EDIT: This post was actually written on November 16th. It is actually a forum post that I wrote in here. Some of the information has been changed a little bit from the original forum post, but it is basically all here. I wasn’t sure if I would post this on my blog or now, but after thinking it over, I decided to post it.

The “gist” of this experiment is to utilize Postrunner, which is a Guest Posting system and part of the Keyword Academy membership, to recieve guest posts for a large authority site in a general niche.

Since originally writing this post, I’ve already received somewhere between 20-40 guest posts, and I’ve only had to decline about 3-5 of them. I’ve also published about 150 of my own posts to keep the ratio where I want it to be. I haven’t monitized the site yet, however I will likely be doing so soon.  So far this project has been going great, and I will definitley keep you posted.

Without further ado… Here is the orignal post:

Ok, I don’t know exactly if this qualifies as an experiment because it’s kind of already the way Postrunner is intended to be used, but I digress…

In addition to making a solid living via niche and supersites, I also own an e-commerce site that generates over 10K in monthly revenue, and my primary business is web development and SEO consulting. The thing that all 3 have in common is Postrunner. As someone with over 2000 posts currently live in the system, many coming within the last few months, I can say without a doubt that it is one of the most valuable tools, if not the most valuable tool I use right now.

All that being said, the fact of the matter is, I’ve only really been using half of the system.  I have had a site hooked in to postrunner since it first launched, however it is in an extremely narrow niche, and I’ve maybe only received 10-20 posts ever.  This kind of makes me feel bad, considering how much I use the “linking” end of Postrunner. For a long time I’ve wanted to  try working on a project where I could take full advantage of receiving guest posts.

Looking at it from the point of view of a “poster”, I feel that by far, the best PR links are the ones that come from the most relevant sites possible. I’ve seen this a lot with home and garden and automotive links in my own experience posting.  Of course there is always going to be a lot fewer of these, especially very specific links, but I would take a contextual link from a highly relevant PR0 site over a link from a PR5 general directory any day.

So based on all that, for this “experiment” I wanted to create a site in a slightly more narrow niche, or at least not a completely general site, so that I can provide some value back to the people submitting to me by giving them a great contextual link from a relevant site.

So here are the details…

Site Details:

I purchased a pre-owned domain.

It is well aged, has a decent existing link profile, currently has traffic,  is PR4 and DMOZ listed.

Pets isn’t the most specific niche in the world, but it is more specific than Home and Garden or Finance or Technology (in my opinion), and I think it will strike a good medium where it is general enough that I’ll be able to get a decent volume of posts, and at the same time I can still make it specific enough for the links to give really good juice.

I’m going to set up the site using a Silo format with the Page-Post-Associator plugin for WordPress. I’ve never personally tried to set up a site using silos, so I’m sure there will be a learning curve, but overall I think it will be a good way to go.

I’ve already created a custom theme.

Content Details:

My main goal is to exploit this end of postrunner for what I feel are the most valuable aspects – the ability to get a constant stream of fresh content, and the ability to get FREE content for setting up internal link nets. In return, posters will get a really high quality link back to their site from a highly relevant and well cared for page.

I’ve gotten 1000 pet related CSVs via Josh’s service here on the forum (which I strongly recommend). I’m going to start with a spreadsheet of 200 green keywords that I will hand pick. I will probably try to publish a quality, 800 word post for each green keyword, then use the articles I get from PR for link nets back to my 200 core green keywords. I will probably also create shorter posts for additional link nets back to my core green posts.  So for each of my initial 200 green keywords, I will aim to have at least 5-10 supporting posts for link nets, all contained within the silo structure. I have SEO Smart Links installed right now to create links, HOWEVER, I think I am going to deactivate it some time before I get my first 100 posts on the site and manually create all the links by hand. This way I can control my link nets very precisely.

What I’m willing to accept for publishing – First off, I will have no minimum word requirement. Second, any topic related to Pets will be in play. Third, I’m not going to be THAT strict about grammar. I might correct a few things myself, I might let some things slide. Personally I don’t think articles with some grammatical errors will be a big deal.

What I won’t accept is articles that do not read well or make any sense. That is pretty much it.

Ideally, right now I am thinking I would like to have an absolute minimum 3 to 1 ratio – my posts to guest posts. Realistically, I think it would like it to be even higher than that.

I will try to add pictures to posts whenever possible.

Monitization:

I don’t plan to monitize the site at all until it gets on a regular google indexing routine. The last time I tried building up a super site on an expired domain, I think I was slowed by the fact that I added adsense before the index had been updated to bump out the old content with my new content – this is all theory, of course.

Hopefully within 30-60 days, I should feel confident adding AdSense. I will likely add it to every page of the site.

Additionally, I will likely selectively add amazon products to my main green keyword posts, and possibly some of the link net posts.

Backlinking:

I will probably follow the normal link building timeline almost exactly starting out.

I will try to build backlinks to individual articles people post. Additionally, I will definitely be building backlinks to the home page for each silo – so for example if you submit an article about Dog Training, it will be in the Dog Training Silo, and linked to from the Dog Training home page. I will absolutely be building links to all my silo home pages, which in turn should be beneficial for all of the articles submitted in terms of juice.

Goals:

Main goal: I want to get the most out of postrunner that I possibly can from a publishing point of view. I feel this is the best way, we’ll see if I’m right.

- I want to be able to contribute some nice links back into the system, since I’ve taken so many.

- I want to show that people shouldn’t be afraid to hook good sites into the system (I will be investing quite a bit in this project)

- I want to show that it’s OK to lighten up on grammar a little bit

- I want to hopefully promote the idea of hooking more specific sites into the system, so that we can ultimately have a very diverse pool of link options to draw from regardless of what niche – I think this will mean people will get more with less links, and it will lead to a better quality system in the long run. There won’t be as much need for you to have your outsourcer spam the lower quality general directories with 100 crappy articles when you can get 25 nice contextual links from sites in your actual niche.

- Last but not least, I want to make some cash. If all goes well, I will be investing a lot of time and money in this project in the first 3-6 months, then hopefully I can put it on auto pilot and start all over again on a new project.

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.