It’s been almost a month since I sold my main earning website and as my monthly website earnings have now dropped I’ve been looking at ways of upping my income. This has fallen into two categories:
1. Improving my current websites.
2. Build new websites.
Improving my current websites
Although I sold my main earning website I still have others that bring in a combined £150-200 a month and so it would be ideal to simply add more content to these so they get more visitors and more click on adverts (I am mostly using AdSense for revenue). This isn’t actually as easy as it sounds as some of the sites I have are very niche focusing on a single topic within a wider area and so they only really need a few pages of useful content. These generally earn around £25 a month and have zero upkeep so whilst I can’t add more content I am looking to improve the click through rates (CTR) by varying advert colour, style, and location. At the moment I seem to have a better CTR by changing the majority of the adverts to plain text.
I do have couple of sites that could do with more content and I’m taking a slow and steady approach to this ensuring that it’s only good stuff getting publishing. This is slowing increasing visitors to the sites as I’m creating more longtail keywords for them to get through the site.
Building new websites
I’ve bought about a dozen new domains and that was the easy bit as now I’ve got to look at getting websites running and getting lots of useful content on there.
I have bought some content to go on several of the domains but to be honest I wasn’t overly impressed but know that’s partly due to what I’m willing to pay. That has lead me to the decision to write all the content myself. After reading Jamie Farrelly’s eBook ‘‘ which I luckily got to download for free, I realised that I actually like writing content and specifically I enjoy learning about new topics for the various niches I write content for.
Writing my own content also means that I am in full control of the quality on the site and I can feel proud of those sites. Yes, it means that the site development is going to be slower but it will hopefully be worth it in the end.
What type of sites are they?
In an ideal world I would focus on one or two sites and purely focus on them but the fact is smaller sites are easier to rank and all these £25 a month sites do add up. So yes I will still be making some 5-page websites but I have also bought a couple of domains that are focused on quite large topics and these will be long term projects which I hope will make at least £200-300 a month each although it will take some time getting there. Just don’t mention the phrase ‘authority site’ though as it doesn’t mean diddly squat!
Why Adsense and not Affiliate sites
I do have some affiliate sites but they are making very little money for me due mainly to the fact that Google is my main source of visitors and it’s getting increasingly hard to rank for physical products. AdSense has been good to me and I think I’m better suiting to writing about topics rather than products. Yes, I have bought a couple of new domains which are suited to an affiliate site but they’re just sitting on the backburner for the moment.
Will you be publishing Income Reports again?
I last published a proper income report in May 2012 to outline my year in niche sites and I think people enjoyed reading them so maybe I will start again as way to keep myself to account and try and improve my month on month earnings. I guess I stopped partly because I’d leveled out a bit but now I’ve lost my major revenue stream I need to get back on track.
So expect a few more posts from me from now on.
Nice to see that your going to be building sites again and looking forward to your income reports.
I have 1 website which brings in £40 a month at the moment which is a good start to 2013 as i had a domain clearout and started again.
I have never tried adsence so might give that ago on some topics.
Understand what you said about adsense, but it is very hard for me to make a sufficient income, especially if the niche you’re covering does not attract big ad spender. I thought about creating sites with different niche, but this is the only thing I know.
Always wonder how people can have more than 1 sites in a totally unrelated category