I’ve read this page plus many others on this site with interest.

Although our paths have been different I feel some similarity with your situation. I have had ME/CFS since I finished uni at 22; am 35 now and making steps to be self employed running a web based business – adsense mainly some affiliate stuff, no client based work unless I can help it. I still have my bad days or run of bad days but will give it a go.

I was wondering if you could give some suggestions on what expenses to deduct from my tax bill for a similar type business.

If you could send me a mail I would greatly appreciate it.

You can see the post here:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2009/10/06/top-10-blogs-that-tell-you-how-much-they-make-online/

Love your determination and clear concise goal of joining the millionaires club by age 45. Who knows could be long before then.

I am trying to make my way through the maze that is called Internet marketing and trying to help people not make the same mistakes I made by keeping a sort of online diary of my ventures.

Good Luck and let me know if I can help

Mark Hughes
http://www.internetmarketerdiary.com

Usually if I am going to take my time to leave a comment I will do it on sites that have a link option or I could better spend the time on making a post on my site.

I know you do not want to leak Google juice, even with a nofollow, but this might be a reason why comments are lower, maybe? Anyway I hope your back is ok, I know that was a real detour on the road to riches for you.

Hope it’s not stopping comments as well as not had many recently.

David Law

I read on one of your posts that you do not have a clickbank product yet. The informaion provided above is valuable to me and those starting website businesses like me. I believe that the above information – expanded on – with some of your WordPress Themes added as a bonus – would make a very valuable package.

After a 6 or 7 years of researching, testing, downloading, etc, I have come to the same conclusion as you have as you have stated above and now from YOUR research and success I can verify that I am heading in the right direction. My final piece of the puzzle to help create the success is your talian wordpress theme that I am now configuring. (the them gives my site the code and structure that SE’s love)

I have thousands of pages on my website and most will be moved into WordPress. It could be argued that my site will be too much for WordPress and that I should use Joomla or something but I want to keep it simple and build tons of content. Many others will be building hiking content at my tracksandtrails.ca website soon because of your excellent ability at coding WordPress SEO Themes.

Thank you,
I pray that your back operation will give you mobilization.

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

I have a few questions.
What is your average payment per click?

Do you run any “image only” adsense ads and if so do they get a better ctr and higher average value per click? I kind of think that they do. Not enough evidence yet though.

Of the hundreds of sites that you have, do you find you have a few sites with lots of visitors with some of the other sites being a waste of time. Or do you always make more adsense income per site than what it costs to keep it going?