I had to laugh at this silly email I received from someone calling themselves the Undisputed “Queen” of Internet Marketing.

Yeah if you’re the queen then don’t be arrogant enough to email me asking me to buy your affiliated product as that just says “Scream” of Internet Marketing, as in desperate. Yeah THAT I don’t dispute. And get yourself a proper domain name to email me from while you’re at it, not gmail. Spam, Delete. Nuff said.

Yeah, it looks like this was an affiliate of the “Queen” using the text from one of her emails, then paying some other internet marketer for my email address. So it makes the both of them look stupid.

This is why when people buy stuff off Internet Marketers they should use a backup email address just in case any of them sell your email address on the back end to other marketers. Hopefully most that do at least disclose that they are doing so, but it’s still a crappy practice. They shouldn’t simply disclose it, they should make it a choice, just like most legitimate companies do. Who really wants to see emails personally addressed to you coming from rank amateurs?

Don’t Do It!

Well, not when you have a niche blog and a lot of your main content is under that subdirectory. I did that, and promptly I got slapped. At least I think it is slapped rather than deindexed as I can still find some of my pages in google, ironically at least one being a page from within another subdirectory I had renamed (so I can expect those to disappear shortly too).

I’m a bit annoyed by this, as I had managed to breach the top 10, and had just got into dmoz, which boosted me slightly higher in the top 10. I thought finally after the project yo-yoed up and down the rankings for about 3 months since starting the project, that the site was finally going to stay in the top 10.

And especially as the bounces were getting narrower and the last bounce was also from the bottom of the top ten. However, this was misguided, and the site was blasted into oblivion the next day!

However, at the same time, I am learning from my mistakes experiences, I am trying not to get frustrated and I am trying to remember that I have other projects to keep working on. Projects that may very well turn out to be far more profitable than the one currently slapped.

So it certainly seems like a good idea for a beginner to have several projects going if they are going to rely on SEO alone as if your site gets slapped, so does your income, as nobody will see you.

Therefore it is good to back your projects up with article marketing, blog commenting, emailing opt-in contacts and anything else you can do to gain traffic through third party sources.

Now most of my traffic is now coming through from my article marketing efforts. Which is better than nothing at all, albeit small fish.

You can also learn how to do PPC properly, so you gain more money than you spend.

So, now I’m just waiting to see how long before google, yahoo etc decides what to do with my site. Hopefully it’s back within weeks rather than *gulp* months.

So lesson learned, don’t mess with your subdirectory once the search engines have started indexing you unless you are prepared to lose rankings. The only question that remains right now is how long will the penalisation last! And will the site come back and ascend into the top 10 quickly, fail to get back into the top 10, or simply resume the yo-yo effect? Stay tuned!

Talking to a friend a few weeks ago about online marketing, the subject of adsense came up. He immediately dismissed it “You can’t make money off Adsense!” he boldly claimed. I said I begged to differ. While I had only made about $10 in April, that was the most I’d achieved in a single month since turning Adsense on towards the end of last year.

What changed? I started activating more sites that I had purchased domains for but never used. I put some content on them. Some I was lazy with and just published a few articles on. And then I underscored them with 3 Way Links, which is a set once and leave system.

I think the main thing is having a site with good on-site optimization, including having a domain that consists of a keyword with low competition. Then obviously having relevant content. For most of these sites, I at least published a single article on EzineArticles so that the sites had at least one high quality backlink coming from a page containing relevant content. Having 3 Way Links must surely help to keep them ranking thought, building up some level of external support and authority. Great to build up links while you work on multiple mini site projects.

The cocktail seems to be working well, I made $55 in May and can also more clearly see which sites are getting ad clicks and which ones aren’t. One of those sites is seasonal however, relating to fathers day. It gets high traffic, but alas the domain name was based on an informational keyword not a buying keyword so that site gets a disgustingly high bounce rate, but nevertheless generates enough clickthrough to be on a par with the other sites.

For June, that site may possibly perform very well as last minute people send the traffic even higher and in turn attract a higher number of people seeking to buy.

Regardless of that June is off to a great start with £12 three days in – more than I made for the whole of April, and 1/5 of what I made in May. Maintaining that rate for the month alone should double May’s figures. However, I did have quite a few days ending in $0, and of course some days there were highs, while on others there were troughs.

I expect to see the same again, except perhaps this time avoiding a $0 day would be nice.

So I believe yes, you can make money with adsense, just that you have to work harder for it than you would through affiliate marketing or creating your own products. However, over the long term it could prove to be the more steady and lucrative income earner out of the two for some. A major benefit is that the sites are yours rather than someone else’s and assuming you look after them, they should continue to generate revenue for you. Just ask some of the folk that have spent time building blogs and websites where adsense is now generating them at least a five figure income monthly! How’s that for a day job?