A Small Portfolio - Spy Gadgets, Fashion Retailers and the iPod Touch

So that you can see where my thinking and ideas lie, here is a list of my websites that I hope to do well from. I’ve explained the concept of the site, where I expect to see the income stream coming from and what I’ve tried. If you have any ideas for the sites below, I’ll be more than happy to hear them!

Power Dosh

I’m not expecting to earn a fortune from this site really, as I expect to gain more by sharing experiences and ideas. I’ve already had feedback on ideas I’ve mentioned on the site, which will definitely help me in the long term. I have about 10-20 daily RSS readers currently, but the feedburner statistics show there is a steady increase over time. I’m getting about 30 visitors a day, but with just 10% of my traffic coming from search engines, which is probably why my visitor and RSS reader counts are so low.

To increase my readership, I need to do more in the blogging world to boost this really. Perhaps I could get more involved with blog article competitions. However, since PowerDosh does not represent a direct revenue stream, I consider it a low priority and just something I do for fun.

Most recently, I have just massively reduced the number of Adsense blocks on the site to make the blog more readable. This was based on the advice of someone doing a review of PowerDosh.

Spy Gadgets

This is one of my latest experiments in a small site that is targeting just UK traffic for a popular search term. The site has only just gone live, and tackles topics such as spy cameras, location tracking, computer surveillance and other such topics. I decided to exploit what knowledge I already had to create a nice niche site.

Gucci Bags

This is my first mini site, and it’s doing surprisingly well. I’m seeing earnings of about $0.30 per day, and I’ve been recommended to use Amazon Associates with Gucci Products to boost my earnings. I’m doubtful that this will help, but am willing to give it a go. Given my expenditure with this site (domain, article and name renewal costs), I expect it to be profitable in about 6 months. This site is perfectly on track, and I’m happy with the progress. I’m also brainstorming ideas to make the site more useful, and less of a mini site.

iPod Touch Tricks

This was an acquisition that I made in January, and things looked promising. It was making around $100 per month exploiting WidgetBucks, and I bought the site for $300. However, I applied to WidgetBucks and got rejected (because I’m a UK resident?), but their email was pathetic and gave no clue to the reason why I was turned down.

iPod Touch Tricks is quite a disappointment and I had hoped it would be doing better than it is. The site has a solid traffic base using the search term “ipod Touch Tricks” with plenty of users leaving comments. With traffic of 600-700 visitors per day, which seems to be increasing thanks to more regular website updates, I must be able to exploit it somehow. I got the site with just 40 or so RSS readers, and have since increased that to over 120 daily RSS readers.

Amazon Associates are not doing me any favours, so I might need to consider PPM programmes. Profits from Google Adsense are pathetic, and barely reach $0.70 a day. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated on this one.

Bux.to Payments

This is a mini-tool that I wrote that estimates the payment day for using the Paid-To-Click site Bux.to. On the forums, it’s very common to see questions asking when they’ll get paid, which is 60 business days for a standard account. 60 business days does not mean 60 calendar days, so I wrote a payment calculator to work out exact days including holidays. The calculator has been very popular with the admins in the forum as it saves them lots of effort. I regularly get 600+ visitors a day.

My costs were simply for the domain and my time to write the script. In terms of earnings, I’m experimenting with the Cash Master product, which I get $22 per sale. I’ve only had 2 sales, but ClickBank don’t pay unless I reach $100 or more from several different credit cards. ClickBank also remove money from the account if you get no sales, so I need a stream of purchases really. The referral programs for AlertPay and Wordlinx are not great and are unlikely to give me much for a few months if anything. I started playing with Adbrite as that gives me PPM earnings, as well as PPC. PPM networks are all very new to me though.