Bob Schmuck

The outcome of the Gameoftheday.net experiment wasn’t as successful as expected however it still has a positive income since the redesign in January 2007. If you would like to read the first post of this experiment, check out Redesigning - Gameoftheday.net.

Financial Statement
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Income: $199.57

Expenses:
- $10.00, Domain
- $20.00, Successful Advertisement
- $1.00, Link exchange request on sitepoint.com
- $97.27, Failed Advertisement

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Cash Flow: $71.30
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So far, in 10 months, gameoftheday.net has earned 230% back on its initial investment.

Today, I received my first affiliate check for $53.15 from Commission Junction. It’s a small amount… I know but it’s a start. The check was from one of my information sites that has a small online store, selling targeted products. The plan is to use this money to fund my first full affiliate site. I’m very excited because I’ve been reading and learning about developing an affiliate site and already have the design of my new affiliate site done. My wife just looked at the design and approved it. With the design done I will be buying the logo and sending the article topics to my writer. The site should be up and running some time next week.

I’m all about having leverage against my competition. My leverage on this site is having my other related information sites linking to my affiliate site driving targeted traffic.

How am I going to spend it?
The following is my plan on how I’ll be investing the money in to my new Affiliate site.

1. $3.19, .info domain
2. $14.00, Three articles
3. $3.00, Logo
4. $7.00, Directory Submission
5. $25.00, 5 one way permanent links

Seeing that I’ve never developed an affiliate site before, I have no idea how long it will take to get my initial investment back. My hope is to get it back in no longer than 2 months.

Are you wondering what am I talking about? Are you saying Thoof… What about it! Thoof is a Personalized News site that provides you with information based on your preferences. It differs from Digg by showing stories/websites based on your individual interest instead of everyone else’s. It has a great color code feature for searched stories:

• Blue: New story
• Green: New story however you haven’t read it yet.
• Grey: Read story

Some of the other features on Thoof are your customized favorites, history, recent activity, and tag streams. You probable already know what the first three are but wondering what tag streams are. Tag streams lets you select and customize keywords and only shows related stories. I really like this because if you want to learn about a particular topic like Earn Money Online. It will only show stories on that topic.

When I first visited the site, I notice the option questions through out the stories. It got me wondering why they ask these questions so I checked their FAQ and found out these questions will help them personalize my searches in the future. I noticed that the design of the site is very simple and easy to navigate. This is one of the reason I enjoyed reviewing their site. I’m very big on KISS (Keeping It Simple Stupid) way of design.
Thoof was developed by Ian and Andrew Clarke, Alan Ren, Scott Miller, Jonathan Locke, and Tammie Lister. In my book, they did a wonderful job in creating this site. I will personally be adding their site to my favorites.

The famous John Chow, who makes over $12,500/month from is blog alone, has decided to revamp his blog by having Nate Whitehill develop a redesign, which John liked, and has already changed the layout with the new theme. The part I found strange is that he openly stated he redesigned the site for just the increased income… I would of thought he would choose to redesign the site for his visitors not the money. With the redesign, he has been able to sell more advertisement quicker at a higher price.

John Chow, “This is all part of the make money online process. I didn’t do a redesign for the sake of a redesign.”

But thinking more deeply into it, he has created a very special blog were most of his visitors visit it to see how much money he is making. Thinking of it this way makes me understand the redesign.

The question is do you like the new layout too?

On a popular Webmaster forum, not saying which one but I will give you a hint. It starts with a “D” and ends with “igitalpoint”. Anyway, to my point! I’ve been reading posts about increasing traffic without investing a lot of cash. I found it amusing when other Internet Publishers responded with “Do loads of SEO the correct way, which takes lots of effort and tons of money), or… you basically don’t get any traffic”. The problems with these responses are how are these people posting the question suppose to know the “right way” of SEO and yes it is true that it takes a lot of effort (reading, learning, and experimenting) but tons of money is not true. You could rank well in search engines without spending a lot of money. Also if you don’t know the “right way” of SEO then it will be very difficult to actually know if the people you hire (spending money) are doing it correctly. I would recommend reading, learning, and experimenting with SEO. The following are suggested readings to help your SEO journey.

On-site SEO Checkup
If you want to get started with on-site SEO, you need to read and test these techniques.

How To Boost Your PageRank With Your Own Site
Even though Eli post is about increasing page rank, this technique will also improve your search engine ranking.

Mini SEO Empire
Jon does a great job on describing how to develop an empire of mini sites to improve search engine rankings.

How to Steal to the Top of Google
On the third page, they say, “Your title tag includes only the keyword on which you’re focusing.” I have noticed this tip has hugely helped my search engine ranking for one of my large information sites.

In June, on the SEO Learning Experience post, I was talking about spending most of my time learning about SEO. Well… Today, I’ll be explaining what I’ve been experimenting with. My main focus has been on one of my large information sites. At the time of that post, it was ranked in Google on the third page ranking 23rd. Now, I’ve been able to get it fluctuating between the first page and the second page (ranking between the 10th and 13th spot), which has increased the amount of daily visitors by 100-300. This has cost me nothing other than my time learning and testing.

On-Site SEO
There have been a few things I’ve changed on the site that has made immense increase in ranking. The first change was altering the title of the main page. Before it looked like this “Keyword >> four word description.” I decided to change it to just “keyword”. It took Google about three days to update my listing and with that update it jumped about 10 ranking for my main keyword. The second change was reediting the content to add more of the main keyword. I was being very careful to not keyword stuff. The last change was removing extra words in the H1 tag for example it looked like this before “Learn about (Keyword)” since then I changed it to just “Keyword”. That pretty much covers everything changed to improve On-site SEO.

Off-Site SEO
How I see it is Off-Site SEO is basically getting backlinks with the main keyword to the site. There are many different techniques that can be found anywhere on blogs and forums. I believe you can’t just use one technique to succeed in promoting a site. That is why I learned and tested as many ways possible. Personally, I think its been working but I still have a lot of work a head of me because I’m still not ranked number one for my main keyword. The following are the off-site SEO techniques I’ve been using since June. Some work better then others however seeing that the goal is to get as many backlinks possible, I use all of them.

• Targeted Blog Commenting
• Forum Posting
• Commenting on old related Diggs
• Directory Submitting
• Article Directory Submission
• Social Bookmarking

To rank well in search engines, you must learn about on-site and off-site SEO. I know it takes a lot of work with reading, learning, and experimenting different techniques but in the end it is completely worth it. My plan is to keep working on this specific site until it is ranked first in Google then I’ll repeat these techniques on my next site. Remember, it doesn’t take money to make money… It takes knowledge and the actual balls to do what you know to do.