Off to the Lake

I'm off to the lake for the night. I made a few changes to the site today, mostly Adsense related to see if I could increase my CTR. I also worked on developing my keyword list for Adwords, both for my site that is up now and the no-content site that I will be developing soon. I have 25 keywords for the home theater site that I will be able to snag for $.05. These 25 are just words, but could triple once I start using the different punctuation variations like " " and [ ]. I have yet to incorporate the spelling mistakes that could help increase my list. I think that is going to be my strategy for this advertising thing. No trying to slug it out with the big boys, just sneak past them all together.

The more I read on forums, the more I'm convinced that diversifying your traffic is essential. And by diversification, I mean beyond splitting it between Google, MSN and Yahoo. I mean a completely seperate route from seach engines all together. At WebmasterWorld Forum, Rfung has a thread on his quest to $300/day from affiliate sales and Adsense. He was doing well and actually was almost there when the latest changes in Google cut his earnings from an average of $200/day to between $50 and $100/day. That is a HUGE cut. That would be the equivalent of your boss coming to you and saying that you will be paid half as much for the forseeable future. In his thread, he says that about 30% of his traffic is from Google. Think of all of the people who rely almost exclusively on Google for their traffic. It's just way too dangerous.