Mad Bad Adsense

It’s been a good four weeks or more since my last post, and over 6 weeks since I decided to re-refocus my online business aims.

I was just getting into the re-believing stage when I saw a post over at Spencer Haws’ Niche Pursuits about how he got banned from adsense for doing what, at a 1000-foot glance, appears to be what I am now doing.

Oh dear.

The worst of it? He’s not alone.

All of those guys are (or were) doing what I planned to do.

Back to the drawing board?

Being More Positive

Firstly, I don’t have anything like their scale. So I can learn from their ‘mistakes’ and follow suit by making sure I mix up my ad networks.

Secondly, a large part of my online income is already pretty diversified – it comes from a lot of smaller niche programs, so to lose my adsense account would set me back all of £1 a day. As I already have a day job once more, I will try not to cry too hard at that.

Thirdly, my niche sites obviously need to be better than my competitors. And that no longer just means being better than other niche marketers. I mean, they need to be good enough to pass a Google audit. Which means it has to be worth visiting.

Actually, point three was always my main objective – building pure ad-spam sites is no good for anybody, and it’s definitely not a model I would build a ‘business’ on.

£1 a day, did I mention that already?

I hit the milestone of £1 a day with adsense earlier this month.

This sounds like bugger all. And it is. Kind of.

It’s £30 a month more than I had. Put it this way, it used to take me 6 months to break my adsense pay out limit. Now it’s going to take 2. And as it’s climbing, it should take even less time in the future.

Also, my adsense revenue is coming primarily from a really unusual source.

This is something that’s changed the way I see niche marketing completely – and it’s one of those things that was staring me in the face all along. A real “well, duh!” moment.

Onwards ho. Let’s hope next month it’s eclipsed £2 a day. I’m confident it will.

Niche site progress report

So all in now I think I have added an extra 8-10 new sites to my arsenal.

These sites are across a number of separate niches, though some are closely related to each other. It’s nice to have related sites, as you can interlink them and so drive traffic around your network.

I know that’s a controversial point, but it’s worked nicely for me in the past.

A few of them have had their first adsense clicks, and sent some traffic to Amazon – no sales there though just yet.

Having a day job and trying to grow a blog empire is difficult, make no mistake. I know from past experience than realistically, what I am trying to achieve is a full time job’s worth of work.

And hopefully it will be my ‘full time job’ once more in the not too distant future.

But this time, with a difference.

Building a Business Model

I am becoming detached from the whole process. The work of my business is becoming more and more outsourced. Jobs are owned and run by an interchangeable network of contractors. Whereas before I would have the whole process stored in my head, now a site starts on paper.

I map out all the parts, assigning time scales, expectations, and make sure the necessary parts are in place.

For example, I don’t want to be receiving Word documents from my contractors – this is just making things more complex than they need to be.

Before I might have done it this way, but no longer.

Now, I give my contractors a WordPress login, and let them add the post, set up the posting schedule, and simply email me when they are done. Then, I just have to log in, check what they have done, and set the document to publish.

Easy peasey, lemon squeezy.

It’s working as well. Sure, it’s costing me money to outsource the processes, but it’s allowing me to scale faster and test more.

So, I think I am going to wrap up here. I don’t much like to do ‘diary’ type posts. I prefer to add value and help by answering questions and solving problems. However, I do hope that by reading this, you may get a sense of what’s really involved in running an micro-niche affiliate site network.

Until next time.

Chris

Tagged as: adsense, Amazon, contractors, niche programs, Spencer Haws