Going Ons & Updates: 1/22/14

Here's a recap of what I'm up to right now.

My BIG Niche Site

A few days back I introduced a project I'm starting where I'm going to build a big niche site designed to serve readers first and make me money second. You can read the post here if you want. I then posted about how I got my new site indexed quickly here in case you missed it.

Over the past couple days I've done a bit more work on the site. I expanded the front page to just shy of 600 words and started building out a bit more content on the main informational posts on the site. I have a lot of work to do to polish the main informational posts but it's better to start and not finish than never to start at all.

I started marketing the site by placing a single well made article on a Web2 site and inserting a contextual link back to the homepage. The link was not using anchor text but was rather just the naked url of the home page.

Since the keyword the homepage targets has very low competition I don't expect to have to do any more promotion like this at all. The domain is an EMD and by putting lots of good content on the site, linking out to authoritative sources that support my main claims, points, and opinions. Including relevant YouTube videos, and maybe setting up a basic Pinterest account to pin eventual images to I expect this site will start ranking for it's keywords in the next few months.

So far I haven't put a custom header or logo on the site but I signed up for Easy Product Displays (EPD) to help me make a responsive grid of affiliate links and thumbnails pointing to Amazon for some of my sales pages. I've traditionally made my code by hand but I'm not a coder and I've never been able to get it responsive by hand. I must say on first use EPD is darned easy to use and looks better than what I've ever created by hand.

At some point I'll probably do a review of the program and post it here on the blog but if you want to try their free trial anyway you can see the link on my ToolBox page.

EMD Sites? Do They Still Work?

I've mentioned Jason from The Pond before. He's inspired this BIG niche site idea of mine with his current method of building extremely profitable Adsense sites. You can see his method on this thread over at The Pond (members only).  Click here to learn more about the forum or to join.

For the most part Jason is doing a twist on the Empire Flippers method of building of building EMD sites. The site I mentioned above is an EMD but other than it and one other EMD that I started in the post-penguin era I don't have many at all right now.

Jason contends the EMD update in late 2012 wasn't as crazy as originally thought and that without spamming the crap out of them they still rank better than all other sites with all things being equal.

I've decide to marry his approach with my own preferences. I like big niche sites, sites with 30-100 pages or so. My site mentioned above will be part of my EMD project and will join my other EMD site (nearly two years old) and I will start building a large(ish) portfolio of big EMD sites based on Jason's methodology.

My two year old site is making around $100+ every month right now and it has zero links built to it. I think this new site will make some cash and I'll try to build out a bunch more of these.

Late in the Fall of 2013 I purchased 6 additional EMDs and installed Wordpress on them. Most sites are slightly developed and some are already starting to get a bit of traffic with zero links built. I will add a few new domains to my portfolio and try to focus on polishing up my Fall additions.

One additional note - Like lots of people I used to use GoDaddy for all my domains but these days I use NameSilo. They offer really affordable domains and they include privacy for free. can't beat that. I've added NameSilo to my ToolBox and one day I'll get around to putting up a review page here on the site for you to look at.

Bubblews

I mentioned a few days ago that I started using Bubblews after about a year of resisting. So far I've posted 27 articles on there, connected with a few of the big writers and long term writers, and I've started commenting on a few things I find interesting.

As of yet I haven't made payout so I can't say anything in regards to the redemption process but from what I read it should go fine so long as you play by their rules.

Assuming my first redemption goes smoothly I expect this to be a great place to pop in on occasion and make a few bucks by trading minutes for dollars.

Probably after my first redemption goes through smoothly I'll post up my full review of the site. For the time being though you can my initial thoughts on making money on the Bubblews platform right here.

InfoBarrel Clean-Up

Back on January 10th I started a thread on the InfoBarrel forums saying I was dedicated to cleaning up my old InfoBarrel articles. I was making over a $1000/month on the site and then panda hit, then penguin and now I'm making a little over $150 on the site. You can see my complete report on this fall right here: The Fall of an InfoBarrel Success Story.

Over the past 10 days or so I've dedicated some time (most days) to cleaning up an article here and there on the site. I'm bringing old "red" articles up by improving the keyword density, editing for grammar, removing bad links, and adding 2-3 pictures per post. I then pin all the pictures to related Pinterest boards in hopes of getting trickle traffic from Pinterest users. This is going well and although I've got A LOT more articles to clean up I think it will be worth it in the long run.

You can see my picture techniques in action by viewing my "door lock" series over on InfoBarrel. One such article from the series is this one. Pay careful attention to the pictures inserted and their corresponding media pages. IB Tip - The money is in the media pages.

PinWoot

This is another new tool for me. I started using it this week - about 4 days ago roughly. I've been getting in the habit of making Pinterest accounts for the majority of the sites I build these days and I've never really spent enough time on nay of them to build up a following.

Like many other things mentioned on this page I'll have to make a big review of this program for the site sometime in the future but in the mean time let me say this. This thing is amazing at getting you new followers quickly. I've gotten bunches of likes, repins, and general account activity and I see it all as real and beneficial. You have to give this a try.

I'm adding this with a huge thumbs up to my ToolBox if you want to give it a look prior to my big review post.

Plans For The Future

Taking a nudge from Justin & Joe and Empire Flippers with the title of this sub-heading but I wanted to close the post out with a bit about what I want to work on over the next week or so.

I really need to make some progress on two Kindle books I want to finish as soon as possible. One is halfway done, the other is in the outline stage.

I also am reclaiming old PostRunner posts from 3-4 years ago. Yesterday I reclaimed around 35,000 words of material that I can re-purpose for new uses. It's all offline and deindexed so it's mine to use again as I see fit. If you used to use PostRunner you may have a bunch of old content sitting dormant too. This never occurred to me until it was mentioned by the smart folks over on The Pond.

I plan on segmenting what I have by topic and using the material to populate a bunch of new EMD domains to add to my EMD collection of sites. I may use some of the content for Web2 sites as well. Time will tell.

Get to work guys!