Challenge Update - day 10
It’s time to take a break and report my progress…
Things accomplished:
1. Put up my first Adsense Content site (using wordpress as a site builder).
2. Added a page a day to that site.
3. Site was indexed by Yahoo, Google & MSN and in the meantime is not sandboxed - Thank God.
4. Got 10 visitors from the search engines to that site, and about 70 visitors using forums.
5. Made about $2 (Total) in Adsense revenues!
6. Almost finished integrating Duncan Carver’s Free - Link Management Assistant into my Wordpress template for this site. Hoping to make this site a small Directory-in-a-Niche and get a lot of Inbound links.
*** I’m still not sure if I should demand reciprocal links from sites that want to be added to my directory - or if I should just ask them nicely after I let them join. I don’t know what strategy would work best. (Do any of you have experience with this?)
7. Have to consider a change of plan for getting traffic for this site. My initial plan was to target a niche which has a lot of Active Forums which allow you to add your signature to each post, thus easily driving traffic to my sticky-content-site. However this did not work as planned. These guys are not following the links on my signature to my new site. Either the signature is not tempting, or I’m not yet a celebrity in these forums. I’ll have to work on this.
My initial plan for earning the $100 a day was:
$75 using PPC to mini-sites+autoresponders -> to -> High Paying - Affiliate Product in a competitive market.
$25 Building Content sites and monetizing on Adsense.
Up to this point 90% of my time was dedicated to building the infrastructure for my Adsense Content sites. But this has led to total neglect of my PPC sites which were supposed to be my main providers by the end of this challenge.
I just can not see a way to use pure Adsense sites, to make that much money in such a short time (though a few of the other challengers (those on the right sidebar) might disagree).
I have to put my main efforts on my PPC-sites strategy or I will not be able to reach my goals in time 
(I just have to use at least 1 smiley in a post)
It means going out of my comfort zone and investing the money to test my PPC campaigns.
I have 2 days to finish integrating LMA with with Wordpress and then I will not touch these sites accept for adding content.
After that it is PPC time for at least a month.
*** This is a mistake I have to stop making. I find a niche - I find a product - I research and FEEL that I can do better than my competitors . I build a complete financial plan based on my feeling… and then… and then… I PAUSE. This is because I don’t want to risk the failure of my theory. Don’t want to crush the dreams I have of succeeding in this niche.
Good Internet Marketing should be based on numbers facts and figures. I might put my ads up and find that I’m not getting enough traffic, or that my traffic is not converting… anyway… What I want to say is that I should start testing my PPC campaigns - knowing that they might not work smoothly for the first month but without testing there would be no improving.
So… By this time next week - I will put my mini PPC site up and start sending traffic to it using Adwords. My initial goal will be to get people to sign up for my Auto-Responder. We’ll see what happens next.
I’ll keep you updated of course.
Nadav
P.S.
As you see the list of Challenge participants on the right is growing 
Nothing would make me happier than to see all of us reach our goals.
March 31st, 2005 at 12:27 am
Hi Nadav
I have a couple of questions about your adsense content site.
(1) Did you get indexed as soon as you put it up - if so how did you get indexed so fast…blog and ping?
(2) How do you know that you’ve been indexed by google yahoo & MSN?
(3) How do you know you have not been sandboxed?
(4) How do you tell if you are sandboxed?
Thanks,
Dhira
March 31st, 2005 at 12:46 am
Hi Dhira!
1. To get indexed fast I used Blog and Ping and posting at least once a day for the first 2 weeks (as Russell’s blog suggests) - I also joined a few forums on topic and added my link to the signature.
2. I check my stats (AWSTATS) on my web hosting account to see which “Robots” have visited. Yahoo now visits almost daily. I also search for my site on these search engines to see how many pages have been indexed so far.
3. Yahoo is sending me traffic almost daily… Google has sent me only 3 visitors in 2 weeks… and I also find my site on these SE’s when I do specific searches.
4. I never learned that officially but I think you can tell you’ve been sandboxed when your site is just not appearing on Google’s results. Try searching for a very specific “phrase” that appears on your site. If your site doesn’t show… either the page had not been indexed or you have been sandboxed.
Use http://www.uptimebot.com/ to see how your site is doing in the SE’s
Hope this helped,
Nadav
April 2nd, 2005 at 1:14 am
Thanks Nadav, yes it’s helped this newbie.
Dhira
April 2nd, 2005 at 4:40 am
Dhira, As Nadav did, I also started a blog for my first new site, and have posted to it daily for the last 4 days. I’ve only got my homepage and blog up at this stage, but already my homepage is indexed in Yahoo, but not Google yet.
I’m adding 25 pages of content per week, starting later today. When I add the new content, I’ll add the websites sitemap address to the links on my blog, and add a post to my blog daily. That’s all you need to do. I don’t “blog and ping” per Rick Butts style, because it’s not necessary, and it is ping abuse in my opinion.
To find if your site (and how many pages on it), is indexed you type this into the Search engine:
site:www.yoursight.com
Where “yoursite” is the name of your site. It will tell you how many pages are indexed, and which ones they are. If it says “page could not be found” it’s not indexed yet.