Reciprocal links are one of the first ways you can bring free traffic to your website. They also contribute to solid search engine rankings, and can get your website indexed by search spiders faster than if you were to manually submit your site.

Unfortunately, finding link partners is a horrid job.

I do three things to get some incoming links as soon as I have a site online:

1) Find webrings associated with my topic and join them
2) Search for “add site” +topic_keyword in a search engine to find sites that offer link directories in my topic. (Actually, I use MetaSleuth to find these sites and dump them into a database. MetaSleuth is an unadvertised free bonus given to Conversionary purchasers.) and
3) Set up an account for the new site at SiteSell’s Value Exchange

Between these three methods, in addition to crosslinking with my other established sites, it’s relatively easy to have 20+ incoming links within a few days of a site going live.

My business partner has created a new site to replace one of his old blogs. I coded the back end article/link managment bit last week, and yesterday decided to use something similar for a new site I’m about to build.

So, I grabbed a template where the layout requires no images and is nearly entirely controlled by CSS, and made Internet Audio Info. I’ve done a few hours of work on adding articles and links, and getting everything to appear the way I want it to, but there’s still a lot to do.

On the plus side, once this site is done, I can move the template to anywhere to create a new site with about 5 minutes of work. Just changing the colours and database info will get me a site ready to populate.

Is it the prettiest site on the Web? No, but it’s gotta be one of the search engine friendliest.

If you, like me, had problems setting up the MySQL databases (errors with the MyISAM line), edit the sql files with a text editor and change the lines that say:

ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

to read:

TYPE=MyISAM;

A while back, I was almost tempted to pick up a copy of the QuickPayPro source code when it was released, since it is something I could use for a number of projects I’ve got currently and many more I am planning for the future.

When I saw that purchasers would have the right to resell the code, I decided to hold off and get it dirt cheap from one of them.

So, instead of paying $297.00 for the code, I got my copy yesterday for $2.50 from an Ebay seller. Yep, two dollars and fifty cents.

So here’s the lesson : when you read a sales letter for the latest hot piece of software or info product, stop yourself immediately when you see the words resale rights. 1) You can be assured that there will, in very short order, be way too many people selling at rock bottom prices for you to make your money back reselling. and 2) If you just want the product, you’ll be able to get it for pennies on the dollar if you’re willing to wait and search for a few minutes.

That’s not to say resale rights are always bad. I’ve made a good chunk of change from selling products I bought rights to… but they weren’t, and will never be, the overmarketed “hot products” that you’ll see most often. They’re little known, relatively unheard of niche products that only a few people have rights to.

And my final tip about buying digital products on Ebay.

Bid early.
Bid low.
Don’t bid twice.

At least 50% of the time, you’ll get the product at the price you bid, even if you lose the auction, through a “second chance” offer.

I’ve been a little too busy with all the other stuff on my plate to adequately keep up with my proposed schedule.

However, I have gotten three sites up, and my adsense has squeaked up to about 50 cents per day. I’ve also had two Clickbank sales from those sites since setup totalling $61.10.

I also added an Amazon web services store to one of the sites which has brought three sales for a total commission of $4.32 (wow, isn’t that a letdown!).

So, my total revenues thus far: $75.32

Divided by 13 (the number of days I’ve been in the challenge), I’m making $5.79 per day.

I either have to make these better, or I’ll need to have more than 50 sites to get my daily total up to $100.00.

Sigh.