Chitika eMiniMalls and osCommerce

I've been messing with Chitika's new eMiniMalls a lot lately. I built an osCommerce store that looks exactly like the eMiniMalls, with eMiniMalls mixed in, but that can be indexed by search engines. I'm not completely finished with it, but it should do fairly well.

If you haven't done so yet, sign up at Chitika.com

Affiliate Sales

My one site that has been indexed has made me $35.24 in affiliate sales this month. Now I just need to multiply that by 100.

Mini Mall

I started to work on my version of the Mini Mall.

You can see it here: http://www.airpurifiers-reviews.info/minimall.php
This took me only about 20 minutes to do. It is searching Amazon.com for the keyword "ipod", and returning the top result based on the Amazon pmrank, which is Amazon's promotional rank.

It still needs a lot of work, but basic functionality is there.

eMiniMalls

The official Chitika eMiniMalls page can be found here: http://www.chitika.com/

Jensense has mentioned it in many posts, and claims that many people are making more from eMiniMalls then Adsense when featured on the same page.
You can read what she has to say about it here: http://www.jensense.com/archives/chitika_eminimalls/index.html

There is also a page devoted towards setting up eMiniMalls with adsense without violating your Google TOS. It can be found here: http://www.eminimalls.org/

Need to find time...

I've been working hard at my regular job, and am in the process of buying a house. I haven't had much time to do anything. I've been making around $5 a day between adsense and affiliate earnings. I still am barely in any of the search engines.

Their seems to be a little bit of hipe around Chitika's eMiniMalls. You can use them on a page with adsense, as long as you disable context based content. I believe it is a pay-per-click service. I've decided to create a affiliate enabled version of the eMiniMall. I will then rotate between the actual eMiniMall and my affiliate version, and see which one produces more income. I won't have much time to work on it until the weekend, but it should only take me a few hours to reproduce. Perhaps someone with an NPB adsenser site with a lot of page views per day would be willing to try the same test. I'm not currently getting enough page views to get good data. Write a comment if your interested.

No Adsense Clicks Again.

I made $1.85 from an affiliate today, but no adsense clicks. I must be doing something wrong. I have started to look at some NPB sites to figure out what my sites are lacking. 2 more sites are up and submitted.

Yahoo! small business is selling dot com domain names for $2.99 a year. I've been using namecheap dot info domains ($2.88/year), but registered a few dot coms to see if it makes a difference.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/

2 New Sites

I finished 2 more sites today. I now have a total of 10 sites. I've spent approximately $50 so far. I've made $7.91 in adsense revenue, and $8.59 in affiliate revenue. I'm still way in the hole at this point, but I only have a small percentage of my pages in the search engines.

I shared some information with a online friend, and he will hopefully help me to improve my sites. I'm not a very good template/graphic designer, and could use all the help I can get.

No AIS Yesterday

I made $0.00 in adsense and affiliate money yesterday. My sites continue to get slowly added into the search engines. It seems that MSN and Yahoo add sites to their search results fairly quickly. Adding an RSS feed to My Yahoo seems to get a site listed almost immediately.

Todays Adsense

No affiliate sales today, but I made $1.07 on adsense, from 2 clicks on 2 different sites. One of my sites received 149 impressions, and it doesn't have any pages in Google. Although with only 1 click, it has a CTR of 0.7%.

I need to start tweaking adsense position and layout on my pages but find it hard to do before I start getting steady traffic. I've setup channels on each site, for each ad placement, but do not have enough data yet to make any real determinations. How much traffic is enough to make these types of judgements?

Slow Growing Pages and SEO

According to the Google Patent:

[0039] Consider the example of a document with an inception date of yesterday that is referenced by 10 back links. This document may be scored higher by search engine 125 than a document with an inception date of 10 years ago that is referenced by 100 back links because the rate of link growth for the former is relatively higher than the latter. While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine 125 to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine 125. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine 125 may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming.

Supposedly, Google likes a page to grow slowly over time in size and backlinks. I am going to setup one of my sites to gain 100 pages per week until the max number of pages is met. I’ll add backlinks to this site slowly as I have time.

Officially Indexed by Google

One of my sites now has 13,200 pages showing up in Google. One other site has the index page showing up. So 2 of 8 are officially in.

Unfortunately the site that has 13,200 pages was the first one I made, and I am not too sure the 'niche' that I chose was a very good one. I didn't do any research before building that first site. I basically used it as a test to write the scripts that create my pages. I don't think it will do very good as far as adsense goes, but.......I produced $171.83 worth of sales for one of my affiliates. I get 5% of the sale, making me $8.59.

I didn't do much online today. I got a few more incoming links, and tweaked some things on the existing pages.

I made $0.39 from adsense, and $8.59 from the affiliate, making my daily total $8.98.

My monthly AIS total is $15.24.

5 More Sites Created and Submitted

I created 5 more sites today, using the FREE software that I wrote. I've decided against using any paid for site creators or keyword lists. I still don't have even 1 page indexed by Google, but hopefully that changes soon.

I've created over 100,000 unique pages so far on my 8 sites. Google has downloaded sitemaps from all 8 sites. They've crawled around a few of the index pages, but haven't begun indexing the entire site yet. I wonder if Google keeps track of sitemaps under 1 Google account, or from 1 IP address. Does multiple sitemaps from 1 user raise a red flag to Google?

I've purchased two more domain names, but I will probably not set them up until later in the week. I've set up a link exchange manager on each of my sites, so that I can start getting some quality incoming links. I think I will focus on increasing incoming links to all of the sites tomorrow.

I made $0.41 today, on 1 click. That brings my monthly total to $6.26.

$1 A Day Challenge

I've been following Baldy's blog and his Quest to earn an average of $1 per day on 100 sites. Barefoot_boo recently joined the challenge as well. I decided to compete and started this blog to track my progress against Baldy and Barefoot_boo. I've made $5.85 on adsense this month before starting the competition. They are both using Niche Portal Builder and Keyword Avalanche to build sites. I've decided to use only programs that I create, open-source software and free keyword research tools. We'll see which is a better path to take.

My cost per month = $20 for hosting + $2.88 per year for each domain name registered.

I created 3 sites today.