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!)

Welcome to Day 2 of this new journal.

My commitments for today include producing content for my new sites. I bought 4 domains yesterday – all in a single topic area and I will use 3 of them as feeder sites to the fourth but they will also have their own target keyword.

All four sites are going to be Amazon US affiliate sites and I’m going to use the review stuff as detailed by Wanda and Paula at http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/.  I think that writing copy that converts is an area where I can learn a lot, so we’ll see how this gets on.

The feeder sites are themselves going to be set up in a similar way to the Info Product Killer techniques that Craig Kaye teaches. He has just released a 2010 update to this package and I like it a lot for the (new) price.

Once I have a post ready for each site, I’ll be updating the main site and building the other three and getting them all set up – including all the analytics etc.

I’m going to also commit to setting up 2 more UAW (Unique Article Wizard) runs for my existing sites and also looking at monetizing a couple of other in Adsense (and maybe Amazon).

Yesterday’s earnings. $0 across the board. Time for that to change!

I’ve noticed a lot of people doing regular daily posts as a way to keep themselves on track in their new internet marketing career. Not only that, but just recently the phrase “keep a journal” has cropped up several times too….as a way to make commitments for each day and then to follow them to conclusion.

So, what I have decided to do is to take the advice and copy the daily update route. (I may also keep a more personal journal, so you don’t get to see the actual site names etc.)

So, this is Day 1.

A quick update for those that don’t know where I have got to so far. I have set up several Amazon affiliate sites over the past year – great keyword research if I say so myself, absolutely lousy subject choices since they all paid out about 50 cents in commision for each sale! Lesson 1 learned….aim higher in price for Amazon.

Lesson 2 for Amazon was to steer clear of electronics – locked to 4% commisions – even though that’s where I am most comfortable.

Lesson 3 was a really painful one and that was to stay away from the UK for big ticket items. It was tempting to sell locally but I then found out that Amazon UK cap single item commisions to £7 – OUCH!! That means that even a modest TV sale (still at 4% remember) gets capped out at 7 lousy quid instead of 12. Sell in the US Amazon folks!

I also have one or two sites where I am experimenting with Adsense, these sites will grow over time but are a wee bit thin at the moment, so I am treating them fairly gently in case I get them dropped from Adsense before they even get going. These are not bad subjects, not hugely interesting to me but at least they have a big enough subject that I can write articles fairly easily without drifting into IM waffle just to make up the pages! Lesson 4 here is to make sure that you have a broad subject to write about (and preferably one you care about too)

I also have a single book up on Clickbank. Again a subject that I knew little about before researching and writing the book. Not a big seller despite the global interest, maybe I need to work on my sales page for that one.

So, as you can see, I’ve played with almost everything over the year. The Amazon and Adsense stuff has shown some results – not huge, but enough to show that it is possible to make some money. All I need to do now is scale it all up.  You can effectively set the daily income meter from these sources to zero (while I am making some money off helping others online, I’m not counting that).

Commitment for day 1 then is to finish some research in some more Amazon niches (not electronics as detailed) to buy the domains related to the subject and to get them all up and running with a single post ready for the start of the week tomorrow. I’m still playing with Amazon review plugins, so that may make up part of another day’s post.

Feel free to follow along, I’ve created a “Journal” category for all these posts to keep it clean and by all means comment if you think I’m doing well (or being stupid) at any point!

Earnings reset: $o