Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve neglected the majority of websites. Either I lost interest in them, or just simply haven’t had the time. When I first started making money online in late 2005, I had all the time in the world to work on my sites. I had time to do grunt work like directory submissions, article submissions, link exchanges, etc. I don’t know if lately I’ve become too lazy, or if I just don’t have the time.

So this morning I went back to the basics. I started doing some of the grunt work on my websites that I’ve just been ignoring lately. I know Adsense sucks, but a lot of these older sites I run still rely on Google for a check every month. The more I’ve neglected them, the smaller the Adsense checks have been. Hopefully by going back to the basics I can level out that earnings decline, and move it in an upward direction.

I picked a couple sites this morning, like Does the Dress Fit, Tebow Zone, and iPhone Pictures, then submitted them to 5 directories each. I also went to a webmaster forum and asked for link exchanges. Pagerank means nothing, but unfortunately too many private advertisers still base payments on how high your PR is. By doing this basic link building I’ll hopefully increase my sites’ PR. Normally I would just hire someone to do this.. but with the economy sucking I decided to spend the 20-30 minutes and do it myself.

Other basics that I’m getting back to are little things like alt and title tags. Sometimes when I’m writing a blog post, I’ll completely ignore the title/alt tags because I don’t want to take the few seconds extra to add them in. Simple things can still make a difference. Also, I need to keep fresh content on the homepages of all my sites. These stupid myspace resource sites I run haven’t been truly updated in over a year, but they still make money. Contrary to popular belief, I guess people still use Myspace.

So hopefully in getting back to the basics, I can save the life of an handful of my websites. Will keep you updated.