indexed and get traffic.
3. I’m going to start testing a half dozen or so new site templates with different spin text and configurations. Maybe it’s just time for a new site design.
4. I’m going to start a whole new adsense account with another company I own and completely start over with new site templates and a different web host. Just in case Google has flagged my adsense account for some reason.

This is all going to take a few months…and I don’t have a lot of free time because of that startup I mentioned earlier. I’ll try to keep you all posted but probably not daily like I used to…look for new articles and updates once or twice a week for the next couple months.

That will change if things start to pick back up…if they do you’ll all be the first to know.

I haven’t given up hope on this overall strategy. I intend to…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

 
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John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.

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