I set aside time each week to view my stats and check keyword rankings for my stores.  I put a lot of time and effort into developing one particular fashion store which was one of my first BANS/Wordpress Stores.  That work has been rewarded with position 4 and postition 6 in Google for my target keywords.   Ker-ching I thought my imaginery cash register counting riches beyond reason.  These keywords have some serious volume and, in my view, good commerical intent.

But what’s this?  The site gets very few visitors and only a handful of sales.  In fact, it makes a paltry $10-20 per month.  Very disappointing so what’s the problem?  Well let’s look at the facts.  Top 2 positions on Google are occupied by the fashion brand itself.  In other words I ain’t going to rank any higher. Third spot is taken by eBay as is the 5th.

So whilst the items I’m selling sell like proverbial hot cakes on eBay it looks like most of the traffic goes direct to the source cutting me, as the middleman, out of the equation.  Can I do anything? Yes, stop investing time in the store.  It should be making up to $1,000 per month with my ranking positions and the high average sale price of the items but it just isn’t happening.  Maybe things will change but for now I’m better off focusing on stores that are more profitable even though the keywords rank much lower.

It’s been a less than interesting start to the year and I have found it challenging.  Deciding on the most effective course of action with 80 plus websites is no easy matter.  I have a dozen websites that perform consistently well so should I spend most of my time on these trying to generate even more traffic?  On the other hand I have about 10 websites with very high EPC but very low traffic.  Should  I spend time trying to generate more trafffic to these?  Or, should I focus on building new sites to replace those deindexed by Google or building links to deindexed sites to help them rank better in Yahoo and Live?

There are variations on a theme as well adding to my confusion about how to effectively manage my virtual real estate.  The obvious answer is that time needs to be spent on all these tasks.  What I want to do is spend time on the most profitable tasks but these are impossible to determine.  As a result I have split up my week along the folowing lines.

Monday – am Outsouricing (Project Mangement, New Requests etc.)  pm Authority Site building

Tuesday – am New site (Niche, keywords, site plan, domain purchase etc) pm Half day Off (nice theory).

Wednesday – am Publish Content & link building. pm New site build.

Thursday – am Authority site development.  pm Publish Content and link building.

Friday – Stats day (plan week ahead, awstats, logs etc.).

It’s a work in progress at the moment and I’m sure things will change but for now it’s the best I can come up with.  How do you allocate your time?

Let me start off by wishing all readers of this blog a Happy New Year.   I have some lofty goals for 2009 and I’m looking forward to getting back down to business on Monday.

I launched this blog back in April 2008 for a couple of reasons:

1. To help inspire others – if I could get this to work then anyone could.
2. To document my own journey.
3. To learn more about wordpress.

I haven’t had time to write as much as I’d like and I’ve got so much more to share that I feel guilty for not making the time.  However, as I have stated before my first goal was to replace my income which I lost as a result of redundancy and I am getting closer to that every passing day.

In December I earnt more than I ever have in a single month and if the trend continues 2009 promises to be an unbelievable year.  I am cautiously optimistic that this may happen but recognise that with the holidays out of the way traffic may fall off .  One also has to keep fingers crossed that changes to search engine algorithms do not have a negative impact but this is not something that should be dwelt on.

The earnings boost has enabled me to up my outsource spend and I have budgeted $1000 per month for 2009 so I would hope to see some excellent returns on investment as the year progresses.  Now if you’re thinking bloody hell I could never afford $1,000 per month remember this.  In July my earnings were only $500 yet by October they had risen to $2000  in November $3750.

But that’s not the whole story is it?  Nope, because in December I made an unbelievable $8,250. That’s a near 400% increase on October.  Sure, some of this can be attributed to seasonal effects but the evidence suggests it is more likely the coming to fruition of all the work I’d undertaken throughout the year on seo and promotion.

Looking back I realize that you’ve gotta have faith.  When you start out on this internet marketing road you work your butt off day after day for next to nothing.   I was working 60 hours per week and didn’t even know if I was doing things properly!  After 6 months of work I was beginning to think it just wasn’t going to happen and look where I stand now at the end of 2009.

For those of you out there that are still struggling know that it is possible to make money online still.  The challenge really has to be finding the time.  If if took me 12 months of 60 hour weeks (from the point I started researching and learning) do not forget this when measuring your own level of success.  If you can only invest 6 hours per week it’s going to take you 10 years to get to where I am today.

I am not saying this to  be negative but rather to impress upon you that it takes a lot of work and if you only have a limited amount of time available you will need to be very, very patient.  If you have a day job I really recommend you set aside an amount each month to invest in outsourcing to help you reach your goals in the shortest amount of time possible.  Too many people want to do things on the cheap and you really can’t cheapen your way to success.

I’ve reached the point now where there doesn’t seem any further benefit in posting earnings updates (in hard numbers anyway).  In some ways it makes me feel bad now that I am able to earn a decent full time income (if it lasts LMAO).  I think there is more value in reporting the number of sites I run, how many new sites I build and what I have done on a montly basis to increase earnings.

That said there isn’t anything new to add in one way.  It’s a system – rinse and repeat as I’m sure you’ve read before.   I do have a yearning to put what I’ve learned down in an ebook though as I think this could help people immeasurably.  Now all I’ve got to do is find the time to write it!  Good luck everybody and have a great 2009.