With the search engine world changing a lot in 2007 I think it is time to try new things. No, I do not mean the old Black Hat SEO stuff or so. No, I am talking more about outsourcing specific things in regards to webmaster work. How much is your time worth or how much spare time do you have at hand to do all the little things that come with working online? My time has become pretty limited for me lately and so I need to consider other options. I also might want to outsource stuff I am less proficient in. In 2005 and 2006 it was soooo easy to build a new website and to rank it properly within a short time (all white hat methods). This has changed and most of my newer sites suffer the 100 visitor per syndrome. They are stuck at around 100 visitors per day. That is nothing to impress with or to show off with. The income of those website is marginal. It is still nice, but nothing to really get rich with. Lol

So, I got enough cash sitting around in my PayPal account to launch some major things. This can be either website acquisitions or the outsourcing of work. I still have not found the exact website I feel comfortable buying and so I decided to spend some money on outsourcing work. The results will take a while to come in, but that is OK. It gives me time to prepare and to monitor the entire process. As the experiment progresses I will post updates here.

So, what is the experiment about? I am trying to position one of my websites better in a niche market that has some high paying affiliate programs going. Payouts are between $50.00 and $100.00, but can go up to mid-hundreds under certain circumstances. I have been concentrating the website on one part of this market for the last 24 months and now it is time to shift it around a little bit and to become more profitable. So, the experiment will concentrate on this turnaround in strategy and hopefully bring in a much higher revenue stream for me. My risk level is in the mid hundreds ($$$) which is almost nothing compared to what an increase in affiliate commissions can mean for me. If things turn out right the website value should also increase dramatically. We will see.

And another update on the removal of the Google Toolbar from my systems. I am still looking for the search box and the Google button I used to have, but I am slowly getting better in remembering the IE 7 search box in the upper right. By the way – there is a hack somewhere that lets you program Google through that search box without having personalized search. Does anyone know where I can find it again?

I also want to throw out that events like the crazy Google Page Rank update and anything that comes with it can either bring you down or it can motivate you. I have been building websites for Page Rank anyway, but rather for Adsense income or other sorts of income. But I admit - Google Page Rank updates always drew my attention and distracted my work style for a few days. I usually went and did some PR related SEO work and then went back to my normal stuff in one way or the other. This is going to change. I am on the roll. I am highly motivated. Pretty much all my websites lost PR and so did my competitors. This is not about value, selling links, or stuff like that. This can be discouraging as PR was always a visible factor of how good or bad my work has been. If my PR did not go up I did not work hard enough. Bullshit. How would I rate this last PR update then? Google should really stop publishing PR all together so that we all have to go back and measure traffic as the real thing of success. I am at this point (finally … duh). Thanks, Google. No, you did not depress me like so many others - I am highly motivated and ready for action. The last 2 nights already I have been extremely productive and that is good.
PS: This posting fits into 2 categories of my blog. I am picking “personal” for now. Got a better idea? Please leave comments.