AIS Challenge

Magento Demo Store and Admin

2007-08-31T09:46:00.000-07:00

Magento was released today. You can view the demo store and admin here:

http://demo.magentocommerce.com/

http://demo-admin.magentocommerce.com/admin/
User: admin
Pass: 123123

Magento Demo Store and Magento Themes, Layouts, Templates, Skins and Translations

2007-08-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

With the release of Magento Commerce Beta 1, I plan creating a Magento Demo Store that will run the Beta and will sell Magento Themes. The development team at Varien has not released the exact details on how Magento Themes will work, but they have stated that they are based on the Zend Framework.

The Magento Template structure has design packages that are easily uploadable in the Magento admin. Each Design Package has themes, with include layouts, templates, skins, and translations. The layouts are based on XML files that define the block structure. Templates are the HTML templates, and the skins are CSS and images. The translations have to do with the Zend_Translate class, which is part of the Zend Framework.

I'll post more once the Magento Forum and Wiki are opened to the public. The demo Magento Shop should be available in the next few days.

Automatic Keyword Generation

2007-03-25T17:56:00.000-07:00

I posted a while back about the Automatic Keyword Generator PHP class by Ver Pangonilo. This works pretty well, but can only find keywords based on the text you input. It cannot generate related terms, synonyms, etc. However, the Yahoo Content Analysis Web Service can do all these things and more.

You can generate these keywords using the following function:

function implodeAssoc($array, $inner_glue='=', $outer_glue='&') {
$output = array();
foreach( $array as $key => $item ){
$output[] = $key . $inner_glue . $item;
}
return implode($outer_glue, $output);
}

function getKeywords($text) {
$baseurl = 'http://search.yahooapis.com/ContentAnalysisService/V1/termExtraction';
$params = array('appid'=>'YahooDemo',
'context'=>urlencode($text),
'output'=>'php');

$request = $baseurl . '?' . implodeAssoc($params);
$xml = file_get_contents($request);
$result = unserialize($xml);
$keywords_array = $result['ResultSet']['Result'];
$keywords = implode(",",$keywords_array);
return($keywords);
}

echo getKeywords("Bill Gates to Finally Receive His Harvard Degree. It's not like he needs it to beef up his resume, but the world's richest college dropout is finally getting his degree. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp.");

This will output:
bill gates,harvard degree,microsoft corp,college dropout,resume

Interprise Suite v1

2006-10-31T17:31:00.000-08:00

I've been following Interprise Suite for the last 18 months or so. I was a beta tester for a while, but I grew tired of waiting around for their release (originally scheduled for late 2005). They just unofficially put out their first release. You can get it here: http://www.interprisesolutions.com/Forum/Topic3911-57-5.aspx#bm3978

I haven't really messed with the software yet, but I hope to use it to start a drop shipping business.

Viral Marketing with phpList

2006-10-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

I've been messing around a lot with phplist. It is a fullfledged newsletter manager with a double opt-in subscription mechanism, scheduling, RSS, click-tracking, attachments and bounce management. The plan is to create a viral marketing script that uses the PHPList database to control user access to the member areas of the site.

I'm also trying to incorporate the GeoLite City database, so I can capture a users region when they sign up for the newsletter. Since the niche I'm working in is very location oriented, I hope to be able to use PHPList and PHPadsnew to target them with location specific newsletters and banners.

I'm going to try the plan similar to the 15kchallenge. The plan is to offer something for free if they add their email address, and confirm using the link in the welcome email. Then offer something else for free if they sign up 3 friends (and they confirm).

Amazon API IntelliTXT

2006-10-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sure other people have done this, but I created a script that injects Amazon products (w/ new product previews) into articles similar to the way IntelliTXT works. I use the automatic keyword class from previous posts to find keywords in an article, search the Amazon API with those keywords, and then replace the keywords in the article with the newly created link. It seems to work fairly well. Mouse over the links in this post to see how the Amazon Previews work.

//To use this you'll need to first download tools.inc.php
//which is included with the AWS Book (awsbook.com)
//samples.
//http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=88612
//Find tools.inc.php under 'Chapter 4'
//
require_once("tools.inc.php");
define('SUBID', '1A7XKHR5BYD0WPJVQEG2'); // Your subscription id

define('Searchindex','Books');
//define('Searchindex','Music');
//define('Searchindex','DVD');
//define('Searchindex','Toys');
//define('Searchindex','Video Games');
//define('Searchindex','Software');
//define('Searchindex','Software Video Games');
//define('Searchindex','Electronics');
//define('Searchindex','Tools');
//define('Searchindex','Sporting Goods');
//define('Searchindex','Art Supplies');
//define('Searchindex','Kitchen');
//define('Searchindex','Gourmet Food');
//define('Searchindex','Apparel');
//define('Searchindex','PC Hardware');
//define('Searchindex','VHS');

function awsreplace($keyword) {
$request = 'http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&AWSAccessKeyId='.SUBID.'&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords='.urlencode($keyword).'&SearchIndex='.Searchindex.'&Sort=salesrank';
// Get the response from Amazon
$xml = file_get_contents($request);
// Parse the results
$Result = xmlparser($xml);
$ASIN = $Result['ItemSearchResponse']['Items'][0]['Item'][0]["ASIN"][0];
$url = '<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/'.$ASIN.'?ie=UTF8&tag=duelcoastweb-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN='.$ASIN.'">';
$replacestr = $url . $keyword . '</a>';
if (!isset($Result['ItemSearchResponse']['Items'][0]['Item'][0]["ASIN"][0])) {
$replacestr = $keyword;
}
return $replacestr;
}

I call the function from within my page like this:

foreach ($keyword_array AS $keyword_replace) {
$body = str_ireplace(trim($keyword_replace),awsreplace(trim($keyword_replace)),$body);
}
?>

AIS Script Finished

2006-10-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I finished my Smarty script. Complete with automatic keywords, SEO URLs, valid xhtml. The speed is great, and there is no need for a database. Just upload the articles, no other configuration needed. I'll be setting up all of the domains I lost when I was hacked over the next few days with the new script.

The only problem I am having with Smarty is with the caching feature. I cannot figure out how to make Smarty see a script with parameters (i.e. smarty.php?a=1) as its own file. Right now it is caching the page as 1 file, regardless of if the parameters are different. If anyone knows how to solve this problem with Smarty, please let me know. Right now, I have cache turned off.

Smarty, SmArticle

2006-10-12T11:09:00.000-07:00

I've been out of the loop for a while, so I just got exposed to Burt's SmArticle tool. I don't own his product, or have ever seen the code... I decided to write my own version of his tool using Smarty Templates. I've wanted to play with Smarty for a while, and since I have no money, I figured creating my own tool would be the way to go. I'm going to mess with the
Automatic Keyword Generator PHP class by Ver Pangonilo (of Limbo fame). I'm just about done the script, I just want to figure out htaccess redirects to make the URLs SEO. I'll post a link to the site once finished. I don't think I'll release the code since Burt's tool should do the job for most people. If you have any suggestions of things I should include in my script let me know and I may share the code with you.

What Happened?

2006-10-11T04:19:00.000-07:00

My last post was April 10th of this year. A day or two after that post my reseller account was hacked by a Chinese hacking group. They deleted all of my domains as well as all remote backups that I had stored through the hosts remote backup server. Watching my AIS go from around $900/month to $0 in one day was pretty disheartening. I've rebuilt some of the sites, but haven't taken the time to get them all up and running. I've made only $58.25 in adsense since the sites were hacked. Backup your sites to disk ASAP. Having a remote backup server does not completely protect you.

I'm starting to get the AIS bug again, and will be working on a viral marketing script. I'm developing a product, and hopefully will launch in the next month. If anyone has any opensource code that will help with the viral marketing script, please let me know. Also, please let me know if anyone is still reading this. Thanks.

New AIS

2006-04-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

This relates to my last post... I've been working on a new AIS.
http://www.bullsessions.com/admin/2006/04/post-your-adsense-on-our-blog/

Multiple Adsense Accounts on One Page?

2006-03-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Can anyone tell me if it is within the Adsense TOS to have multiple adsense account ads on one page? So have an adsense ad at the top of the page from one users account, and another ad further down the page from another adsense account.

I've been looking at the TOS and can't figure out if this is allowed.

Adsense Update

2006-02-11T16:14:00.000-08:00

I made some changes to one of my original adsense sites, and it has started to do better. I split some larger pages up into smaller ones, and replaced some adsense ads. I read a post somewhere saying that all pages should be between 5-10k. I'm not sure there is an exact science to it, but making the pages smaller on this site definately seemed to help.

This month so far I've done $251.50 in adsense, and a little over $50 on the affiliates. The site that I made changes on made $13.80 last month, and $7.31 so far this month. If anyone wants to share some PLR articles (all on 1 niche topic) with me, I'll share the tool I've been working on. I need to see some examples of how the PLR articles are delivered so I can adjust my tool appropriately.

Unique Articles

2006-02-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

Reading about http://www.plrmanna.com/ made me think about the RSSG article script I wrote, and how I could manipulate my articles to make them appear unique. I would want to do this as the article is displayed in the page, and not in a once and done type of way. Since my pages are cached, the article would display the same way for 14 days, and then on the next page load would become unique in a different way.

The first thing I wanted to try to do was to put a block of text in the middle of the article. How would I find the middle? Depending on how the article was formatted (I'll assume 2 BR tags are used between each paragraph) I would count the total number of occurences of the paragraph break, divide by 2, and merge my text there.

The first thing I needed to do was to figure out a way to find the Nth occurance of a string within a larger string. I was able to do that using this function:

function strposnth($haystack, $needle, $nth=1, $insenstive=0) {
if ($insenstive) {
$haystack=strtolower($haystack);
$needle=strtolower($needle);
}
$count=substr_count($haystack,$needle);
if ($count<1> $count) return false;
for($i=0,$pos=0,$len=0;$i<$nth;$i++) { $pos=strpos($haystack,$needle,$pos+$len); if ($i==0) $len=strlen($needle); } return $pos; }

To find the middle of the article, I would do:

$text = file_get_contents($article_path . $file);
$paragraph_count = substr_count($text, "(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)");
$middle = floor($paragraph_count / 2);
$middlepos = strposnth($text,"(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)",$middle);
$start_text = substr($text,0,$middlepos);
$end_text = substr($text,$middlepos);

So that got me the beginning and end of the article. I could then add text in the middle like this:

$middletxt = "(2 BR TAGS REMOVED FOR BLOGGER)This is the paragraph I am adding";
$outtext = $start_text . $middletxt . $end_text;

I know this is pretty easy stuff, but I thought I would post about it. I would like to get together a list of synonyms that can be used on most articles without causing problems. I'll then have my script automatically replace these words in the articles. Adding a header, middle, footer, and replacing the synonyms should make the article appear more unique to the search engines. I am going to sign up for one of the PLR article sites as soon as I get this script working as wanted.

January Stats

2006-02-01T04:04:00.000-08:00

Best month so far, here are the stats:

Adsense: $640.04
Affiliates: $234.24

Total: $874.28

Hosting cost me $19.95, and I registered a few domains at $2.88 each.

Dropshipping

2006-01-30T06:45:00.000-08:00

I've been a beta tester for Interprise Suite by Interprise Solutions for the last 8 months or so. I am pretty excited that the final release is coming out in March, and when it does, I plan on trying my hand at a drop shipping business (they are offering a FREE 3 user version). I already know what I want to sell, I've registered the domain, now I just need to find a supplier.

Has anyone successfully gotten into dropshipping? I would love to have a conversation about it (IM or Skype).

Looks like I'll fall alittle short of my $1000 AIS for the month, but not by much. I'm at around $850 so far on the month, with today and tomorrow left.

Drupal CMS Search Engine Optimization

2006-01-18T11:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve been messing around with Drupal CMS a lot lately. As I have stated in previous posts, I believe my IP address (which contains all of my sites) has been banned by Google. Now that I am making fairly good money from my sites, I am going to get another reseller account, and start hand building sites using original content (nothing scraped). I’m going to do this with the Drupal CMS.

Drupal is very search engine friendly right out of the box. Adding the pathauto module, turning on clean urls, and adding an optimized theme makes it even friendlier. It has built-in syndication, and is pretty easy to setup.

If you have a site that’s doing nothing, I highly suggest messing around with Drupal. I'll do my best to help you out with installation issues, just leave a comment with the problem and your email address.

http://drupal.org/

AIS Update

2006-01-17T09:12:00.000-08:00

Most of my sites are doing terrible. However, I have 1 site that with a little bit of attention each day can easily make $50+ in adsense any day of the week. I've made $50+ dollars every day for the last week. It takes me about 10 minutes a day to achieve these results. If I spend no time on the site, I make nothing that day.

I'm still basically unlisted in Google. I believe I've been put onto some type of IP address ban, because all of my sites are on the same server, with the same IP address. I need to get a new resellers account.

Reading Burt's post today about his $50 day yesterday made me want to "Set it and forget it". 10 minutes a day doesn't seem like a lot, but the fact that it makes nothing if I forget to touch it, or am away from my computer is very annoying.

I am going to get a new resellers account and start slow, building true "Set it and forget it" AIS sites. I still have not paid $1 for site generating software or keyword lists.

Update

2006-01-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

If you've been following my blog, you know I recently just bought a house and moved. Unfortunately, AIS has had to take a back seat for the last couple weeks, but I'm now committed to getting back up and running. My goal is to hit $1000/month in AIS by the end of the year.

I just created a new type of AIS site (who knows if it will work) using a modified version of RSSG. The content on the pages is lacking, but I'm hoping to be able to generate enough traffic using other methods. http://www.fenderguitarstore.info/

Christmas Stats Update

2005-12-25T16:41:00.000-08:00

December Adsense = $286.47
December Amazon = $7.78
Other Affiliate $$ = $79.87

Total AIS = $374.12

I don't think I'm going to hit my goal of $500 from adsense, but it has been a great month so far. I'm way up from last month.

I few people have my article script. Hopefully I'll get some good feedback.

Article Script

2005-12-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

I guess if I can't even give it away, theres no chance on me selling it. :( No one commented that they would like to check out the RSSG Article Script. I've added it to all of my sites and will see how they do.

Article Miner

2005-12-21T19:14:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a recent post on Burt's Blog (http://osworld.blogspot.com/2005/12/ais-sites-need-articles-get-article.html), I decided to write a quick article miner. It was actually a lot easier then I thought, and works great. I only have it setup to get 10 articles per keyword, but I believe that will be plenty.

I made mine to work with RSSG and findarticles.com. Other article sites could be added fairly easily, but I didn't take the time to do so.

I'm not sure what Article Miner does to the HTML or to the text in the articles. Does it change words, or redesign HTML so that the article appears to be original? I'm thinking about adding this functionality, but I doubt changing the article text would be allowed due to copyrights.

Let me know if you use RSSG and want to BETA test the script (its really rough). I'll only allow an AIS regular (I have to recognize your name) to test the script. I think I'll sell the download for a few bucks once I refine it.

RSSG and more.

2005-12-17T16:52:00.000-08:00

The RSSG site that I experimented with a few posts ago got indexed by Google and made $2.25 today. I am suprised by this, because as I stated in my first post about this site, I spent only a few minutes gathering keywords for an old domain that wasn't doing anything. Who knows if it will make that type of money consistantly, but I think I'll try to find a true niche, research keywords extensively, and see what type of difference that makes. I've also found a way to use my 'questionable' techniques described below in an 'unquestionable' way that I feel good about. It hasn't made quite as big a splash as last weekend, but I've made $8.36 today using that technique. Overall I've made $11.69 from adsense today.

My goal is to make $500 on adsense this month, which is a stretch, but still possible. I'll need to average about $20 per day on adsense for the rest of the month.

I didn't join Burt's challenge because I didn't feel that I had anything to contribute. I'll be following closely though, and will hopefully be able to learn a lot from the other contestants.

I'm also looking forward to the release of Chemo's new shopping cart. His blog has been a little stale recently, but you can read about his project here: http://oscommerce-chemo.blogspot.com/

I made $89 today from adsense.

2005-12-13T14:31:00.000-08:00

Is it ethical to create a page offering services or products that you are not actually able to provide, if you never actually sell those products? For example, someone could setup a page saying that they have this year’s hottest Christmas toy, an apartment in a great location, or can provide eye surgery, etc. Then provide no way to check out, an email address that will never be responded to, and no contact information. Monetize the page using adsense. Frustrated shoppers will click on familiar Google ads with hopes of finding the product or services they desire.

Pages like this work, see my last few posts. However, I’ve decided not to proceed any further with those types of pages because I didn’t feel good about them. I received a ton of emails from users who were excited about the services/products that I was falsely offering. Reading these emails is what made me reconsider this type of marketing. Its not like I scammed anyone out of any money, just a few moments of their time.

So I ask you the question, is providing false hope to a consumer unethical?

Busted!

2005-12-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

I made $82.54 on the new website in the last two days ($17.24 today), before being taken off of the website I was advertising on. At this point I'm unsure if I've been banned, or if I can advertise again on this site. If I can keep the ad up on the site for a day or two at a time, I should be okay. Otherwise this good fortune was short lived....

Adsense Explosion

2005-12-12T03:45:00.000-08:00

The new site ended up making $65.27 yesterday (all from adsense) in just half a day of existence. And its made $10.66 in adsense today.

Best Day Ever

2005-12-11T18:02:00.000-08:00

I had a new idea, registered a domain this afternoon, and setup a few pages with adsense ads. My new idea produced $43.91 in adsense revenue in the last 8 hours. With a few hours left in the day I hope to top $50. I'm not sure how long it will last like this, but I've tried to multiply my immediate results by 10x (10 versions of the same thing). The domain cost me less than $3, no cost for advertising or software.

Burt's Challenge

2005-12-07T13:10:00.000-08:00

Burt is running an AIS challenge, with a $100 cash prize. The challenge starts on 12/16, so check out the rules and enter here: http://osworld.blogspot.com/2005/12/burts-challenge-will-you-accept.html

RSSG Site

2005-12-02T20:26:00.000-08:00

Taking a lead from Baldy, I decided to try to setup a RSSG site. I downloaded a general free template from the web and changed it to work with RSSG. This Automotive Tools domain name was purchased on a whim a while back, and I haven't done anything with it. This is the first keyword list generated site that I've attempted, and I think you can probably tell that I'm not very good at putting together a good list. I used Web CEO to get some keywords (remember I'm only using free tools), but only spent a few minutes on the keywords. If it seems like Google eats this site up quickly, I'll then start worrying about good keyword lists. Let me know if you like the layout of the site, or if you think it sucks.

AIS and More

2005-11-29T05:37:00.000-08:00

Its been a wild month. I settle on the house that I bought later this afternoon. Add that to being away for the holidays, and you get a blog that hasn't been updated in a while. Right now, I'm sitting with 20 sites. Here is my income breakdown for November:

Adsense: $22.97
Affiliate Sales: $182.37 (all on one site)
Chitika: $0.80

Total = $206.14
Cost = $20.00
Profit = $186.14
Avg Per Site / Day = $0.33

Although I'm doing a little better then before in the search engines, I am still barely listed. I've decided that I just need to wait a few months before making any decisions on what to do. I doubt that I'll be able to get to the 100 site mark by the end of the year, but I hope to atleast get 10 more sites, and average $1 a day on each of 30.

Google Analytics

2005-11-14T17:04:00.000-08:00

I signed up for the new Google Analytics service, at http://www.google.com/analytics/. I integrated it into a few of my sites, but won't really be able to check out the data until tomorrow. I have no need for the e-commerce functionality that the Urchin software provides, but I think I'll integrate the full functionality into osCommerce and release a contribution when I have some time. Hopefully in the next few days.

Lack of Updates

2005-11-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lack of posts to this blog, I've been really busy. I just bought a house, and have been preparing for moving. So far this month, I've only made $7.66 on adsense. I am still having a really hard time getting indexed, and am pretty disappointed in my sites in general. I haven't spent a huge amount of time on them in the last week or so, but I really thought I'd be indexed by Google by now. Most of my sites have the index page in Google, but no other pages.

I'm pretty happy with the way my Chitika / Adsense / Amazon / osCommerce integration turned out. Most of the pages really work out with the Chitika ads, but on approx. 5% of pages Chitika displays a completely unrelated ad. The ads are being generated by feeding the product title as a keyword. It seems that when Chitika doesn't have a related product, it just displays something random. Not the best, but as Chitika grows, this percentage should lower. You can see that page here: www.1800plussize.com

I've made $73.01 from an affiliate on my one site that is indexed. As for the person that asked about NPB sites... I still have not paid for any keyword list or software. My only costs are for hosting and domain names.

Indexing problems

2005-11-06T10:22:00.000-08:00

I'm still having a ton of trouble getting my sites indexed. I am averaging around a $1 a day total for all my sites. One bright note, my 1 site that is indexed has made $27.00 this month in affiliate sales. I've slowed down on creating sites, and will be focusing on getting the current sites indexed.

Please point me towards articles or forums that will help me to learn about getting indexed faster.

13 Stores Up.

2005-11-03T05:31:00.000-08:00

I now have 13 sites up and running. Each site now takes me about an hour to setup. My daily adsense income is about $2 per day. Most of the sites still haven't been indexed. If anyone has any tips to get indexed quicker, besides developing backlinks, please feel free to share them in the comments.

I finished my Chitika integration project, and may start using that site as a template for all of my sites. I think the site looks really good. I submitted it to the search engines today, and probably won't see results for a few weeks.

I made enough from 1 affiliate site last month to pay for my hosting fees. I haven't figured out my exact costs/earnings, but I believe that I am in the black. Since I did not buy any software to create my sites, I believe that I am the only 'AIS Challenger' to be on the plus side of things. So I guess I'm in the lead now, but we'll see if their larger daily profits will over take me in time.

Chitika eMiniMalls and osCommerce

2005-10-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

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...

2005-10-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-10-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-19T19:11:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

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.