So what happened to the 30 posts in 30 days?
// November 21st, 2008 // other
I made it, actually I smashed it, no that’s still an understatement I annihilated it. I did two posts just today alone. I wrote six new posts in one day a week or so ago. Its just not on the zig or hiphipuk. So what happened?
Well I was moaning to Pete that my formerly second best affiliate site winemoneysaver had stopped converting, not slightly, but totally, like no commissions in one month totally. When I check the traffic it had plummeted from 500 a day to 5! I probably should have noticed sooner, but I’m shit at running affiliate sites and they are all neglected and rubbish. What was the cause? Google decided that winemoney saver was neglected and rubbish and refused to index it anymore (no longer shows in the search results). Fair enough, can’t complain it was shit. So Greg and I have been scrambling to clean up all the sites so they dont suffer a similar fate, cleaning, optimising, content updating, backlink driving boring webmaster tasks which sucked all my time.
The bad news is that it can take three months to get out of the google sinbin, assuming you deserved to, and we don’t, so the golden pre-christmas wine and champagne rush is going to pass right by winemoneysaver, we’re probably not going to make a penny, even with all this hard-work. But we might save the other sites and have something slightly sellable.
But this taught me a lesson…..
You can only expect to get out what you put in. An obvious lesson sure, but a lesson for me none the less. I’ve completely over-stretched myself with too many websites (I’m up to 10 now). The result is that all 10 are rubbish. There’s just not enough of me to go around, not enough hours in the day. I’m watching Pete who runs spendless and just spendless until recently - http://spendlessonline.co.uk/ go from strength to strength after two years solid graft, focused on one project.
I planning a proper post about this at some point when I’m back in a writing mode, the curse of being a Gen Y, at least thats what I get mocked with a lot at work being “Gen Y” a term I didn’t really realize applied to me, but whatever, if the hat fits and all that.
So what did I also do after this great revelation? What would be an Adam classic response to my new found insight? I stuck my tongue out at it, and open a new site - freecouponcodes.co.nz
Number 11.
Going forward I’m going to wind down or sell wine, beds, tv’s and supermarkets after Christmas. That will leave me just two affiliate sites. I’ve taken on 4 writers for those two, so I don’t have to do so much work (nothing but a bit of editing) and I’m going to plow my energy into them. I’ll keep a strict 5 site rule, which will be the zig, hiphip (although I might merge those two), rad-ish, tee-junction and freecouponcodes (I have one or two more but they are just little things, like one for my football team where players can sign up for the upcoming game etc, nothing that takes any upkeep). No sites come in, unless one gets retired.
I have no real idea why I’m telling you all this, as you have no interest in my affiliate sites and probably only read this blog to see what goofy post I’ve put up next about a monkey or a segway or something. But I feel I should share why I ended up scrapping my 30 posts in 30 days challenge and why I’ve not written anything proper for ages, which might also be because the backpacking china series took it out of me and I’ve not managed to get back into writing mode.
The weekend is here, long live the weekend. Just under four weeks until our Australia holiday, so I’m glad the hardwork is over and another lesson has been learnt.
Possibly related, hopefully entertaining other posts:
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Pete
