I’ve had a few comments over the past several months asking about how many sites I have so I figured now is as good a time as any to give a list of my websites. I’ve included little blurbs about each site, a bit about earnings and some hopes I have for the websites. This is type of information is something I always wonder about when I read other web developer’s blogs so hopefully reading this will give you some inspiration and a bit more insight into how I earn money online.

For some of the sites I haven’t listed the URLs beucase they’re simple ideas that would be pretty easy to copy. Most of my simple sites don’t really make any money but I am living in hope.

Travoholic.com - This is my first ever site that I started back in 2001 and it’s about budget travel. When I started it there were only a handful of sites about budget travel and backpacking and I felt I could offer something that was better. I always start out ambitious! I have always felt that where you stay has a big impact on your experience, especially if you’re a solo traveller, so I wanted to build a site with a focus on hostel reviews. The idea was a good one and I’m pretty sure it was the first site to use several different criteria to rate hostels. Unfortunately I was busy wasting my time in university and the site was neglected until 2005 when I started taking things a bit more seriously. By that point I had missed the boat and there were plenty of sites that filled the hostel reviewing gap. But this is when I discovered Adsense and after that first click for $0.03 I was inspired to improve my site and start others. Travoholic.com earns about $50 to $100 per month with Adsense, a pitiful $2 to $10 a month with Hostelworld.com and a small amount through advertising. I haven’t done a thing with this site in years but I have a few ideas for how to overhaul things. Because its an old, trusted domain and does well with Google, I think it has a lot of potential.

Working Holiday Info - This was my second website and it’s my favourite because of the little cartoon characters I’ve added. I totally went over the top with the artistic flair I added to the site, but it was fun. This site was penalised ages ago by Google and dropped down to PR0 so I haven’t had much success with advertising, although I haven’t really tried. I don’t have any affiliate programs on the site either so there’s nothing doing there. Adsense does well with around $80 to $100 monthly. This site could use an update and I could also see myself selling info packages specific to each working holiday country.

Nerdy Nomad - You’re on it! This is my only blog and it isn’t my aim to make money from this site. For me, blogs aren’t the way I want to earn online (I prefer to build a site and forget about it). I have this blog because I love connecting with people who are into travelling and web development. Plus it gives me a place to keep a few of my travel tales and it helps to have a place to ask questions and get feedback from you guys. I earn a bit through advertising deals but I don’t go out and look for them.

Stuck in London - This is my most popular site with over 350 unique visits a day. The site is focused on a specific niche that I know a lot about in a city I know a lot about so it is a great fit. Adsense has been the main income source with around $200 coming in per month and I am also starting to have high quality advertisers contact me about partnering up. I’m in the process of adding a few affiliate programs that seem like a good fit but time will tell if that works. The information on this site is of a high quality and I think that’s important for being able to keep attracting advertisers.

Travel Insurance Sites - I have three old travel insurance sites that focus on a specific niche and account for almost 100% of my affiliate earnings. I have recently finished another four websites that are targeted at a different niche in the travel insurance market. I know they are good ideas that will work but I need to get them ranking with Google before I see any earnings and that will take a lot of work that I don’t have time for just now. I’m considering an Adwords program but I probably won’t get to that until next year because I don’t know a thing about them and will need to do some research before I get started and a lot of tweaking once I get things going.

Adsense Sites - I have two websites that were created solely to put Adsense on them. I don’t like these sites but having seen a few net friends do well with them, I thought I would give it a try. I need to do loads more SEO for these sites to start performing and I won’t have time for this until after Indonesia next year. They’re on the back burner for now and don’t earn me anything.

Stuck in Beijing, Sydney and New York - These sites have been my attempt to get a little network of city sites going similar to my London site. The Beijing site is the oldest and ranks well with Google but doesn’t get as much traffic as I would like. The Sydney site’s content isn’t as good as I would like it to be but after a recent barrage of SEO it’s starting to rank. The New York site is brand new with good content but I haven’t done any SEO yet. For each of these sites I expect to earn a bit with Adsense but I’m hoping the main revenue source will be through city-specific advertising. These sites are all a work in progress and so far none of them are doing much.

London 2012 Olympics - I love the Olympics, I love London and I love making websites. This one sprung from a conversation with my friend Mike who ran a site for the Beijing Olympics. It seemed like an interesting idea and I didn’t think I would ever get a match more suited to me than the London Olympics. I’ve had a couple of lucrative advertising deals but, other than that, I haven’t earned much. I expect to earn a lot through Adsense in the months running up to the Olympics but I will need to get cracking on the SEO for this site. I think there are other ways to squeeze a few bucks out of this site but will have to brainstorm and get to work soon.

Wanderstruck - I started this site last year as a pure travel blog. The plan was to have a place to write about my travels, post photos and keep friends and family informed. My aim wasn’t to make money off of the site. I have since realised that I don’t really like writing blog posts about my travels. I find them difficult to write and they were taking up far too much of my time and I always felt guilty for going weeks without a post. At the moment this site is empty but I’m working at building a site about travelling in Africa. This is a massive work in progress and it’s the site I’m most excited about.

Backpacker Niche Site - I have a website about a very specific type of trip that Aussies, Kiwis and Saffas take around Europe. I actually forgot to register the domain at the beginning of the year and had to buy it back which screwed me over for this year’s earnings. Normally this site earns well during the summer with Adsense and insurance sales. I also have a partnership with a company who is a perfect fit in the niche and they pay me a pretty high yearly fee to advertise. I have lots of ideas for how to improve this site but it’s one of my lowest priorities right now.

If you haven’t been counting along, here’s a summary of my sites:

1. Travoholic
2. Working Holiday Info
3. Nerdy Nomad
4. Stuck in London
5. Stuck in Beijing
6. Stuck in Sydney
7. Stuck in New York
8. Insurance Site A
9. Insurance Site B
10. Insurance Site C
11. Insurance Site D
12. Insurance Site E
13. Insurance Site F
14. Insurance Site G
15. Crappy Adsense Site A
16. Crappy Adsense Site B
17. London 2012 Olympics
18. Wanderstruck
19. Backpacker Niche Site

Wow, I didn’t realise I had so many websites until just now. Like I said before, many of these are either brand new and doing nothing for me or they’re old and neglected and doing nothing for me. I’m an eternal optimist though and think that all of my sites have potential. I think one of my main issues is always wanting to move onto new site ideas before finishing the SEO and promotion work on the others. I love the building stage of web development so this will be a hard habit to kick.

I do think that having a network of sites is key in this business, at least in my experiences. Often one of my best sites will randomly start sucking for a month and another will come through with a great month to save my ass a bit. It’s strange how that works. Diversification is important with revenue streams (Adsense, affliates advertising, your own products etc.) and I think it’s equally important to diversify your sites by having a few different topics even if they are still a part of a broad niche like what I’m doing with budget travel.

I hope this has been helpful to people. Don’t feel overwhelmed because I have almost 20 sites. I admit that I have gone a bit crazy over the past few months. I think as few as four or five quality websites is fine. More sites doesn’t always mean more money, especially when you lose your focus and fleet from project to project without doing the SEO work.

Either way I hope this post helps. I would be interested in hearing about other people’s website portfolios. Do you dabble in the crappy Adsense sites or stick with one or two high quality ones? Blogs or static sites? What works for you and what is your ideal number of sites?

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There’s a reasonable chance I could be heading off to Indonesia in a few weeks so I’m working hard at tying up a lot of loose ends before I hit the travel trail again. I’ve put in a lot of work these past two months while I’ve been at home: I’ve done some link swapping, written a load of articles in an effort to get links, finished four new affiliate websites, updated another affiliate site, added articles to my moving to Sydney website, filed my tax return, set up three people to help me with new city sites, converted old HTML sites into CSS, and updated parts of my working holidays website. For the amount of time I’ve actually been sitting behind this computer I would have expected to have more done, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with my effort.

One loose end that I really want to get tied up is my living in New York website. It’s similar to Stuck in London and the first goal for the NY site is to attract search engine traffic and convert it into Adsense revenue. My London site went from earning $1 a month for several months in a row when it was first launched at the end of 2006 to earning over $120 per month six months later. I’m hoping to replicate this result with my New York site as quickly as possible.

The site has a good number of New York area guides and I have a few authors working on some how-to type articles and basic information pieces for my articles page. I’ve had some success using Textbroker.com and would recommend them. One author in particular has a ton of great article ideas and she’s a way better writer than I am. For less than two cents a word I am pretty happy to have found her and I’ll be loading up the site gradually with her articles. I will be heading back to New York in a couple of weeks to visit a friend, snap some photos for the site and to gather prices for my New York prices guide which I have yet to start.

I’ve already been working at link building and have outsourced some of the article submission stuff to a friend of mine so I’m hoping this site starts paying off sooner than the London site which I did zero link building or promotion for. Plus, based on a bit of keyword research, New York has more searches and pays more per click than the same London keywords. Overall, I really think this site is the key to bumping me up above $500 per month with Adsense and I’m putting everything I have into it right now.

So I just wanted to give people an idea of what I’m focused on at the moment. I’m really excited about the quality of the articles and area guides I’ve already had submitted and I’m looking forward to seeing how quickly I’m able to get this baby earning for me.

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I got an email yesterday from pointing out a new site that was set up specifically to sell ebooks on a certain topic. The site is two pages: the main page listing four ebooks with brief descriptions of each and links out to their affiliate programs and an ‘about’ page. The person who emailed me pointed out that he thought the site is a great idea and was wondering if copying it would be ethical.

This is a question I’ve struggled with a bit. My main affiliate earner is actually an idea I got from another internet marketer who focuses on travel sites. He didn’t tell me what he was doing, but I noticed his site, thought it was a great idea and set one up for myself with great results and thousands of dollars in earnings. Since then, dozens of people have jumped on the idea with copycat sites so I’m happy I got in there early before the masses. He wasn’t bitter at me for using his idea and I certainly can’t blame anyone else for wanting a piece of the action. It’s the nature of business.

There are few barriers to entry in the internet marketing game, especially for simple concepts and sites without any fancy programming involved. A one-page website with a list of related affiliate programs is super easy to copy. The difficult part about affiliate marketing isn’t creating the site or finding the affiliates, it’s coming up with the idea for which keywords to target so that people who come to the site are ready to buy. When someone has already done this and goes into detail about how much they’re earning, it is tempting to want to grab a piece of the pie for yourself. Once you have everything set up it really just comes down to who is doing a better job at SEO.

I am happy to talk about most of my websites on this blog but you will notice from time to time that I mention a site without giving the URL or too many details away about the exact topic or revenue stream. The reason I keep them quiet is because they are simple sites and would be very easy to copy. In creating them I did a bit of keyword research, stuck up some simple sites and now I’m hoping for the best. Because anyone could spend an afternoon and replicate one of these sites, I prefer to keep them quiet, at least until they’re at number one in Google with a zillion backlinks.

So far these small, simple websites are based on ideas I have thought of myself and I have no idea if or when they’ll pay off. It would make a lot more sense for me to work on an idea that is already proven so if I stumble onto a website that I know earns money, I will study it, check out the competition and consider launching a copycat site. This isn’t something that’s happened yet, but my eyes are always peeled. If I don’t do it, someone else will.

What do you think? Is it ethical to copy an idea for a website (I’m not talking about copying at site word for word, just about the idea) and launching your own version? If you see a simple site and you know it earns and doesn’t have much competition… is it stupid to ignore it just because someone else got there first?

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So far during my internet exploits I really haven’t known what I’ve been doing most of the time. I just go with my gut, produce sites I enjoy making and hope for the best. Things like link building and keyword research have always sucked the life out of me a bit too much for me to actually spend much time doing them.

Link Build Like a Mo-Fo

I have five completed websites that are doing absolutely nothing for me. They range from about 20 to 60 pages each, they are stacked with keywords, the on-site SEO is pretty good, the topics are potentially lucrative and once I get these babies into Google and ranking well for my terms I think I will see a big jump in my earnings. Unfortunately for me, I will need to build a lot of links to do this. The old days of sticking a link to my new site from my oldest site and seeing instant results are gone and I will need to put a lot more effort into this area. Darn.

Write an Absolute Crapload of Boring Stuff

I have managed to come up with a few keywords by accident that I think will turn into good Google Adsense earners but I need to actually write some articles or websites if I hope to capitalise on this. This part makes my brain hurt.

Stop Talking About It and Do It: Affiliates Marketing

I always say that I need to work at finding affiliates that fit with my sites. I have added a few programs here and there but sort of half-heartedly. Affiliate marketing is where the money is folks and I need to get this in gear. I will need to spend a lot of time not only on finding programs but also on finding ways to make the sales. I also have a travel insurance site that ranks really well and sees some very targeted traffic but it doesn’t do much in the way of affiliate sales. I think with a bit of tweaking I will be able to improve its performance.

Find a Way to Franchise My ‘Stuck In’ Sites

I wrote a post ages ago about starting a network of city guides aimed at backpackers and expat types who are planning to move to a new city for a few months or longer. So far I have four sites on the go (London, Sydney, Beijing, New York) in various levels of completion and with varying levels of traffic and income. I think the sites are useful, but only if there is someone writing for them who really knows their stuff. So far I have been paying writers to pull together content but this isn’t something I can afford to do for much longer. I prefer the idea of a profit-sharing model or even a monthly rental/franchise type fee. I will be working on comin gup with some sort of master plan to move forward with more guides. I have a couple who are interested in writing for my Rio site and will throw a few ideas at them to see what they think.

Position Myself as an Expert on Working Holidays

I know a lot about working holiday visas and have worked abroad in a few countries. I also run the site Working Holiday Info so I think I’m well equipped to take control of the niche and market myself as an expert on the subject. Part of this will involve a massive update of the site as visa rules are changing all the time. The other part will involve a lot of writing, guest posts, research, staying on top of things, making contact with others in this industry and generally pimping myself on social media sites. I’m not sure what will come out of it but the gap year/working holiday sector is huge so it can’t hurt. This will be a huge undertaking but the site needs to be updated anyways so I will start making blog posts as I update and see how things go.

I’m sort of veering away a bit from the ‘do what you love’ mentality I have had for years. I think I have had my eyes opened a lot by Lissie. Seeing how much she is earning now and how she has gone about it has really made me rethink my approach. I’m not going to stop writing about the things I love, but I will add a few profitable but painful-to-write sites into the mix and see how things go.

All of this is going to take a lot of time. I have put a lot of effort into building sites over the past month or so and now I need to do the behind-the-scenes type stuff. I plan on being home in Canada for close to two months (although this week I am off the grid and floating around on a houseboat) and I expect to make some pretty significant strides forward in that time. I’ve put off the hard work long enough and it’s time to get down to business.

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I decided last week to throw down $500 bucks on a custom Wordpress theme for a site that will live on my Wanderstruck.com domain. The main reasons were to get a site that looks good, does exactly what I want behind the scenes, and to get this without having to waste a zillion hours of my time trying to figure out the complexities of Wordpress.

Another reason was to see what the process of hiring someone to do work for me actually invloves and to share my experiences with everyone, and that’s where this post comes in.

• Step 1 - I chatted with Mike, my designer guy and gave him a pretty specific rundown of what I needed the site to do. The design aspect of things wasn’t important at this stage because my main focus is being able to get the site working as I need it to on the back end. He said he could pull it all off and we agreed to go ahead.
• Step 2 - I transferred $250, half of the agreed price, into his Paypal account.
• Step 3 - I asked him to hold off on starting until I could put together a Word file with fairly specific details of how I wanted everything to work. It turns out that his first step was to come up with a design and layout, so I should have focused more on this at the beginning and worried about the other stuff later. I did include a few screenshots of sites I liked the design of, including images of fonts, headers, footers, image borders and stuff like that.
• Step 4 - Mike uploaded his first draft of the design to an area on his website for me to take a look and, well, it wasn’t what I had in mind. It’s unrealistic to expect someone to read my mind, so I visited a bunch of sites I love the look of, took screenshots, opened Photoshop and cut and pasted my way to a site that was more along the lines of what I was after. Given how important getting the look right is to me, I should have been more specific about this part, especially since I already have avision of what I want in my head. Talk about a hard to please customer, eh? Fortunately I am capable of doing a lot of the design myself. Unfortunately I am paying someone else to do it because I want to spend my time on other things but if I’m going to be picky, I guess that’s the price i have to pay.
• Step 5 - Mike took my comments on board and didn’t seem too put out by the fact that I essentially asked him to start over. He told me he is more clear now on what I am after and I am curious to see what he comes up with for draft two.

For me the design is less important than the behind-the-scene mechanics of the site. I can design, I can’t hack Wordpress so that’s where he comes in. It must be difficult designing for me when I have a clear idea of the site in my head. I am open for new ideas of course but the first draft didn’t really do it for me.

It’s been a very interesting process so far and I’m happy to share it with you. I would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences hiring designers or coders and whether it turned out the way you had hoped and how you went about conveying a clear vision for your site to your designer.

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I spent most of the day last Sunday working on some pretty annoying little jobs and fix-ups that have been long overdue. Although I’ve been motivated lately thanks to a serious kick in the pants, the work was pretty dull and my mind was wandering to more interesting things like the Travel Blog Exchange 2009 that was taking place in Chicago that day. I couldn’t get their live video feed to work so I resorted to following the updates on Twitter where loads of people were keeping everyone informed.

Nomadic Matt spoke as part of a panel of guests and people were Tweeting some of the things he had to say. One of the main things he said that struck a chord with me was the idea of being the expert in your chosen niche - of owning it. Be the best in whatever field you choose and people (including advertisers) will search you out, rather than the other way around. It was a nice reminder because this is a goal I had originally had but have since lost sight of.

My intention several years ago when I started my working holidays website was to position myself as an expert in this area. I wanted my site to be a one-stop location for information on all of the visa possiblities for eligible people from English-speaking countries. I had planned to know the stuff inside out, keep on top of updates and be the go-to place for young people looking to work abroad.

Well plans are a great thing but the hard part is seeing them through. I haven’t updated that site since I created it a few years ago. Working holiday visa rules are changing all the time and keeping on top of things will take a committment from me beyond what I have given so far. I also think that it is difficult to position yourself as an expert with a static site. People want to see a face behind the advice. They want to interact and, while I have helped many people by email, I think posting replies to comments is a much better way to engage people.

I think I have a great opportunity to take a running at really owning this niche. My site is ranked number one across Google from several countries for ‘working holidays’ and on top of tha tI get loads of more specific long-tail searches from people looking for specific country information. I also have a bit of experience in this area having travelled twice on the official working holiday visa to New Zealand and Australia. I have also worked in Scotland, Ireland and England on my British passport. Throw in a bit of experience living in a popular destination for English teachers like Beijing and some time spent WWOOFing and I think I’ve got a pretty well-rounded set of experiences to draw from.

This is a pretty lucrative niche and there are plenty of companies out there trying to help the working traveller get a visa, arrange their first few nights, sell information packs, sell memberships to working holiday job boards and much more. So far I have only tapped into Adsense and that’s just plain crazy. Madness!

Positioning myself as an expert in this niche by adding a blog, keeping the site updated and getting myself out there using social media is something I will be working on once I get back to Canada in a couple of weeks and it will be a major part of my ‘I need to start treating this like a business‘ plan. It will be a huge challenge but I think I am already in a very good position with the site I have and I’m looking forward to seeing where I can go with this.

Do you guys think it’s possible these days to ‘own a niche’ given all of the information out there already? Do you think adding a face to a static website is something that adds value for the everyday reader?

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I tried, I really did. I spent about 20 hours over two days with my eyes fixed on that godforsaken Wordpress theme editor page only to find myself back at square one this morning. I have decided to develop a site about backpacking in Africa on my Wanderstruck domain and have lots of ideas, but little know how. This has meant that I’ve flushed some serious time down the toilet while attempting to bring my ideas to fruition.

If I were just going for a standard blog I would be ok. I can do that. But I would much rather the site act less like a blog and more like a guide, with a blog as a small add-on for when I start my travels on the continent next year. I want to use Wordpress as a Content Management System (CMS) for the first time, rather than sticking with HTML like I have with all of my other sites. I have everything clearly laid out and know exactly how I want the site to work but it’s all stuck in my head and I don’t have the skills to get what’s in my head onto the web.

That’s where Mike from Blog Theme Machine (soon to be Made by Guerrilla) comes in. He shot me an email last month after finding my blog on some list of making money online blogs. It was pretty much an unsolicited sales pitch offering a redesign of Nerdy Nomad for $500. Normally I would delete this sort of thing but the email was nicely written and I replied that I didn’t want Nerdy Nomad redesigned, thanks anyways and good luck on your projects. He replied ‘no problem, thanks yadda yadda yadda’ and that was that.

Well after my bouts with extreme frustration over the past couple of days, his email popped into my head and I went to his site to check out his work. Good stuff and $500 seems like a fair price so I emailed him to see if he could make Wordpress do what I want it to do for Wanderstruck and it turns out he can.

After wasting two full days on nothing (I don’t even feel like I learned anything helpful) I think I’m beginning to see the value in spending a bit of money to free up my time for doing the things I’m good at. It will take Mike a fraction of the time to create a much better site than I would be able to make and, more importantly, it will free me up to work on other things. This is the first time I will be spending any significant amount of money on a website, actually. It’s sort of a big step but I’m really excited to see what Mike can come up with. I will write more posts as the creative process begins to try to give an idea of what is involved in having someone else do work for you.

What do you guys think? Is it silly to spend $500 on a custom theme when I could stumble and bumble my way through and make a semi-decent one myself? Or do you think that freeing up my time to do other things makes spending $500 worth it?

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Last year I decided that I wanted to start a blog to keep family, friends and stalkers updated on where I was and what I was doing, without all of the nerdy internet stuff mixed in. I started Wanderstruck with this in mind and put in a good effort for a few months but wasn’t able to keep at it the way I had hoped. Earlier this year I gave up and transferred all of the travel posts over to this blog and as a result, Wanderstruck died. R.I.P.

But I still think the domain name is fantastic and I really want to develop something on there, I’m just not really sure what. Here are my ideas, I would love to know what you think.

Travel Magazine Type Site

While writing about travel in general is something I really like, it’s also something that has been done to death and done well by people like Vagabondish, Nomadic Matt and Matador. I had sort of been thinking about possible niches and the best I could come up with was a site dedicated to super long term budget travellers. People that sell all their crap and just go for a lot longer than a year, with few plans for the future and nothing holding them back. While I think I’ve got a few good articles in me, Im not sure how long I would be able to repeatedly come up with good stuff that has’t already been said. I could attempt to attract contributors but that could end up being a lot more work than I’m willing to take on just now.

Africa Independent Travel Site

At this point I know less than nothing about travelling in Africa. For me it is still a scary, dangerous place and, while I know nowhere is ever as bad as ‘they’ say it is, Africa still scares me a bit. But it also fascinates me and seems to be one of the few places in the world that not a lot is written about as far as independent travel goes. I would love to create a site to fill this void, sort of in a similar style to what Travelfish and has done for parts of Asia. Become an expert on a region and do it really, really well. Africa is obviously huge so I might start small with whichever countries I head to first and go from there. I have zero knowledge to share at this stage but I have all the time in the world, a love of slow travel, a huge amount of interest in the area and am up for a bit of an adventure. This is a project I think I could really get behind.

Sell the Site/Domain Name

I’ve also considered just selling the thing. I don’t know the first thing about selling sites or domain names but one person expressed interest, although I’mnot sure for how much. I have a different and really ambitious project in the pipeline involving programmers and designers and all sorts so maybe taking on another big project will be too much and unloading it would be better.

I’m all ears if anyone has any suggestions or comments on the ideas I have. Let me know what you think.

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When I started my London 2012 Olympics site a few months ago the idea was to keep people informed about how it was doing, new developments, ideas and stuff in order to give people an idea of the things I think about and try to do when I develop a new site. Well it’s time for a little update on what’s been happening with the site.

Content

For the most part the site’s pages have been created and it’s just a matter of filling in the content either as I find time or as more information becomes available to me about things like venues and medal favourites. Adding this content isn’t a huge priority right now but I will be chipping away at it over the next couple of months and hope to be pretty much done by the fall.

Google SERP Rankings

I posted awhile ago that the site was ranking on page two of Google after only a week or two of existing and I was pretty pumped with the results. Unfortunately, it dropped off of the face of the earth shortly after that post. But it made a comeback and is currently getting traffic from Google for such popular search terms as ‘olympic trampoline’ and ‘great britain mens quadruple skulls’. It appeared once again on page two for my targeted keywords and stayed there for a wee while but has vanished again for the moment. I’m working on building one-way inbound links from sites about London, the Olympics or other sporting websites so I’m curious to see what effect this will have and how long it will take. Not that I pay much attention these days to PR, but the site was awarded a PR2 in the recent Google update.

Monetisation

When I started the site my only definite idea for monetisation was Adsense. Pretty lame. During my internet-free days in El Lagartillio I had a few brainwaves on how I could monetise the site more effectively. At both the Athens and Beijing Olympics the food was terrible. Absolute crap. Beyond crappy, actually. It was all chocolate bars, cookies or processed food with loads of packaging and it made me dread the thought of eating inside the venue. Unfortunately, I could never seem to find alternatives outside of the venues. So I’m thinking of offering cheap listings to restaurants along with an info bubble on my Google map to show where it is. Same goes for clubs and pubs… I will develop a page about partying at the Olympics and offer up spots for sale including a section for opening and closing ceremony parties. Will it work? No idea but it’s worth a shot. There are lots of London affiliates that I think could work with the site too and I will start to look into them more once I get home in August.

So that’s where I am so far with the site. I will continue to update on how things progress (or don’t progress) and any new ideas I come up with. As always my ears are open to suggestions so feel free to get in touch with any brainwaves!

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Since I started expanding my website porfolio back in 2005, I have pretty much stuck with the same strategy. My intention has always been to provide websites with good quality content that are actually useful to people. I’ve always taken a lot of time to construct and research them and usually spend quite a lot of time on making them look nice, just for kicks. In short, while making some money is always the ultimate goal, it’s important to me that I also provide useful information in a well prestented way.

But building large, content rich websites isn’t the only way to make a buck online and, up until now, I’ve pretty much ignored all of the other possibilities. After learning how much a fellow web marketer earns with Adsense on one of his simple websites, I decided to see if I could make it work. I’ve done a bit of keyword research in a similar niche but totally different geographical area and came up with a bunch of site ideas and found plenty of available domain names.

I registered one a couple of days ago and after a solid day and a half of work, I’ve got a site that is ready to go live. The site isn’t purely made for Adsense as it actually provides useful information, just not that much of it. The site is small at 20 pages, it’s simple, and the only way I plan to monetise is with Adsense. I will post the URL and give a report on how things are going in six months or so.

My web marketer friend and I both agree that sites can take anywhere from six months to two years to get anywhere and the key is to produce and wait (with a bit of link building thrown in here and there, of course). I’m not expecting much from this site for the next six months to a year or maybe even longer, but when Google starts to warm to it (and they always do) I think it could become a nice little earner with Adsense.

I’m going to create a few more small sites based on keyword research with the same long term goals in mind, get them online and forget about them. I’m in no way going down the ‘100 sites making $1 each a day’ road, but I would eventually like a handful of very small, no maintenance sites to compliment my bigger ones.

My earnings seem to be going down instead of up so it’s time to start exploring some different strategies.

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