Update

Just a quick update. I've been slowly but surely adding more links. Real life has kept me from adding any content but I've been raking in revenue from various sources, which is pretty sweet.

Sucess

So I have finally broken even with my first site. My goal was to at least earn enough to pay for hosting and lately I did just that. Lately I've been getting around twice my hosting costs a month, but it averages out to a little over hosting so far.

Hopefully if the current levels of earning remain constant I'll be able to pull a profit before the 1 year mark.

Goal: Break Even
Time Taken: 8 months

Advertising

So far I've only been using Adsense as a means of advertising. Which on one hand is nice, since it's very easy, relatively unobtrusive and so far has been delivering a decent level of return.

However, after doing some research and seeing how much it is to get a simple text link on some sites, that other means might be much more lucrative. Since even for PR3 or 4 sites, a link can cost anywhere from $5-50 a month, that can easily beat out adsense revenue if you don't have a ton of traffic. Even $5 a month would considerably increase my revenues for the site.

I'll continue to do research and see what I find.

Losing Battle

Sometimes is seems like this whole SEO business is losing battle. If you don't keep trying to get inlinks than you're quite likely to see yourself dropping in rankings. After getting up to a good position, I've seen myself dropping for the past couple weeks. Now I'm off the first page of rankings for my major keyword, despite adding some more links.

Now I must throw myself back into the battle and get that good ranking back!

Hmm

So after sinking at bit in my google listing (to #8 or 9), I've seen a significant drop in revenues, which is frustrating. I still send out some cold-call link exchange requests to try and up my rankings, but they haven't been as successful as they had been. I'm trying to research some other methods/means of getting backlinks. We'll see how it goes.

I've picked up a few new domains and are slowly populating them with content. Other life things keep me from devoting a large section of time to them, but they'll get there eventually.

No more chapters

After apparently getting out of the sandbox, I've had much better results with my ranking and traffic. Of course, it's never settled and it bounces around plenty, but I'm relatively happy with it. At this rate the site should at least cover my hosting and other input costs, make even make a tiny profit.

Now that I've tasted a bit of success, perhaps its time to try my luck again. Since my hosting is already paid for (and that's the majority of my costs), adding more sites is a no brainer. Even if they don't reach the same level as my primary site, whatever they make will essentially be profit, plus I can use them to link back to my primary site and increase it's PR.

So I'm in the process of picking up some more domain names and building sites around them. We'll see how it goes.

Chapter 8: Some Success

So after taking some time off from the site to do things like, oh you know, not fail out of college I have some success. All of a sudden, I'm on the first page of my main keyword, up from around page 15. What did I do? Nothing. So it seems that once my site got old enough it got out of the sandbox and up on the listings.

We'll see how plays out.