Why would I let it go?

Well right now I am getting ready to leave for Africa for about 40 days so I really don’t have the time to add more pages and I am creating a new tattoo blog site to create another income stream. I want to be diverse in where I get money, which tattoos I don’t think will be going anywhere any time soon. The tattoo market can only get bigger and better as more and more people want their own tattoo.

Future plans?

When I get back from Africa I plan on adding more pages to the site, currently its only 153 pages. If I can add about 20 pages each month, it will only attract more people to the site.

The above picture is from Clickbank which on August 4th made four sales of the affiliate product on the site. There are a few days like yesterday that just makes the tattoo site really kill it with making money, while I do absolutely nothing. The last actual job I had back in 2007 I would make $134 a day, working 8 hours. So to make 101.45 from having a simple tattoo site just makes life even better.

I could go back and figure out a month by month stat, but that would take way to long. Instead I am just going to focus on each month from now on.

Here is what took place in July.

• I changed all of the ‘first link priority’ on every page to point to the home page of the site for the top level keyword.
• I found three really good link partners who helped the site gain a page rank of 3 from a 1.
• I added about 15 new pages and linked to each page.
• The sites traffic ended the month with 114,457 unique visitors, which is almost 48k more than any other month!
• Clickbank created $262.91 in profits
• Adsense created $578.64 in profits

Total Site Income: $841.55

I also started another tattoo blog which I plan on it being more profitable than this site. The blog has huge potential and will create repeat visitors, which is something my ‘adsense’ tattoo site lacks. No one really wants to go to that site everyday, mostly because there isn’t any new information on it.

Creating an adsense site is actually very easy, it just takes time, money and effort. You need to find something you love to talk about, something you are passionate about, otherwise you will never keep up with it. Once you have created the site, it takes alot of work to get links, create good titles, find linking partners, and then keeping the site updated. After a long time the site can run itself or you can hire someone to manage it, but it will take you to get it to that place.

Now mind you that this niche is a very huge niche but has very little money in it. If you found a niche that was much smaller but had a lot of money in it, you could do way better than this tattoo site. I know a guy who owns a blog who only talks about banking information, rates, cd rates, interest rates, credit cards and makes about $1,200 each month from it, AND he only gets about 500 visitors/day to his site.

How do you find out if a ‘search phrase’ has money in it?

The first step is to use a keyword research tool such as the one at wordtracker to find how many people are searching for what you are interested in.

Then you search your keywords on google to see how many ads are showing. How many sponsored links are there? If there are only a few, then you probably won’t make too much money from adsense but if there are many ads then your chances are good.

Start right now, start writing down every idea you have and see what you can find on wordtracker and search google for ideas. This is the first step.

I remember the day when making a few dollars a day from this tattoo site was awesome, but never expected it to reach $83 in a single day. Of course the sites has had its better days and this ISN”T a record, but its been a long time since I have made that much money in one day.

This makes me wonder how much money is really out there to be had, just by the little work I have put into this site. Its three years old and is getting loads of traffic. This also makes me wonder how much work I can put into building another site like a blog just about tattoos and see the traffic to the blog increase dramatically. Hmm.. smells like another new website for me in the very near future. I’ll keep you updated on everything as always.

In the graph above there is still 4 hours to go in the day. The picture below is my Adsense earnings for July 16th and “Today’s Earnings” of July 17th

The above is my Adsense earnings for 7/16/09 and for 7/17/09 with 6 hours to go in the day. I am not really suggesting you get into tattoos for money making sites, but there are loads of people searching for tattoos. The only problem is that there is not too much money in advertising cost for tattoos online. Basically it takes a lot of traffic to make a little money. You get thousands of visitors to this site for $900 a month, but if this was a different niche I would be making loads more money, depending on the niche of course.

From now on I plan on updating my blog with stats from my sites making money and how much they have done over the week. This way it will help me keep track of what I am doing, how much I am making and to show you that I am making money online. In fact I am self employed and have been since that great day of September 22nd 2007! Ah that was such a great day, my last day working as an Environmental Specialist. Now if I can do this, you can! I got a little motivated last night to buy sites that have potential with making money online and making those sites better from this blog: Self Made Minds.

What would an extra $900 each month do for you? I know it pays my car payment and insurance and some of my gas.. ah the joys of a gas guzzling car! But seriously the Lexus LS 430 is a pretty sweet car!

That’s it for me for the week. Its going to be a very busy weekend as one of my best friends is graduating a Leadership School here in Washington. Exciting times ahead.. and I leave for Africa in 24 days! Wow time flies!

Fast forward to December 2006, I created an Adsense site in the niche of tattoos. The site was horribly designed and basically thrown together. I don’t have the programming, website building skills needed to create a great website. So I hired a guy on Elance to create a template for me. The site actually has 2 different designs an old design and a new design as I kept on creating pages to the site but used the new design.

• November 2006 I had 27 visitors, but ended the year 2006 the site had 561 unique visitors to my newly formed tattoo site which created $14.75! (Grand Total For The Year 2006 = $14.75)
• By the end of 2007 I had 331,856 unique visitors to the site which created $2,534.67 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2007 = $4943.80)
• By the end of 2008 I had 618,781 unique visitors which created $4,630.25 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2008 = $7668.54)
• So far this year the site has had 401,901 unique visitors and created $2,405.92 of income all from Adsense! (Total Up To July 14th 2009 = $4159.78)

The site also sells a few Clickbank items and did $3038.29 in 2008 and so far in 2009 has done $1,753.86 from commissions. (2007 it made $2,409.13 from commissions).

I tell you all of this to show that making money online is possible even if you have no skills like me! I did not know how to make a website. I basically bought the articles for the site and put it all together myself. I did have a little knowledge of how HTML works but nothing too extensive. I do know something about ranking well on the search engines and if you can get traffic you can make money! Its really as easy as that.

What if you had a website that brought in 500,000 unique visitors a year, or even a few hundred a year? You could put a few ads, Adsense, Kontera, Affiliate products or programs, create an email list, Clickbank or sell ad space on the site. With a large amount of traffic you are almost guaranteed to make money. The tattoo site was never supposed to be a huge earner for me and it really isn’t. I basically use that site to pay for my 2006 Lexus LS 430 and it pays each payment for me. My online stores make loads more money than that site and I know if you were to get into affiliate marketing you could make TONs more than me, just like Jonathan Volk (who is my new hero! Seriously though, he’s a highly successful Affiliate marketer and someone I look up to).

It All Started In 2006!

My first month of making money started with the first 27 visitors to that tattoo site that I created. I remember making $0.09 my first day and how excited I was, because I created something that WORKED! It was just a matter of making it bigger and better, because if it worked, why would it stop if I made the site bigger.

Now today its pushing $20/day and over 4,000 visitors/day. That’s only because I spend the past month making changes to the site and getting it to rank better in Google, and now its paying off, just check out my screen shot below.

Really anyone can do this stuff, whether you make 1 Adsense site and go from there or create a Yahoo Store. It just takes time and effort. Start learning today and tomorrow you will see the rewards. I will post more about the ‘how to’s‘ to creating a successful site that will make you money day in and day out without doing anything more to the site. The tattoo site that I created runs itself with zero effort on my part. I only put time into it when I want it to do better.

Also you have to be careful on what niche you pick because really, there isn’t too much money in the tattoo market online. There are not many products to be sold online for tattoos since its mostly an offline business. I will go over more on how to pick ‘more’ successful niches and what to look for in the future.

The large jump in traffic is because I made changes to the site to help it rank for some keywords that get loads of traffic daily. The site hit the first page for one of those keywords and you can see the results. It also caused a jump of about $8 extra in Adsense income daily. If you look at the ‘Hits’ column you will see the jump. This shows how many times its been ‘seen’ in the search engines, not necessarily bringing traffic to the site. It takes about 14 Hits for the site to get 1 visit.