It’s been a long, frustrating 15 months since I last posted here. Over the past year I have:

• Put a lot of money into four major non-gaming domains/websites, none of which have yet reached page one for their targeted keywords.
• Sold my only USA-facing poker site, which had struggled in Google for over a year, then watched it skyrocket in the rankings a few months later after a Google update.
• Saw my non-USA poker affiliate income fall by 50+%, despite buying up several new revenue-producing sites throughout the year.
• Paid a premium to buy into an existing, revenue-producing silver affiliate network, only to have APMEX terminate their affiliate program shortly after. After we found an alternative way to monetize the silver sites, I decided to buy an additional percentage of the network, only to have the majority of the network get destroyed by a Panda update two days later.

A lot of the above was my fault, but to put it simply, 2011 was not my year.

However, I’m extremely optimistic for what is to come in 2012. I think a few of my non-gaming websites will “pop out” from some sort of age filter that seems to be holding them back, and I’m also a partner on a new venture that I’m pretty excited about: JMBullion.com.

JMBullion.com

This is the first retail site that I’ve been involved in, and it’s been fun to handle tasks like ad buys (for traffic), our affiliate program, increasing customer confidence, etc – basically all the things I never got to do while running affiliate websites. The site has already proven to be profitable with the small amount of traffic from our existing silver network as well as a few ad buys/affiliate deals, so it’s exciting to think what will happen when we start getting some Google traffic, add gold, recruit more affiliates, do more ad buys, etc.

I’ll probably post a little more often now with updates about JM Bullion, as it’s a little more exciting than my normal websites. Also, anyone who used to promote APMEX and is looking for an alternative way to monetize their silver/gold websites, feel free to check out our affiliate program or Skype me to talk more (michael.wittmeyer).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.