A good start but then?

At the start of the month I thought I was heading for a bumper niche site payday with my main site bringing in almost £100 in the first 3 5 days. ?Woo Hoo? I thought but then something bad happened and I was punished by Google with the site getting a ?minus 6o penalty?. I wasn?t sure what had happened but after doing some research it looks like my backlinking and site structure had come under scrutiny from Google and I had contravened their policy. At the end of the day it?s pretty hard to pinpoint it to one specific thing but I believe it was because I built up too many backlinks too quickly, used the same keyword for most of my links, and also commented on some poor quality blogs.

The majority of my backlinks came from commenting on blogs, some of which were just a bit spammy, I?ll admit to that, so I know that was wrong but it?s interesting how Google works this out. If I were a competitor then I could spend some time spamming comments with my competitors details and hopefully see if Google would apply a penalty to them.

Tricky times but it?s all a learning curve and has influenced my link-building policy for the future. I am only commenting on blogs that are relevant to the niche I?m in, and yet again only useful comments that add some quality. The other thing is not to focus too much on keywords for backlinks and instead think about how a novice would write. They wouldn?t jam in keywords and instead it would all be a lot looser and more organic. Lessons learnt then and as usual I?m taking this a month at a time.

So now onto the numbers:

	July Income	August Income	Difference
Niche Site P	£384.83	£127.27	(£257.56)
Niche Site F	£11.24	£50.98	£39.74
ademdjemil.co.uk/blog	£2.86	£1.98	(£0.88)
Niche Site C	£0.00	£1.54	£1.54
Niche Site P2	N/A	N/A	N/A
Niche Site E	N/A	N/A	N/A
TOTAL	£398.93	£181.77 ($282.65)	(£217.16)

As you can see my overall income has taken quite a knock but that was always the risk with having one major earner so I?m not going to focus on that and instead focus on the positives of getting my other nice sites rolling.

Site F has seen a big jump in earnings which was partially helped by a £16.85 click late in the month (someone clearly isn?t using AdWords that effieciently) but even without that it was a good rise and I?m very happy with that.

Site C also saw a few clicks and started bringing in revenue and the aim as always is to increase this amount much like I have done with Site F. This means I now have 3 niche sites earning me money and we?re on the way to spreading the revenue and leaving me at less risk of suffering the same fate as this month.

I have submitted Site P for a but I have read stories of it taking years to get back up the rankings so I fully expect my earnings to drop next month too.

Aims for the future

So I?ve got three sites earning revenue and as you can see from the above table I?m creating Site P2 and Site E, which if you?re good at maths, will bring me up to five sites  (excluding my blog). The route I will be going down is to create many sites each earning a small percentage of my overall revenue, and ideally I would like to have ten sites up and running and earning money by the New Year.

The thing to remember is that all this revenue is extra to my usual 9-5 job and for the moment if I make no money or suffer a drop in my AdSense income then I am not greatly effected (apart from my pride) but if I can succeed and keep building more sites then this could be something that would require more of my time in exchange for the income it brings.