I’ve teamed up with my brother Rodney (and several others) to form SaintLouisSports.com! I was shocked to see this .com domain name available and knew from the beginning it would be a solid site to grow out. It should get natural traffic and be “legit” enough to get link backs from some notable sites as well. Very exciting.

So the basic design is done and we’ve been working to get some content out there. Now it’s time to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, Guest Posts, links, emails and more. If you have a site – would love a shout out to SaintLouisSports.com! The site will feature the Cardinals, Rams and Blues. Basically it will be a blog, directory and more. Really excited about this project and hopefully it keeps me connected within the STL Sports cirlces as well!

Visit Saint Louis Sports today and see our progress.  Or follow us @SaintLouisSport on twitter.

Cake Poker Affiliate Program

Well, this changed with the news that the US Government is shutting down Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars to US players.  Now, all of a sudden, there is the potential for millions of established poker players searching and looking for a new poker room to play at.  I’m here for them and you can be too.

Consider signing up to be a Cake Poker Affiliate.  Cake Poker is the room a lot of players are migrating to.  They seem to be ready to take on the challenge.  I started pushing them a little and over the first 2-3 days I had 20+ signups!  Get in the game before it’s too late.  If you are looking to just be a player at Cake Poker, be sure to signup through me

Sign up for Cake Poker Affiliate Program here.

You can twitter me @RyanKnuppel if you have comments or questions.

• Adding new pages of content.
• Updating blogs with new content.
• Getting new links.
• Setting up the design of new sites.
• Marketing the sites.

All of this stuff is important to the success of a website.  Each and every day I map out an agenda of things that need to be done that day.  The thing is – a lot of it doesn’t ever seem to get done.  Why?  Well, as most of you know I have a limited amount of time to work on my “hobby” sites.  I have a full time job and a full time family life.  So my time is limited to evenings after the kids go to bed.  But what do I find myself doing?  I stare at Gmail, or Yahoo mail, or Twitter, or Facebook or chat.  I spend countless hours getting nothing important done and just kinda VEGGING.  At the end of the night – I haven’t checked anything off my list.

So I guess this post is just a reminder to myself that I need to shut some of this stuff down/off at night and actually do some WORK.  Success doesn’t come without hard work.  I have the lists or to-do roadmaps all setup to have a successful internet marketing “career”.  But, without following that roadmap and checking things off the list – it will never be successful at all.

Time to get to work!

March 2011 Recap – Affiliate Marketing

• Post tons of March Madness content on my betting site:  I did this.  I recruited some help as well and got some nice traffic around March Madness.  Learned some things for next year as well.
• Have at least one day of 1000+ visitors to my betting site: SUCCESS!  Actually hit 2000+ on a day or two.
• Sell a minimum of 10 Cubs Suck shirts via email, site, Facebook, Twitter:  FAIL.  Sold 6 to be exact.
• Get homepage article up on every one of my “dormant” domains:  SEMI-FAIL.  Did a few but didn’t focus on some others.
• Move from Phase 1 to Phase 2 on my medical site: SUCCESS!
• Start tracking all finances in Quickbooks:  FAIL.  Getting close though.
• Take on this new “Link Building” job and deliver 5+ links: FAIL.  This job isn’t for me.
• Deliver 150+ articles to my G5 clients: SUCCESS!  Delivered well over this number and took on another 2 clients as well!
• Start the process for my CardinalsGM secret project: FAIL.
• Successfully setup and run a March Madness contest on my betting blog and convert 10+ new users to a sportsbook: PARTIAL SUCCESS!  I ran a nice contest.  Had 30+ players.  But didn’t get that many new users to the sportsbooks.
• Do not miss a single day sending out Betting Blogger free picks email: FAIL.  I missed a few.

March 2011 Goals – Affiliate Marketing

• Post some baseball strategy and baseball picks articles on my sports betting site.
• Sell a minimum of 10 Cubs Suck shirts via email, site, Facebook, Twitter.
• Get 1 or 2 contributors for my medical site.
• Successfully finish setting up my business (LLC).
• Start tracking all finances in Quickbooks.
• Deliver 150+ articles to my G5 clients.
• Get business cards printed up and increase the visibility of my Cardinals sites.
• Plan my Cardinals contest and get it off the ground.
• Do not miss a single day sending out Betting Blogger free picks email.
• Prune my domains and sites down to a “manageable” number.

So there we go.  April should be a great month.  It’s going to mark the first month I’m actually doing internet marketing stuff under an actual BUSINESS umbrella.  I’m very excited to get this going and will make a post once my company is formed and rolling.

February 2011 Recap – Affiliate Marketing

• Spent a lot of time planning out and setting up my new medical site that I’m partnering with a buddy on.
• Got another writer on board at my sports betting blog.  Had a great amount of traffic around the Super Bowl.
• Sold or let go of a handful other sites.
• I did buy 33 more domains.  Just couldn’t pass up on these.  More on these in my March goals.
• Put together a nice plan for selling Cubs Suck shirts in March.

March 2011 Goals – Affiliate Marketing

• Post tons of March Madness content on my betting site.
• Have at least one day of 1000+ visitors to my betting site.
• Sell a minimum of 10 Cubs Suck shirts via email, site, Facebook, Twitter.
• Get homepage article up on every one of my “dormant” domains.
• Move from Phase 1 to Phase 2 on my medical site.
• Start tracking all finances in Quickbooks.
• Take on this new “Link Building” job and deliver 5+ links.
• Deliver 150+ articles to my G5 clients.
• Start the process for my CardinalsGM secret project.
• Successfully setup and run a March Madness contest on my betting blog and convert 10+ new users to a sportsbook.
• Do not miss a single day sending out Betting Blogger free picks email.

As you can tell, March is going to be a busy but productive month.  I’ll report back in April how everything turns out.  Wish me luck  :)

So I decided to finally just get this stupid thing developed and see if I can get some traffic coming to it.  I’m not going to try and make any money from this site – YET.  All I’m going to do is collect emails and grow a targeted fan list for future use.  Once I have this list I can market different offers at anytime.  So no adsense or paid links or anything at this time.  I went ahead and got about 15 articles created on different topics surrounding Andre Iguodala.  It’s all published and I probably should spend a few more minutes internal linking but oh well.  I’ll add some pictures as time goes on and probably get a few incoming links as well to get some PR.

All in all, it’s not a very fancy site.  Purely informational but the end goal is to get traffic and grow a list.  The I can market my MONEY sites to this list in the future.  I actually own about 5-10 of these types of exact match domain names.  If this one starts to convert some visitors into the mailing list I’ll probably develop out the others.

• Estimated cost to develop: $30
• Estimated time spent: 3 hours

Take a look and if you own a site – link up to me with anchor “Andre Iguodala“. Thanks!

I talked the other day about how we should act like every month is January. If we learn to set monthly goals this should help with our “project” problem. One thing I’m going to try very hard to do going forward is to finish my projects before starting another one. This could be very difficult but I promise it will be more rewarding. I WILL NOT START A NEW PROJECT UNTIL TE PREVIOUS PROJECT IS DONE! This doesn’t mean I can’t have ideas. Have an idea – jot it down – and then keep plugging away on the current project list for this motnh. Lay out each month what projects are currently open and the steps needed to complete these projects. Don’t add other projects to this list until they are complete.

I’ll give a few personal examples of my “unfinished projects”.

Betting Blogger

This sports betting blog is going to be huge. Trust me. But start navigating through some of the pages and categories and you’ll see there is a TON of blank pages. It needs a lot of base content developed for it. My main focus in 2011 is Betting Blogger and making it an authority in the betting world.

My Celebrity/Disney Sites

All of my celebrity sites are about 75% done. But 75% makes you lose out on money. They all have nice content and traffic but what am I doing with this traffic? I need to get a plan in place to truly monetize these sites.

Cardinal Sites

CardinalsGM.com and Albert Pujols Club are my two Cardinal sites that are pieced together. CGM is coming along nicely and is probably my 2nd biggest focus in 2011. My dad and I have slowly been adding content and growing the readership of CGM. But it’s still not complete. APC needs lots of work and I’m not even capturing emails or visitors here. What a waste.

Ok, I could go on and on about these half finished web projects. You don’t even want to know about the projects I’m READY to start working on. I have probably 5-10 great ideas that are just itching to get started. But I am forcing myself to refuse to start these projects until my current list is complete and making me money!

Set and Review Goals Monthly

The first thing I’d recommend doing is reviewing and adjusting your goals on a monthly basis. The first of every month is a perfect time for this. In your mind, act like each month is a New Year and you have a whole new set of goals that upcoming month. Take a look at how you did with the previous months goals and don’t settle for not meeting goals. Simply doing this will help you not lose focus on what your true goals are and will give you a shorter time span to try and accomplish your goals.

That’s a short tip but it’s all I got for today. Act like every month is January and watch your productivity soar throughout the entire year.

2010 Recap

Since this is the first month I’ve done this I’m not going to have a lot here. 2010 was a great year from an internet marketing perspective for me. Mainly because I weeded down my portfolio of sites to a manageable number. I also really grew the content creation aspect of my web business. I guess now you could break my web stuff out into two different areas. 1) Internet Marketing 2) Affiliate Services

2011 January Goals

Betting Blogger

1. Successfully run the Sports Blogging Challenge on Betting Blogger.
2. Don’t miss a day sending out the “Free Picks” email on Betting Blogger.
3. Send out a monthly newsletter.
4. Add 10+ static pages of content.

Knup.net

1. Create a blog entry each and every day.
2. Create an email distribution list for a newsletter.

Cardinals GM

1. Successfully clean up the links and work with other UCB and BBA sites to link exchange.
2. Define plan for “Project G”.

G5 Content

1. Line up several clients for “daily blog updates” service.
2. Get a small team to help me with some smaller content projects.
3. Take on a few extra orders to get the ball rolling again.

Show Me The Money

Coming soon – maybe.

I hope you all have a great January 2011 and lets make some money.

2010 was kind of a rough year.  I learned a lot and came full circle in my Internet marketing philosophy.  I had spent the last 2-3 years with this simple philosophy:

I will never create that one website that makes me $2000 a month.  But I can easily create 100 websites that each make me $20 a month.

WRONG!  While in theory this may sound good.  100 sites is WAY more overhead than many of you can even imagine.  You have to keep up with site upgrades, theme designs, content (this is the hardest), links, reply to emails, monetize them all, and on and on.  It’s simply impossible for a one man show (Knup) to do all of this.  Especially in my limited time to work with my site portfolio.  Basically I have 2-3 hours each night to work on stuff.

I had grown my domain count up to like 215 at one point in 2010.  215 potential website ideas.  UGH.  My actually “sites” number was probably 115.  Each of these was a half-a** excuse for a website.  Nothing was done well.  Everything was done just mediocre at best.  I couldn’t keep up.  So the last 3-4 months I made the switch to this philosophy:

Create the biggest and best site(s) for niches (topics) that I truly have a passion for.

Simple.  If you have an authority site – you will make money.  And sometimes – LOTS of it.  So I have been selling many sites over the last few months.  The funny part was, most of them made small profits over the years.  Between the adsense revenue, ads I sold and the amount I sold the site for – they profited.  But that many sites was overwhelming.  So any sites that weren’t even worth selling – I just dropped.  Domains that were out there – DROPPED!  I didn’t wait for them to expire – I just simply deleted them from my GoDaddy so I wasn’t tempted to renew them later.  It felt good.  I now have my domain/site portfolio down to a manageable 50 or so.  Not all of these are sites that I do the work on. Some are hosted, some are ran by others with me as the IT guy, some are self managed, some I blog on, and some are ideas that I will still implement.

So first of all, what are the niches I really care about.  Simple.  1) Cardinals Baseball  2) Sports Betting / Poker / Casino  3) My family / Internet Marketing

Remember all of those celebrity sites?  SOLD.  Gone.  I kept 5 of the main ones around because they simply get tons of traffic and are going to be authority sites in the near future.  I also have a nice blogger to take care of the content on those sites so they are no effort for me.

Let’s take a quick look at the sites that are still in my portfolio going into 2011.  Each of these has a plan and will be in my 2011 Internet Marketing Goals which I’ll post in a few days.

Sites I Blog On

• Cardinals Blog – my dad and I run CardinalsGM.com which is an awesome STL Cardinals Blog!
• Albert Pujols Club – AP is my sports idol.  But lets face it – this site will be GONE quickly if he signs elsewhere.
• Betting Blog – Betting Blogger is my HUGE blogging project for 2011 and beyond.  Instead of smaller focuses sites – this site will have EVERYTHING related to sports betting, poker, casino and fantasy sports!  It will be big!
• Club Lebron – I do truly like LeBron and couldn’t let this site go. Gets great traffic.  I’ll blog on occasion. Would love to get a dedicated blogger to take over here though and just manage the monetization.
• Cubs Suck Club – My baby!  This is where making money online started for me honestly.  Can’t let this go until they win a World Series.  NEVER!
• Knup.net – RyanKnuppel.com and BryceKnuppel.com go along with this.  Family blogging.  I got rid of my Internet Marketing blog (knupnet.com) and will make knup.net ALL ENCOMPASSING for family, business ventures, fun stuff, etc…

Other Blogs I Monetize and Manage (but do not blog)

• Miley Cyrus – Jeff does a great job.  Getting big!
• Selena Gomez – Largest CCN (Celebrity Club Network) site I had.  Jeff blogs.  Real big and lots of traffic.
• Vanessa Hudgens – Jeff blogs!
• Demi Lovato – Jeff Blogs!
• Golden Tee Fan – Erik’s baby!  Is the largest Golden Teen resource site out there!

Sites I Host via KnupHost.com

So as you can see.  This is still all a lot of work.  But I’m making it more manageable.  My 2011 goals will hopefully clearly define what I want to do in each of these areas.  Another positive of downsizing my portfolio is I was able to get rid of my dedicated server (costing me $125 a month) and use HostGator shared hosting which will now cost me a total of $10-$20 a month.  So what do you think?  If you are interested at all in Internet Marketing and starting up your own website or set of websites in 2011 – contact me!  I can help you get started learning the ropes.