The first quarter of 2009 is almost completed. It is mid-March and I am amazed how fast time is flying. The first 8 weeks of the year have been extremely interesting to me. I saw a few successes and I am also seeing some frustrations growing on my side – mainly with how difficult it has gotten to drive traffic to my websites via SEO. Google really has gotten a good grip on things and made it hard for webmasters. I can understand their approach, but it also removes the ability for average webmasters to rank in their specific niches, while the really large players can take over a market segment and dominate it. Difficult for a new site to rank and I might have to use shortcuts, too (i.e. buying existing sites that already rank). Sure, some of the low end content put out by sleezy affiliates that don’t care about quality is kept out of the index, but it also shuts out quality content provided by smaller players. Oh well – I got to work harder I guess. 
Anyway – Now that I am having a better overview of my finances with 2 large website sales under my belt and some smaller acquisitions done as well, I can better plan for the year. I will need to upgrade my hard drive storage at home and are thinking about getting one of these Western Digital 2TB My Book Studio Edition II Hard Drive. I usually order hardware like this from Newegg, but in this case Amazon has the better deal (~$30 lower pricing) + they have the better return policy. This unit allows to mirror the 2 drives and therefore give me redundancy in case of a drive failure. And even though it is targeted towards MAC users, it works under Windows just fine.
I might not attend any conferences until the end of the year, but maybe plan to attend Affiliate Summit 2010 in early January instead. I might consider PPC Summit in Los Angeles again, but not sure if that will work with my schedule. I will decide on that during summer. I attended PPC Summit last year and really enjoyed the event. Tons of knowledge. Good stuff. Overall I am delaying a decision based on the economy. Rather than spending money on travel, I’d rather invest it into the business. The knowledge gain and networking would do a similar job, but at a higher price. For now at least I hold off, but if things go really well I might scrap that and travel.
My current laptop is coming up for replacement this year (I swap hardware every 3 years) and I hope I can stretch it until Windows 7 has been released by Microsoft. So, I will probably be in the market for that around October/November. I will not buy a Dell for the first time in many years due to their ugly designs. Why do business laptops have to be so ugly? I am considering a Sony laptop instead. It will cost me a little more, but I have heard good things about their laptops. I want a powerful, but lightweight laptop with at least a 15” screen. The new E series from Dell is just plain ugly. A friend recommended ASUS laptops. Have to check into that.
In an earlier posting I wrote about possibly being scammed by a seller of a website. I increased the pressure and added legal consequences to the mix and seem to have gotten what I was asking for the entire time. Still checking. But in general – why does this have to be such a hassle? If you sell a website and data, then deliver properly. Don’t mess around with other people. It might come back and hurt you really bad.
I am currently working in a new niche on Google Adwords and I am not seeing sufficient conversions yet, but I am seeing great success with my ads, keywords and the quality score. The campaign started off with a QS of 8 (QS=Great) and the CTRs are between 4% and 20% (consistently). I guess by tomorrow I can slowly reduce my bids without losing rankings for my ads. I still need to work on my landing page to turn visitors into buyers. Hopefully conversions will go up and make this a success. The other good news about this is that this is a brand-new Google Adwords account and that this campaign with high CTRs and great quality scores will help to build up a good account history.
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