I thought I'd do a quick round up of my Swish World AIS site's earnings as it's been a month and a 3 days since I purchased the site and started work on it (and I'm bored and fed up of doing client work!).nnPaid out £20 for the web site:nAdsense – $51nAmazon – £1.40nnTherefore this site has definitely covered the money paid out for it from my perspective. Of course there's 4 years worth of domain fees that my friend has paid out so I can't say for sure if it's broken even on money yet. However time is another thing. I've spent around 5-10 hours on this website, adding products, cleaning up the pages, researching key phrases etc. Unfortunately there is a lot I would like to do to the site however time is one thing I don't have much of recently due to my business.nnThat said, the visitor numbers are beginning to drop from their post-indexed-in-google high of 140 down to around 70-80 a day. Whilst I still get into double figures for clicks, the money generated per click is just miniscule. In theory, if I'd had payouts that I've received on other sites (such as this and even a contentless holding page) I'd be looking at over $500 of adsense revenue easily! It's just a shame that it's a low paying topic when it comes to adwords.nnI have managed to find another template source tonight however so I've signed up to that as an affiliate and just waiting for confirmation. Whilst the Template Monster templates are great to sell and easy to set up… everyone sells them! A lot of the Swish sites I've looked at have Swish templates from template monster for sale. Unfortunately when something gets a little repetitive people get fed up of seeing it! So I'm hoping to source other products or templates that I can sell.nnI've also started to work on pulling all the files into the root directory. This makes it easier to update, easier for the linking and hopefully google will not see the directory structure as a 'footprint' of a link directory site and be nicer to me! I've started to add content to each page too hoping to trigger better paying adverts and also give something for the spiders to feed off. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Googlebot is at all interested again as it's not indexed any of the altered pages I put up last week
I know my content writing is bad but that bad?!! I've not looked into the raw logs to see where googlebot is actually going during visits so I'm hoping that it'll notice an update on the sitemap and the 302 permanent redirects I've put in place for the old to new pages and perhaps re-cache the pages.nnHowever on to bigger and better things! The Tribal Tattoo site has had 15 pages indexed since going live on Monday, yesterday's visitor count was 51 and so far we've had 35 visitors via search engines, Google supplying 33 of them. Money wise, no Tattoo Flashes have been sold yet and the adsense doesn't even hit $5 but it's early days and you have to bear in mind this website is completely brand new unlike the Swish World one, so it's still taking time to get the spiders in – but I hope things will start to change soon. Again we have a lot of work and products still to add to this site too, I'm just looking for the time inbetween client work, contract work and sleeping.nnOh and I sold a template last night for $13 commission so that's spurned me on to get my template site more up-to-date with more template suppliers as I think there's more money to be made quicker in that business









There's certainly money to be made in templates – but serious money can be made by selling templates that you have created yourself…my templates sites are by far and away my top AIS's.nnGood luck with it!
I'd second what burt said – spend a bit of time making your own templates to sell and watch the money roll in
I realise that but I'm a PHP developer not a designer
nnI've got a few other ideas up my sleeve, just got to get things finished off first
I realise that but I’m a PHP developer not a designernnYou don't have to sell your own designs – there's loads of good designers on DDN and particularly sitepoint whose work you can purchase full rights to for not a lot of money…
I found you thru 'bored and fed up' and funnily enough I am looking to get back into IT. I have 28 years up until 6 years ago when I moved to East Yorkshire.nMy last 10 IT years were on the IBM AS400 (Cobol and RPG etc) but am now too out of date. I am good at analysis, troubleshooting, strategic planning etc so maybe you could point me in a good direction, for which I will love you forever! (Yes I am old [54]) but still full of energy and enthusiasm and I love being in the thick of things.nI moved up north for personal/family reasons and am now free to get back to serious work.nPS: My background is mainly financial….Andrew