Today as I went to post a few articles on Buzzle, I realized that one of my articles had been missing. Then I realized that not only this article had been missing, but that every article I had up was missing. Then I found this blog post from this year about a guy whose articles also went missing. He emailed Buzzle and got the following response:

We periodically review content from both current and inactive accounts. Such procedure updates our database to ensure Buzzle.com offers a high quality experience to our users. During routine reviews one or more of your articles were deleted so that our database remains updated with the latest content.

So Buzzle is not only asking for unique quality article, now they are telling us (or not telling us) that our articles has a short lifespan.

Fortunately, I always save my articles somewhere else, so I figured I should be able to find them and simply repost them on Squidoo or Ezine... I say forget Buzzle, if they can't even just keep them in their database, they aren't worth our time.

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the websites overall (considering that I haven't put a lot of effort into them in the last 2 months). As a matter of fact, the reassurance of having a fairly stable income have allowed me to explore other business opportunities.

Indeed, I've started this new year with new business ideas in mind, and started pro-actively making them happening. Stay tuned for more info about both the websites and new business opportunities.

I am pretty busy and overworked these days (my real daytime job which I am planning to quit in a few months, my websites and my new side business), so expect me to be fairly slow on updating the blog.

As for December, so far so good (knock on wood). We even sold an expensive piece of item yesterday (which makes me all smiles and wanting to work even more). We decided not make more websites, but rather concentrated on making the one we already have better and better "seo'd".

What's going on?

Things were going pretty slow (Google updates + summer). Income have been a little bit lower over summer (in the 2000$ range) but seems to have picked up again towards the 3000$ range. Hopefully I can aim for a 4-5k, if not more around Christmas time :)

Will let you know soon what we've been up to lately.

Nat

I decided to compare the graph below, and although there seem to be a strong affiliate (amazon) increase, we can see that the adsense increase seems to have plateau since September of 09. This make sense since most of our new sites have targeted affiliate programs rather than adsense-based websites.

Overall, the month was sparsed with many high days, and many very low days. Not sure what is going on with google, but the rankings of the websites have seemed to be dancing around, something being pushed as far as 2nd or 3rd page before coming back to the first page. We have also lost a few first positions for some keywords that had looked strong in 1st position. We did not change anything... Google change in algorithm?? Difficult to say... Anyway all we can do now is keep pushing the websites and the keywords and hope that we can rank for more keywords and get our first places back.

Unfortunately, this month did not meet our growing expectations. We made a total of $2590.29 for the month of April, which is not bad, but certainly not as good as our previous record month.

Interestingly, we are seeing an overall increase in traffic on our websites as seen on those analytics charts below. So the reasons in drop in income does not lie behind a decrease in traffic, but rather a decrease in sells and adsense revenue. So people have not been buying as much - affiliate income have dropped by 20% (tax season? summer coming up?) and we assume that for similar reasons people haven't been tempted by the ads or adsense ads were just really crappy - adsense income have dropped by 34% (tax season? bad economy? summer season?). We are trying new affiliate programs other than adsense (clickbank), and are excited to see how this will turn out for us. In April for have earned only 6$ in other affiliates :P, but we are working in increasing this number.

These are the trends for a few of our main sites. As you can see, there is a general growing trend in increase traffic.

We are hoping that sells will pick up for the months of May, and that the new affiliate programs will help increase the revenue so I can finally quit my full-time job and travel the world :P.

Just be more original, or at least don't make it so obvious you are trying to take over our keywords... Geez.

Anyhow, happy Easter everyone!