In a nutshell, David asks “how many sites do your GUYS maintain, and how much are the sties making in order for them to pay for themselves?”

I thought the question and answer were informative enough to make a post out of it.
Here’s my response:

@David – this is a great observation.

I’ll tell you a little about my business so you can understand a bit about how I work.

I don’t know how many sites I currently have…maybe 50, maybe 100?
How many have I built over the past years? …hundreds maybe?

Here’s a quick breakdown of sites my team has 100% built for me:

• I have a site that makes me over $15,000/month that my team built.
• I have some sites that make between $1000-$5000/month that my team built.
• I have lots of sites that make between $100-$1000/month that my team built.
• I have even more sites that make me between $1-$100/month that my team built.
• Most of my sites that my team built don’t make me anything! $0.

Some of those $0 sites are new…at some point they’ll make me money.
Lots of them I’ve given up on because the model/market/niche/site failed. I lost money on those.

For me, I just know that the more sites I build, the better chance I have of finding winners.
I also know that some of them that I build are going to do really well. Every once in a while I’ll get an awesome one.

My team (of 3-5…depending on how you look at it) builds and maintains all these sites.
Once a site is built and established, it requires less and less maintenance.

The thing about all this is that I DIDN’T DO THE WORK!
If it were up to me to do the work, none of these sites would have been built or marketed.
Because other people are doing it, it got done, and I make money because of it.

To me, that’s the key to all this. For years I tried to do all the work myself. With that I think I had built 10 sites in a few years and only 1 of them was really successful.
With other people doing the work I’ve built hundreds of sites and lots of them are successful.

Frankly, I’m capable of doing better work than my GUYS do.
However, I DON’T DO THE WORK even though I’m capable. I don’t know…it’s just some problem I have. If it’s up to me to do the work, it’s just not going to get done.

For this reason I created my outsourcing system. So others can benefit from what I’ve done.

John

If not, why not?

Here’s why you do it.

When you want to create a sales/squeeze page for yourself, you can go back through all the pages you’ve bookmarked and just pull the pieces out of them that you like.

When you’re ready to test different elements of your pages, you can just go back through your swipe file and pull out the different elements that other people have to test.

Here’s a head start for you.

http://delicious.com/hjuan99/swipe
http://delicious.com/hjuan99/squeeze

There’s some of my swipe files (easily worth $100 just having that).

I keep my stuff on delicious.com because it’s easy, it’s online, and I never have to worry about losing it when my computer crashes.

TIP

When you’re ready to do your next sales page, go through the swipe pages you have and record them with jing, and tell the person you’re giving it to (hopefully your guy in the Philippines) what you like about each page.

Here’s an example video I did (using Jing) of how I would create a page:
How to create a sales page using a swipe file

So, I’ve come up with new ways of doing keyword research.

One way I do it is with KeywordTopia. I built it so that I could get results from all the places that would give keyword results.

Another way I do it is with the free google keyword tool, in conjunction with google trends.

Here’s a video about how I do keyword research across multiple niches:

See…in the past, when promoting other people’s products, what most people have done is pick a program to promote, and then go test it on Adwords to see if they can make it profitable. It takes time to pick the right program, and it takes time and money to test.

UnderCoverProfits reverses the process. Instead of spending money to test, it uses other people’s testing to figure out for you what affiliate programs will be profitable, so that you can start your campaigns knowing that they’re going to be profitable from the beginning.

It’s the exact opposite of the big hype right now about keyword level conversion tracking. With keyword conversion tracking, you test keywords on your own dime. With UnderCoverProfits, you test keywords and affiliate programs on other people’s dime.

If you’re looking to promote your own product on Adwords, as a competitive intelligence tool, I don’t know anything that will give you better information about your competitors than UnderCoverProfits. It will show you what keywords they’re bidding on, and which of those keywords are profitable for them.

So far our beta testing has been amazing. About 85% of the beta testers are now making money as affiliates on Adwords where they previously weren’t.

[tags]UnderCoverProfits, Under Cover Profits, Undercover Profits, affiliate marketing, affiliates[/tags]

Hostmonster has lowered their hosting price from $9.95/month to $3.95/month and increased their limits on the product.

You can’t increase the ability to host unlimited domains, but they increased the bandwidth you get (who cares), and also the storage space (WooHoo!).

This hosting is soooooo much better than anything else I’ve seen its ridiculous.

And, what’s even better, is when you call them, you get a human…fast.

http://www.istockphotos.com

Stock photos between $1-$5 depending on size.

That’s a great way to make a website look better.

1. The power of user generated content
2. Search engines certainly aren’t telling the whole story.

1. Users are blogging on WritingUp.com. They write hundreds of blog entries each day. They also write thousands of comments each day.

Two weeks ago a site:writingup.com search revealed that google had 510,000 pages from the domain writingup.com in their index.
Today, the same search reveals 729,000 pages.

The community is growing.

2. It has always been said that search engines won’t want to index very many pages of a site that has low pagerank or that has very few links to it.

Well, with 729,000 pages indexed, google says that writingup.com has 2 incoming links.
It also has a pagerank of 3!

THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!

Google isn’t telling the truth here.

Want more proof?

Try a link:writingup.com search on msn:

12,158 incoming links

Or what about a linkdomain:writingup.com search on yahoo?

20,400 incoming links.

Something is wrong here.

Or, what about a site:writingup.com search on yahoo?

They only have 13,100 pages in their index. Huh?

Or, msn

8227? What? What are you guys thinking?

Why can google find over 700,000 pages on writingup.com, and msn can only find just over 8000? I mean, all the url’s on the site are clean. They don’t have index.php?somevar=somethingelse. Everything is linked to. There aren’t duplicate posts on the site (yet).

So, my point is, search engines aren’t telling the whole truth.

Also, if you’re still using what the search engines tell you as a metric of how successful your SEO campaign is going, you’re fooling yourself (or, they’re fooling you, just like they’d like to do).

Not that I’ve been anxiously awaiting it or anything, because when something works for me, I’m usually happy to leave it alone. But, I really hate when I write a post and realize I want to upload a file so I have to copy the text from the post, go to the upload screen, upload my file, copy the tag, only to realize that I just lost the copy I had of the post, so I can’t paste it back in and I have to write it all over again!

This version puts uploads inline with the posting screen. Nice job.

Upgrading…

You can see the dip in traffic on Christmas, and the little dip right before the skyrocketing from 20-25,000 hits/day to 40,000 hits/day was when we were having server problems.

The problem is that www.writingup.com grew so fast that we had major server problems. The week between christmas and new years was really a struggle for us. The server went down for hours at a time, basically time after time after time.

We were getting so many hits that our little server couldn’t handle it…

Or so we thought.

It turned out that mysql just needed some tweaking. I guess mysql by default has caching disabled so we turned on caching by adding this line to the /etc/my.cnf file:

query-cache-size = 20M

As soon as mysql started caching queries it immediatly started working again.

Before we added that our server load had slowly gone from .2 up to about 30 before it would just die. Mysql was getting so many queries (hundreds per second) that it couldn’t do them all, so it would start getting slow queries (queries that took over 2 seconds) and those take up a lot of memory. The system would take up all the memory, and then start using the swap space until there wasn’t any swap left. Then it would just die.

After turning on caching to mysql it never gets overloaded. It never gets behind. I’ve seen it doing 565 queries per second, which is more than it can handle for a sustained period of time, but it handled it just fine.

We also added this:

key_buffer_size = 64M

Which helped a little, but not as much as turning on caching (I don’t really remember what this one did, but I think it allows mysql to use more memory when searching through tables that have keys in them).

Anyway, the server has been up now for over 7 days without any problems. We’re still going to get a bigger machine for it, so that it can grow more.

Not bad for having only launched it less than 2 months ago. Especially considering that the site looks terrible, isn’t very clear for how to refer someone, and I haven’t really started marketing it yet.

We have some big marketing campaigns slated for the near future, which include a bigger PPC campaign, a PR campaign, an emailing campaign (I met 2 people this weekend at the Big Seminar who have mailing lists of 650,000 and 15 million business opportunity seekers, who have double opted in to their lists…and they’re very willing to send an email about it), a newspaper press campaign, and finally a campaign to get the users to promote it more than they are already doing it.

I have had quite a few users ask me how they can promote their own blog and I’m putting together a plan for them.

The best part about the growth are the emails I get from people saying they’re starting to make money. It’s amazing how much confidence making just a little extra money will give you. If you can do it online once, you can repeate it 100 or 1000 times.

Plus, the more the site grows, the more money each person is going to make because people on the site read each others blogs.

Exciting.