Starting A Journey Towards Financial Freedom - Q&A

Posted on April 2, 2008
Filed Under Earn money online

This is an email conversation with one of the readers of this blog and I thought it would be interested to include here as a post. I am happy to answer questions as it also helps me get some quality content for this blog…

Hi Tomaz,

Just a hello from me again.

How ya doing, your blog is not active nowadays and I missed reading your insightful posts.

To be honest, I did not do anytime much for the past few months after emailing to you. Just register a few domains and left it at that while I change a new job and got settling in.

But now I am ready to put a blueprint and really achieve financial freedom…can you give me a helping hand? hhahah,….well i was just writing as i think so if possible maybe you can give me some comments on my thoughts and hopefully, I will stay the course and see the RESULTS real soon!

First, can I know how is your sites doing now? Are you still hitting the 10k mark per month as you indicated before? Or are you doing better than before with your tennis site and vacuum cleaner site? Can share some details for motivation sake?

Hi,

Good to hear from you. Yes, not many posts lately. I’ve been focusing on myself lately (selfish? ) than others…

Yes, I am at around $11,000 per month right now. There are no big changes since none of my new sites has skyrocketed in traffic and my vacuum traffic is growing very slowly…

Ok, to your questions…

a) Do 5 niche sites at one go.

If these are your first sites, I would suggest you start with 1 or max 2. You’ll lose focus and motivation for all the sites… (most likely)

It’s better to have one that you feel is like your baby and you’ll take really good care of it. You’ll get links where no one else will bother and this will put you in the top 5 of your niche…

b) Reasearch 5 niches -mostly product-focused niches

Product based sites are good because people are looking to buy. A free recipe site won’t make much since people look for free info…

c) Monetization would be focused on adsense, chitika, kontera and a few affiliate products

OK. Chitika rocks. I had a $287 day a few days ago…

d) Plan out a 3-tier program for each niche site - 1 seed word, 15 tiers 2 and 5-10 tier 3 (at least 225 pages for each site)

Yes, something like that, but don’t limit yourself. My plan is to find at least 200 good keywords where Wordtracker shows demand over 10 per day. But if you can find closely related keywords then shoot for 400 to 500 articles. That will make your site an authority.

e) Outsource these 225 articles to getafreelancer.com. Plan $8 as the a guideline. Upload these articles slowly (maybe 2-3 per week)…

Test the writers first. I asked for 10 articles on one topic and selected 5 writers. Once I got the articles back, I chose the best writer. And if some articles were really not that good, I did some editing and used them for article submissions…

f) Track traffic using sitecounter and google analytical….

Sure, and SBI Traffic Center gives you all the details too…

g) Go for paid links (budget $300 per niche) - like Wow directory etc…do this slowly over 6 months to 1 year

Hmm, be careful. Yes, some directories like BOTW.com and Joeant.com may be worth the money but many others are not. Consider Yahoo too and check whether the page you will most likely be listed has any pagerank. That would help nicely.

The start is always tough because good sites don’t want to exchange links if you don’t have any pagerank. And it’s hard to get good pagerank if good sites don’t link to you. ;(

So start with some high quality directories, article submissions, social bookmarking and contact some low pagerank (PR2) sites for a link exchange. You should get to PR3 in 6 months and then it’s going to get a little easier…

If you do look for paid links, then contact the website owners and ask for a link within content. You can get a good link PR3 for one time payment of $100.

h) Write 5 articles every 2 day - > submit to ezine articles only (is this enough?)

Consider buzzle.com, squidoo.com, hubpages.com and others. Ezinearticles.com does send a lot of traffic though…

You can start with 2 submitted articles per week per site and then ease down to 1 article per week.

i) After building pages to 50 and above for each site, start to increase link building activities like search for link partners, submit to yahoo answers, google groups, forums, blogs postings.

Sure, the link hunt never stops…

j) Monetize only when i have at least 100 visitors per niche. Use asrep to track adsense..

Maybe. 100 visitors with a 10% CTR and 0,10 per click will earn you a $1 per day. ;(

You need really good traffic to make something with adsense. I now DON’T monetize a new site unless is has 500 visitors per day and at least pagerank 3. The sooner you monetize the more difficult is getting a quality link…

I plan to do 4 sites on non site build it and use 1 site for Site build it - due to costs.

OK, one SBI package will give you lots of information and guide you in the right direction. You’ll lose on Content2 and some other cool features though.

Consider what I said replying to your a) question…

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Comments

5 Responses to “Starting A Journey Towards Financial Freedom - Q&A”

Yogi on April 3rd, 2008 12:52 am

Thanks Tomaz, Your posts are always very motivating and provide guidance for a new webmaster like myself.

Taking your advise I am now into the planning stages for my next website which is going to be product focused and I plan to use all the advise you have so generously offered from time to time, on this blog and SBI forums
MV on April 9th, 2008 11:56 am

Hi Tomaz,
your postses are always extremely interesting.
In the answer to the mail that you have received, you have written what time you earn around $11,000 for month…. This datum is extremely interesting for who, like me, earn currently few Euro per day.

So I ask you some more informations on your actual situation:
Can you tell us these $11,000 comes from how many sites? and from what type of sites?
I don’t ask you to say the urls or to disclose your niches sites, but only I would like to know how many sites serve for reaching that figure. What kind of sites, how old are they …. and so long.

Besides it would be useful to know how many visitors have these sites and thing you use for making to yield them: adsense, chitika, ebay, amazon, other affliate products ….. and in what percentages these compete to your earnings.

I think if you will tell further informations on these $11000 your advise will be great, and every blogger thar reads this wonderful blog learn something more

Thanks, MV

P.S.
I apologize for my poor English, I am trying to improve it
Tomaz on April 9th, 2008 8:21 pm

Hi MV,

Thanks for stopping by!

I earn 99% of that income from 2 SBI sites - my tennis and my vacuum cleaners site. Tennis site was started in November 2005 and the vacuum site in July 2006.

The tennis site earns approx. $2,500 per month, the rest of the $11,000 is from the vacuum site.

So let’s say $8000 comes from the vacuum site; around $4000 comes from Chitika, around $3000 from Adsense and the rest from Amazon, CJ and some other affiliate programs.

Traffic? On my tennis site: between 1200 to 1500 daily visitors and on my vacuum site between 2500 and 3500 daily visitors.

I got a little bit lucky with the vacuum site at the start since I started targeting the right keywords although I had no idea at that time that the competition was really poor.

The tennis site took a long time to start ranking for keywords in high demand like “how to play tennis” and “tennis drills”. It’s just continuous work although it doesn’t feel that way since tennis is my passion and my expertise…

Go with what you know…
Mark van Tuel on April 17th, 2008 2:16 am

Hi tomaz,

I really like your blog, my compliments.
It is very informative and motivating.

I had a question about getafreelancer.com.
You mentioned to outsource the 225 articles to GAF. Is it smart to do the whole job to one writer or spread over more?

Maybe you can make an article with the do’s and don’ts for outsourcing content.

Thanks for you informative posts and good luck
Tomaz on April 18th, 2008 9:54 pm

Hey Mark,

Here’s what I did: I chose 50 keywords and posted a job on GAF for 10 articles. Then I chose 5 writers based on their reviews and gave each of them 10 articles.

In my case, I got 20 very good articles, 20 medium and 10 poor ones.

I then chose one writer for my full project of 100 articles and gave her some extra cash so that she did a really good job. She bid $6 per article on my first batch of 10 and I offered $8 per article for 100 if she did a really good job.

Right now she is writing my fourth batch of 100 articles…

I use the 20 medium articles for article submission sites and the 10 poor ones I never used at all…