The domains cover some broad markets inclucing money/finance, fashion, education, food and property. This is in addition to similar purpose sites or blogs we have for travel, health, dating and entertainment.

Having fun setting them up. Importing WordPress themes, redesigning them, setting up the category structure, and so on. Some very nice and very practical and easy to use themes are available now. And the best thing is that they are all free. I just need to provide a good web host and WordPress does the rest.

Future sites that we need for promotions will cover markets like electronics (cameras, video, GPS etc).

To make our new domains SEO friendly as possible I decided that they are dot coms, not previuosly banned by Google or Yahoo. I also checked the webarchives to see if they had any prior history. If they did, a real website got a pass. But if the domain had been used for a spammy looking site I avoided it. Just in case.

I must admit I would love to see my EPC increase to averages above 20 cents like it was a year or so ago. Ah! The good ol’ days of domain parking.

Anyway the volume going through my main account is around 6 to 10,000 ad clicks per day. So my figures are based on a reasonable volume fo traffic.

So despite the continual doom and gloom in the media about global recession, it’s good to see some industries like domain parking and online marketing still doing OK.

Well, actually fantastic when you consider the daily almost-passive income this method of arbitrage earns my company.

Well I did that. I also deleted any adgroups/keywords that may have got me a lot of traffic but no clicks because it was off topic or Yahoo couldn’t display any ads for that keyword. After all no point paying to send people to a website that is off topic or has no ads to click on. I also made sure that links using keywords with high traffic appeared on the parked domain page.

The result is a nice increase in my spread of revenue to PPC spend. Prior to these campaign and website changes my spread was around 1.3. Now it increased to 1.5-1.6 over the last few days.

So well worth the effort considering the result and the speed these changes take effect. And it may even get better if EPC’s increase again from late January onwards as expected (well at least by me).

EPC’s across my parked domains have dropped a couple of cents as of January 1. Enough to see my net income drop $200-$300 per day. And my spread of parked domain revenue after PPC costs (yes I do arbitrage with parked domains), has dropped from 1.63 in December to around 1.3 so far in 2009.

Should I panic? Nar, no time for that!

I expect it would be a aftermath of the silly season. When many people take annual holidays for Winter up north and Summer down south. Credit cards are all spent up. There’s the usual news about the financial crisis and credit crunch. And maybe some advertisers aren’t getting the usual conversions for sales or leads.

Whatever the reason, it appears to me that many advertisers either pause their campaigns or drop their bids. If the spending frenzy of Christmas slows down. Dropping bids that may have built up to high levels would make sense.

Anyway, I’m not too worried. As usually business picks up from mid January onwards.

The funny thing volume is up though. I’m getting record levels of traffic for my pre Christmas PPC bids. It’s just not getting good payouts from the other end of the food chain.

Remedy: I went through all my campaigns starting in order of daily revenue earnt. I checked the Google campaigns for any high volume adgroupds/keywords that were driving traffic to dead ends. Some of the parked pages at Epi weren’t displaying any ads for certain keywords. Obviously Yahoo must be a bit short on ads for some (or many) keywords. So those adgroups were deleted. And in many cases all adgroups in a campaigns had their bids dropped a few cents to post New Year levels.

But I’ll keep my eye out for opportunities to increase them again when EPC’s pick up. Hopefully soon.