You wouldn’t work 300 low paying jobs to make a living, would you?

Posted in Building Assets on Oct 30th, 2010 | 10 comments

A lot of people looking to get into SEO and making money online pretty quickly stumble across the strategy of building out a ton of small Made For Adsense (MFA) sites to try and make a couple of bucks a day each. Their theory is rather than build out 1 or 2 sites and tackle just a few different, challenging niches in order to get traffic, they’re going to instead target a ton of low competition keywords and go for the easy money.

There’s a variety of reasons why this is a very short sighted mentality and the truth of the matter is the majority of people who want to follow this strategy end up failing miserably. As the title of this post says, if you want to become rich, you don’t go out and get 10 part time jobs, you get one good, high paying, high quality job. That same philosophy translates over directly to building out internet properties.

Just Look At The Numbers

When you start looking at the costs involved with building out 300+ mini sites, it becomes plainly clear that it’s an epic waste of time to pursue as a means for earning a living.

Let’s assume you can get domains for an even $10 each. So, 300 sites is immediately going to set you back $3000. Off to a terrible start.
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Time For A Personal Challenge – Growing Traffic and Subscribers

Posted in Building Assets on Oct 29th, 2010 | 2 comments

As outlined in my last post a bit, I’ve been spending a good amount of time pondering what I want my focus to be on when it comes to the internet and my skill set. I have decided building out assets is a very valuable think to focus on, and one of the first things I have immediate access to in terms of a solid asset is this very blog. So…

Where LayeredThoughts is at Currently

As you can see in this analytics screenshot, I’m averaging right around 50-60 visitors a day to this blog. Not too bad considering I don’t post here very often anymore, but it definitely can be better.

I also have right around 100 RSS subscribers according to Feedburner.

In looking at these numbers, I’ve come up with a personal challenge/goal for myself. By January 1st, I want to be averaging 500 visitors a day and have 1000 RSS subscribers.

Ambitious?

Absolutely. Given my track record with inconsistent posting here, it seems like an impossible goal. However, I am very active at a few online communities that are very relevant to the list of things I am planning on writing about here in the next few months, and I’ve come to the realization that there is no reason in the world I am not writing a post a day. Additionally, while it might be a little shameless, I plan on writing targeted posts and then promoting them at the large traffic garnering sites like stumbleupon, reddit, and hacker news in order to gain exposure and boost traffic. It won’t be spammy in any way, everything will be relevant. I’ll just be kick starting

Also, other than submitting my posts to these sites, I will not be building links. Any links that I gain will be 99% organically obtained, so it will be interesting to see how things grow over time. Just for reference sake, here are my current backlink details according to webmaster tools:

I’ll post these same screenshots at the end of each month to show growth as I work on things.

Think I can do it?