Return of Project X

This is a little off topic but it looks like Bobby (aka Chemo) has decided to resume development of his Project X shopping cart system. Hopefully within a couple months we will see a first release as I don't think I can stand to develop another OSC-based site.

Note to self

I had my first deslisted domain a couple days ago. It originally had a very low CTR (about 3-5%) but was indexed and ranking well in the major SE's. In an attempt to raise the CTR I changed the template to a more ad-focused one (read spammy). While the CTR did get up around 15% after the change, it got delisted about 2 weeks after the change. I'm convinced (although one can never be too sure) that since it was a techie site someone reported it to the SE's.

Moral of the story: When you create a scrapper site in a somewhat tech-savvy niche don't use a spammy template.

Lesson learned.

Competing with yourself

Last night while trying to sleep I was thinking about my best earning site. As I don't think there's much I can do to make it a better performer I thought why not create a second (or even third) site using the same keywords.

While I don't know if it's a good idea to start competing with yourself, it may turn out to be good plan of action for a couple reasons. Since I assume my current site will eventually get deindexed having a backup site in the same niche may keep the $$ coming in. Also since I can vary the keywords and content slightly from my current site I may start getting hits from search terms that I may be missing out on.

There may be some downsides as well, with the first one coming to mind as possible duplicate content, and of course, having several sites competing for the same keywords.

Either way I guess there's really only one way to find out. If it works out well I'll write about it again in a month or two.

Nifty tool for Mac

While writing a PHP script to extract text from a webpage I came across a cool tool from Metafy called Anthracite. While there are too many features to list here, in a nutshell what it does is let you mine webpages' content.

As an example of what it can be used for I wrote a quick "script" to extract the content section of an article from ArticleCity, remove all html tags and classes, split up the paragraphs and titles, then apply my own html formatting and spit out a text file of the article.

The real beauty of it is that it is scriptable, meaning all I have to do is browse to the page I want to scrape with my webbrowser (safari), click a button and in about 5 seconds I have a copy of the article on my computer ready to be used with my page generation software.

Another nice use for it is as a keyword scraper. By using the integrated Google API module I can mine thousands of keywords from Google by parsing the meta tags of the sites returned for my main keyword, usually only taking a couple of minutes.

While the software does cost some $$ there is a 2 week trial available. If you're on a Mac and know a bit of HTML you should download and give it whirl. I think you'll be quite pleased with the results it can give you.

Number of ad blocks

It may just be me but I've noticed lately that pages with fewer ad-blocks seem to perform much better than those with the max. Currently my best performers have only one ad block and one link unit.

Obvioulsly this is not concrete but my results are from different sites in the same niche so if you think you should be getting more per click you might want to try reducing the number of ad blocks on your pages.

April Roundup

April was my best month so far totaling $156 and change which is slightly more than double last months total. In fact I made more in April than all of my previous months combined (Dec-Mar) which makes me think I'm going to have to step up the site building if I'm going to increase my earnings again in May.