Internet Marketing Magpies Anonymous » Goal Tracking

Planning for 2010

Clare — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:07:33 +0000

I know, I know – we’re only two days shy of the end of February and suddenly I’m writing a post about planning – but it’s better to document goals late than never!

I’ve met some other IMers over recent weeks via their blogs and being able to follow the real life activities of other ‘normal marketers’, rather than hyped posts from so-called gurus has made be realise that making money online is possible especially if you treat it as a proper business. So I sat down and thought about what I enjoy doing and how I can work most effectively in the few hours I have each week to dedicate to my ‘information publishing’ business. I like many other people have a full-time job so I grab time in the evenings and then mainly on weekends to really work on my own business.

This year I am going to dedicate my time and effort to the following areas

Travel authority site
Travel membership site
Book Reviews authority site
Building and maintaining a number of smaller information sites
Creating and selling PLR article packs

1. Travel authority site

This site has been around since January 2008 and started out life as a personal blog. In the first couple of years it grew organically with no thought to keyword research or monetisation. It began to rank well and sees a reasonable amount of traffic.

The income streams I will drive this year will be from Adsense, the sale of an ebook and via commission from my travel partner. I’m going to aim to generate £200 a month from this site over the course of 2010 for a year end goal of £2,400.

2. Travel membership site

This site is newly built this year and is a membership site where content is delivered weekly in a course environment. Essentially it teaches people how to plan a vacation. The course is 17 weeks in length and I’ve written nine-weeks content so far. So for now I’m focusing on getting the content complete which will take another wight weeks. After that I can focus on promotion.

The income stream will come from the weekly course fees and I’m going to aim to generate £50 a month from this site over the course of the year for a year end goal of £600.

3. Book reviews authority site

Again this started out life two years ago as a personal blog. I was simply keeping a record of my thoughts on the books I’d read and suddenly I find that people are reading them!

The income streams on this site will be Adsense and Amazon commission; the other kick back I get is free books that are sent to me by the publishers to feed my book addiction I’d like to think I could generate £30 a month here for a year end goal of £360.

4. Building and maintaining a number of smaller information sites

I’ve been dabbling with IPK and Xfactor information sites to drive Amazon and Adsense income, so far with little success but its early days! I’m also just going through Steve Crooks’ Adsense 101 Bootcamp. I want to come out the other side of that 10 week course with a sturdy information site under my belt and the skills to build more over the year. My aim is to build a number of information sites throughout 2010 to increase my Adsense and Amazon commissions. I’m going to aim for £100 a month from these additional sites for a year end figure of £1200.

5. Creating and selling PLR article packs

I’ve tried to step up my article marketing efforts recently and remembered that I’m a darn good writer, so I’m going to try and earn some income by creating and selling PLR packs. I need to think of a strategy for this, what kind of packs, how much to sell them for etc but I’d like to think this part of the business could earn £900 in nine months if I aim to start selling in April.

Of course all of these figures are complete guesstimates and the monthly figures are averages which is a bit silly really as I should hope to see my earnings grow over the year but it’s a good way for me to track my progress until I can spend some time working out a more realistic budget.

The figures also don’t sound all that high with a total forecast for the year of just £5460 but I need to remember that I only work eight to ten hours a week and this is year one. If I were working eight hours a day that would equate to £27k a year which isn’t a bad annual salary!

Expenses

As far as costs are concerned I don’t plan on outsourcing anything this year so it will be purely hosting, domain purchases and any training courses/tools I purchase as the year progresses. Each month I’ll make a note of how much I’ve earned versus how much I’ve spent and hope the first exceeds the last!

Have you written your goals for 2010 yet? If you were efficient then I’d love to hear how you’re getting on, and if like me you haven’t got around to it yet why not challenge yourself to write your goals down before March shows her face on Monday?

2010 is the year for taking action

Xfactor update – one week on

Clare — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:06:12 +0000

Well my flurry of activity early on in the week on my Xfactor sites had to be relaced by some activity on my authority sites. Having said that I did get 5 sites live so I thought I’d have a look back over the week and see how they did.

Site 1 -

Static site
Published 05.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
31 article views – no CTR
3 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 12 in google.com and number 5 in google.co.uk – shame that I didn’t buy the keyword for the exact keyword I’m targetting!

Site 2 -

WP site
Published 05.02.10
EZA submissions – 2
Site now indexed
19 article views – 1 click
2 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 1 in google.com and number in google.co.uk – again I couldn’t get the exact keyword phrase though

Site 3 -

WP site
Published 08.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
46 article views – 0 clicks
1 article published by another site
2 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 2 in google.com and number 14 in google.co.uk

Site 4 -

WP site
Published 08.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
34 article views – 0 clicks
4 article published by another site
0 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 4 in google.com and number 8 in google.co.uk – again no exact keyword

Site 5 -

WP site
Published 09.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site not yet indexed
335 article views – 6 clicks
2 article published by another site
7 unique visitors
$0 adsense
No keywords ranking yet

Four out of five sites being indexed isn’t bad off the back of three ezine articles and an RSS submission. The articles I wrote for site 5 were about Valentine’s Day so I think that is the reason behind the much higher volume of views. CTR is very low but I’m quite pleased by the number of articles that have been published by other sites. I’ve not see those kind of numbers for my other articles and I think this is because of the low key bio boxes and the quality of the articles.

I didn’t follow Xfactor to a tee in that I wrote my articles in a related niche rather than something completely different. I just think it looks odd to have an article about Valentine’s Day and then links to breadmaker website! I have made sure not to use my keyword in the main article though to prevent EZA becoming my competition when the sites finally start ranking!

Interestingly I set up two brand new wordpress sites as an experiment with another strategy and both have their homepages indexed despite no promotion other than submitted the RSS feed to feedagg.com. Both are ranked at number 1 in Google for the domain keywords which are the keywords I want to rank for – trust me though the competition for these will be minimal!

I hope to get Site 6 built this week. The images are all ready to go so it’s just a case of writing the first article for the site and then three more for Ezine. The product is a bit of an odd one though so I’m not too sure what to write about!

How did you get on in your online activities this week?

Xfactor Site 5 goes live and EZA articles published

Clare — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:40:53 +0000

I’m struggling at the moment with an awful cough which is presenting me sleeping. Since I was up so early this morning I thought I’d try and get another Xfactor site live before work. An hour and a half later and I have Site Number 5 live with two keyword posts published and three articles freshly written and submitted to EZA.

Yesterday I was quite surprised to see that EZA published all of my articles from Sunday and Monday morning. I’m a platinum member so the SLA is 48 hours; they turned the last few around in about 12!

Despite the new backlinks from EZA Google is still refusing to index the sites as yet so I’m going to need to rely on EZA for traffic for now.

I’ll just keep plugging away getting the other five sites uploaded and then go from there.

Xfactor sites 3 and 4 go live

Clare — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:44:55 +0000

Well today marks day four of my Adsense Xfactor journey and I have just published Sites 3 and 4.

I’ve submitted three articles for each of the sites to EZA and added the homepage content to each site. It’s taken just over four hours to get both sites up and running and the articles written and submitted. At that rate it could become a Saturday morning task to publish new sites each week.

I’m slightly moving away from John’s plan at this stage because you’re supposed to work on two sites for a whole week submitting articles to EZA. Because I found 10 sets of keywords on my keyword finding day I’ve decided to just repeat the Day 1 activities until all ten sites are up and running. Then I’ll go back and submit the other backlink building articles. I figured this way they have time to settle in and hopfully for Google to index them all.

Sites 1 and 2 are still waiting to be indexed but I hope EZA will publish the article set I submitted for them at some point tomorrow and then I should hopefully start seeing some traffic.

2010 is the year for taking action

Clare — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:07:55 +0000

This blog has been through many guises since I started it early last year; I think I’ve deleted all of the content in it more times than i care to remember! This year though I’m going to use it to really track my progress on my Internet Marketing journey – and I plan to actually make some progress!

I’ve been inspired by Sara at Noteworthy Tips and Ruth at Web Career Girl to start writing this blog again (so inspired in fact that if you visit Sara you might notice that her theme looks stranegly familier; she had it first!) I stumbled across their respective sites when researching the XFactor Adsense strategy and found their posts so motivating that I decided it was time to start writing my own again. They do say that writing down your goals and plans is the best way to achieve them don’t they?

So this year I have a few irons in the fire in the world of IM strategies. I have told myself that I will not be dabbling in new get rich quick strategies; that’s so 2009! I have a handful of strategies lined up and I will be using those to try and kick start my online earnings. Here’s what I have up my sleeve:

A membership site – it started out in a Jimmy D Brown Membernaire vein but has since been converted to a WordPress site. My initial goals are to populate the course content and then to go out and get people to sign up.
Two authority sites – one in the travel niche and one in the leisure niche. These are my long standing sites that I have been working on for a couple of years now and are here to stay. I’ll earn income via adsense and affiliates as well as ebook sales.
Xfactor Adsense sites – this is my new strategy for 2010 and I’ll track my progress with them here.
Internet Marketing Affiliate Sites – this is a strategy I chanced upon yesterday and its hard to say too much without revealing the process. I have four domains bought and paid for and if it works out I’ll let you in on the secret.
Article marketing – this will be my main source of driving traffic this year. I’ve dabbled in so many traffic generation strategies and I think article marketing is probably the most effective.

Holding Myself Accountable