Edynas.com

I made a seperate part of the site dedicated to reviews and case studies. All within the internetmarketing products and tools. Anything that is related to affiliatemarketing, seo, article marketing, selling online etcetc

It’s located at http://edynas.com/reviews

The first case study is going to be about Article Marketing Automation which I talked about a few days ago. I believe it’s a must have tool for any affiliatemarketeer but I want to proof it.

So today I started a 30 day case study which you can read about here : ArticleMarketingAutomation Case Study

A bit over a year ago I had an idea about automating several task with blogging. (I have many ideas) I named this wpoctopus. If you take a look at http://wpoctopus.com you can see the members area at http://wpoctopus.com/members/ but it never made it to full development.

The idea was born after installing 80+ wordpress sites in 2 weeks and till today they still make me about $600 a month. No work besides the 2 weeks of frantic work. I even have to admit that out of the 80 maybe 25 are realy setup the right way and the rest could do some work. After those two weeks i saw the potential of wordpress in full and wanted to automate all the tasks I had gone thru by hand. I spent the months June till October working on that project but finally gave up when the high season of my normal business came.

But I still believe in Wordpress and making it a cms for affiliate based sites. The power of wordpress in combination with plugins like related posts(products), ratings, xml sitemaps, auto socialmarker and more are in my eyes obvious. But installing wordpress with the right plugins, monetize it and managing it becomes almost impossible whn done by hand with more then 100 sites. And I for one believe that it’s easier to make a site that earns $1 day then it’s to make a ste that earns $100 a day. So automing the tasks of making that $1 a day site is what I had in mind but never finished.

I have looked at alternatives but none of the tools I saw advertised did what i wanted. Most of them were all hyped up and only covered one thing. An overview of these tools

Installing as many wordpresssites as you want:

http://www.blogmatrixpro.com
cost: $97

• 7 day trial for $1
• Mass install wordpress sites
• Manage plugins (delete, activate)
• 1 site to mage them all
• RSS to blog (automtic content creation ) if you wish

Easy content management

I stunled upon Windows Live Writer and like it. It’s free (i stay Dutch) and can be downloaded at http://get.live.com/writer/overview

It’s only practical as a content management system and not for installing, modifying or editing your blog.

Yesterday I got an email about something that comes close to WP Octopus tho…the call it FirePow
It comes in two flevors: basic and premium. The diverance is that with the premium you get access to 50+ blogs with high Pagerank to build links to your sites.

I think it’s a tool that really works. Will buy it this weekend and start a casestudy with it. So be ready to see a review of Firepow here

Well over a year ago I created deblogging.com Deblogging because i love wordpress and still do but didn’t liked the blog feel and look for all my sites. As many of my endevours i ran into the time problem and altho i did created over 50 sites in the deblogging style ( like fi http://fietsen-winkel.info ) i didn’t created any more themes around this idea.

Now as i took my next goal in creating 10k a month i am once again at the lookout for a nice standard theme to use with wordpress but that doesn’t has a blog feel. I did a bit of research and found the following magazine style templates that I like and that give me a bit of insperation.

So what’s the next step in creating a magazine style template?

I discovered a nice tool at Yahoo that will help you in laying the foundation of your template. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/builder/ using this grid builder you can easily create the outline of how your template should look like.

In my case i want of coure the header, a sidebar of 310 at the right so the nice ads of 300px x 250px will fit and it can be split like it’s done at the right at http://www.revolutiontheme.com/news/

The first row should hold the featured article and i want it to be like it’s on http://gazette.premiumnewstheme.com/

Creating a featured article that rotates is a nice feature that you also see a lot in joomla based templates. Making this is not that hard. What you need is a category that is made pure for holding featured articles. As you know you can assign a post to multipal categories. So if you write a ost and want it to be in the featured category select that one also.

Next is the code… first you want to download the mootools archive and Smoothgallery you can get both at this place http://smoothgallery.jondesign.net/
At the getting started page of the gallery code you will find this part


<div id="myGallery">
<div class="imageElement">
<h3>Item 1 Title</h3>
<p>Item 1 Description</p>
<a href=”mypage1.html” title=”open image” class=”open”></a>
<img src=”images/brugges2006/1.jpg” class=”full” />
<img src=”images/brugges2006/1-mini.jpg” class=”thumbnail” />
</div>
<div class=”imageElement”>
<h3>Item 2 Title</h3>
<p>Item 2 Description</p>
<a href=”mypage2.html” title=”open image” class=”open”></a>
<img src=”images/brugges2006/2.jpg” class=”full” />
<img src=”images/brugges2006/2-mini.jpg” class=”thumbnail” />
</div>
</div>

So you need to replace that with the code to display the posts from the featured category

<?php query_posts('showposts=5&cat=5'); //selects 5 articles of the category with ID 5 ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class="imageElement">
<h3 class="leadtitle"><?php the_title(); ?>></h3>
<?php the_excerpt() ; ?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>


You can add anything inside this loop but it’s a start.

The rest of the page i will make 2 columns like on http://www.wp-themes.der-prinz.com/magazine/ and at the bottom i like it how it’s done at http://www.fembusiness.nl/

Nice job for the weekend

I am almost ready with setting the 200 sites up. I installed wordpress on 150 of them and at the others I will use a script I found at affiliatestore.com

With wordpress I will use of course Google Adsense and my own tool ABB (affiliateblogbuilder) but I will also use the wide range of topics to match cpa offers with the sites. Fi Azoogleads has an offer for free baby products which pays $1.25 per email submit. One of the 200 sites is a baby site so at that site I will include this offer.  In total they have well over 350 offers so I am sure that most of the offers i can place in a matching website.

CPA Networks I am aware of are Azoogleads, Maxbounty and Neverblueads. I will look for more networks when I am ready to start creating content for these sites. Maybe use a bit of the affiliateblog ideas by creating posts about affiliateoffers and mix that with a bit more general posts about the topics.

A lot of work ahead…. and the problem is we have in spite of the month June which is normally slow a lot of orders for our mug business so I need to juggle with time again.

When you have read some of my posts here you will know that besides my internet marketing business I own a business in creating personlised mugs. But , and i do want to be unthankfull, we (my wife and me) want to replace the income we make from it with income solely out of internet marketing.

The problem is only that in times it gets bussy with the mugs I have hardly any time on working the internet side and when i do I sometimes seem to lack focus. I am sure that if you done anything in IM you understand what i mean. Checking stsats, reading forum posts, reading ebooks, answering emails ..things that produce noting.

So to overcome this I will create some focus points. First is the numbers…what do i need per day in cold hard numbers. writing this down will make it more concrete

First target : 10k a month.

I have 700 domainnames for which i had great plans but most of them are collecting digital dust. I ran thru the list and picked 200 of which i think real have a great potential. Those 200 will be the onces that i will be working with.

10,000 / 200 = 50

So I will need to make 50 a month per domain. Of course not all things are equal but on everage it will have to be 50. That converts into 1.67 per day per domain.

Per month

• 10,000 total income
• 50 per domain

per day

• 333.33 total
• 1.67 per domain

How am i planning to do this?

I will need to plan the ways to monitize it and the ways to get traffic to the sites.

I will take a combination of 3 monitazation ways. Adsense, affiliate income and private ad sales. Each will have the potential to earn the 50 a month on it’s own but using it all 3 it will have a higher change in making it.

Making 50 a month with Adsense: My experiece has learned me that i earn about 15 per 1000 imperssions with adsense. So to make 50 I will need about 3500 impressions in a month which comes down to a lil over 100 a day.

Affiliateincome. Selling products that give a commsion of 25 it takes 2 sales. My conversion rate in average is around 0,5% so i need 200 visitors for 1 sale. Making 2 sales will make me need 400 visitors (targeted vistors that is)

Selling private ads. When you create a site that looks good and gets visitors and prevably has a pagerank of 3 and up selling ads on them is relative easy. If you sell 10 ad spots for 5 a month you are there and when the site has authority it’s no secret that even 1 ad will bring more then 50 a month. Just take a look at some income reports of top dog bloggers…most of the income comes from selling links and adspace. Using forums like digitalpoint is easy to find your first advertisers. Networks like tnx.net and text-link-ads can help also

Each of these 3 monitaztion ways will have the capability to make 50 on it’s own. But as I intent to make 200 sites it will be difficult to have each website reach it’s full potential. But breaking the numbers down like these is a hugh insight in what it takes to make 10,000 a month.

Next thing will be making a task list to make things easier.

One thing i didn’t address here is the costs involved. hosting and registering the domains are besides off course the only real costs. These account for such a low number per day that it’s almost not worth mentioning them.

Registering a domain: 8 per year = 0.02
Hosting 8 per month for unlimited domains. I mostly keep 50-100 domains on 1 account altho much more is allowed. (8/50 )/30 = 0.005
So in total per day the costs are 0.03

A long time ago (last year :)) I build several lenses (pages) at Squidoo.com and set them to forget. I had heared a lot about the love of Google for Squidoo and thought it was worth a shot and try to see if I could earn a bit from squidoo.

I did but it was not that much…i made a lens about dutch carinsurence called Goedkoopste Autoverzekering

I made a comparison about several car insurance offers and had affilaite id’s with the offers. The money earned in a year? $380 .. a nice amount for about two hours but I guess it could have been a lot more. Why? Because i didn’t build any links to my Squidoo page and had it set and forget just to see if it would rank out of it’s own.

So I’ll try a lil casestudy and see if I can build the traffic to squidoo by adding some more links to the page and see what it does with earnings and traffic.

Traffic last 7 days as of June 11th : 7 visits

PS if you’re dutch and are looking for Goedkoopste Autoverzekering I do recommand visit my lens at squidoo to get a comparison and ask a free quote

At the end of October I build 45 sites real fast using a script and took one of them as a casestudy. My goal was getting $2 a day for that site within 30 days. But because of my “normal” business I had a major lack of time and didn’t spend the time I had in mind for it.

At this moment it has been 2 months after building the sites and the total time spend on promoting the batch of sites is no more then 10 hours.

Was it profitable? well …..

Adsense income to date with these 45 : $492

Affiliate income: $62

The income in November was $130 and in december it was $237 and for Januari it’s already $114 so it looks like it will end around $300

I haven’t done everything I wanted to do and in the coming days I will promote individual sites more as some are performing less then others.

Overall I think i can’t complain. The registration of the domain was $1.99 and I have them hosted on accounts I already had. So i well covered the costs and renewing fees are also justified so these sites are well worth it. They will not be $2 a day sites but rather $0.50 - $2 and i am ok with it.

Next project…upscale this

I mentioned it several times that my normal business is printing mugs and I am making 70-80% of my income in the months september - december. Bizzy time is over..which feels strange btw..and now it is time to expand my affiliate projects.

Until January 20th dotster and mydomain.com have a special deal for .info domainnames. It will cost you $0.99 to register a domainname. Yesterday and today i took time to plan my actions and I got an insane idea to build at least 10 sites a day using the model I have. The plan is to have a 1000 new sites before the end of April 2008.

Nice new goal…

The total of 45 sites that the casestudy site belongs to are doing ok. Yesterday the total income from those 45 was $20.19. In the 20 days till now the casestudy site made a bit over $10. Not the $2 a day but i have good hopes for this niche as the $20 from ysterday came actually of 11 sites that were indexed by Google. I just need a bit more time and buiild links to the sites. Funny thing is tho that I never really made these sites with the intention to earn the majority of the income from Adsense. I made them around affiliateproducts and thought it would be doing good with that…till today however i haven’t made any affiliate sale with these sites.

But time is something I do not have. My mugprinting business is never been so bussy. We know that the months October till December are bussy but this time it’s almost double as bussy as last year around this time. We made well over 7000 mugs in 3 weeks and wrok from 7:30 till 22:00 without a real brake. Me and my wife are real tired but we know this bissyness keeps untill about the week before X-mas. After that it’s time to relax and time to do what i wanted to do

Time already spend : 3 hours
Visitors to date: 394
Pages indexed: 19
Income: $10.54

I opened adsense today to find a surprise. The casestudy site is at $2.79 today. It had 25 visitors of which most came from Google.
Yesterday it ended at $1.22. This is great and i still need to do some promotion i had planned but didn’t came too

20071115.jpg

Time already spend : 3 hours
Visitors to date: 194
Pages indexed: 7
Income: $4.55

The day for Adsense is not finished and i am halfway the daily goal. The CTR is way above average and even tho i had only 11 people visit the site today it earned me $0.99. The biggest one till now as yesterday it was only $0.15
To be honest I haven’t done what i set out to do for this last days because i was to bussy with my normal business - the mug printing

20071114.jpg

Google has sent me 16 unique visitors and Yahoo 1. That is with only 4 pages indexed and as i said earlier this site has a few thousand pages.

4 other sites from the 45 are also earning money now. So i got good hopes on it.

Time already spend : 3 hours
Visitors to date: 155
Pages indexed: 4
Income: $1.54