Firstly I went on holiday for 2 weeks in Turkey to Hisaronu, if you haven’t been I highly recommend it, it’s quite cheap, very hot and a beautiful place!  I now have a tan to rival David Dickinson!

Secondly I have been very busy trying to build and launch a new website, details will come soon but I am pretty excited about it.  For those of you who know what sites I have I like graphics and teenager based sites.  This is based on a similar principle but for a slightly more mature market.  It is taking up a lot of time but I am quite proud of what I am making so far.

Just before I went away I was contacted by someone about selling another one of my sites.  It is a fairly undeveloped site but with a good name and I originally had big plans for it.  Due to a lack of time I never got round to pursuing it and marketing it properly.  Anyway someone got in touch about buying it and I am closing the deal today for £700 which is pretty good as the site is only a year old.

This is the second site in as many months that I could have sold.  I am beginning to think that buy buying an attractive domain name and putting a simple site up could work well as a flipping opportunity by waiting for buyers as opposed to peddling the sites on digitalpoint or flippa.

Flippa, by the way, is the new website selling service from sitepoint.  Their entire marketplace has been moved to this new site.  It is quite good but, like most sites like this, is full of spam and rubbish.  If you can filter through the rubbish though there are some great websites to buy.  I look on there fairly often to see if I can find a bargain as I am still looking for an established site to buy to add to my portfolio.

Related posts:

1. Quick Update
2. My aims – Update

One of my sites is a graphics site, serving up graphics to the masses of teens who love that kind of stuff.  It works very well and has some clever SEO stuff up its sleeve that I will probably go into on this blog at some point.  It earns pretty well too, it earnt well over $2,500 in the past year and that is taking into account an explosion I had last Christmas due to implementing adsense link units so this year it should do even better.

I received an email from someone last week asking if I would like to sell the site.  Interested in knowing more I responded asking him to make me an offer.  He offered $3,500 blind without even knowing any of the stats.  I presume he guessed at my traffic / income levels by how well I ranked in the SERPs for various difficult terms.

So what did I do?

I said no… but why?

Firstly I believe the site will, over the next year, earn the amount offered, but it also has the chance to earn more.  Plus I will be earning that amount every year unless something goes wrong.

Secondly the site has some very special SEO properties that I can leverage to help new sites I make.  Note I have not done this for my adsense challenge as I thought it would be cheating.

The best thing about it? Exactly 1 year ago someone offered to by the site off me for $400 and I almost said yes! It just goes to show how much difference 1 year can make to a site’s value and income.

Has anyone here sold a site (or had an offer on their site) for a fair bit of cash?

Related posts:

1. Exploring the earning power of a niche site
2. Starting your niche site

The image below is a partial screenshot of my Adsense earnings yesterday (for just two of my sites) . Site 1 gets a lot of hits and clicks, but doesn’t earn that much as it is in a low paying niche, Site 2 is a site that I haven’t promoted much and so only gets 50 hits a day and 3 clicks a day, but earnt $3.50 which is a massive difference to Site 1!

If Site 2 had as much traffic as Site 1 then I would be laughing all the way to the bank, sadly it doesn’t and probably never will.  But the point still holds true, choosing a well paying niche is paramount to your earning success!

Related posts:

1. Starting your niche site
2. Do you own a $3,500 site?
3. Choosing your niche and keywords

If you haven’t already signed up to Adsblacklist do the following:

1. Firstly goto Adsblacklist and register an account.
2. Once you have registered click on My Account.
3. Now click Add New Domain and add your domains

If you have already signed up and added your domains then you need to generate a list of poor quality sites:

1. Goto Generate Filter List
2. Drag and select the domains you display Adsense on to the box on the right
3. Select MFA (Made for Adsense) and LCPC (Low Cost Per Click)
4. Click generate!

Now we have a list of sites that notoriously pay low for Adsense clicks we now need to add this to

1. Goto your Adsense account
2. Click Adsense Setup then Competetive ad filter
3. Paste the list generated from AdsBlacklist into this page and then Save

Now over the next day or so the advertised sites will be blocked from showing on your site and hopefully you will see an increase in earnings.  Please let me know if anyone uses this and sees an improvement!

Related posts:

1. Adsblacklist and adsense competitive ad filter, does it work?
2. Increase your profits with Adsense link units
3. Adsense blacklist does work!

A week ago I posted my eCPM for a particular site as $2.01 for its previous week.  As of today the last 7 days (since using adsense blacklist) has increased to  $2.29 for that site.  For those of you not good with maths that’s about a 15% increase, which is good by anyone’s standards!

What I never did, and should have, was to test it also across all my sites as the competetive ad filter works across all your sites indiscriminantly.  I did notice that all my sites did appear to earn a little more too.

So all in all a good test, and a good thing to do, I encourage other peope to test if it works for them and let me know how they get on!

In closing, I think it may well be worth while updating this list quite often (say once a month??) as new MFA sites come up quite often so you want your list to be up to date.

Related posts:

1. Adsblacklist and adsense competitive ad filter, does it work?
2. Tutorial: Using AdsBlacklist to increase your Adsense eCPM
3. Increase your profits with Adsense link units

The thing is, motivating yourself to work on websites in your spare time is really hard.  You have many distractions, such as your spouse, children, Xbox, TV and even house work.  Many people also say they just haven’t got the time.  This is not true, they do have the time, they just have to sacrifice watching telly quite as much.

You may question that motivation isn’t the biggest factor and that perhaps intelligence, skill or experience is.  I beg to differ, as all three can be improved immensely with enough motivation.  To put this point into context my current biggest earner is a graphics website, monetized with adsense.  An old friend of mine copied my success and is ranking just below me for a top search term.  I went to Uni and have a degree in Software Engineering and have many years experience on the Internet, he is a window cleaner.  BUT, and this is a big but, he had enough motivation to get himself in that position, which is commendable.

You only have to look at the likes of Jeremey Shoemaker who, at the start of his web career, was broke and made sites out of necessity (his motivation), and now he is extremely successful and rich.

Now, when someone asks me the question of “How do I make money online” I usually tell them that it’s all about motivation.  Which I think is true.