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Aside from hitting the 6 month blogging mark, Google has finally given my blog sitelinks for my blog’s name: Mixed Market Arts.

While this may seem like a lame reason to post because there is nothing special about ranking for your website’s name, but it is a little more than that. Sitelinks are an automated feature of Google’s algorithm that gives a website an authority status for a specified keyword. This means that unless I do something extremely stupid, there is no reason I should ever stop ranking for that name. This also means that Google is now giving my domain, with my newly acquired pagerank 5, a good amount of trust in the eyes of the search engine, which should be later reflected across every page of the site. In simple terms, sitelinks are basically Google reminding you that you are slowly but surely growing into a ranking powerhouse, and that there is no denying that you are the only one who should rank for that term.

So now that I am an “authority listing” for Mixed Market Arts keyword, I will move onto “MixedMarketArts” and then later “Collin LaHay,” and ultimately, “Website Marketing Strategies.”

Every month I make a public blog post about my online earnings for that month. These income posts are never meant to be for bragging purposes. The true purpose of them is so that I can be completely transparent about what I make online, and so that years down the road I can show everyone my journey to wealth. Being completely transparent about what I earn online also allows me to show you my biggest mistakes, and what I have learned from the most. The more mistakes I have, the more I learn from, and the more I show you how to avoid. My monthly online income reports are a summary of where I made my money, and where I lost my money.

Blog Statistics
Numbers in parenthesis are stats from last month to show improvements or declines.

1. Google Pagerank 5 (2-4 because of a penalty)
2. Seomoz PageStrength 4 (3.5)
3. Alexa Rank 135,608 (53,549, the Alexa ranking system changed incredibly)
4. Technorati Rank 10,433 (10,523 - it received a penalty or a hand edit because it was under 10k a long time ago and it has only grown since)
5. Technorati Authority 493 (423)
6. Total Visitors 6,794 (5,746)
7. Total Pageviews 14,519 (13,543)
8. RSS Subscribers 542 (460)

Advertising

• Adsense $37.79 ($44.78)
• Adtoll - Removed
• Kontera - $7.38 (I have now removed it)
• Paid Reviews - $40 ($80, I had two but one $40 review was free)
• 125×125 Ads - $60 ($90)

Affiliate Marketing

1. NeverBlue Ads - $77 myself, $21.75 through my affiliates. (Sign up for Neverblue Ads)
2. Market Leverage - $5.25 (I have only done one offer so far, still trying to find time to expand).

Consulting Clients

• Link Building & Viral Marketing - $2400

Other Sales

• PR7 Blog Links - $100 (sold the last spots)

My Ventures

I have one site that has been coded already, but I am just waiting for the designer to finish and then I will launch it publicly on my blog. Stay Tuned!

Monthly Expenses

1. Google Adwords - $43.61 + $5 signup cost
2. MSN Adcenter - $0.30 + $5 signup cost (although I have $75 of free spending money now)

Total April Online Revenue - $2749.17

Total April Online Profit - $2695.26

Profit per day - $89.84

Conclusion

April was another very solid month for earnings, and a solid growth for the blog. I reached a pagerank 5 already, which was months ahead of my prediction as well. I have started getting my feet wet with affiliate marketing, and I will enjoy doing that and will continue to spend a lot of time learning it in May. I have referred 19 affiliates to neverblue ads, one of whom is making $200-500/day with it, netting me a nice amount of money through the 2% referral system. Congrats to whoever is utilizing neverblue ads from my post! The only thing that really went down this month was my technorati rank, but considering my technorati authority went up a ton I have to believe it was a manual edit because it happened hours after my post about how much technorati sucks… so I am not too worried about them. My future goals for a few months from now are to be making $100/day profit, and I believe I should be there in a couple of months easy.

How well did you do this month?

Looks like Google got around to updating their pagerank again, and my blog’s pagerank has increased from a 4 to a 5 which is pretty cool considering the gap from getting a 4 to a 5 is a heck of a lot larger than having a pagerank of 2 and moving it up to a 3.

I knew my link building campaigns would help my pagerank, but considering my blog isn’t even 6 months old yet I didn’t expect to get a PR5 so soon.  I want to thank everyone who has been congratulating me on hitting the pagerank 5, as it is quite an accomplishment for such a new blog, however to me this is just a number. The reason I am happier is because the new pagerank update has made Google’s million-lines-of-code algorithm know that my domain is a trustful site, and has blessed about 15 more of my posts allowing them to now be on the first page for new google searches.  I have also been seeing a few number one results for very old posts of mine.

In conclusion, yeah it’s awesome that I actually hit a pagerank 5, but the real reason for me to be happy is that this will increase my search engine traffic which is the ultimate goal of the link building I have been doing. Whether you went from PR0 to PR3, or PR5 to PR4, stop wasting your time wondering why and just keep your focus on link building because at the end of the day, search engine traffic is what matters, not some number that you and only other tech-savvy webmasters know exist.  Now having my blog be a pagerank 5 will also give a lot more dofollow juice to those that read and comment on my blog frequently, so if you are looking to voice your opinion and be rewarded with powerful links, then the top commentator spots are for you, so long as that you do not keyword stuff your comments, and that your comments are actually topical to the blog posts.

As I have been writing this post, I have been multi-tasking reading my emails and my RSS reader, and I noticed that Darren Rowse of Problogger.net has already made a video emphasizing my point that you should focus on keep moving forward rather than worrying about your pagerank. You can read his post and video over at his recent video called forget about pagerank and build a better blog.

A sorta off-topic note worth mentioning is that the rapidly growing Digg.com competitor Mixx.com has increased to a pagerank 7, and every article you submit to Mixx is a dofollow backlink. So if you aren’t building links with Mixx, there is no better time than now.

As many of you have noticed, I have only had two blog posts in the last 11 days, one of which was a guest post. I wanted to make a quick blog post to let everyone know why I have slowed down my blogging schedule.

1. I have been spending a ton of time learning affiliate marketing with NeverBlue Ads.
2. I am auditioning for the Top Affiliate Challenge (Detailed post coming soon, for now, vote me a 10!).
3. One of my new startup websites is nearing completion (I will write a detailed post letting all my readers get a first hand look before the site goes public).
4. The President of Datepad, David Nichol, has unexpectedly passed away.
5. I am nearing the final month until my high school graduation.
6. I have been going to and from the hospital because my dad had hip surgery this week.
7. I made it a personal choice to only make blog posts when I have something beneficial to my readers.

In conclusion, I have decided that I want to make my posting schedule a lot less sporadic. I am going to be making a lot less posts, and instead focus on quality of quantity. Every post that I write will be in more depth, and if it is one of my unique methods to building links, I will try to write a step by step guide for all the newbie link builders that read my blog.

I am going to be changing my blog’s title for the last time, and the new focus will be Website Marketing Strategies. The reason for this is because I only make around $300-500 profit a month with my blog, and I am by no means a professional at making money with blogs. Even though I know there are thousands of people who would love to be making $500/m with my blog, I do not believe I should be a blog mentor in any way. I am a professional at creative website marketing, and I want to keep my focus on that. If you have been following my blog for some time now, you should realize that marketing a website (or blog) ties hand in hand with making money on that site, so really nothing has changed other than the title and keyword I am going to SEO for.

Content wise, since I am cutting down from my daily posting schedule I use to have, I want 90% of all posts from now on to directly or indirectly help my readers build links for search engine traffic, build traffic from other viral methods, tips to monetize better, tips for better search engine optimization, posts about my new startup companies (one is coming in a little bit), or just general posts about my entrepreneurial journey to wealth.

Starting this week, I want my blog to be more of a hybrid between a blog and an email tips newletter, because I want to focus on teaching everyone how to properly market their websites using different strategies. I am positive that all of you readers would prefer a single blog post every week that provides a cool trick to build traffic, rather than a bunch of off-topic posts including what I ate for dinner. No offense to John Chow and his dinner parties, but in all honesty I don’t think my readers would give a damn about what I ate for dinner, so I am going to keep my posts in quality over quantity.

Paid Reviews Update
In the coming days, I am going to be raising my paid review prices by a long shot for a number of reasons. The main one is so that there will be fewer paid posts each month, giving more traffic to the ones that do purchase reviews. I will also be throwing in a ton of bonuses for new paid reviews, and I will write a post about them after my new startup company launches and when the paid review prices increases. I am also going to be limiting the amount of monthly paid reviewers to about 1 per week.

Guest Posters Update
My blog’s goal of helping everyone learn unique Website Marketing Strategies wouldn’t be very true if I didn’t allow an underground user promote himself through his writing. I still strongly believe in guest posts because they can bring you a lot of traffic in return for expressing yourself to others, and so I thought I would offer more to any guest posters who write posts for me to put on Mixed Market Arts.

Now, not only will you get a little mention at the TOP of the post giving yourself a link and a nice heap of traffic, but for every quality guest post that I publish on my blog I will pay you a $10 tip via Paypal as an added incentive. Now you can make money, traffic, and links just by contributing to my blog.

Have a link building tip that I have not discussed?
For anyone who emails me a unique link building article or website that I have not covered already on the link building cookbook, I will give a permanent backlink on the post I write about it linking to your site, as well as a one month sitewide link on every page of my blog. That is over 150 backlinks in return for sending a 5 minute email… quite a deal if you ask me. (PS: Nothing about directories or articles, I am looking for unique web2.0 sites that people generally wouldn’t think to build links off of. Check out some posts in the link building cookbook to get a feel for what I mean).