Hello, first time buyer mortgage

Just one more addition to the portfolio, so far this month. First-Time-Buyer-Mortgage.info has been developed because I think it has a chance of ranking highly in searches on these keywords.

I have also re-written DasKapital.co.uk and now has original content, which again should do well for a narrow band of search terms. However, I am not so sure about its revenue potential………………………………

August 2007 totals

This has been an interesting month and I can report increased profits from Adsense this month. This is despite the fact that SIPTelephony.co.uk and DasKapital.co.uk were both pointed to SubprimeLender.co.uk  for much of the month. Indeed Das Kapital has not been rewritten yet and that is on my to do list for September.

The average weekly income per site is $0.88, an improvement of $0.55 per site over last months total. However, this is far short of the $2.00 per week, per site, set for this minisite challenge.

One thing that is clear to me is that many of the sites have content that pays relatively poorly. For a number of sites in the challenge it may be that they will not cover their costs unless they have much more promotion, other monetization options are considered and time and effort is spent on their development.   I am currently considering adding Amazon and eBay affiliate ads, as well as affiliate programms through Commission Junction and Trade Doubler. More on this in due course.

100 sites at $2 per week or one site at $200 per week?

Although, tthis month, I have only added one site to the challenge, and I am rewriting daskapital.co.uk, I do have the content written for another four sites. These should come on stream next month.

As I develop the text for each site I am beginning to see very clearly, that not all clicks on adsense ads are equal! Indeed, looking at my stats, depending the site, revenue from individual clicks has ranged from under 30cents for a click! to more than $1 for a click. This is not a random variation either. Hobby sites make far less per click than business and finance sites. The question is why build additional websites that are only making a few cents per click when I can be making additional pages on existing sites that pay 50c/ $1/ $2 per click.  Now I appreciate that the amount of traffic a site gets should be added into the equation – the lower amount per click may be compensated by high levels of traffic. However, there is clearly something to think about here and this will be a theme I will be following up on in future posts.

Duplicate content

You will have noticed that some of the sites in the challenge include content from either Wikipedia or from ezine article sites.

The use of this material is permitted as long as the rules and regulations are followed precisely. However, I have been particlularly concerned about Wikipedia material as the authors of Wikipedia articles could be submitting copyrighted material that they do not own the copyright to, and I would never know. It appears to be less likely with ezine articles, as the author is usually easier to trace through websites associated with the articles, but the risk is still there with ezine articles as well.

As a precaution, over the last few weeks, I have been removing Wikipedia material from my minisite challenge sites and from one other site, not in the challenge. This process meant that I had no choice but to write my own content for several sites, which was quite time consuming. Furthermore, DasKapital.co.uk is still not finished. However, it has enabled me to add one more site to the challenge portfollio, :-

CSI Fan – This site relates to the CBS television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and it’s spin offs, CSI:Miami ans CSI:NY.

This brings the total number of sites in the Challenge to 10.

This weeks new additions

Four more sites have just been included in the challenge. These are:-

DasKapital.co.uk - this is about Karl Marx’s classic text on capital and capitalism. It has an important place in political and economic history and some argue that it still has relevance today. Leaving the politics to one side it is clear that a site devoted to the academic study of this historically important book would be of interest to academics and students alike.

SIPTelephony.co.uk - this site covers Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony, a new emerging technology. SIPTelephones.co.uk is also pointed to this site.

ResidentialMortgages.org.uk – this site is slightly more ambitious than the others and will be a detailed advice site around UK residential mortgages.

Domaining.org.uk – blog relating to the buying, selling and development of domain names.

As a general point it is worth mentioning, and this applies to many of the sites in the challenge,  that single page sites are quite limiting. I have a few single page sites and I have a lot of concerns about their money making potential as they are at the moment. This means that my plans are to develop all of my sites to have a minimum of 3 – 5 pages each.   

So for the next stage in the challenge I think I will spend August developing the sites in the ministie challenge before moving on to developing more sites. There are 9 sites in the challenge. So thats a goal of $18.00 per week for all 9 sites. Thats also $8.67 per month, per site and $78.00 for all 9 sites. (The calculation to get $8.67 is multiply $2.00 by 52 weeks to get $104. Then divide $104 by 12 months.)

My site SubprimeLender.co.uk received a welcome boost of traffic last week when I pointed a couple of my domains that have type-in traffic to that site. However, the topic of the domain names are unrelated to finance, loans or subprime lending, so the traffic does not convert into ad clicks very well. This is cheating a little, but as my goal is so challenging I have to use every opportunity open to me. However, I think that because of what I suspect is a very poor conversion rate from unrelated traffic, this move will have a limited effect on earnings.