I said on Saturday (Day 7) that I’d probably spend Sunday doing more reading and research than site updating and that is what I ended up doing.I like the old biblical idea of having a day off (at least a bit!) – it lets your brain catch up with life and re-energise in a way that our constant high-pressure lives don’t give us.

Having said that, I did spend some time getting my main site’s first post set up in “The Best Spinner” so that I can plug in a load of articles to UAW and also to Link Juicer. I’m pretty pleased with my text so far – it’s up to 91% unique in TBS and that’s only with a second paragraph for each existing one and no synonyms yet in place.

As a special bonus to those of you following along, I’ve also decided that Sundays will be “search for a keyword” day. What that means is that I’ll set some stuff in motion on Sunday that will make Monday my “Free Keyword” day. I’ll give you a new keyword and domain each Monday that has good searches and at least some potential for commercial exploitation.

So, tada, fanfare please. The first keyword is:

“Single bed with mattress”

Domains available: .com .net and .org all available

This bad boy gets 33,100 searches a month and Traffic Travis says that it is relatively easy to compete for. But check this before you wade in. This is a UK keyword. Check it out in Google Insights and you’ll see that it doesn’t even get a flicker of searches from the US…..so make sure you target the right market and you should be fine.

As a special, special bonus, I checked out the .co.uk for you and found that it has already been snapped, but (and get this!) it has been registered for 2 years to an individual, has a default unix directory listing as its home page and in a bizarre twist of fate is only registered until tomorrow (August 24)! Maybe a short wait will see this back on the market, but if not, I think the right offer will easily secure it.

I haven’t looked at commerciality overall, but beds are beds, right? People need to sleep, so I’m guessing this will be fairly evergreen!!

If you pick it up and make some good money with this, let me know. I’ll preserve any anonymity you want and a bit of encouragement helps everyone on their way.

Earnings for the last two days have been miserable, even when accumulated.

Adsense earnings:  7c despite adding a new  site into the adsense farm that gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

A disappointing day today in some ways. I failed to get my content written for my satellite sites and Saturday just ate away at my day with small updates from the rest of the family. Families huh? Who’d have ‘em?!

What I did manage to do was to get back to one of my Adsense sites and prepare a LinkJuicer campaign for it. It’s stuck at number 9 on the first page and while the clicks are supposed to be valuable, I’m not getting enough stuck down there. The LJ campaign is pretty slow, but I’ll report back as it progresses.

The other thing I did was to revisit a load of sites that I built earlier in the year. Many of them are Amazon sites too and some had some nice heydays where they made a bit of cash before dropping in the search engines. I was checking through them and discovered that a couple had recovered back to something like number 13, so I will probably fire LJ at them too and maybe even a UAW run to see what happens. Their individual contributions were small but there were enough of them to get me up in Amazon’s commission structure, so they will help me make money off my new sites.

It’s now 8pm so I may not get much more done, but I’m still working so I have something to add to tomorrow’s report. I hope that these reports are not too demoralising if you are just starting out yourself but I see so many of this kind of log starting about when the person involved is already doing 1k a month – nothing like that here! In fact I just downgraded my reseller account as I worked out that I had aimed way too high with my initial signup and the tiniest account would do me fine. If you know of anyone wanting some hosting, let me know!

Tomorrow is going to mainly be all about research and some  learning but I may step away from the purism of a day off to get some more work done on these sites. They feel too important right now to leave them alone.

Day 6 Earnings – $0 everywhere (see, this really is a beginner’s blog!)

I talked the other day of my change in theme for the blog and I’ve just checked my stats to discover hundreds of 404′s generated by missing temmplate files.

So, sorry Swift Theme….your day is done (for now). I’m using Socrates for a load of other sites and I like it a lot, so here it is for the main blog too. I’ll be adding to its rather stark image over the next few days but for now it’s just waay more reliable than the other one.

Check it out from the link below (right at the bottom) if you like it.

Today’s work carried on from yesterday’s in many ways; I spent more time than I probably should have learning how WordPress shortcodes work so that I could have a stab at understanding how WPZonBuilder works.

Now I’m going to regard this as valuable time well spent as it will give me a chance to start modifying the templates that came with the product. The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted Louis’ very generous comment on yesterday’s post and I may take him up on the offer, but I wanted to get a bit further on my own before going for support. All I can say is that his comment really echoes other forums where I’ve read about his engagement with his customers. Well done Louis.

Despite all the time spent on that, I have had more time to actually play with the WPZonBuilder plugin itself and found several options that I hadn’t really understood in the training videos (maybe I’m just slow). So, in general I’m a lot happier than I was yesterday and I have set up my site with a bunch of posts ready to go over the next few weeks. I’m hoping to crack the template stuff before they all get posted so I can add my own content to the reviews but overall I’m growing to like WPZonBuilder a lot more.

The site itself is already at number 40 in Google with no promotion and the hub/authority site is at 100 for it’s primary keyword. I’ve also completed the other two feeder sites as far as setup is concerned, maybe tomorrow will be content day for these two.I’ve put up a couple of high PR profile links for my first feeder but I’ve held off with full link-building until I have a few posts to point my UAW and Link Juicer submissions towards.

I think I may have to checkout some WP site management software, this plugin installation lark is easy but tedious!

Day 5 Earnings:

Adsense: $1.05
Amazon: $0
Clickbank: $0

Spent the day today getting one of my satellite sites looking nice for the users! Lots of messing around with plugins and a good sized first post as an introduction to the site and to get the SEO going.

Now I know that I said I would be making these much more like authority sites than just raw niche sniper sites, but I have to say that I am in awe of those folk who can churn out one a day (or maybe even 2 in some cases!)  My simple editing games have left me with a site that is “getting there”…… It doesn’t have any products on it yet, a job for completion tomorrow I think, but at this point I’ve tripped over my new Amazon auto-poster plugin.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully intend for these reviews to be fully-fledged as per the Amazonian Profit Plan but I thought it would be cool to have access to all of the Amazon metadata for my products in advance. That way, I can theoretically build my own templates for the product pages and use the data I have to populate some of those fields while writing the rest.

Anyway, best laid plans of mice and men, the templates that come with the product – WPZonBuilder – are more obscure than I was expecting and unfortunately the demo sites don’t really go into any details about how they were achieved. This has left me trying all possible combinations of settings trying to get something that looks the same and wondering at the same time if I shouldn’t really be going with pages instead of posts as a site building mechanism. It’s funny, I went down this route thinking that it would be so much easier than editing the HTML templates provided in the IPK setup. I must have “stupid” written on my forehead.

If anyone has enormous WPZonBuilder experience, I’d be really happy to hear from you about your own thoughts on my dilemma.

Earnings for Day 4:

Adsense: $0

Amazon: $0

Clickbank: $7 (I seem to have an affiliate who has worked out the right audience!)