So a couple of months ago I registered a domain, set up a blog and installed a plugin for wordpress which allowed me to take e-bay feeds and turn them into a post. A click through on an item in the list which led to a winning big would supply me with a commission. The whole site was very simple to install and set up and for a while it looked like it was going to work really well. I gained a few back links and began using the plug-in to post everyday. The blog was to target the fancy dress niche, which meant making a post was very easy. I simple typed in fancy dress costumes into Google keyword search and then made a post using those keywords with little competition in the search engine placements, e.g less than 1,000,000 results.

For the first few weeks I got incredibly lucky. The film Mama Mia was out in the cinema and I quickly realised that by creating Abba costume related posts my blog would jump to near top of the serps. I made money both with adsense, and via a few affiliate commissions. I thought with Halloween approaching fast I was onto a winner. Unfortunately Google quickly decided my blog wasn’t worthy. I’m fairly certain that this is due to the “sandbox” factor that many people see with newly established sites. In fact I have another website which shot straight to position three in the serps over 3 months ago and is only now building it’s way back up, yet is still only on page two. Rubbish

So this meant that I missed out on the Halloween rush as there is nothing I could do in time to get the google love back to the blog. Which means I now have to wait a while and keep building up natural looking back links and hope that this time next year the blog will be in a more likeable position and I can start making the money back spent on the domain/hosting.