Nick Bakewell

Hello again! Once more, i’m sorry for the infrequent updates. Anyways, I would just like to notify you of my new site that I just launched (work in progress) - HostGator Reviews - read non-biased reviews on HostGator. I hope to compile the biggest database of Hostgator reviews on the internet and rise to the top of search results for such keywords.

A lofty goal, I know, and maybe a foolish one with the multitude of similar sites on the web, but I am using this as a long term experiment. Anyways, please check the site out and tell me what you think - and of course, if you have any experience with Hostgator, feel free to write it up and send it to me!

Some quick updates - Google has done a pagerank update (or downgrade, as many people seem to be complaining) and it appears that nickbakewell.com has a PR of 3 now - cool!

As always, most of my effort is going into Abstract Promotion and school work.  I’ve been trying out some different promotional techniques, like writing ebooks and free articles, so check out my thoughts over there.

In the future: more work on my desktop wallpapers site, WallpaperNexus.com (which is getting ~100 uniques/day right now), start other various small projects, and turn this site into something a little more…nice.

Until next time!

Hello everyone,

As you can see I have not been updating this site recently, and that is because all of my effort has been going into my new site, AbstractPromotion.com - Promotion techniques to drive traffic to and profit from your websites.  This site is where I am going to be focusing all of my effort, so don’t expect many updates here for the time being.  Read AbstractPromotion.com instead!

Any day now I should get back my custom made landing page from Copeac - which means I can finally start testing out my new longtail keywords on a professionally designed LP.  Hopefully the results will be better than my last attempt.  I have broken down my keywords into categories of brands (Canon, Brother, HP, etc) and if their is significant distinction inside those brands (like Canon Pixma), I have broken it down further.  These will each go into different ad groups.  Although my projected traffic is only around 4 clicks a day per ad group, it is very targeted traffic for a low cost.  If I could get just one click to convert from each group…imagine the possibilities!  Ha ha.

As for this blog, I plan to make a few changes in the coming weeks.  I am going to make a custom header graphic and change the generally layout just a little - make it something unique.  Also, I need to find a good comment spam plug-in, because suddenly I’ve been getting a lot of it.

I have some big plans for WallpaperNexus.com, too.  I plan to add a blog to the site and post two to three times a week about various stuff relating to my wallpapers - anything to get indexed for my search phrases and drive traffic to WPN.  Already 80% of my traffic is organic search results, so hopefully this will boost that.  Also, I am going to customize the layout some more, especially by making the side menu more robust and usable.  The image view page will go through some changes, and I will make sure each category and album view page has a couple sentences of content written for it to increase my potential SE ranking.

The Thirty Day Challenge is almost over, and sadly I have not really participated in it - I just haven’t had the time.  If only it was in July.  But, the good news is that I have downloaded all the content, videos, and podcasts, and soon I plan to start my own personal thirty day challenge.  There has been great success stories from its members, so I’m really excited about the possibilities.

Finally, I will be researching potential small niche sites that I could write some content for and get ranked in the SEs, as an experiment to see how long this process takes and how the potential monetization may be.

That’s all for now - wish me luck!

Looking at statistics, I haven’t made any progress from my last status report.  Actually, I may have even lost a little more money.  However, in terms of what I know now, I have made large progress.   Here is what has been going on…

WallpaperNexus.com - I have added a couple more wallpapers and created my first tutorial.  I am doing this by adding a category for tutorials, and then each album underneath of that category is a tutorial, and each image inside that album is a step.  My first tutorial is a real basic how-to-create-a-desktop-wallpaper one, mainly meant to check out the system.  I submitted it to Good-Tutorials yesterday, so hopefully that will start bringing in some traffic.   Once I get a decent traffic stream I will start experimenting with ad placement and layout to see what generates the best revenue.

As for My-Printer-Ink, my first Adwords campaigns have been unsuccessful.  However, after some days of thinking and researching, I will soon be trying a different approach.  I learned that Copeac offers free landing page creation services, so I will be working with their design team to get one or two of those and try them out instead of my current approach of using a real site type looking page.  Also, I am narrowing my Adwords campaign keywords even more, this time targeting long-tail keywords and grouping my keywords better.  Also, I may point different ad groups to different landing pages, based on their subject.

As always, I have many different ideas floating around my head.  I start classes at JMU tomorrow, however, so my time will be limited.

I’m back from Florida now, and it was a blast.  Anyways, down to business.  While I was away my promotion techniques I used on WallpaperNexus, which was only a couple small things, have kicked in and now I am getting an average 50 uniques a day instead of 15 - woo!  WPN seems to be getting ranked well in Google and a lot of its traffic comes from searches using the Google engine.  For now I will be leaving the Adsense placement as it is, but once I get to around 200 uniques a day I will start experimenting with different placements and colors.

As for My-Printer-Ink.net, it is now listed in Google but the three subpages with an article on each are not, which leads me to believe that it still may have a low quality score.  I will be promoting it more and once I get the whole site indexed I will start my Adwords campaign.

That’s it for now - the next couple of weeks should be full of progress!

My newest in attempts at affiliate marketing, My-Printer-Ink.net, is now live.  Other than selling ink through 101inks, My Printer Ink also offers a couple articles on how to install ink, how to refill ink, and how to find which ink that you need.  I will also be adding more articles in the future.  My goal for this site is to take it away from the classic sales-only landing page and have it instead provide some related useful information to the user.

I designed my new site with the colors and general layout of 101inks in mind.  This way when the user clicks out of my site and into the “real” site, the change won’t seem as abrupt or out of place.  Hopefully this will increase follow through.

I leave for Miami tomorrow and won’t be back for a week, and I am hoping by that time Google will have crawled my new site and give it a decent quality score, which is very important.  This is mostly the reason why I added real content to My Printer Ink and have started linking to it from other sites of mine.

My-Printer-Ink. net - Printer Ink Resource Site 

I think I have finally gotten the layout of WallpaperNexus.com to the way that I want it. I still have some albums to add the Adsense code to, but otherwise, the layout is done - version 1, of course. Once I start driving traffic to the site and getting feedback from the users and see how the ad placements are doing, I will probably be revising the layout.

I have also added another 100 or so wallpapers, bringing the total to 1000, which was my goal for launch. However, I will most likely add more because I don’t think that I have a diverse enough selection.

That’s it for now, just a quick post. More later

Today I added about 200 more wallpapers to WallpaperNexus.com.  I have now about 750, and I am for around 1000 before I start seriously promoting it.  But I don’t think I like the design very much, and I don’t think it is the most user-friendly and optimized design, so I will also be looking to change that.  I may attempt to do this myself, but I am terribly unfamiliar with Coppermine Gallery and may end up hiring someone to do this for me, as there do not seem to be that many good mods out that I change my site’s appearance with.

Also, through W3Counter.com, I’ve been noticing that WPN is getting around 12 unique visitors a day so far with only a couple posts done in a forum with a signature link.  Hopefully when I start promoting, this number will rise drastically and quickly

In other news, today is the first day of the Thirty Day Challenge, and the first video/podcast was informative and well done - I can’t wait for these following days and what I will learn.  If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend participating.  Today they discussed the four most important principles of establishing an internet business, which are: Market Research, Traffic, Sales/Conversion Process, and Product.  More on this as I learn more.

In the upcoming days I will be:

• Updating WallpaperNexus.com
• Participating in the Thirty Day Challenge
• Building a mini-site around a new Copeac offer that I would like to try
• Learning!

After watching a video about leverage on the Thirty Day Challenge Blog, I have learned new ways on how to use all the social utilities offered through the internet today as promotional tools for my websites.  These utilities include StumbleUpon, Flickr, Technorati, BlogLines, and del.icio.us.  The video is quite interesting and very informative, and I highly suggest that you take a look.

That being said, only two more days until the Thirty Day Challenge starts!  With as informative as this pre-week has been, I can’t wait for the real deal.  Hopefully this will be the push/knowledge I need to get started.