Stephen Crooks

Glad I can be of help Oling.. By the way, the 100buckschallenge blog has a new update.

Oling

Thanks Steve for the reminder about the update. i have just read and I am not surprise at how many people would be interested on a one-om-one step by step tutorial. i for is inclined cause i have been on this for more than a 8 months now and I only made a xxx or so dollar. I will think about it.

thanks
oling

Learn More About Me later...

Julia Andersson

Hey Steve

Got a question for you. I'm assuming that adsense will NOT be the only form of monetisation for this site. Are you planning on promoting any affiliate programs to travel sites etc?

If you are I have a couple you might be interested in. There are a couple of sites in the clixgalore affiliate site.

http://www.escapetravel.com.au pays $10 per LEAD! (more than just cruises)
http://allcheapfares.com pays $10 per sale (but has more than just cruises)
http://www.easycruises.com.au pays $10 per sale (Australia and South Pacific cruises)

There are others available but these are probably the most appropriate ones. If you're not already a member of clixgalore (which you probably are) just let me know and I'll send you my affiliate link via pm (if you don't mind that is!).

Stephen Crooks

Hi Julia,

For the purpose of this challenge, Adsense will be the only form of monestization but that may change after the challenge is over.

Thanks for the tips on affiliate programs, I am not a member of clixgalore yet as far as I know. I went through a phase of signing up to as many affiliate sites as possible a couple of years back so I can't remember half of the sites I actually joined! I personally have most success with Commission Junction, clickbank and paydotcom with a few others that bring in some income.

Stephen Crooks

I have just updated the 100buckschallenge blog with some new stats and my first adsense income overview. (link in my signature)

bellabee

Steve,

I just wanted to let you know that this thread is what lead me to warrior forum (via a google seach). Before reading your thread, I just toyed with the idea of getting into niche sites - but I decided to give it a try, follow your advice, and see if I could mimic your results.

My first site went "live" on January 14th. Between January 14-31st I had a total of 1278 unique visitors at monthly average of 78 per day. I had a one day high of 333. So far in these first 3 days of February I have 267 unique visitors with an average of 116 per day.

So I just wanted to take the time to thank you and some of the other contributors to WF for the tips and advice. I'm new to AS & Niche sites, but not to SEO - so I wasn't totally clueless. But it does feel good because a good portion of my traffic is all organic search, and the portion that is not - it's targeted traffic that sticks around the site to actually read. My bounce rate is like 41%, which I know needs improvement - but for a site thats barely 1 month old I'm satisfied.

My question is this though - my CTR is pretty sucky. (lol) In my 3 weeks of work I've made like $32...but generally speaking what can I do to improve my CTR? My ads are well blended, I use a combo of skyscrapers, 728banners and the 250 square boxes...I'm just not sure what else to do.

Stephen Crooks

Congratulations first of all for getting the traffic to that level already, that really is great and I love seeing this working for other people to. Without actually seeing the site it would be difficult for me to comment.
Is it in a niche with lots of advertisers?
Are the ads that are showing very relevant to the content on your site?

It could be that your articles are so interesting that they are reading them to the bottom and missing any adsense at the top of the page. Have you tried testing an adsense block inline with your posts?

If you wish to PM me with your url for the site I could try taking a look at it for you.

articledoor

Its really good you are very ambitious.Please do share your success with us once you start making $100/day.I also do have a couple of blogs but not made much with Adsense.Cheers,Good Luck

Windows7kb.com, over 4,900 visitors per month. PM me with offers. Google Analytics http://windows7kb.com/Analytics_wind...ardReport).pdf

bellabee

I'll PM you as soon as I reach the minimum number of posts

Oling

Its good to hear that you are already in the process of forming the membership club so a lot of us can benefit from it. I hope I can afford it. Probably will as you said it will be something reasonable. Thanks again Steve and more power to the 100 dollar challenge.

Thanks
Oling

Learn More About Me later...

Stephen Crooks

It will be affordable Oling and will be geared at getting every member to $100 a day. Back to the challenge and I have noticed a lot more traffic coming from MSN today as more keywords are being picked up by them plus Yahoo are also sending me some half decent traffic. Just goes to show that it isn't always just about google.

bellabee

Same here. I'm now ranked at #11 (first listing on page 2) for my primary target keyword in MSN. I assume MSN puts a lot more weight in title tags and keywords in the domain name.

Gunter Eibl

Steven,

traffic picks up nicely, congrats!

This thread teaches a good lesson called BEING PERSISTENT PAYS!

99% of the people would have given up already within the first two weeks. If you are not willing to put in hard work consistently then you won't succeed.

Gunter

FREE Expired Domains

Oling

You cannot be further from the truth Gunter Eibl... Its very true that most people would just quit and things get tougher but that's when you fail.

oling

Learn More About Me later...

grumpyjacksa

yes, and most actually do...

take note, he did not say warriors, he just said people.....

so he may be right.....

just my 0.02c...

Ex-ghostwriter now writing exclusive PLR ebooks - Limited PLR Club

powercazh

Thank you very much for this inspirational thread Mr. Steve, I have just found this thread a few days ago. Never I have learned so many things in such a short time. I have been reading lots of adsense stuff being a newbie in this field but never I have never seen this kind of step by step methodology. I am very much interested in your membership site and just hope I can afford it. Great going Mr. Steve. I can feel that you can hit the goals that you have set for this. I am following this thread step by step though I quite not understand everything being a newbie. The most inspirational feeling though is that this can be done if we take action. You are becoming an inspiration for many of us...
Thank you and God Bless..

askloz

out of 577 replies, i've not seen any notes of how much you're making already, why's that?

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Stephen Crooks

Because it is against googles TOS to reveal anything other than gross adsense income. I have explained everything on the 100 bucks challenge blog.

askloz

oh, so you've only made a few bucks in adsense, really, in all this time?

dude, you need to work on your model, by now, you should be on at least 20$ a day if not more.

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Stephen Crooks

I think you may be jumping to conclusions here askloz. The model is alive and kicking and doing very well already. As for revealing what the blog is earning overall, well, I can only give an indication of how well it is doing to stay within the rules.

meocon18

Thanks you very much for this info..
Good Luck !

Play Dress Up | Games Dress Up | Dress Up Games | Doll Maker Games | Hosting Discount | Forum Seo Webmaster

SaSeoPete

Hey Steve,

Looks like you are doing well with your challenge. I have been doing the same with my Niche blog and things are coming along nicely. It's been just over 3 weeks and I have had 3 sales with my affiliate product I am promoting. Nothing huge, but its a pretty great start.

I am getting between 30-70 uniques a day. I can see I am on the second & third page of Google for quite a few of main keywords which is cool.

I have started building a lot of links into my site and interlinked my pages to pass the link juice.

Hopefully soon I will be ranking for some of my main keywords.

This is working really nicely!

I am now adding 1 article a day.

Stephen Crooks

Nice one Pete, it does take time to rank for the main keywords but you are doing everything right so I have no doubt you will.

dolcevita

I will following this thread to.

ManAbout

Hey man, I have been following Steve's model closely, but I am intrigued when you say that he should be making at least $20 a day by now. How do you think he should change his model?

Or maybe do you have a thread where you talk about your model in detail? If so, can you please direct me to your thread on how you would do it? Thanks!

Oling

Congratulations SaSEOPete... you are doing great then! Keep it up

Learn More About Me later...

star007

You just have to play around with your adsense ad size and colors. I tried blending ads on one of my sites and the CTR was very bad. Change the ad colors back to the original link colors and people clicked on them...amazing!

Affiliate links are not allowed!

star007

I was going to ask how you were driving traffic to your sites... but from reading many of the posts it seems that when it and done, article marketing is still one of the best ways to get traffic to your websites, however time consuming.

Affiliate links are not allowed!

Merlinthecat

Article Marketing is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic for sure. It can be time consuming and does take a concerted effort to implement and track, but once in place you would be hard pushed to find a more effective, white hat way of promoting your site.

ManAbout

Two people promoting article marketing stuff in their signature tell us that article marketing is the best way to promote.... a totally non-biased opinion from them of course.. NOT!

webcopywritersblog.com

I would be keen on knowing the roadmap so would be tracking your results soon and this thread as well.

Steve, I am not sure whether I could use adsense on my blog as I am offering writing services out there. Would it be fine if I use adsense on my articles page? What do you think?

Also, I used to get scared from getting banned from Google Adsense. Any tips?

Best Of Luck Steve.

genesis55

Steve
I have just stumbled upon this site and your thread is very interesting and educational - many thanks

Julia Andersson

LOL ManAbout... You're a cynic I totally GET what you are saying here. But it is true that article marketing, when done properly, can generate significant amounts of traffic. I've had articles with keyword rich titles ranked number 1 in google in the space of 24 hours of publication. True, the link leads to the article in the article directory and many people who view the article will not click the link in your resource box but it can still help your traffic... and also note that if your site isn't indexed it will be indexed VERY quickly if you submit articles... because those sites get indexed constantly. That's the first thing I do when I create a new site. Write an article with a link in the resource box pointing to it... bang, it's indexed.

http://www.bestwaytoloseweight4u.com

magentawave

Hey Steve,

I was wondering about a few things please...

1) Have you figured out how to put Adsense on your RSS feed pages using Max Banner Ads?

2) Of those 400 articles, will you be posting ALL those articles to your site or will some be submitted to article directories like Ezinearticles.com?

3) Will you optimize every one of those articles using the All In One SEO Pack and then sprinkling the target keyword in each article with synonyms of that keyword?

4) How much do you expect to pay per article?

5) Will you be posting one article per day to your site?

6) Are you going to use anything like Linkvana or Nextgenlinks for getting one way back links?

7) How many words will your articles be? Minimum to maximum.

8) Will you be using something like RSS Bot to submit your RSS feeds?

Thanks
Steve

Stephen Crooks

Hi Steve,

1. I haven't used max banner ads to put adsense on my rss feed. If I need to do this I create a feedburner account and use this with adsense or use adsense for feeds in my adsense account.

2. Most of the articles when they get written will be added to my blog and about 30 used for other promotion, squidoo, article directories, other blogs..

3. All in one SEO just sits there doing it's magic to my titles etc, I never really touch it. If I need to add meta stuff I do that when I make the post. As for the articles they do include the main keyword sprinkled throughout and any supporting keywords also. Like always though, my number 1 concern is that the article is good first and keyword density second.

4. Between $5 to $10 per article.

5. No more than 1 article per day otherwise I will run out of time with the challenge

6. No I won't be using any 1 way link or any other link service for this challenge.

7. Between 400 - 600 words.

8. Yes, I use RSS submit for my submissions.

I hope that answers your questions.

Oling

Congratulations Ekamala! Good job ... I hope i can duplicate what you have achieve so far... and with the help of Steve here....

Thanks
Oling

Learn More About Me later...

Oling

Hi Steve,

I wish I can build a Blog/Website like what you are doing. Its Awesome! I wish that one of these days I can build that kind of website and earn as much as what we are all tying to accomplish here. Very Clean and Organized! easy to navigate and can see all the things you need to see and its not cluttered like mine. Excellent!

Just one day i can make one of those.....

Thanks Steve for sharing what is needed to get to something or soemwhere realistic and not just the bla...bla... from most internet marketer...

Thanks Again,
Oling

Learn More About Me later...

magentawave

That is wise advice. I had one mostly Adsense site that was making about $800.00 per month in Adsense income a couple years ago. I was making some money from affiliate stuff on that site too. Anyway, the point is that Google decided to drop that site one day after I was dominating many many first pages on Google for many keywords. I had and have other income so it wasn't devastating or anything, but it was certainly a bummer to lose that automatic income. The site still exists but is a mess when I moved it from SBI to Hostgator (SBI had lots of proprietary things like nav bar images that didn't move over) with tons of bad dead links. The site also still has decent PR just because of its age and it still makes about $200 a month from Adsense. THe good thing is that this thread has motivated me to take the time (FINALLY AFTER 3 YEARS!) to rebuild that entire site in XSP and get it back to where it was before. This thread also motivated me to create two more sites similar to the site I just described (one has exact same domain name but without hyphens and both sites are on different cpanels with different IP addresses) but this time I'm building both of those sites using Wordpress. I already have 15 posts up for one of the sites and will continue on past the original sites 150 pages and 15 for the other site.

So thanks for the inspiration and motivation Steve to finally activate a couple domains I've been hanging on to for a while and for starting to rebuild a neglected and once quite profitable site. Just know that I am not only carefully reading this, but I am also putting it into practice.

Thanks again.
Steve

magentawave

I use the XML Sitemap plugin for all my WP sites too, but do you have any idea why some of my XML sitemaps go bad sometimes? I can see the errors whether I look at the xml sitemap in my browser or can see that its putting out errors in my Google Account. And do you know how to fix them when they go bad? I've tried updating the XML sitemap at the page within Wordpress, but that doesn't seem to do anything. I posted this somewhere else on the forum last week but got no takers as far as why this happens. Seems hard to believe I'm the only one.

I copied and pasted the text I see when I click on one of my XML sitemaps that has gone bad. It is this text below on a pinkish colored background...

================================================== ======

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Line Number 1, Column 580:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://www.mywebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.xsl"?><!-- generator="wordpress/2.7" --><!-- sitemap-generator-url="http://www.arnebrachhold.de" sitemap-generator-version="3.1.2" --><!-- generated-on="February 6, 2009 4:25 pm" --><urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

================================================== ===

magentawave

Steve, what is the point of adding that text for video posts when you could just add a 100 word or so description about the video with your target keywords of course?

Steve

askloz

cos it's supposed to give you more targeted results for the ads that show up, it takes about 2 weeks for it to fully take affect though.

You may find a keyword in a niche that only pays 5 cents, but another in the same niche that pays a lot more, so you place this code in there with the keyword you want google adsense bot to ONLY pay attention to and ignore the rest - well, you need to add extra code, ie (weight=ignore) then the keyword under it, followed by the end tag.

more info here
https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...n&answer=23168

pretty old skool stuff that's been around for ages.

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askloz

okey dokey, no, not jumping to conclusions, just going off stuff that I do, which isn't far different from what you're doing.

and just wondered why you hadn't posted any figures yet, you are well within your right to show ppl the earnings, once just has to hash out the CTR, clicks, impressions,and leave the $ viewable.. which is fine.

any ways, keep up the good work...

HEADS UP - EVEN NEWER -->> 27 Dollar FX Systems - Ultimate Golden Cross - FX Signal Book

Julia Andersson

Hey Loz

I think it might be a little difficult to actually give adsense figures at the moment because Steve only added the code a few days ago.

Remember he originally said he wasn't putting the code in immediately because he wanted to get reasonable traffic first...now that he has over 100 visitors per day he feels able to add the code. But yeah, it's been less than a week so I think patience is called for before we start expecting actual figures.

http://www.bestwaytoloseweight4u.com

Kay King

I use the section targeting frequently, seems to kick in after a few days to target the keyword phrases I want. It's useful to know about for any page where ads are not targeting as you want them to.

kay

SAMMY IFE

Thanks Steve. This is one of the best threads I've read. I'm following with keen interest.

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Steveb2u

I would be interested in seeing an update to this project and seeing how much progress has been made.

Julia Andersson

Hey Steve

Just visit The $100 Challenge for updates. Steve is putting all his updates on there (because they would get lost in the crush in here)

http://www.bestwaytoloseweight4u.com

Stephen Crooks

Thats brilliant, I love it when I read positive stories like this.. I am not very familiar with SBI but I have heard a few stories from people that have had success using the system. However, I am trying to work out if there is a common denominator when google de-indexes sites generally. Now I know there are so many factors it could be any reason out of a hundred but primarily I am trying to assess whether linking schemes would be a major factor.

Does SBI use some sort of link farm to generate backlinks or do they utilize more natural linking techniques? I am not picking on SBI specifically but as far as I know they teach good "white hat" (hate that term) techniques so I would like to know what they teach about linking.

Stephen Crooks

As far as I know askloz, the rules state quite clearly that you can only reveal gross earnings and not earnings for individual sites. However if I was to say I am nearly 10% of the way to hitting my target then maybe people can get some idea.. I have a long way to go but progress is being made.

Stephen Crooks

I will be giving a good update on the 100 bucks challenge blog today and will be giving an impression of how well adsense is doing in the first week and the tests that I have been trying on placement of the adsense. I will give as much detail as I can without breaking any of google's rules. I know I am being quite conservative but I do try to err on the side of caution when it comes to google and I suggest everyone does the same.