Half Way Through The Month

It’s a little over half way through the month. I am not liking how things are going but then again when things run slowly in the first half of the month I push harder to make the second half better. Today I want to go over a few things. May goals, a few things added to the “to do list” this week, and how the income is coming along this month. First let’s get into this month’s goals. I want to complete 10k words of new content, revamp one of my sites, rank on the first page for 5 keywords, and complete the follow ups for the newsletter using aweber for my new site.

So far I have done over 6k words of new content. So half way through the month I am over half way done with goal number one. I am really happy about this because I got into the mood of not writing my own poker content. Now that I am writing again, I really feel bad about selling the content. The articles are so good I want to place them on my site for my players to benefit from them. However, I need the money to fund my project. I will touch more on the income later. Some of the articles I do keep for myself if I feel it’s more beneficial to place the article on my site. I also use some of the articles for article marketing if I don’t like the way it came out or if it’s shorter than 400 words.

Now goal number two is a little more work than just writing. This site I plan on changing from a poker community into a online poker news site with a little twist. I have taken off the dead poker forum, change some of the sidebars with an awesome wordpress plugin, and since I took off the forum where the poker commercials was published. I am going to add a poker commercials section. I still have to pay for the reviews, a new design, and logo as well as hire a poker news writer. The only problem with this project is funding. I told myself this project will only be funded by its income. So far, it has been producing from 2 online poker rooms and direct ad sales. However, I played poker with some of the funds and lost. It was during my downswing. So this project will be fund by my poker winnings since things have turned around and any direct ads I sell on it for now on.

Goal number three, this goal is bothering me a bit. I 301 redirected my test site which had a nice amount of backlinks and 301 redirect 3 mini sites to the new site. At first it seem google was taking forever and day to update the search results with the new site. Then it updated, I was happy until I notice some rankings dropped and others complete disappeared! So I began working on getting some of my rankings back by building backlinks for them but the more backlinks I built the more they dropped so I stop building backlinks for awhile. The rankings are coming back.  Then I read on PAL a lot of people are having all types of problems with google search results. So I guess I will have to ride the wave until things claim down. Until then, I am 1 out of 5. Rank for my own domain name. Not something I am happy about since that is pretty damn easy to do.

My final goal of the month, finish the follow up emails for the newsletter. I did this in the first week of the month. It took a lot of thinking and writing but I got it done. I should count the writing in the new word count for goal number one but I am not going to do that. I did 14 follow up emails including the welcome email. If the newsletter can not convert a player into a real money player producing rake each month I don’t know what will. Also I have some follow up emails that promote some poker tools that such bring in some nice sells as well. Once I get some training videos on the site I will be adding those to the follow up emails as well. By the time I am done with this newsletter it will have a ton of follow up emails. I will never have to send out a promotional email. We all know I will anyway.

Things I added to this months to do list. Create a facebook fan page for the new site, create a twitter page for the new site, and this one can wait until later maybe next month but it’s on the to do list. Hire someone to answer questions on Yahoo Answers. Personally, I think outsourcing this is best. It will give me time to complete other things.

The break down of income and what needs to be done. This month I said, I was not going to focus on direct ad selling. So far this month, I must say I only made a few comments this month in my sales threads. A few people contacted me but no deals. I have been focus on selling articles though. I stocked myself this one though. When it comes to something hard to make money. I normally run back to what I know best if I don’t see results fast enough. However, that’s not the case this month. I am really replacing my direct ad sells income with article writing. I have a few problems with this though.

1. Coming up with things to write about.
2. Getting over the feeling of keeping the article.
3. Knowing I will have to produce 50 articles to make $1,000

Now there is an up side to writing articles over selling direct ads. At first I didn’t even think of this but after talking with a friend. He help me realize a couple of benefits to writing articles than selling direct ads.

1. I only have to write 20 articles to replace my $400 a month income from selling direct ads
2. I will have less outbound links from my site. Which is always a good thing. I rather do internal linking.

As you can see there are good and bad things about selling articles than selling direct ads. I don’t know if I can write 50 articles a month plus content for my own sites. However, I have no problem producing 20 articles a month for $400+.

What will I do with the income? Here’s a break down of what will go where. All direct ads sold on my soon to be poker news site as well as some of my poker winnings will be reinvested there via producing content and hiring a poker news writer. All direct ads sold on my poker blog will be used for producing content and SEO for my new site. All articles sold will go towards producing content, design work, and SEO for my new site.

Summary
In my opinion, I done very little work in the first 2 weeks of this month and need to really pump out new content this second half. I only wrote 9 articles to sell this month so far. 11 more needed to completely replace my direct ad sells income for this month. Who knows if I will complete it. I been having writers block a lot lately. I think I am still having troubles getting back into the writing groove. Although, I always seem to crank out 1 or 2 articles around a long poker session. The twitter and facebook pages will be completed this week. However, I will have to find out the cost of a custom design for the facebook fan page landing page. If that make sense to you. I will wait on getting though. There are far more important things need to be done on the new site.

Here’s a little self promotion for my articles sales thread. Support my project and add new content to your site by buying an article or two maybe all of them. Until next time, work hard and work smart.