Prepping for 2012

We’re fast approaching the end of another year. Holiday shopping is in full swing, and (hopefully) when you log into CJ, Pepperjam, LinkShare, etc – you can almost hear the cash registers.

Aside from the time of year where a lot of us get to see months of hard work pay off, it’s also a time to take inventory, reflect on your progress and the industry as a whole, and plan.

Here are notes from the year, written to myself. Your mileage may vary.

Inventory

Real Estate

• Dude… you’ve got how many domains? Why?
• There’s 62 of them sitting in your GoDaddy account.
• 17 of them produce 90% of your income.
• Take a look at the rest and cut your losses where it doesn’t make sense to continue.
• Sell some off to gain some quick capital for bigger projects.

Content and Link Building

• Your content and linking processes are pretty sound.
• Good for you. Have a cookie.
• Downside – they don’t run without you.
• It might be a bit more expensive, but you need to find more reliable outsourced providers. Otherwise, when you take a week off, your link acquisition severely slows down. That can’t continue.

Client Work

• Client work is going well and they’ve all renewed for most of next year already.
• Look to add ~2 more in the first half of 2012.
• Use some of that money to buy something for a change. You’re kind of a cheap-ass. (Maybe a car? A new car would be pretty sweet… eh? Eh?)

2011 Thoughts

This past year, you mainly built out ~10 page content sites focused on affiliate offers and Adsense integration. They’re cool and all… and they make money. But… c’mon.
Don’t you think it’s about time you actually invested a significant amount of effort and budget into a larger, more defensible property?
Wouldn’t it be kind of cool to build a website where you’d actually notice within a week if it got dropped from Google?
Plus, you can go after much bigger terms.
Sure, it’ll take a lot longer to get ranked – but you’ve already got a nice stable income from those ~20 other sites. Let those ride, and push your attention to building up one or two properties for the year.
Just uhm… make sure they’re worth it. If you don’t up your take by 40%+ this year, we’re gonna throw down.
Fight Club style.
For real.

Outside of site building, you should probably blog more.
Remember that SEO Keyword Research post that resulted in you picking up a new little side client? Yeah… do more of those.

Also, you should really get rel=”author” implemented. Seriously.

On that note – give Google+ another shot.
Yes, I know. It’s pretty lame. But odds are the freaking PHDs at Google are going to look at it for rankings. So. Be there.

2012 Planning

Alright man, look. You’ve got a hookup in the (not provided) niche. Use that to your advantage and jump on it ASAP.

• Main target keyword has 110,000 exact match searches per month for the US.
• That’s about 3,666 per day (give or take).
• ~15% CTR for the second position will mean 550 visitors a day just off that term, and it’s pretty commercial so they’re buyers.
• There’s also new products released every single month that go hot and end up with 18-20k exact monthly searches for a few months in a row.
• Make the thing an authority site, and rank for all those product names.
• Focus on reviews. Product Name + Reviews will be the sweet spot.
• Grab the EMDs for Product Name + Reviews anyway. Just 301 them or make a simple one page lander. This is all defense.

Actually… here’s a dick move. Buy all the EMDs and create landers listing them for sale. Sell for at least $500 a piece, or just keep them. Stall on closing the sales long enough to cement your authority site page in place, enough to stay above the EMD.
….register these domains to a fake name. You’ll also need another PayPal account.
What? You thought we’d go all whitehat this year? To quote Bob Rains…

Fuck you, internet – pay me.

Anyway, back to the site…

• 1,000 words of content on the home page. Swap out at least half of it each month. Reference upcoming holidays/seasons and the usefulness of products during that time. Keep that damn home page fresh.
• Display snippets from the top 6 reviews on the Home as well.
• Product reviews need to be at least 1,500 words.
• Use at least 3 images per review, in a slick lil slider.
• Have a video for each one too, there won’t be that many.
• Build. A god damn. Email list.

On blogging at halo18.com – update at least twice a week.
One should be a recap of what you did that week. That should keep your ass from getting lazy. The second can be reviews of tools/vendors. You’re going to be moving towards vendors more anyway, remember?

Alright, that’s really all. There’s a whole other site you’d need to build, but no planning on that one until you get this first one fully launched and get into the habit of blogging more often.