Read Me First – Tips & Info!
I decided to quickly whip up a Read Me / FAQ section over here because I’ve noticed I’ve been having to answer the same questions over and over…If’ you’re looking for an answer to a question, please try searching for it first, a lot of questions have already been answered in the past comments.. you can also read on and you might just find an answer to a question that’s been in your head…if you can’t find your answer after both searching and looking through this FAQ though, shoot me the question and I’ll see if I can answer it for you..
Breakdown:
Part 1 = Questions and Answers
Part 2 = Useful/Interesting Posts
Part 3 = End Of Month Totals
Part 1 – Questions And Answers:
Q: How long have you been at this?
A: Since around June of 2008. I’ve been at it seriously though since late December 2008 when I began logging my progress on a daily basis over at another site’s forum, I eventually moved that daily updating over to this site in May of 2009.
Q: What hosting do you use?
A: I use a Hostgator reseller account (several now, I bought 2 more so I can have around 300 sites on each)
Q: Where do you get your domains?
A: I buy my domains at Namecheap (free privacy protection first year and 99 cents after that with coupon)
Q: How many sites do you have?
A: I don’t know off hand, but about 130 Clickbank Snipers made via George Brown’s Google Sniper (link in the sidebar), 8 authority sites with 60-180 posts each selling Clickbank products and at the time of writing this(January 2010), 130 Adsense snipers as per John/XFactor’s book.
Q: What are your expenses? / What is your net profit? / Are you “breaking even”?
A: I am strongly against the whole notion of counting expenses for the purposes of seeing if you’ve “broken even” and whatnot…just a useless mentality. If I thought like this I’d never be where I’m at with the passive income that I have; This kind of mentality will seriously impede your success, it does not put more money in your pocket and it’s the WRONG thing to be focusing on. What you focus on you attract..If you focus on breaking even or making sure you’re in the green, you’re mind is not going to be conditioned for success, you will not have the needed mindset to attract the wealth you’re looking for.
Really, the only thing you need to know is that I spent money on whatever I felt was necessary to progress my IM understanding and my IM business, no matter the cost…that becomes a lot easier when your business starts making money and is basically funding itself. The end result is that I now at the time of writing this have about a 3 – 3.5k/month passive income stream. This mindset never served me in the past and it’s not going to serve you now…Under “A Few Generic Tips” read point #2 : Click here to read on…
Q: Can you show us one of your sites?
A: It’s not often that I get asked this, but most IM’ers know that if you put out a site of yours, you’re basically asking to get ripped off, copied and raped. This is a business and you’ve got to protect your sites from those who would attempt to uncover your network of sites and backwards engineer your success and become your new competition.
Q: Can you tell me how you make your sites from beginning to end?
A: Read this
Q: How do you pick your keywords?
Q: Why aren’t you backlinking as per XFactor’s guide?
A: I initially started backlinking as per John’s suggestion (Predominantly Ezine Articles), you can see me going nuts with that over here. Read through Sept – Oct and you’ll see me doing many Ezine submissions, I did around 300+ of them, you’ll even find screenshots of the results of my efforts..
Although it was generating some results, it was not giving me the results I was looking for and not nearly as fast as I’d like. I figured there had to be a better way and hence I began making use of other backlinking methods.
Q: What do you use to backlink your sites?
A: Unique Article Wizard is an absolute staple in my backlinking efforts, each run of that goes out to 500-1.5k directories and out of all that I end up with 25-30 registered Yahoo backlinks. And if you’re wondering why that wouldnt’ result in 500-1.5k backlinks, his is just the way things work, not all backlinks are counted by Yahoo, even fewer by Google which is why most ppl use Yahoo backlinks to check their backlinks.
What I like to do is outsource the writing for the Unique Article Wizard Articles to Human Rewriter. I find an article on Ezine Articles related to my niche, bring it down to 350-400 words and submit it to Human Rewriter to be re-written 3x which costs me around $9-$10, then I use those 3 re-writes as input into the UAW system to auto generate those 25-30 backlinsk for each of my sites.
I’ve also recently used Backlink Solutions to great effect as can be seen here , and here.
Q: When did you start working on the Google Sniper Method/Xfactor Method/Hubpages/Infobarrels etc…
A: Read the 2009 yearly income summary here for the answer.
Q: Why do you have videos in your posts?
A: It’s how I roll..
Q: How do you link to your sites in a UAW submission?
A: Read the last comment right here.
Q: What are you using to track your rankings in the search engines?
A: I used to use Magic Rank Tracker, but that was a bit cumbersome, now I use Market Samurai.
Q: Do you use dashed domains?
A: I never go for dashed domains and never will pick one up..just like with adding words to the end of a domain, it will be harder to get it ranking, I prefer easy/guaranteed rankings.
Q: How do you maintain all your sites?
A: I have a different mindset..I don’t see anything as needing maintenance, I just put my time and effort into BUILDING and everything else takes care of itself I’ve found. Maintenance seems regressive…
When I find out what the winning sites I have are, I will not try to maintain them, I will try and GROW them further. That’s what I’m looking to do with some of my adsense sites that are performing well, I’m going to hit them with more UAW runs.
So no, I don’t spend my time building backlinks to sites, not unless I’m trying to grow them further. The only routine I have is of building more properties or building up winning properties..it’s never motivated by dips in earnings. If dips happen, they happen.
Q: How many hours do you work on your business each day?
A: Back when I was working IM while still on contract working a regular job, I’d work at least 3 hours each day and more on the weekends. When my last contract ended and I started doing IM full-time, I would spend around 6 hours a day 7 days a week (sometimes more, sometimes less).
Q: How do you stay focused/disciplined and get work done each day? AKA How can I improve my time management / be more productive?
Q: How do you use Backlink Solutions?
A: Read this.
Q: What proxy service do you use for Scrapebox?
A: At the moment, yourprivateproxy(dot)com.
Q: Do you do your Bookmarking Demon submissions to all of the sites at once?
A: Yes, I submit to 100 odd sites…not all of them go through though, only about 1/2…I have no adverse effects from doing this. I also make 2 alterations of the title and 2 alterations of the description before submitting.
Part 2 – Useful/Interesting Posts:
How I create my adsense snipers, beginning to end
An example adsense sniper keyword I would pick for a sniper site
The 101 Articles in 1 Day Post
My first serious venture into outsourcing via Human Rewriter – Need motivation in overcoming your fear? Read this.
My first venture into outsourcing via ODesk & GAF – If you’re considering it, but you’re intimidated, read on from here to see how I started doing it.
Interesting Insight on the traffic you get based on the position you hold on page 1 of Google
Adsense Sniper Tip – Don’t Count Out 2 Word Keywords
Some tips on CPC and keyword selection for adsense snipers(near bottom of post)
The secret to high earning adsense sites
A look at my adsense income progression
Tip from John/Xfactor on getting pages to rank
Tony Robbins + Frank Kern + John Reese video
Here’s where I really kicked up the intensity as far as devoting hours to develop my business
The day I built my 100th website
15 days straight of sales, first time I had bars filled in for each day on Clickbank
Some info on Angela’s Go Articles technique
Over 300 Clickbank hops in 1 day – For this and the ones below, you might be interested to note how quickly the hops grew…
Over 500 Clickbank hops in 1 day
Over 600 Clickbank hops in 1 day
Over 700 Clickbank hops in 1 day
A shocking day in my Clickbank income
An in-depth look at my Clickbank hops broken down by site – This was done a long time ago when I wasn’t making as much as I am now
Me discussing the bandwidth used by a Wordpress site vs. an HTML site made with XSite Pro – Read the comment from 1/2 way in
Part 3 – End Of Month Totals:
December 2009 – Also includes a summary of each month’s total’s for the year 2009
Mail this postPopularity: 10% [?]
…you may never see me again. I’ll be here.
i forgot to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! WOW!!
This is great! Thanks!
No problem, I’ll be adding to this whenever I can and let you know when I do :>
Great stuff, Mike! Several times I’ve found myself digging through your site trying to find something I remember you said but wanted more details on. This will help a lot!
@Linda
glad it’s helpful :>
If I read it right you host 300 sites on 1 reseller account? I am just wondering because I have finally reached 100 on mine and not sure if I should continue building on this hosting account?
@Susan
Yup, around 300 on 1, with plenty more space/bandwidth left over…
Hi Mike,
Powerful stuff right here Mike. I have learned a ton and inspired a lot from reading about your progress.
I, and my company, http://www.backlinksphilippines.com would like to offer you 400 Free Profile Backlinks in exchange for an objective review of our service here in your blog. So we offer to place 400 profile links to any site of your choice and you post in your blog any improvement or drop in the rankings or income brought about by the backlinking that we have done. The review will be very objective as it will be in the form of a series of short factual updates (blog posts) here in your blog. Please contact me if you are interested or if you have more questions. And by the way, we are the main backlinks outsourcer of Terry Kyle.You can ask him directly for feedback of our services if you like.
John Dales
Hey Mike, Great site and thanks for sharing your inspiring journey.
Quick question, do you have a preference for Backlink Solutions over SEnuke, or you used them both?
Regards,
Lucky
Both works, but SEnuke requires more work. I know Mike doesn’t use SEnuke but has had great successes with BLS.
Thanks b&c for the kind answer…I read somewhere that he used SEnuke in the past, perhaps he stopped using because BLS was more effective to him.
Regards,
Lucky
They both do different things it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
SEnuke create web 2.0 properties on parasite sites such as blogger, wordpress.com etc, with the full version, you can Socialbookmark, RSS nuke, video nuke etc.
BLS gives you access to a network of 300+ private blogs that you can post snippets to with BL’s to your site.
BLS is easier to use but has a cap at 1000links per month, SEnuke can be used infinitely limited only to your time. It’s a desktop software.
@John Dales
Hey John, thanks for the offer man.. I’m only looking to document what I’m doing without any outside influence / without any agenda though. The only way that could happen would be if I decided on my own to give profile backlinks a shot again and went ahead and paid for your service.
@Lucky
Thanks Lucky…I prefer BLS as I’ve seen some nice boosts in income using that and it takes very little effort to set up the backlinks… SENuke is more involved…I have seen results with it a LONG time ago..the time I went from $300/month to $600 I had run SENuke on the inner pages of one of my authority sites and raised them from page 2 & 3 to page 1..
When trying it out on my adsense snipers though, I did not have the same level of success.
I’ve found BLS to be more effective for my adsense snipers + take less time to manage.
Thanks for taking the time to answer that mike.