Day 10: Removed Bad Links, Earning $5639 Per Year, Tracking RSS Subscribers

27 Jun, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

This is day 10 of my 30 day marketing challenge to demonstrate that blogging can be an inexpensive and profitable business to start.

Note that I got a permanent link to my website from John Reese’s Income.com Blog here based on the advice I sent him. There are a bunch of links on that page, but still, it will gain page rank over time and every little bit helps.

Here are the 3 tasks I completed today…

1. I went through my LinkMachine program and looked at the page rank of all the people I was linking too. About ten of them had a page of 1 or “n/a”, so I removed them. The ones with “n/a” in particular are bad because that means Google dropped them from their directory. Google drops websites for behaving badly and it can actually hurt MY rankings by the fact that I link to them. The logic goes..if I have links to crappy websites, then I must be crappy. Hopefully removing those will improve my rankings.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that the opposite (crappy websites linking to you) can never hurt your page rank. This becomes obvious when you consider that I can’t control who links to me, and Google should never punish me for what isn’t under my control. You can also imagine a scenario where some malicious person who wants to hurt your website creates a ton of unlisted pages in Google and makes them all link to you. Google doesn’t want to make that possible, so they don’t penalize for who links to you, only who you link to (might have to read that a few times ;).

2. In an attempt to get a listing on this website which lists bloggers salaries, I will give you a little update on my progress. This blog was started almost one month ago to date. It is currently averaging about 300-400 page views per day. My biggest day so far was over 2000 page views. Adsense income is about $2.50 per day, and I’m averaging about 1 book sale per day. I also have a Text Link Ads account installed on this page, which is another way to earn money, but no one has purchased a link yet. I’ve gained 298 RSS subscribers in the past month, bringing the total to 834 (a large number of people on my original email list did not stay with me in the transition). Anyway, at my current level, this blog is earning $5639 per year. After being on the internet for only one month, I think this is outstanding. With my current rate of growth, I’m sure it will be well beyond that in the coming months.

Hopefully this post information will be enough to get another back link to my site from Paula’s list of Blog Salaries.

3. I added some code to track where my RSS and email subscribers are coming from in Google Analytics using Francesco Mapelli brilliant tutorial. I’m going to give it a day or so to make sure its working. Then I can launch my StumbleUpon.com paid advertising and track how many of those visitors subscribe (a measure of the quality of the traffic).

I’m doing a pretty good job so far of getting keywords into the title, url, h1, and meta tags, but I realized while reading Darren’s article on search engine optimization for blogs that in future posts I should get those keywords into outgoing links, alt tags, and bold tags as well.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

Danilo said,

Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 2:13 pm

Great job Brian. Careful there, I don’t think you can publish how much you make from Google. Your overall income can be stated if google is a part of it only so no one would know how much is coming specifically from Google.

Would you be interested in exchanging links? Drop by my website to have a look. Keep up the great work!!

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 5:54 pm

Ahh, is that against their TOS? I wonder why. Will be happy to talk with you more over email. Thanks!

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Danilo said,

Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 10:28 pm

It looks like it is Brian, its just something I’ve heard but never actually took the time to read through it, but you’ll see that in major sites its never said how much the blogger is making from it.

Again, the blogger can say how much he/she makes but never states income from adsense. Why? Im not quite sure…

Will send you an email. Best wishes!

[Reply]
Simonne said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 12:46 pm

It is OK with Google to disclose your gross earnings from AdSense:
” Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information …(b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance… However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.”
This is an excerpt from paragraph 7 of the TOS
https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Terms.html

[Reply]
Chris Paul said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 1:37 pm

Brian,
The income you reported was incredible. However, I would like to politely challenge the purpose of this series of articles as I understood it was to teach people how they could make money by marketing their blogs the right way. First let me say I believe your approach on teaching a day by day plan of action task list is right on…however I’m not sure this business case is aduplicatiable (is that a word?) system. Not because of the marketing methods you suggest but, because of the fact that not everyone has the knowledge base you have to write a book and a book to market.

I sincerely applaud your web marketing methods and results but I suggest the real challenge is how to tell a person without money, without a product like a book to sell how to start a blog and earn online. I have been helping individuals and companies for 14 years to start web businesses, to add income to their online projects, networks, affiliations, and sales channels both online and offline to support online projects. And from these experiences I again suggest the real challenge is to start from scratch and earn online.

So perhaps you can make a day by day guide as to how to write a book or resource a viable product to sell online through a blog …marketing is a blended formula and it includes the product sourcing, pricing strategies, product distribution as well as all of the great methods you are sharing…that obviously for your specific business case example is working like crazy. Thanks for a great site…and insight.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 3, 2007 @ 2:37 pm

Thanks for the info Simone!

Chris: a great point that you bring up. You’re right that while everyone could duplicate my marketing efforts, they might not have a book for sale which is bringing most of the income right now.

Luckily, I think the broader idea, that everyone has something of value to contribute to others, is still applicable. A book is only way way to do that (and perhaps not even the best way!)

But yeah, I’d be happy to do a discussion on how to get a book written (it’s not as hard as most people think) or create an info product.

Probably the next post series I do will be on how to start a business in 30 days for $100. Everyone has something they can teach others…whether its speaking a foreign language, a certain type of dance, what you do at work, a software program, writing, some craft/hobby you have, teaching math to high schoolers, etc. So stay tuned for that…

Do others think this would be valuable?

[Reply]