1) Get into another niche completely.
2) Check out google adsense and earn a little bit each month.
3) Promote an ebook or make some money via clickbank.
4) Pay per lead programs can be a nice little extra revenue stream.
5) Partner with other sites as joint ventures.

I know, these are not breaking news ideas.  But think about where your money is coming from and how you can expand that.  Turn the $2000 per month from one or two programs into $3000 a month spread across 5-10 different revenue streams.  In the end, you will be much more comfortable with your online business plan.

How am I taking action on this myself?  Currently I make 50% of my money from Google Adsense, 40% from private advertisements and 10% from Affiliate marketing.  This is solely in the sports and celebrity niches.  The first thing I’m going to do is branch out into one more industry – gambling.  Secondly, I plan to promote affiliate programs heavily and make that more like 25%-50% of my income.  Sportsbooks, casinos and poker rooms pay massive amounts of revenue sharing to promote their sites.  I also plan to heavily incorporate email marketing into my bag of tricks.  I’ve been building lists over the years but never really did anything with those lists.  IF I can manage another few hundred a month via email marketing, thats good.  I took the step and subscribed to aweber.com to manage all my email lists.  This is a little pricey, but without taking that step I know I’d sit on my hands again and do nothing.  So now it’s on.

What are you doing to bring in your income in 2009?  Anything different?

1. Use the Google services consistently among all sites. I need to verify EVERY site I have in Google Webmaster Tools along with adding a sitemap.  Sitemaps are very important and it’s something I have not done for many sites as of now.  Make sure the Google Analytics code is installed properly on all sites.  Attempt to use Google Ad Manager for some sites.
2. Complete development of all USN team sites.  In 2008 I got domain names and headers done for all NBA, MLB and NFL team sites.  Now I need to finalize the design, monetize them, add content, and bring in at least $1 revenue from every single site in 2009.
3. Launch the UGambleNetwork.com sites.  This process has begun and I just need to keep the ball moving here.
4. Move knupNET.com from 278 into the top 150 on http://www.digitalproductreporter.com/make_money_online/
5. Get PR boosted.   I currently only have PR on 38 of my 260 domains/sites.  This needs to be increased.  PR goals at the end of 2009 are.  100 sites with PR1 or higher.  20 sites with PR3 or higher.  Sound easy?  Ha, not so much.
6. Profit Goals (Revenue – Expenses).  In 2008 I made nearly $3k in profit.  I plan to triple this in 2009.  Still not a ton compared to some of you, but my goal is $10,000 in pure profit from my sites in 2009.  To break that down, that is $833 profit each month.  Yikes!
7. Properly use my partners, resources and consultants.  I need to contract out more work.  You have to spend money to make money.  Content writing is going to be the big thing this year that I contract out.  I also need to get some of my “partners” involved a little more heavily.
8. Attend at least one Webmaster conference.  Just one please.

So that’s enough goals for now.  Time to get to work.  What are your goals for 2009?

Soon, I will talk about 2008 from my MMO perspective and then also discuss some 2009 goals that I have in mind.  In the meantime – would love to hear from you readers.  What is new with you?  What have I missed?  Can I help you with anything?

Hope everyone had a great holiday!

I have 25-50 domains out there that are just “waiting” for a website to be built on. I have no time to “website flip” these days and I’m dreaming if I think I’ll find the time to develop these.  So why let them sit there and decay?  It is time to get rid of some of this excess and really focus on a few niche’s that I am interested in.  For instance, Sports, celebrities and gambling sites.  That is my passion.  After that – all other sites in my portfolio MUST have an “admin” taking care of them or they will go bye-bye.

I’m going to be posting several domain/site sales up at Digital Point over the next couple days so I’ll let you all know how that turns out.

Recently I’ve been trying to diversify my revenue streams a bit. As most of you might know, Google Adsense seems to be down a bit. Earnings per click are just not what they once were. It’s frustrating yet exciting because I am not hesitating to pull the plug on Adsense on a few sites and replace those ads with something else. The latest successful programs have been MaxBounty and NeverblueAds. Both of these affiliate programs offer a wide variety of things ranging from Pay per sale and Pay per lead items. For some of my sites that have a young demographic I love to use the Pay per lead strategy as it typically just takes a few clicks. Young people love to click things! If I’m promoting offers on a site that has a little older more mature audiance I’ll opt for the Pay per sale programs.

I’ve been using NeverblueAds for a few months now and I’m proud to say that it is increasing every month. If you haven’t tried it yet – TRY IT. It’s a breeze to sign up and there are some fun offers to promote. MaxBounty just jumped on the scene recently and I joined up but hadn’t done a thing with them til this month. I finally chose a couple items to promote and WHAM – conversions. Seems like a slick little affiliate program as well. I challenge all of you webmasters to really think about how you are earning money. Is there some other ways you might be able to earn a few extra bucks? Sign up at NeverblueAds and MaxBounty and start rolling. As always, I’m here to help if you have any questions or comments.

One final thought… I had never done a lot of email marketing. Just hadn’t for some reason. This is an area that I will be diving into very soon. Both MaxBounty and NeverblueAds have excellent email creatives to promote as well. I’ll let you all know how that goes.

• Should I sell or buy links? You here all the time – don’t sell links on your site or Google will ban you.
• Be careful not to “click” your own ad or your adsense account will be deleted.
• Should I really spend 5 hours developing this site? Will it pay off?
• I see a site for sale at a decent price – do I take it at BIN or take my chances and make a lower bid for it? Knowing that someone else can swoop it up at BIN.
• When I want to find a great internet marketing resource I’ll head out to a “top list” or a “review” site similar to 45n5.com to find some of the top blogs in the industry. When I’m looking for the best and safest place to wager a little money, all I do is head over to a place like ixgames.com for some great Online casino reviews.

These are all prime examples of why this industry is kinda like gambling. You are risking your time and sometimes your money in hopes that your next site will “make it big“. Do any of you feel this way sometimes? Or do you just do the “sure things” all the time?

I especially enjoy when guys like Zac and Shoemoney show a little more detail.  I mean you hear all this stuff about them making bagillions of dollars and that they are super affiliates, etc… But to see it for yourself is a good thing!  I can’t wait to make it to a conference in the near future and meet some people like this.  Get some real first hand knowledge and pick their brains a bit 

I started to show all my earnings here at knupNET a few months back, but found it kinda worthless.  First of all I’m not making thousands of dollars a month (just hundreds).  I think my time is a little better spent monetizing my network than showing what I made last month.  I’ll try to give an update every few months but the every month update is done for.

So what do you think?  Do you like seeing peoples proof of profit?  Do you believe them?  Should they just keep it to themselves or are they trying to help?

In a previous post I expanded on my Make Money Online strategy and how I am building an empire of sites in the knupNET network. I’d like to go a little deeper now and show how I broke these sites out.

I’ve set up 6 mini networks within the knupNET network. Every site I develop fits into one of these networks. I track stats for each site individually but also for these networks as a whole. This will be valuable in the future if I ever want to sell a mini-network or even for selling advertising at a network level (all sites in a network). So here are the mini-networks that make up my empre:

1. Celebrity Club Network – This is exactly what it sounds like. I create a celebrity fan club site/blog for a number celebrities. These sites all use WordPress. I then find a fan/blogger to be the admin of this site. If I can’t find someone, I will try to at least keep a weekly article out on the site. A few sites I do auto feeds just to dump news there. I monetize the sites with adsense to start. The twist on these sites is that they are “Clubs”. The ultimate goal of each site is to actual get big enough to have a meetup with that celebrity. We make it clear that this may never happen – but it could. You never know. A few of them, RascalFlattsClub.com, AlbertPujolsClub.com and ClubJonas.com have actually gotten pretty big in a small amount of time.
2. U Sports Network - I’m a sucker for sports sites. Sports is my passion. I found myself owning and operating a vast array of sports sites. From general forums, to team fan sites, to you name it. I wanted to accomplish two things with the U Sports Network. a) To organize these sites under one similar network. b) To reach my goal of owning a site for every professional team. In the near future I’m going to go on a hunt for bloggers that are wanting to come under the U Sports Network with their site. Basically, they operate the site. And I host it, get the domain and place ads on it. Of course we’ll have profit splitting options and all that for the blog admins. Very exciting future for this mini-network.
3. Celeb Fan Zone - As I talked about earlier, the Celebrity Club Network is more fan club blogs. The Celeb Fan Zone is for “static” celebrity fansites. I own a number of these. They don’t change, they don’t get updated. They just have a decent look to them, a bio, pictures, etc… Monetized with adsense. The hope is to build links and enough traffic to earn a few bucks per site. I have not spent a lot of time on this mini-network yet.
4. Niche Content Network – So this little network is for any focused “niche” related site. Kinda like the CCN sites, I want to write or have someone write 10-20 unique content articles per site. With a decent look to the site, this should generate enough search engine traffic to earn some Adsense money. These aren’t the prettiest sites as they are highly optimized for adsense clicks. Again, I haven’t written a lot for these yet. But for the couple I have started, I am seeing results. So soon enough I’ll put together a plan to get these network sites rolling again.
5. knupHOST – I rent a dedicated server. Often times I’ll have friends or acquaintances ask me if I can help them get a website going. So, I created a very small hosting website/company. I only host about 5-10 outside websites but it brings in a little yearly income. I list these sites here and they fall under this mini-network. I have no right to monetize these sites as I don’t own them. But my money comes from their monthly/yearly hosting fees they pay.
6. knupNET – And finally knupNET gets the rest. It’s kind of the catch all bucket. For blogs/sites that I own that really don’t fit in any of these other buckets.

So as you can see, I’m an organizational freak. I love things organized. You might think it’s a bit overkill to have all of these mini-networks. But it sure helps me stay sane. And it’s kind of motivating to see an entire “network” grow. I watch stats on a network wide and individual site level using Google Analytics. Tracking expenses and earnings is another nightmare (errr, fun) task. I have a huge spreadsheet that I track every expense and every revenue stream for each site. I want to know if a site is not profiting over the year. That means I either need to do some more work on it, or throw in the towel on that site. It’s all a big challenge but I truly think I’m on my way to a web empire. Any questions?

I came to the realization about 6 months ago that it was going to be nearly impossible (or take some good luck) to get that one huge site that makes me $2000-$3000 a month.   And that is my dream, and everyones dream, to make a full time income on the web. I had always liked creating sites in other niches or of other topics, and typically found that it was pretty simple to get them off the ground, monetize them, and make $5-$10 a month off a site.  So I changed my strategy.

I decided that I was going to build a huge empire of websites.  I am not spending a ton of time/money on any one site, but spending a lot of time/money on the entire network as a whole.  The investment comes up front.  I bought a dedicated server to host all my sites and all the domains are really the only expense that comes with it.  Monetizing them with adsense at first, but as you know, Adsense isn’t the best for some sites so usually this is just temporary.  After a few months of a site being live, I’ll review the traffic a bit and make sure it’s off and running.  Then I’ll spend a little more time really thinking about how to monetize it for that traffic base.  Stick with Adsense?  Sell private ads?  Affiliate ads?

Now obviously the huge key to all of this is content!!! How in the world do you manage to get content on 100+ sites and keep it current?  The answer:  YOU don’t.  This is where internet relationships come in.  Find bloggers that are passionate about a subject and work out partnership deals with them.  Some people will write just because they want to be a so-called “expert” in that field.  And some will want to actually split any profits with you.  But that is fine!  As I like to say, “Half of something is better than all of nothing.”

Well, this is all a bunch of rambling – but I’m going to wait and go into more detail in another post.  I’ll discuss how I’ve moved from just a bunch of random sites to putting them all in their own “network”.

So – as Mark asked – is it easier to make  a bunch off one site?  Or a little off a bunch of sites?  You know my strategy… What is yours?

• ChampionsCentral.com – I never updated this. It didn’t produce a lot of income either. Time for a new owner. Got $19 for it.
• DailyRoulette.com – Never even developed it and just registered it back in October.  Put a little Roulette script there for the buyer. Sold for $15.
• KidLaughs.com – I had high hopes for this site. But again, time was not available to keep it up to date. Got a decent return on it of $49.
• LinkBidding.com – I struggled with if I should sell this or not.  It has been producing  $10 or so a month for the last year.  I liked the concept and the domain but decided it was time to get a little return on it.  Sold it for $139.
• SudokuStump.com – Just registered in October and took like 2 hours to put up a script wrapped in Adsense.  Sold 3 months later for $29.

The 2 sites that did not sell were HangmanFan.com and Wisdoo.com – I guess I’ll try again soon 

p.s. – I purposely did not link up the domains as I don’t own these anymore and I’m not sure what the buyer put on the other end now.