just saw it now.great thread and best of luck for your and your wife's surgery.hope all goes well and you are back in action with full life instead of the half life you are living now.good luck buddy.
Challenges on the way - 1. Domain names - It is very important to do your research on the domain name and pick the right one. I changed my domain name in between because the first name did not signify anything. It had been a spur of the moment decision to buy it. I changed it couple weeks down the line because I was not happy with the name. It was a bit frustrating, but everything was in place in a week. Still, lost a week in the mess. 2. Revenue temptation - From day 1, when I saw the first visitor coming from Google, I was tempted to place adsense ads on the blog. It was very difficult to contain this temptation, but I somehow managed it till last week. I now have placed 1 blocks of adsense ad and it is averaging $1-2/day. I had initially planned to integrate ads after 3 months, but ended up doing it after 1.5 months, half the intended duration. I was also looking for affiliate programs to sign up so I could plaster some banners. I am glad I found nothing interesting. 3. Link Building - From the beginning, I was tempted to buy one of the 400-500 guaranteed directory submission service here in the forum. It was the temptation to build links aggressively and rank faster(and die faster). In the past I have picked up 500 guaranteed directory links package and got burnt. One of my sites was featured in front page of Google for a few days and then stripped off. Its been over 3 months now and no sign of it in Google. I am damn sure it's triggered the spam filters. Definitely a bad bargain, keeping in mind that, the said site had 2 keywords bringing in 46,000+visitors a month. Content creation - I have been having this urge to stuff the niche sites with lots of content at once and then forget about them for sometime. This wasn't in the plan at all. I wanted to add 1 article per day for the next 1 year consistently so the network builds in a slow and steady fashion. Fortunately, this is what I have been doing so far. The fear of breaking rules is always there in the back of the mind. So far, I haven't done any major mistakes. Everything has been smooth, except for the transition to the new domain, which is also fine now. It amazes me how, in spite of knowing the golden rules, we still fall for temptation. Hope this is serves as a lesson for all of us who plan to take similar paths to financial freedom.
I dont think a week wil matter u at the pace u working now i am sure that u wil get past ur goal before time and this one week lost wont matter at all.... i am damn sure abt it Its just the normal thing to do everyone is tempted by the potential earnings that could be bought by it.....atleast u are better than me i thought wen starting my blog that i will place ads only after maybe 1-2 month but ended up putting ads just after 1 week..... I think u did control ur urge and waited this long.....congrates and hope u complete ur goal before time....
Question: Has any of your sites been accepted to botw.org? Have you submitted to lii.org and dmoz.org? Probably though this phase should come after you have built the pages to a certain degree of good quality, as both are very strict.
JohnSon, I haven't submitted to BOTW. I had planned to, then decided to wait. I will submit after couple months. DMOZ and LII will come after 6 months. No point submitting now. I may buy a Yahoo submission later too.
UPDATE I now have content ready till the end of 2008. Time for a bit of rest and sleep. The past 1.5 months have been damn hectic and I have hardly slept more than a few hours everyday, including Sundays.
With this much progress in such a short time frame, a well deserved rest sounds good! Keep up the good work !!
LOL yea, so I am gonna take sometime off this week. The contents will be auto-published using Wordpress time stamp feature. Thanks anyways.
Hey what are your current earnings at now? Do you plan to earn strictly from adsense, or sell links too?
That's great. I am willing to do make a plan like this, too. And I am probably going to start after this month may be? I've looked at JimKarter's link building strategy and I'd be possibly following it with some of my plans. Hopefully, after a year or so, we'll be earning great money from AdSense. And by the way - I'd recommend you to digg the pages as they'll help you in getting indexed faster.