I have been a busy bee lately – therefore lacking in providing updates to this blog. For one I have been working on my accounting and bookkeeping stuff to catch up. This September I will make my first voluntary quartlery income tax payment installment using EFTPS. So far I have been able to use my day job for my tax payments. I did adjust the deduction to match my business income, but it is getting to a point where I would have to expect that I will need to send more money to the IRS. And I do not want to be subject to a tax penalty owing more than $1,000 when filing my taxes. So, I rather send Uncle Sam some money now (September).

I have been busy with affiliate marketing as well. I spend time building another site in a niche where I have seen some good conversions. All my websites are build with SEO in mind and so I am making each website unique. I found a good content writer who – besides the low price he is asking for – really provides quality work. He is not from the US, but you just cannot tell from how he writes about specific topics. This allows me to concentrate on other things and as my available time for the business is currently very limited it allows me to work more efficient. I also did outsource some SEO work – with mixed results. We will see in a few weeks how that is working out.

It is a little quiet on the PPC front for me. For one the new website I am working on will also be a target site for PPC traffic. To avoid a Google slap I am putting extra efforts in to have a high quality website up and running to receive great quality score ratings. I have ordered a new landing page from someone highly recommended to me. Next week I will fully concentrate on preparing a large scale PPC campaign. I know that the product I am going to promote converts. The organic traffic I am sending them has been small, but actually showed great conversion rates. So, I am so optimistic that I want to  try PPC traffic as well.

My plan for August is to redesign a few websites and to optimize websites inside my network. I think I am at a point where I cover enough niches and can now pick the ones that offer most financial benefit to me and expand accordingly. Expanding means trying to a) do more SEO work and b) to match the traffic with more optimized product offers. If the PPC traffic works on the existing project I will also expand there or go back to the drawing board to look for a different approach.

{Knocking on wood} So far my increased efforts in affiliate marketing seem to show prmosing results. My business would be limping for a bit, but at this point I could almost survive without the 4-digit Google Adsense check (direct deposit of course). Like I said, there would be some limping for another month or two, but I think it shows me that I am on the right track. My biggest problem is time to work on the business – I know too many excuses on my side with family, full-time job, etc.! I knew that having a baby would make things more difficult and slow me down, but I am in it for the long term and giving up is not one of my core strengths.

Short Note here about the latest Google Page Rank update. I’ve stopped tracking page rank for a while now - especially since I am mainly concentrating on affiliate marketing. I noticed one of my long-time PR 5 websites is now a PR 4 and another internal page on this blog that was PR 5 is now PR 4 as well. Since both targets have a huge number of on target inbound links it seems like Google is raising the bar for a PR 5 even higher. I have not seen any traffic changes to the worse, rather have seen an increase in traffic. So, stop worrying about PR. ;)