MJ

After a crazy few months I finally decided it was time to get back to blogging once in awhile, I'm in the top five "ADD Affiliates" around here and often have wayyyyy too much going on which leaves me often guilty of either not blogging at all or throwing up half spammy posts which I've been avoiding lately. I'm sure MikeW and JohnH didn't really enjoy having their guest blogs stay as my most recent post for the last six months either so I figure it's time I give an update.

Summer

Wow what a crazy summer this has been, I had 100+ sites that were basically placeholders and literally all of them either sandboxed or were hit hard by the "may day update" from Google. A lot of these were "post it and they will come" type sites but they contributed to my income, imagine having 100 sites each getting 5-10 targeted visits a day going poof - bam - just like that you are down 500 visits a day collectively.

The bad news about that is the cure to the MayDay update is links, and I've found it extremely difficult to build links in scalable fashion. The good news is the we've been seeing all those 10-20 page sites start to come back a bit without much work on our part, I tell ya guys AGE is not to be discounted in this industry, it's damn tough to get a site to break out for big kw's until it's at least a year or two old.

Anyways I spent the summer outsourcing, we built 7 sites to 100-200 pages from scratch, took 15 placeholder sites and brought them to 20 pages, and setup another 100 placeholder sites while I spent the summer on the golf course and on the lake. I'm a bit new to golfing but fell in love with it so I bought a cart and since I live near the country club I just drive it from home - I'm the worst golfer you ever met that plays the most - I started the season shooting 120's and now I'm down to about 95 so I guess the improvement is good but I still suck overall. Anyways it's hard to find people who can play every day like I do so I started playing with 3 retired guys every morning, they've all been members at the club 30+ years and shoot high 70's to low 80's so it helped a lot for my learning curve.

My two year old son also started golfing with us, since it's a "private" club or whatever - we just take him with and let him play a few holes, he loves it - I really need to get some pictures.

Redirection

The big thing that came up this summer was my decision to scale myself out of the gaming market, I have acquired 450 gaming domains since starting two years ago. I will never build all of those and I've grown a bit bored with the industry overall, plus I've noticed since I started building a lot of sites the overall quality of my sites is diminishing, especially as I've outsourced content that rarely goes as "deep" into a subject as I'd like. I plan to keep just 10 domains and sites, as I've jumped into three new industries outside of gaming as well and it's just too much to keep up with it all. The ten sites I'm keeping are "big keywords" and will require my full attention anyways.

Here is a taste of a couple of my new projects:

http://www.bestgamblingsites.com

http://www.bestpokersite.com

http://www.bestbettingsites.com

http://www.onlinecasinosites.com

All need a lot of work, especially in content and design - but we are having a blast building them out. Good god can someone please help me with logos lol.

New Income Streams

While I'm not going to discuss any of them now, we have earnings sites now in 3 industries outside of gaming. The money is not great so far, a few hundred a month, but it's coming from diverse streams and has received very little of my focus compared to gaming. I've come to love the idea of $25 CPA's in a high volume low competition industry compared to $150 CPA's in a competitive industry with less stability, simply put I think I can sell 6 cpa's in other industries with less work than I would need to put in per CPA in poker or gaming.

Finally - An Exit Strategy

At the end of the day nobody could build 450 gaming sites and do a good job at it, so I plan on selling off most of my domains and sites over the next year if there is sufficient interest. We don't need the money, but my "retirement" plans involve flipping houses and I'm driving myself crazy seeing great opportunities out there and being too invested in gaming to make a push at it. I was formerly a contractor before becoming an affiliate and I have secret dreams about pounding nails again for some reason - only this time I want to manage rather than labor myself.

Anyways, this blog is running way too long - it's going to be a crazy year in my world so I hope to start blogging again, but there is a very real possibility I won't be around in a year anyways if all goes well, can you imagine being "retired" under 35? I never could, but I can now. In my next blog post I'm going to give my complete history to how I got where I am now, I'm no baller but I flipped my way up from $10 domains and a site I bought from Prop to where we stand now and I think it might provide a bit of inspiration for new affiliates who feel like they don't have the budget to compete.

Hopefully I'll remember to include all my failures in that post too, because the one thing we surely did wrong through all of this was not concentrating on one site - but I'll elaborate more on that in the next post. I hope this serves as a good reintroduction to blogging for me, I was certainly more successful when updating regularly and really hope to get back to my roots so to speak.