Since my last post had a somewhat negative tone to it, I thought I had better go ahead and drop a more positive post on you. I’ve still been plugging away with my micro niche sniper sites, and the progress is coming along good. So far this month, from a total of 17 micro niche snipers I set up (13 last month, 4 in late 09) I’ve earned $10.20 in adsense. Not too shabby considering a good chunk of the most recent 13 sites are still only a couple weeks old. Overall, 11 out of 17 sites have produced clicks so far, also not too bad. The 4 sites I set up in 09 and the 2 I set up early in January are accounting for about 75% of the total earnings for this month. Also, just a refresher, I made a total of about $5.75 from these sites in January.

So overall what I can tell so far is that, it’s definitely good that my newest batch of sites are bringing in clicks already, and even better to see that the aged sites have already almost doubled what they pulled in last month. If things continue going in the same direction, I’ll hopefully end up around $20 in earnings this month. Another good trend I’ve been seeing over the past 7 days is I’ve been averaging clicks from at least 2 of these niche sites per day, some days even 4-5 of the sites sending clicks, so I’m hoping as I go along, I’ll keep seeing more and more different sites from the group sending clicks each day. Overall, the value of the clicks is looking good – ranging from I would say about 0.40 to 1.25/click, with some bigger and some smaller ones mixed in. I’m not going to get rich overnight with this, but I’m really encouraged by the results so far. I should have 7 more of these sites deployed by the middle of next week or so.

All of the most recent bunch of sites I’ve deployed, I’ve been sending about 5 backlinks to right off the bat from article sites – from original articles on each site. This seems to help get the sites indexed really quickly, and almost all of the most recent sites I’ve put up have started out in the top 20 for their keyword, and still remain there. I’m going to hold off on sending any additional links to any of those sites for another 2 weeks or so, and then I’ll probably cherrypick the sites with the highest CTR and send out another 5 or so backlinks and see how much movement I get from it. I’ll probably also take some time to backlink my existing backlinks on those sites.

The main questionmark for me, still, is how effective Micro Niche Finder is. I’m still loving the tool, and I’ve been getting a good amount of clicks on the newer sites, all 11 of which are niches from MNF. Most of my earnings at this point, however, are from the sites I created in 09 and at the beginning of January which are niches I came up with off the top of the dome. I think, still, that time is the most determining factor in this case and the results I’ve seen so far from the MNF batch look really promising. I’m still going to hold off giving it my full recommendation for another couple weeks, because I want to see how these MNF sites are looking after about 5-6 weeks time.

My plan moving forward is: finish the last 7 niche sites – that will make 20 new sites for 2010 and knock one goal off my overall list for the year. That will be done by early next week. Then, I’ll probably let all my newer sites site for a couple of weeks and see how things go. In the meantime, I may try sending some more links to the aged sites – particularly the first 4 I built. Then, probably in the second week of March, or so, I’ll start sending some additional links to the newer batch of niche sites, and hopefully just keep going from there. Ideally, I would like to see $20 in overall earnings this month, and hopefully $50 next month. Based on the numbers so far, I think that is a pretty conservative goal. If it looks like I’m on track for it in mid March, I may try to do 100 AdSense snipers in April and then be good after that.

Also – I decided to squash my plans to do 100 articles on my automotive site temporarily – I’ve got a lot of the keywords figured out, but still have a lot more to go, and I don’t know that much about the automotive niche, so I want to take my time with it. Instead, I want to get a little primer of how using MNF to add new pages to existing sites works, so I choose 2 sites that are very aged that I bought over a year ago off digital point. Both of them have about 3-4 pages of content and currently bring in minimal amounts of revenue from adsense right now. What I did was research 30 new keywords for each site, and I’m going to add each keyword as it’s own page within the exisiting sites. These are all really low competition keywords, so I’m hoping the age of the sites will help a lot in ranking quickly for these keywords. I should have all of these articles added by the end of next week, and should have a rough idea of the effectiveness within a couple weeks.

I will also say – I had a whole group of sites in a certain niche that I set up as EPN sites about a year ago. About half of the network got squashed by Big G because the sites were too thin, so I took down all the auctions from 2 of the sites, removed all the pages and put up a single page of about 300 words and an adsense ad. They didn’t get deindexed, and remained in the #1 – 10 positions for their main keyword on google for quite a while, then slowly dropped off. Anyway, about 2-3 months ago, I put up some new keyword rich articles on each site, and formed them into what is very similar to how my niche snipers are set up – the rankings returned and they are both doing pretty good in AdSense. These are both niches that do better in the summer time, and I expect them to get at least $5/day each via adsense for a good portion of the summer based on how they’ve been doing now. Anyway the point is, I’m pretty sure that the strategy of adding new keyword rich pages to existing sites is going to work pretty well, so I’m excited to see how it goes with the two sites I’m going to be adding 30 posts each to.

Ideally, I see myself putting out another decent chunk of AdSense snipers once I feel confident in the formula, which should easily get me to my $50/day adsense goal. Then after that, I want to start putting out some bigger sites – not necessarily 100+ page sites, but at least targeting a good 30-50 keywords within a niche. I think if I keep on this strategy I can get to $100/day by the end of the year, which would be about a 70% increase from right now. Then, I can focus on building really high quality sites that target super competitive niches.  I think I only want to manage about 500 sniper sites, anything more than that is just going to be too much hassle. I’ve already got 100 EPN snipers, and I’m planning on doing 100 adsense snipers in addition to the 24 I already have. I’ll also probably do at least 100 Amazon snipers if all goes well with the Adsense project, so that is going to be a lot of sites to maintain right there. I may do some of my new adsense snipers with basic HTML templates, as they are way easier to backup and maintain that way. WordPress is great to deal with, but it could be problematic to have so many WP blogs to handle. I’ll just have to see how it goes.

Anyway, things seem to be on the right track, and I’m liking the way this is going compared to how I did with my EPN sites, so hopefully my next report back will be even better.

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Ok, so if you’ve been tuning in regularly, you may remember I mentioned about a month ago, or so, that I was working on some new micro niche sites. Basically, these are just like my EPN sites, but the niche is more focused, and thus it should be easier to rank the sites and get targeted traffic. The overall earning potential is likely a lot lower than with my EPN niche sites, but I should be able to avoid the sandbox with most of these sites, and see much quicker earnings. So in my attempt to reach my first New Year’s resolution of kicking my Adsense earnings up to $50/day, my first new affiliate project this year is going to be working on deploying a handful – 20 – 50 of these micro niche sniper sites.

First things first, this time I plan to do a little testing and have solid game plan going into it. I researched and set up 4 of these micro niche snipers at the beginning of December and I haven’t done a lot with them since, but they are all aged now, and believe it or not, I’ve actually made ~ $2.00 in adsense so far off of a couple clicks. So now I am ready to test some different promotion strategies with each site, and see what brings the best results.

First, some background on the 4 sites:

Site 1

• 645,000 google results (not using ” ” for my searches on any of these)
• Exact keyword .com domain name
• Targets a product – very obscure
• Currently ranking #8 in google for keyword, was ranking #5 for almost all December
• Currently showing 0 backlinks
• Have NOT added AdSense to this site yet

Site 2

• 475,000 Google search results for the keyword
• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Targets a product in the energy/home niche, relatively common product
• Currently not ranking in top 100 in Google for main keyword
• Showing 11 backlinks – I submitted several Ezines with a link to this site in the bio
• This site DOES have Adsense installed

Site 3

• Keyword returns 270,000 results in google
• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Targets a product in the health/fitness niche
• Currently not ranking in the top 100 for its keyword, although it was at one point
• Site is showing 0 backlinks
• This site DOES have adsense installed, has earned ~2.00 so far

Site 4

• Google returns 168,000 for this keyword
• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Product related keyword in the health/fitness niche – same niche as #3, more specific keyword
• Site is currently ranking #59 for its main keyword
• Site currently has 0 backlinks showing
• This site does NOT have Adsense installed

So these are the 4 sites. I have hardly touched them at all since I originally deployed them at the very beginning of December, and they are all a little over a month old now. The only site I did any kind of promotion with whatsoever so far was site #2 – I wrote a handful of Ezine articles in a popular topic, with a link to this site in the bio – this is a technique from the X-Factor system, which appears to not work at all. Anyway, other than that, I’ve done literally no other backlinking on the other 3 sites, and I’ve currently got 1 of the sites on page 1 already.

So my initial strategy is to try a few things starting ouut, and see what gives me the best results.

For site #1, I’m already on the first page, I just want to stay there, and ideally move up a few spots. I’m going to try conservatively using automated social bookmarking to send a few links at it every couple of days. I’m hoping this will be enough to move it up closer to #1, and still keep it from being sandboxed. I also plan to wait until at least February to finally add Adsense. As it stands right now, sites #2 and #3 are the only ones currently monitized, and also are the only sites not ranking in the top 100. I believe all of these niches are specific enough to avoid sandboxing, so I want to see if there may be some kind of “penalty” for putting adsense on too soon. I’ll know more once I send more links to these sites, and see if they start to rise, or remain out of the top 100.

For site #2, I’ve already sent a few off-topic ezine links to this site, but I plan to send 10 more 300 word web 2.0 links at this site this week to see if it helps bump me up at all. These 300 word articles will all be on-topic, and hopefully will at least push me back into the top 100. Since this site already has a few links showing, I can probably send all 10 links at once and it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

For site #3, this is my other site that currently runs AdSense and has actually earned me a couple dollars already. For this site, I’m going to do a manual social bookmarking run, and also do 250 manual web directory submissions. I’ve had some nice success on really specific niches submitting to manual directories in the past, so I want to see if it helps. One thing I like about it is, the directory links don’t always get instantly added, so its a nice way to slowly drip in new links.

For site #4, I’m also going to send 10 x 300 word article links to this site via web 2.0′s. Since this site has 0 links showing right now, I’m going to stagger the submissions a little bit – probably over the next two weeks. This is the most specific of this whole group of sites, and I don’t think it will take much to get it ranking, but we’ll see.

There’s no guarantee that any of these promotion techniques are actually going to work, but I think it’s worth a shot. If I find that I can get these really specific niche sites ranking quickly simply via bookmarking and directory submissions, it will make it really simple to scale the whole operation up. Really, same with the web 2.0 article links. I mainly just want to see what’s most effective, and try to get a better grasp of how big an impact it makes to put AdSense on the site right away.

I have 2 more mirco niche sites I was able to get deployed yesterday, and they also are in a very similar niche, so it should be really easy to run another split test with them.

Last, I’m going to give Micro Niche Finder a try as well, to see if it works better than my current methods for finding new niches, and I’ll be testing several of those niches over the next month or so.

I’m getting cracking on this right now, and I will try to report back on the progress regualrly.

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