SparkyBlue's Cutting-Edge Journal Spectacular - 30% more awesome

Hey everyone - WHAT'S CRACKIN'?!


Now I've been on these forums for a little while now, I thought I'd show you all my journal... it ain't your usual kind of journal either.

Y'see, I figured that instead of starting at the start - which can be a slow and boring process, I'd at least fire this sucker up for a while before writing a journal.

I hope you get something out of this journal, I'd like to both share my progess as well as offer you a few things that I learnt on the way - both from online and also just things I picked up myself.

Now at least I have a few things to talk about!

Ok. First thing's first.

Here's a little about me.

Alrighty. I'm SparkyBlue, 27 years old and I'm a fuckin' daydreamer living in Melbourne, Australia.

Been cooking up schemes to make cash ever since I wanted a Sega Master System (got it too, at 8 years old - with Alex Kidd built in how fucking sick is that!)

Just came back from 3 months in Europe. Loved every minute, lived it up with the missus and blew enough money to chuck a deposit on the house.


Here's a pic of me after I got back from OS - I grew this kick-ass Chuck Norris beard over there, and shaved it into this Pornstar Mo before taking the whole thing off:



Yeah, so that's me.

Now here's the story.

So I got back from Europe and immedately felt a desire to slash my wrists due to having to go back to work. I just blew tens of thousands of dollars that would take me years to save again.

OH THE HORROR.

So I stumbled across this forum one drunken night. (Oh yeah I like to get drunk and play poker - but not usually at the same time, unless I'm prepared to lose a shitload of $$$)

It made sense. I freakin' made perfect sense!


I had a charity based website for nearly 6 months but that was it. I had a casino based affiliate site as well that I chucked up before I left but it was (and still is) going nowhere.


BHW made me think. I had the tools, and a little bit of knowledge. You know, HTML/website building, very rudimentary SEO knowledge, so on and so forth. Nothing special.

I'm also blessed with a 4 days on/4 days off roster, meaning that aside from spending time with the girl I have 4 out of every 8 days free to hit this thing like a school bus hitting a penguin.

Ok I read up. I learn more and all that stuff.

I buy up on domains, and upgrade my hosting account to accomodate them.

I'm a firm believer of the fact that you need to fork out a little cash. You can go the free domains/free hosting and blogging/cheaparse SEO and do okay - be it blogging, bum marketing, etc. - but the truth is that I think the path to $$$s is a lot steeper if you bite the bullet and pay some cash for a host and some domains etc.

I mean you can have a years hosting, and three domain names for around $50.

So, up to now I've got 7 domains, and I've upgraded my hosting to about $40 for 6 months. Shared server, unlimited add on domains and bandwidth and space. It's alright. All up with that I've spent about $120 US - and it's all been PayPal which I like. I have a CC but so far I haven't had to use it.

My 'Office'


This where I'm working at for all my online stuff. The computer is a freakin' beast so there's always a temptation to turn to gaming.




My Motivation

Well that's the thing you see. I don't need motivation. People need to hard graft it to make money, and they tend to complain about it - and fair enough. But I LOVE DOING THIS. It's enjoyable, yeah sure with it's tedious moments but I get into it - usually companied with a few beers or 'whatever'. So yeah, I get into it - at night shift on work I can work on my blogs and stuff a but as well, or just do research.

Oh yeah, here some songs I like to listen to especially for my web stuff...

I'd zip them for anyone who wants them but I dunno if it's allow on here.

*Audio Karate - Jesus is Alive and Well (and living in Mexico)
*Drapht - Boom Boom Boom
*Regurgitator - Superstraight
*Gives You Hell - All-American Rejects
*Digitalism - Pogo
*Gonzales - Working Together (Boys Noize Remix)
*Lupe Fiasco - Go Go Gadget Flow
*Phoenix - Lisztomania
*Beirut - Forks and Knives

There's a strange mix of types of music right there, there's a lot more I listen to, to keep me interesting in doing this work but I can't remember them right now.

My Situation

Ok, so 7 domains.

6 active.

Made up of:
*One adult gallery (Aff. + BlackLabelAds)
*One gambling Aff site. (AdBrite + Aff.)
*One clickbank product blog (CB + Adsense)
*One AutoBlog (Adsense)
*One Semi-Auto Blog (Adsense, minor easy updates)
*One Personal Use site for a band I'm in.

A lot of SEO programs (mainly thanks to BHW!)

My most useful:
*MarketSamurai
*SeoQuake for Firefox
*Shitloads of Wordpress Themes/Plug-Ins I will list if asked
*Some other than mustn't be that important if I can't remember them!

Minor SEO. (Don't want to get them banned, but I know it's take time though)

A link wheel for one of these sites, just to see how it goes and so on.

Directory Submissions, not many - need help with this.

My Goals

I'm not going to quote an amount, or a time frame.

If you do you only pressure yourself into meeting the immediate goal.

I want to make money and I want to be happy. I've set milestones but no time limit to reach them.

Where to from here?

Pumping out more sites with a variety of profit methods. SEOing the crap out of the existing sites. Any help with this? I want to keep them reasonably white hat for now, they are long profit stream sites - not flash-in-the-pan Acai Berry type sites.

I want to see whats wup with my CB product I'm an aff for. Good adsense ads $20 worth, Good landing page, Good product and sell page... 100 clicks to my site AND NO FUCKIN' SALES. Not even a CheckOut Page view!! Why!?!

I've got 6 functioning sites at the moment, but I'm thinking I need hosting with another host as well if I want more domains - especially if most are blogs.

Any experience with this? I'm thinking Big G doesn't really like massive blog farms on one shared server. I'd go dedicated sever and IP, and maybe link 'em but I'm thinking it's a little pricey at the moment. I'll wait until profit.

Oh yeah, the profit...

Profit (So Far)

AdultAdWorld $3 - something for like 100 clicks... cheaparses!
Adsense $14 - mainly from old charity site
ClickBank $sweet fuck all
Rude Aff $46 - (oh yeah, I did this with YT - now as an aff link on my
adult site)

I think that's it.


For now.

I won't dedicate to writing back every X amount of days, but I WILL say that I'll be back - and I won't be deserting this thing, or this journal.

Why?

Because I've been at it for a few months already and I'm fuckin' hungrier than ever!

Take it easy everyone.

Ah. thats nice mate. Just keep working on it and dont ever give up
For any reason be it, we don't need to look outside this forum to make money

Btw, your pics are not showing up. Not sure if the prob is with my end.

Hahahaha a Calton fan ey

sorry but im getting sick of all these journals, if you like your work then you do it quietly, if your lazy then your just lazy, these threads won't motivate anybody.

Incomedarkness - Dont shit on other peoples threads. If you dont like this type of thread dont read it.

OP - Keep this updated, there are a lot of journal threads at the moment and they have the tendancy to clutter up this forum. Personally I like well written ones which show progress and that the writer is actually doing something.

I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Hey man!

Good luck to you and everything I'll be keepin up with your progress.

In my honest opinion, I like journals... But only if they are well written...

Keep updating this please and I'll follow

x

Here's an update

Did sweet fuck all so far this weekend - had a wedding to go to yesterday (I was a groomsman), that finished rather messily in the early hours of the morning.


As for today?

I'm going to rock out some niche research (using Market Samurai), I've been working about a hour a day recently compiling a list of 10-20 decent niches (that fit all my requirements -

*long tails (2-4 words),
*under 30k pages on the net with matched keyword terms
*No. #1 adsense advertiser spends more than 80c for click for the keyword
*AT LEAST 200 searches per day for keyword, more often closer to 800-1000
*seo competition for first pages isn't all big businesses

So yeah, hopefully I can knock that on the head.

Then, if all goes well - I'll do some domain research (.com/.net/.org only) for the keywords. I try to get the keyword in the domain, using "-" dashes if I need to.

Once that's done I'll register the domains and fire off a request to a article writing service. I'd write them myself but

a) it's too time consuming
b) i like to write, but i'd rather work on the novel i'm writing atm
c) i can't be fucked.

I'll try and fire off a post on how i went at the end of the day.

My replies to posts

(In no particular order, can't be bothered quoting!)

*monkey - Yeah, a massive Carlton fan. I love sports. Any sport. Carlton FC (AFL), Melbourne Victory (A-league), Dallas Mavericks (NBA), Indianapolis Colts (NFL), Manchester City (EPL), Forest Green Rovers (BlueSq.P). \

*Hazrid - thanks for the nice post, yeah if you have a little background knowledge before coming to this forum it's a great start. The photos aren't working for me either, I'll try and get them back up.

*IncomeDarkness - Mate, like I'm going to care about your opinion concerning journals. Just read your 4 other posts and it looks like this post was the fifth you've written that has no substance and adds nothing to this forum. Why don't you stick to reading the forums if you are going to shitcan every time you type?

*Zen19 (and absynthekid1/xcubic- Thanks for the support guys. I really want to make a point of starting this journal and keeping it going, hopefully it'll start getting interesting and give people both reasons to come back to read as well as some inspiration for those just starting out.

I'm going to endeavour to write in this journal as much as possible - but the biggest break between posting on here will be 4 days, because of my shift work sometimes I'll be working 10 hour afternoons and may not get a chance to accomplish much.


Anyways, just checked the original post - DAMN IT'S LONG. If you read it all, then you get a gold star, 100 internets and you fucking rock!



PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait...wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...

I really like your addition of pictures. It adds a sense of realism to your journal. Hopefully your journal can turn into the next Zen or Richuser type journal.

I will admit I am pretty good at spotting guys who will have good success at IM. I've been right except for once, and I think you've got the skill set and more importantly the mindset to achieve what you want. And remember, it took Thomas Edison many, many tries to get the light bulb right. Don't give up the first time you've failed. I learn 100x more from failures than I do successes.

let's see how far can you go, mate. good luck

End of day update

Well.

It's been a bitch of a day. Mainly because my net was throttled (went over my 60GB a month allowance in about a week), so with a treacle slow net connection the research wasn't all that quick and easy.

I DID however get it done. I passed the time while MS did it's thing by checking domain name availability.

So now I have:

*5 niches selected (long tail - 2-4 words as I said earlier)
*5-6 article titles selected for each niche
*An available domain name for each with the title in it

So I'm about to shoot off a request for about 25 articles to be written. Then I'll pick up the girl from work (poor chick workin' on a Sunday), and when I get home I'll register my domain names and that'll pretty much do for the day.

Then it'll be a case of setting up the domains with WP - all ready for when the articles start rolling in. I'm fucking psyched!!

Just off topic quickly - I checked out my current sites I already created. Surprisingly a few are ranking on or near the first page with minimal SEO.

Is it the name in the domain? Easy niches?! Who knows. Hopefully when I'm ready I'll be able to give them a little SEO boost and they'll hit #1 or close easily.

Any ideas for some white hat linking I can do for batches of sites for cheap? My only thing is that I really don't want to get sandboxed with any site.


(thanks deadster and magcshroom for the words - and magcshroom, your name brings back good memories of Amsterdam earlier this year... good times! )

Good mornin' sunshine! Just woke up at 11am, had a big bowl of cornflakes and crack (jk!) now its time to seize the day. Have some errands to do then, who knows?! Quick question, while setting up WP on new domains I'll be hooking up some backlinks

A) more niche specific or can I spam cos it doesn't matter?

B) recommend manually tracking down backlinks or outsourcing? Don't want to pay for everything though!
Posted via Mobile Device

I hate these posts... there so addicting to read lol . I spend twenty times more time everyday reading this forum than getting anything done lol.

SparkyBlue I'm really looking forward to fallowing your Journal. You are very organized in your posts and honestly in my personal opinion it makes it a pleasure to read. So I just wanted to say thanks for distracting me more from making money lol and good luck in your venture.

Even though you're an aussie(I am a kiwi living in the states ), I will have to say that you have a few things going for you, firstly your copy is good, you pull the reader in, and there is a lot to be said for being able to do that, anyone can learn the technical side of all of this but being able to write good copy is priceless!

Secondly, it seems like you have the fire of the beast and the yearning to make it, and not sit on your ass.

A lot of guys on this forum could learn a thing or two from you brother. Make the money, then enjoy the money.

I'm sitting at the xray clinic about to get my busted foot looked at. I'll be writing an update this afternoon - just quickly the articles will be written in the next week by which stage my sites will be ready to go!
Posted via Mobile Device

End of (lazy-ass) day update

Hey wassup!?

Alrighty. Yeah. Rockin'...

(By the way, my foot's screwed - happened a few weeks ago and isn't getting better... meh, free health care on Oz - s'all good, another day off work tomorrow so another day of kickin' internet ass)

Domain's purchased. Wordpress set. Waiting for articles. Just in the process of FTPing the plugins and themes and stuff.

So now I'm:

$39.98 (USD) Domains
$52.40 (USD) Articles

in the RED - that makes $212 USD behind.


I'm thinking about stepping this up a little.

How?

Well firstly I'm thinking of researching again soon, and as soon as the articles come in I'll request more to be written - and at the same time buy another 4-6 domains and get them set while I SEO and organise the one I'm working on now?...

...I mean, after all - what's the use in fuckin' around, eh?! :yo:

And.

I was thinking of getting that Rude cash up to the payout point. Why keep it there after all?? I think tomorrow I'll read up on Blanking the Referrer, and try to use YT and another site that has proved very, VERY useful in sign-ups to get the last $10 or so bucks needed to cash this sucker!!


Oh yeah, and here are some pending questions I'm hoping you guys can answer:

SparkyBlue said:

Quick question, while setting up WP on new domains I'll be hooking up some backlinks

A) more niche specific or can I spam any topic cos it doesn't matter?

B) recommend manually tracking down backlinks or outsourcing? Don't want to pay for everything though!

Click to expand...

And one more Question:

C) My Wordpress sites have previously been Multiple pages with keywords set one to a page (with breadcrumb links at the top of each page).

Is this better, or should I just have each article with the long-tailed keywords all ON THE ONE PAGE?! Hmm...

Thoughts would be greatly appreciated!


So really in point form...
(For those who need it - including myself!)

*Waiting for articles
*Domains purchased today
*WP all set up today
*Doing the plugins/themes/analytics at the moment
*Considering ramping up the domain numbers
*Tomorrow looking at fleecing RUDE a little more, I wanna payday!
*I have some questions (above) that would be awesome if answered


Take it easy all!


(Freqout - bloody Kiwis! Can't escape 'em anywhere! Thanks for the words of support mate, I pride myself on my writing - it's a bit laxidasic at times but I'm not writing a thesis as such, I kinda like the 'lazy prose' And trust me mate when I say I'm hungry to make this work!! And Bnotaro, thanks mate nice to see I provide a decent read in this thread. It's great to read and follow and (hopefully!) be inspired, but sooner or later you'll have to pull your finger out and give it a crack yourself. Best of luck when you do!!)
All these positive comments mean a lot to me guys - thanks a truckload.

Hey all. :sombrero:

Stuck at work. Another 10 hour day. woot. Notice I can barely contain my excitement.

Probably not a good week to start my journal but none-the-less - what with work, my busted foot (and repeated xrays), and tonight I've got a birthday piss-up at a lah-di-dah swanky bar in the city and tomorrow I'm going to Derby Day. For those that don't live in Melbourne/Australia it's one of the main racedays of the Spring Horse Racing Carnival.

Last year I couldn't back a winner, but my girl picked the winner of the main race - paid 70-1 or so and I got back nearly a grand.

She better back another winner this year!


Anyways.


Still waiting for the articles, had a DNS problem with a few of my domains - issues with propagating them to my hosting account. As a result I didn't get the 4 new sites up until last night. Will be fully ready by Sunday to chuck the articles in and should be able to dedicate a full day to flat out SEO of my 9 or so sites.



No answers to the above questions in the previous post?!


I do have a specific question now as well.


IBP. Any good? They have a guarentee on hitting the top 10 in SERPs or your money back... now, that doesn't have to be a obscure long-tailed keyword like:

"busty nova scotia housewives playing badminton in lederhosen"

Does it?

Will IBP be the easiest method of cracking out some decent SEO and backlinks for my pages? Because at the moment looking manually for links can be a major pain in the ass.

Hope all is well with everyone. Bring on the weekend and wish me luck at the races tomorrow.

I'll try and chuck up a photo on here of me with my three rum and coke cans on top of each other... hey the line is long and I'm usually dammmmmnnnn thirsty!

All class baby, all class!

Take it easy.

I like that you are funny - your posts always bring a smile to my face. I also like that you format them properly and give a little personality in them.

Im still following this one, and I wish you the best.

I agree...the personality you put into your posts and updates makes for an interesting read Sparky. Keep up the good work and progress mate!

"busty nova scotia housewives playing badminton in lederhosen"

You stole my damn keyword!

Cheers,

Red

OK, first off I hate journals. It just so happens that I hate yours most of all because I read it to the end and cursed that there wasn't more.

Can't answer your other questions since I'm not really a blogger but as for IBP it is the shit, it does what it says it does. I consider myself pretty good at the old SEO malarky but it still nit picks my sites and makes good suggestions so it's definately worth using IMHO.

Good luck to you mate I hope your foot gets better and, more importantly, I hope you start hitting your goals. I'll be back to waste some more time soon