Creating and Selling Websites

So lat month I decided that I was going to sell one of my websites. I have quite a few now and it is a bit difficult to keep them all up to date as often as I can. So I thought about it and decided that I would sell the best performing one so that I could achieve the best price for it. I sold my site for $500 on flippa which I think was a fair price for the site that was producing regular adsense and some amazon income. The transfer of the site was a little stressful but it all worked out OK in the end. Hopefully the site is performing as well for the new owner.

I thought that in order to earn more money maybe I would create more sites on a rolling basis and sell the best performing one every few months. This would then hopefully give enough time (8 to 12 months) for the new sites to get a foot in the door and get some traffic going until it came to their time to be sold.

So today I bought a new site. It is a tricky thing to decide on as it has to be the right domain and content. Luckily (or unluckily in the circumstances) I found a .com URL directly relating to a medical condition I have now which is not good but has a lot of searches for it and low competition. It is a two word domain and I have to say I veer toward the xxxx-xxxx.com domain name rather than the two words without a hyphen as this looks more readable to me. Anyway the one without a hyphen was already taken but it is a parked domain with no useful information so that might help me with the fact there is less competition.

Anyway, hopefully this will keep me busy during what is actually quite a sad time due to this health situation and I can impart some knowledge on this topic that I have learned through personal experience. As an fyi the website I sold was also one I had knowledge on through personal experience so it helps if you know what people are looking for in terms of information.

30% Off Web Hosting

So I run about 20 Wordpress sites where I earn money by using adsense and amazon on those websites. When I first set up a Wordpress site I bought some hosting with GoDaddy and it cost me (I think) $3.95 per month for each site. After I had set up 2 sites on there (and their domains are the best value so I do think there is a place for them) I realised that I could have unlimited Wordpress sites via HostGator Hosting  for only $9.95 a month. So I moved my sites to HostGator and set up all of my other sites there too.

To get the unlimited sites (and they don't have to be Wordpress) you need to set up an initial site and then create Add-On domains. If anyone wants any more information on how to do this then I will elaborate.

Anyway, until the end of January HostGator are running a promotion to give 30% off the cost of their hosting plans. If you want to take advantage of this then use the code JAN30 when you sign up.

2011 Earnings Summary

So 2011 was my second year of trying to earn money online. There is so much to learn that you are really only going to succeed if you keep persevering, trying new things, learning more and more and basically just not giving up when the going gets tough and you think you are never going to earn any money. I can tell you that there have been quite a few times when I wonder why I started this and if it is ever going to reap any rewards for me. I think the hardest thing that I found was the fact that I only wanted to sell things that I believed in and I didn't want in any way to be seen to be conning people. That was the spur of moving the focus of my earnings to adsense and Amazon. When I was first introduced to affiliate marketing then one thing I was advised to focus on was ClickBank. Now there are some legitimate products in ClickBank but by and large I think that I would not want to be selling the majority of the stuff on there.

Anyway, I persevered, mainly with a focus on HubPages and also creating my own websites half way through the year and that saw my earnings increase significantly. Now most of my earnings come from Adsense and Amazon and although I would like to have my eggs split between a few more baskets, this is a good start.

So having totalled up my earnings for 2011 I made $807.30. Although it is not as much as I would have wanted (obviously!) it is a great start to build on. I am currently looking at earnings or around $200 a month and am aiming to increase that to $500 a month by the end of the year so I am hoping that I am looking at at least $3000 in total for next year.

Get Unlimited Wordpress Site Hosting

So one way to make more money is to scale things up and decrease your costs. One way of doing this is to use an unlimited hosting account to host all of your websites. Personally I use Hostgator to host my sites and I have their Baby plan which gives me unlimited domains and unlimited hosting. So the only thing I have to pay for on top of it each year are the domain name fees. This hosting is less than $10 a month and you can get a 25% discount by using the code AZURE25OFF.

They also have a simple wordpress install facility (all of my for-profit websites currently run on Wordpress) so you can be up and running with a website in no time.

New Website Launched and One Rebuilt

So I figured that if I was to start increasing my earnings then I need to increase the number of websites that I have so I started a new one based on an article that I had written in the past that had done well. I did some keyword research and came up with a URL which I liked which was New Golf Clubs.

Although I know a particular big time affiliate marketer that I follow does not like to have hyphens in his URLs, I decided to ignore this fact as my best producing website also has hyphens so I'm not sure that there is a problem. The keyword phrase 'new golf clubs' has approx 74k searches every month and low competition so I thought I would give it a shot, even though I know the golf market is a very difficult and competitive one.

I know it will take time for the site to grow and get hits so for this one I am going to aim for 6 months until I get into profit either through amazon sales or adsense earnings.

Oh yes, and I also completely rebuilt my original site that I started with. I had built it on Sharepoint which is what I knew about but that was too expensive as I had Wordpress hosting available for free (unlimited hosting on the one I was paying for) so that would save me some money by bringing it over there.

I am also contemplating selling off my best producing site to get some capital to fund newer sites...

New Google Update

So I read that there has been another Google update a few days ago that may change which results are seen in the search engine. The figure I saw quoted was that there may be a change of about 12% in where websites are placed in the rankings and this is due to the fact that the update takes into account websites that have been more recently updated.

So basically this is saying that you need to keep your websites up to date. What I am trying to do with mine is to make sure that they are updated at least every 2 weeks. For some of them I find it hard to generate extra content on a regular basis as all the information is already there pretty much but I guess the best thing is to add in some extra news articles etc to keep things fresh.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any changes in my viewing stats this week but at the moment things look like they are on the up for most of my sites.

Great Month in October

So although in September I hit my target of making $100, I wasn't sure that I could keep up that kind of pace in October. However, after writing a bunch of Halloween Costume hubs on Hubpages that got me over $100 in Amazon sales alone, I managed to achieve earnings of $205 in total in October.

Once again I am not sure it I will be able to top this in November. I need to get on with writing Christmas product articles to kick things off but I think unless these really take off now I will be back looking at maybe $100 again for November if I am lucky.

I really want to reach the $500 target but I will probably have to build more websites for that to happen.