Journey Of 18 To $100k/month Through Adsense/Affiliate Marketing ONLY! Live Case Study

Awesome thread bro. It sure did get me motivated a lot. I am looking forward to how you turn it now. I am also thinking of going big with adsense soon.

-Deleted-

Sorry for what you had experienced. Why don't you give a direct call to OP to sort this out after a 2 mth long of waiting?

Final Update

Please take the time to read this, I guarantee it will be worth your time.

As I mentioned in my last post here, I dont have much to add to this thread now so I think its time for us to close this so I can take this responsibility off my shoulders, even though I have stopped spending lot of time on this thread its still a very big distraction for me. Also, I have covered everything I possibly could in this thread and its gotten to a point where all the new questions/comments by others have already been addressed on previous pages.

I am very happy and proud to make this final post. I have read a lot of "journey" "case study" threads and most do not last this long and OP disappears half way leaving everyone else hanging. I am not claiming that what I shared was all unique information or some secrets but I think I have done a great job at putting everything at one place for those that are interested in this business model. I did a brief recap of everything we did in last 6 months in my previous post so I wont repeat the same thing. I want to take this opportunity to share few "behind the scene" things and what we learned through our 6 month of experience. I am hoping that people find this information helpful.

#1: Micro niche sites are waste of time in the longrun. The way they are created is not the reason, you can be the best at everything and it wont change much. Theory behind MNS sites is flawed and the idea never got me excited. It was a good way to make money while it lasted but everyone who has some IM experience will agree that in the longrun MNS business model is not sustainable. Worst has already happened so I dont think there is any room for debate but for those that are still considering investing into MNS, please dont waste your money. MNS sites dont and cant work in the longrun Main reason is because they are not worth the effort to spend time and money on them after the initial cost. First of all the exact match domains used for these sites limit the future potential. I mean I never understood how you can expand a site called panasonicvierast30.com even if the site is making you thousands, its not realistic to expect same income for years or even months. So even if you find a winner from your list of 100s what are you gonna do about it? Another major problem is that MNS are worthless, I mean it doesnt make sense to spend more than what it costs to build a whole site. When the cost is like $20-$40 per site, you have such a limited budget that it makes more sense to build new ones instead of grow your existing ones. I talked about all this when we started and I ended up arguing with many. Just few months later, see what happened. There isnt a single person I know who still considers this a viable longterm strategy. In past 2-4 weeks especially after Penguin update, I have talked to many people who have lost everything.

I was talking to someone on skype last night, I think he is a member here too who spent $18k(not including domains and all other costs) with multiple service providers in past 2 months, he made a grand total of $480 from 500 websites and ended up getting his Adsense banned (Not sure about the reason for this but it def has something to do with MNS on large scale because there are many who lost their accounts) before he could switch to something else, he lost all the traffic on over 80% of his sites. I was surprised when he told me that he had not received a single visit on most of his sites in over 2 weeks. This is just one example, I have lost count of how many people approached me for help after wasting thousands with service providers here and WF and I am sure this will piss off many but I feel obligated to state the obvious because people keep ignoring the signs.

I am telling you from experience and anyone who doesnt agree with me has no idea what he is talking about. It is NOT logical to offer a service instead of building your own portfolio. Anyone who is confident that they can make money, even 10% of what most of these guys claim will NEVER offer a service until he has done as much as he can for himself. How hard is that to understand? Look around the service section here or on WF, you will be surprised at what most of these guys are claiming. I understand its part of the sales process and its expected that a seller is going to hype things up to make a sale, hell I do it and I know everyone else does it but you gotta stay in limits. I mean come on people, this is a blatant scam that some of these guys are running. Especially after the updates now when its clear to those who are aware of the changes that MNS are done. I have not seen one person be honest about what just happened. I suppose its a great way for a newbie to learn their lesson, I am just trying to warn those who are planning to put their life savings into this.

I am not discounting the effort, time and value that needs to be invested and I know many of these guys arent making a lot of money after they cover their costs but whats surprising to me is that none of these guys are willing to make changes in their system/process. They can still continue to do what they are doing but for God sake change what needs to be changed. Seems like they dont want to bother with keeping upto date and coming up with solutions to new problems. I guess if they could or wanted to, they wouldnt be offering a service in the first place. Anyways this is getting too long so I'll close this part by making a suggestion to those that are in this business and are ready to make necessary changes to ensure their customers get the value they deserve.

Stop with the EMD nonsense, seriously! I have personally tested this. Amount of time spent looking for EMDs can be better spent doing SEO. We ran extensive tests with a group of 25 domains before my accident and I wasnt surprised to find that SEO value of EMD = 4 BMR links (BMR was still in business back then) even with BMR out of the picture, EMDs can easily be outranked with little extra effort. EMDs in almost all cases will be ABSURD domains that have no potential for expansion. This is the biggest limiting factor in MNS.

Micro sites strategy is an amazing strategy to pick the winners. I feel thats what it needs to be used for. Anyone who thinks they can continue to make money forever from a 2 page site is in for a surprise. What you can do is build 100s of these 2-3 page sites and pick the winners no later than 30 days. 30 days is not long enough to get a clear picture but with 2-3 page site that isnt being updated, you cant wait more than 30 days. Based on the performance, grow the site by adding more content which is impossible if you have an EMD that makes no sense.

Its worth repeating, Exact Match Domains are the real problem behind current MNS model. If you cant or dont expand your sites, sooner or later they will be dead.

Another big drawback with MNS is the shitty resale value. Market is flooded with service providers, competition is through the room and there are 1000s of MNS site owners who want to get rid of their sites for whatever they can get. Simply put, MNS built on current advertised model are not worth it.

#2 You cannot depend on offpage SEO anymore and its going to get worse and if you dont change with the market you will be thrown out like a piece of worthless turd

I mean it does not matter what strategy you are using or how established your site is, if you are doing a lot of offpage SEO you are risking everything. You are better off doing absolutely nothing. Even Google made it very clear that its time to forget about manipulating SE with offpage SEO, ofcourse there are always going to be exceptions but unless you want your life consumed with worries or you love the inconsistency and constant ups and downs, I suggest you change your business model.

I am a very logical person and to me it does not make sense to try controlling something that you can NEVER have control over. You can do everything right and you still have the risk of losing everything any moment. No matter what you do or how you do it, there are no guarantees.

Like I shared in OP, we are very heavily involved in providing SEO for offline clients and while SEO for offline clients is lot more easier and way more consistent, we have lost a LOT of money and had to fire many clients who were not being understanding in past few weeks. Methods we use or the sites of offline clients are as whitehat as it can get but even then we have had a few clients that we had to start PPC campaigns for urgently to make up for the loss.

I am not suggesting that there is no need for offpage SEO but the point that I am trying to make is that it doesnt make sense to focus on something that you have literally no control over, instead you need to shift your focus on what you CAN control and make sure you are banking with that as much as you can before getting involved with things that are more risky per-say. So whats that thing?

Content "Content is the king" it always has been and it always will be. As long as you have quality content, no one can screw with you. Even Google cannot afford to screw with you. I have been in this business for almost a decade now, I have seen a lot of things change the ONLY thing that has stayed consistent since my first website is the value of content. Infact, value of quality content will only increase with time and for those who have spent some time doing online marketing especially SEO they will agree with me on this.

This is exactly why I think this project was a success. We didnt depend on offpage SEO. We were not dependent on few keywords instead our strategy was based on longtail keywords. I would say over 80% of our traffic is from keywords that we arent even targeting. Random sometimes absurd search terms like "the best method to lose weight without dieting in 2012". Quality of traffic from longtail is way better than keywords I believe but even if you dont agree to that, you cant deny the fact that its same if not better since the source for both is same.

Now, just in past 6 months I think we have done well over 20k articles. My past experience is in line with what we noticed here too, it is almost impossible to lose money on content investment as long as you didnt pay a ridiculous price for it. I am not sure about these numbers but its prob very close to real numbers if someone was to test. 500+ word quality article by a native writer will cost you minimum of $5, obviously our costs are way lower than that because of the way we have things setup but I digress. With $5 cost for 500+ word article, it should take no more than 2 months to make your money back if the article is used on an established website and no more than 3 months even on a brand new website. Even if my numbers are way off, keep in mind that the longtail traffic rarely drops most if not all the time it will increase and the content will bring traffic/money for the lifetime for the site. Content is the safest investment in the world right now, there is absolutely nothing more safe or anything that can even outperform the return that you can expect from quality content. So why not put all your time, money and effort into something that is 101% guaranteed to make you money.

Yea the results are very slow but slow and steady always wins the race. If a site is making $10/month with no or minimal offpage SEO, you can count on that site to continue making you $10/month if not more.

No matter what Google changes, traffic from longtail rarely takes the hit. As long as you have the niche research done right and your website is being monetized right, the content will always provide positive ROI. Now I am not suggesting that there is absolutely no need for offpage SEO but forget the softwares, blackhat or shady methods, just keep doing occasional link building using good sources that have proven their worth against the test of time.

Basically thats what I wanted to share with everyone and I hope there is atleast one person who takes my advice above and makes the change because if you dont now, you will be forced to sooner or later anyways.

If you want to guarantee your place in online marketing many years from now, think about shifting your focus more on content.

Now before closing, I'll share our future plans. I wont go into the past since I covered most of it in my previous post on this same page.

Like I have been saying, we cannot keep adding more sites to our portfolio so we have stopped doing that completely and we plan to continue expanding our current sites until end of July atleast so we wont be adding new sites until then. So we have spent the last two weeks trying to come up with ideas/plans on how to put the team to use, this is what we have in mind so far and it will probably change if we can come up with a better plan.

Reserve 25% of the resources including manpower for our own use, to expand the sites and continue the work. This will ofcourse require some major restructuring of teams which we are doing right now.

Reserve 25% of the resources for join venture opportunities with others, we have already started working on this and I am very excited about this opportunity, if all works out as planned we'll dedicate more for this.

Remaining 50% will be used to offer "Authority Website Creation Service" works similar to the way MNS service works. We have been using about 35% of our resources for past 1 month on this. As you can see from the history of this thread, I have been planning to start a sales thread for over a month now and I havent been able to do so because I cant keep up with the interest we get just from people contacting me through signature advertising. I have atleast 5-7 new skype requests everyday and the number reaches 10-12 when this thread is bumped, I still have 100s of PMs that I havent even opened. Basically the demand is so high that we havent even felt the need for a sales thread. This part requires a lot of work, dedication and organization to make sure everything runs smooth and I have been having problems because of my busy schedule and a half assed system we have in place for this. Unless its organized and managed by someone who does not need to spend over 10 hours a day to make sure everything else is working fine, its not possible to do a good job. To provide the kind of service that I would want to offer, I need to have someone else take control of this who can dedicate atleast 3-4 hours per day managing everything otherwise with 100s of clients involved it doesnt take much for everything to screw up and this creates major distraction for me and I cant focus on what I am suppose to be doing. So we have two options with this and I need to make up my mind soon. I can either put a dedicated person to manage this and that will cost me atleast $2k-$3k per month that I havent accounted for OR I can do a partnership with someone else but I am having a hard time trying to figure out how something like this would work. With my reputation at risk, I want to take no chances here but at the same time I also do not want to miss this opportunity. With absolutely no competition in the market we can really control everything. We can charge MUCH more than what we have been charging since its pretty obvious that demand > supply. With such a low cost price that would probably shock even the most experienced marketer the profit margins in this are very high. 100%-150% is a very reasonable expectation so this is something we cannot afford to miss while we have the opportunity. No direct competition and with our reputation and experience, even in a competitive market we have a major advantage. We can beat any future competitor in pricing, quality and experience. We'll ensure that no direct competitor survives by adjusting the pricing accordingly since I am 100% sure that there is no one who can in even get close to our cost range. Anyways I am not worried about making sales at all, thats the easy part the only thing I am concerned about is providing the same quality that we have been working with for our own sites otherwise its not fair to the buyers. Lets see what we come up with in next few days but you can expect the launch of this service either by me or a partner if thats what we decide on in the coming week or two.

At the end I want people to see this thread as proof of the fact that hardwork always pays off. Relationships/contacts in business with your employees or clients are most valuable, above all ideas/methods.

Even after a very successful journey for 6 months, I havent cashed out as much as some of you may be expecting even going off of the numbers shared above because you arent taking the loss we have dealt with in other business or all the mistakes/accidents/mishaps I have had to pay for but I feel I have accomplished more than what I wanted to. I have the respect of my employees because they understand and know what I went through mostly for them and the way this whole thing has brought us all together, working at office is more fun than even partying

Keep going, dont give up. It didnt take me or us one day to achieve all this. Everyone has to pay their dues, sooner or later, one way or another. There is no getting around that even if you win a lottery you still gotta pay your dues in life and trust me life will find a way to make you pay forget the shortcuts and once again NEVER give up!

I'll be back with a new challenge sometime soon. Until then, I suppose we'll just be communicating on threads by others

Peace!

Closed! Appreciate all the support. Will continue to contribute on other threads!