This past week, I either purchased or agreed to the purchase of 7 sites, to bring my tally to 8. Except in my eagerness, I ignored checking into a few things before forking over my money (or agreeing to barter freelance blogging work in one case). I figured that I’ve learned enough in the past 1.5 years of blogging that I can apply some plans to monetize these blogs.

For example, I purchased Songwriting Forums to supplement my low-traffic Sound Alchemy Online music blog, on the basis that the forum supposedly was receiving roughly 70,000 page views per month. It sounded high for a site with under 100 members, but forums do get higher pageview counts per visitor. Except when I looked under the hood of the statistics, I found that the of the 70,000 pageviews, about half of them belonged to a single IP address - that of the previous owner, I presume.

Still, 30,000 pageviews per month is nothing to sneeze at. Except traffic has dwindled. And the owner turned off the forum for two days, but with good intentions, in case a database backup was needed. That, plus the necessary domain transfer, seem to have affected daily pageviews even further, falling to all time lows since the site was orginally created in Jun 2006.

I still think I can do something with the song writing forum, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve written any songs, and I’ll have to come up with some interesting and relevant forum content. Except that I don’t have any time. And I have the other 6 sites I bought this week. And that’s a story in itself. It runs on the Typepad weblog platform, which I really dislike immensely. But it generates static HTML pages with “.html” in the URL. So I can’t port everything to WordPress without losing all the PR (3-4).

What’s more, I had hoped to run Text-Link-Ads on the single PR4 site, but I found out after the purchase that Textpad isn’t supported yet. Since you shouldn’t run Google AdSense on this type of site, I’m left with few choices for monetizing 6 new sites. Affiliate programs could work, but I’m still learning how to do that. I haven’t made a single affiliate sale ever (referral signups not included).

So while the cost of most of these sites is bartered, I’ve spent or committed funds totalling in the early four digits for 8 sites in 5 months. That’s cash money I won’t have. One site does okay on Text-Link-Ads, which I’ve mentioned here previously. Half of it’s monthly revenue goes to paying for content. The other half will fund part of the cost of content for the other 6 sites. A moderator for the song writing forum will come out of my pocket.

I’m giving myself until June to show some revenue on the 7 new sites. If they don’t, I’ll probably sell them.