45 Year Old Millionaire

How I Make Money Online

Hey Clayton,

The same post question is a plugin called WP-Sticky that you can get at http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

I’ve found tracking my affiliate success/failure really helpful, my SEO business is running smoothly, but because of my back problems I’ve avoided taking on too many SEO clients (can’t over do it).

The opposite is true for affiliate projects, they pretty much run themselves long term and more importantly if I feel terrible one day there’s not a business behind the project relying on my expertise, so I can leave them half finished for months at a time. That being said had an operation on my lower back late last month and hoping it’s been a success (still in post op pain), if it works can really throw myself into business.

My cost per click average SUCKS because I have a lot of traffic to some very low cost (from a AdWords perspective) content like classic literature, I’m lucky to make 10 cents a click from that traffic!

First sites I built was for generating PR, I wrongly believed having millions of pages would be worth while because each new page generates a small amount of intrinsic PR. The amount is so small it’s pretty much cancelled out by the PR cost in getting a large site indexed! So I built a set of sites with public domain content (classic literature) for generating PR. Now I’m much smarter and tend towards creating pages that have a function, if a page doesn’t do something useful, I don’t create it.

I tried image only ads and found they don’t perform that well, also tried text only ads thinking if image ads only don’t work well text only should. Text only was better than image only, but not as good as mixed, I guess it’s to do with the amount of money advertisers are prepared to pay and the way Google AdSense determines which ads to display on our content, IME it’s better to let Google AdSense decided which ad performs best for each page.

I have just over 100 domains currently, but they don’t all have sites on them. Of the domains used about 50 would be considered full sites, but about half of those are affiliate sites form years ago when Google didn’t downgrade thin affiliate sites.

Out of the rest I’ve got about 15-20 good domains. A good domain would be one where I’ve not run a SEO test that could result in a penalty and have fair quality content. I consider this site a good quality site, though currently it only gets a trickle of traffic a day since I’ve not added much diverse content (only 21 posts and 9 of those are revenue reports which will only cover a small number of SERPs). So I get about 20,000 visitors a day not so evenly spread over about 20 domains, rest are either not used, redirected or penalised/downgraded in Google etc… (I do way too many SEO tests ).

So yes I have quite a lot of domains that currently could be considered a waste of time. For example AdSense income for these over the last 12 months.

Amazon store, thin affiliate : car-auto-parts.info (below 1,000 visitors) $2.35
Amazon store, thin affiliate : cell-phones-store.info (below 500 visitors) $2.63
RSS feed site (not unique content), used to be a Amazon store : athomedayspa.com (below 1,000 visitors) $1.74

Remember the above are year figures, I’ve probably made similar from Amazon from the first two so might barely cover the yearly registration fees.

March 2006 to March 2007 those three sites made ~$180 and the year before when I first made them and Google wasn’t downgrading this type of thin affiliate site they made over $1,500 (probably about $3,000 including Amazon sales).

As you can imagine when you find a way to make a site in about 2 hours that can make you $500 a year, ($1,000 when you take Amazon sales in to account) you tend to make more of them I only made about 30 of them as I was so busy with my SEO business. Now they don’t even break even as a whole:

I pay for two dedicated servers at around $1,500 a year, domain registration about $10 a domain and that’s about my only costs. So about $2,500 in costs, so each domain has to make $25 to break even each year. I’ve let about 15 domains with Amazon stores on them expire over the last 12 months.

The best sites are those with unique interesting content, one of my domains at one point was making about $60 a month from AdSense, discovered Clickbank and have added less than a dozen Clickbank reviews and supporting pages to it and it makes most of my Clickbank revenue now.

David Law

45 Year Old Millionaire