Make Money Online
€5,27 for the month of February. Damn, its barely nothing and almost exact the same as the €5 income from January… One month to go to set up AdSense to break the €100,- month in April. Looks like i’m never going to make that but I won’t give up.
I have to admit I didn’t work good in February. The last 2 weeks were pretty silent in my AdSense quest. I did start some other projects though, but damn…
No excuses, failing to get €100,- on AdSense in April would suck big time!
Back to work!
The instagram project I was talking about in my last post is yet to be launched. The beta version should be finished by now so I think it will take a couple of more days to be online.
Also threw some more money into domaining. I bought a 4 letter .com domain as investment. These domains are going for $200 + on average nowadays. I bought one for $200 which seems like a good price. I also bought a dutch domain for €75 on a generic tax term. It has 9.900 monthly exact searches and the top 5 results in Google are all deeplinks. Let’s see if I can create something with value on it.
The €100 Google AdSense goal is going crap. I am at €3.65 so far this month. The goal is to have €100 in April. The theme on my creditcard site got updated and I had all these changes made in the code… All gone… I got another theme installed now but its just a very basic wordpress theme.
Together with a friend we are working on a new project. It will be a site to use with Instagram. At the time of writing this the idea is not yet developed by someone else. It is quite unique and we think it has potential to earn a good amount of money.
Buzz
The thing is the site will need buzz when we launch it… I’m not sure yet how to proceed with the marketing. Marketing the site is one of the most important things when it comes to a new site. You can create the best website or app in the world, but with no one visiting, it is pretty worthless…
The site can be used by Instagram users. It will be focused on the advertising niche that is upcoming on Instagram. Thousands of dollars are spent each day on Instagram ads. Our plan is to get a piece of the action! At the moment I have nothing to show you yet, more on that later. The planning is to have something ready end February 🙂
Yesterday I wrote about how I installed the word count plugin at my creditcard wordpress site. The thing is; it is highly motivating me to write. I discovered that the site had only 7000 words of content on it which is really, really low.
3000 words of new content
Today I wrote 3000 words of new content for the site. The average word count for blog posts was 270 words per post. This is way to low and not good for the search engines. Ofcourse quality is important too, but 270 words in one post is just not enough to get good rankings. The 3000 words of new content are divided into 4 new posts, which comes out to an average of 750 words per post. That makes a total of over 10.000 words on the creditcard site.
Website investing
While browsing a webmaster marketplace I stumbled upon a nice little website about an airport. The site is made in WordPress and is getting around 1,200 unique visitors monthly. Last month it generated €15,- on Google AdSense. The sale was set up as an auction and I bought it at €255,-. It’s kind of a gamble as the seller just got 1 month of Google AdSense statistics. I will keep you updated on how this will work out.
Content ideas
The Google keyword tool is a very good tool to find new content ideas. If you put in a keyword, the tool will give you suggestions on other keywords, the search volume and the CPC (cost per click) that comes with the keyword. If you are in a specific niche it can be hard to find new post ideas. With this tool you don’t have an excuse to find new post ideas.
Yesterday I got my motivation killed a little bit, but I got over that again. I just pulled out a fresh 1,000 words on the creditcard site. Made 2 pages on it with keywords found on the Google keyword tool. I’m about to post them on social media to get them ranked and see how they do. I also installed a word count plugin to see how much words are online and I got a bit embarrassed. The total word count is only 7,000. This is really low for a content site. Good I know this so I can work on it…
Online investing
I am checking webmaster forums to see if there is anything up for sale for reasonable prices that have potential to make money online. I got a budget of a few hundred for this just to try some things out. I will keep you updated on if I buy a domain or website.
First two days of the new month have passed. I worked quite a few hours the last weekend of January to start the new month strong. Till now I only made €0.02 on Google AdSense which is really killing my motivation to work on my content sites. It got me thinking if I’m heading into the right direction… Maybe I should ditch Google AdSense and go with affiliate marketing? Not sure what to do… Maybe I am pulling that dead horse I was talking about in my last post..
While thinking about affiliate marketing and how to get into it I checked a couple of affiliate marketing blogs. All these guys are killing it with a few thousand profit a month (some way over that). It all looks so easy but it is definitely not! I got this great domain for a sneaker affiliate shop… I bought it for way too much money last year when I had a short rush of getting back at the make money online niche. Well, I got new motivation and I guess these kind of set backs are part of the game. Got to make it through this…
Enough said, back to the drawing table and I am not sure what to do yet with the creditcard site… The goal of making €100 a month on Google AdSense looks further away than ever… The actual number of earnings on Google AdSense in January; €5,00. *depressing*
Today I put some good work into my creditcard site. I updated all posts from the site (25 posts at the moment) and got some new content in as well. I am still not sure if i’m pulling a dead horse here but okay…
Internal linking
One of the SEO factors is internal linking. Google also notices content easier and quicker when internal links are good. Most of the older posts didn’t have any internal links in the content. So I got through all posts and added 40 to 50 internal links in total if i’m guessing right.
Updated content
While checking posts for internal links I also updated some of the content. I’m still getting the hang of it again as I didn’t blog or write for a long time. So it takes some time to write a few good sentences that make sense on the creditcard topic. In some posts I just added a few words / changed sentences and in other I wrote an extra 200 to 300 words. Now lets see if this helps the rankings
Google AdSense
I also changed all Google AdSense ads on the site. I’m trying some of the recommended sizes now including the responsive size. The responsive banner ad will change to the device that is visiting (desktop, mobile, tablet) which should do good I guess… I tested myself on desktop and mobile and it looks good.
Like I mentioned before in this post I am not sure if it’s worth it to work on this site. The site is nearly two years old and never brought in any money. I will find out after a month or two I hope.
New Domains
Today I registered some new domains as well. These domains are in the financial niche and I am planning to make some small Google AdSense sites on it. They are exact match domains and get around 250 to 1000 exact searches monthly for the keyword(s). The financial niche is not easy I know… But lets give it a try.
Last week I decided to put up some Google AdSense ads on the neglected creditcard site I started 2 years ago. In the past I have been earning a decent amount with Google AdSense. Some months were over €500,- which is a nice extra. But I am starting at zero again. The ads are online for a little over a week now and in the image below you see the results of the last 7 days.
A bit over €1,50 in the last 7 days. Makes an average of €6,- a month. Not something to brag about… As I am back with new motivation and putting in hours again to create new content and links I expect the earnings to climb.
Google AdSense Goal
I just came up with a new goal of earning €100,- monthly with Google AdSense in the month of April. That gives me a full two months to do whatever it takes to make that €100,- in April just on Google AdSense. After this I will set a new goal, but lets first see if I can make it to this one!
If any of you is starting with Google AdSense and has some questions, please ask me in the comments and I will be happy trying to help you out.
Just checked one of my servers to see what my old sites were doing apart from collecting dust. I remember starting a creditcard website in late 2014 and it still gets some traffic. It’s not much but around 800 uniques generating 1,500 pageviews. 82% of that is organic traffic (stats from last 30 days).
Fresh content
To check if this site is worth it to work on again I started to make a couple of posts in the last week. I did some research on semi popular word phrases on the google keyword tool and put up some unique posts about it. One of the posts ended up at #11 in google.nl (It’s a dutch creditcard site). That shows me it’s not that bad and i’m thinking of working on it again and putting in more hours on this website.
Started a new website
In my last post about selling another domain I mentioned I also bought another domain for €50. A generic term with an exact search volume of 22,000 monthly. I checked google and the top 10 results were all deeplinks, which shows me there is not THAT much competition. Just got a WordPress site installed on it and I will publish a new article this afternoon to get it ranked. Not sure which way to go with this site as it is in the recipe niche and I never had a site in this niche before. At least i’ll make sure I get top-notch images on it which seems important in the recipe niche.
I’ll keep you guys updated on both the creditcard site as the recipe site. Also got other plans for a new site in mind but more about that later!
Buying and selling domain names is an option to make some extra money online. Although most good domains are already years registered you can snap up quite good names for a few bucks on webmaster forums / marketplaces. Most of the times I buy a domain with an idea to develop. But as you might guess, that idea will soon be collecting dust or i’m not getting the motivation to get things done. I’m working on the motivational thing though, more on that later…
€120 profit with zero work
The domain I bought set me back €140 and I bought it on a domain auction site. There were a couple of other bidders that drove the price a bit up. It was a pretty generic term in the web hosting business and actually was trademarked. The plan was to build a review kind of site about web hosting but I decided to sell it off as I have much more domains and old sites that need my time. I ended up selling it at a webmaster forum for €260.
Yesterday I bought another domain for €50 which has an exact search of 22,000 monthly for the term. It is in the recipe niche and this domain will be developed into a website. More on that later.
If you have any questions or good stories about buying and selling domain names, don’t hesitate to put them in a comment 🙂