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. As promised, time for a more in-depth update on the progress of my micro niche sniper case study. First – I’ll relist the info for all 6 sites, and update what I’ve done so far this month on each, then give some more info on the results to this point.

Site 1

• Keyword is in the Home niche
• Exact keyword .com domain name
• Keyword has been in top 10 of SERPS since December
• Originally planned for automated bookmarking
• So far, still showing 0 links
• Added AdSense in mid January, site has earnings

Site 2

• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Targets a product in the energy/home niche, relatively common product
• Currently showing 14 backlinks
• Submitted 4 off topic Ezine Articles
• Submitted 10 GPS articles
• Site has Adsense earnings

Site 3

• 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 28 backlinks
• Site has Adsense Earnings
• Submitted to 250 Directories
• Submitted to 50 social bookmarking
• Submitted 10 GPS articles

Site 4

• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Product related keyword in the health/fitness niche – same niche as #3, more specific keyword
• Added 2 one-way blogroll links from my own network on different IP
• Site currently has 6 backlinks showing
• This site does NOT have Adsense installed

Site 5

• Started in January
• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Keyword is in the Automotive niche
• Showing 3 backlinks
• Added 1 contextual link from another related site I own, PR2
• Site started out with adsense installed, no earnings yet

Site 6

• Exact keyword .com for domain name
• Product in niche closely related to site 5
• Site currently has 3 backlinks showing
• Submitted 4 GPS articles
• Site started with adsense, has earnings

Current Rankings for Main Keyword:

Site 1: #5 w/ double listing

Site 2: 100+

Site 3: #8

Site 4: #21

Site 5:#100+

Site 6:#100+

Analysis

So first off, total earnings for January for these 6 sites is right around $4.50. Almost all of that came during the last 7 days. Second – all these rankings are based on a Scroogle search. I’ve been getting varying results in google.

Anyway, the biggest change I saw was with site #3. This was the site I submitted to directories, and social bookmarking sites. It was actually out of the top 100 results up until the beginning of this week, when it jumped up to around #50 or so. Then on Wednesday, I decided to hit it with 10 GPS submissions and yesterday it jumped into the top 10. so overall, I’m really happy with the progress on that one.

Site #1, has been my biggest earner, and I never did get around to doing any automated bookmarking on it. Instead, I’m going to be hitting that one with a few GPS submissions to see if I can push it up into the top 3. I don’t want to do anything automated on it, as so far it has a great CPC and  looks like it has a lot of potential. I’ve hardly done anything with site #4 either, and it’s already around position 20 or so, so it seems like progress is pretty promising there. With my newer sites – #5, #6, one site already has some earnings this month, however both are currently out of the top 100 – they were both within the 50-100 range for parts of this month. Overall, I’m going to wait a few more weeks and see if there is more movement before doing much there.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m pretty encouraged. I  made $4.50 this month off of  6 new sites, so you can already start seeing the potential of how scaling this up will work. Not only that, but the best thing I’ve seen is that these domains are starting to fall into place after about 5 weeks of publishing them – this is a stark contrast to my 100 EPN site project, where around week 5 was the point where the honeymoon period wore off and the sites would slip into the sandbox.

So what I can conclude so far is that – picking exact match .com domains for low competiton keywords appears to be a good strategy to get a site ranked with little to no backlink work up front. Only 1 out of the 6 sites I’ve built so far – site #2, has not cracked the top 100 results – however I have seen it around position #110.  This isn’t entirely surprising, as I believe site #2 is the most competitive keyword of the 6 so far, and I get the feeling that it isn’t necessarly sandboxed. It also has a small amount of earnings.

The directory & social bookmarking submissions DID seem to work, however if I do the same exact thing on a large number of sites, I would strongly begin to wonder if it would have the same effect in every case.  The jury is still out on that one, but I’ll keep an eye on it. For now, I’m going to focus on web 2.0 and GPS links, as those are very easy to get and seem to pass nice juice.

The plan now, is that I am going to continue working on my 10 new micro niches that are going to be added to the mix. These are all niches I found via MNF, and are along the same lines as the first 6. 5 are exact .com keyword matches and 5 are exact .net keyword matches. I’ve got 2 of the sites completely deployed and backlinked already, and should have the remaining 8 done by early next week. Based on the results from this first bunch of 6, I would estimate that by the end of Feb. or beginning of March, I should have at least 33% of these 10 sites ranking in the top 10 for their main keyword, and should be seeing income for a majority of them in some capacity.

Probably the most important thing I’ve noticed so far by doing this case study – whether or not I added adsense at the beginning, or later on, didn’t seem to have any effect one way or the other. I think for these 10 I’m working on now, I will put AdSense on all of them from the outset.

I’m also planning on setting up piwik for these sites so I can get some further info on what keywords they’re getting traffic for. I can see that the overall impressions in the adsense report is indicating that all of the sites are getting a fair amount of impressions, so I want to dig in a little further on that.

Overall,  I’m really encouraged by the progress. I’m expecting these first 6 sites will continue to move up in the ranks, and provide more and more earnings as they do so. The short term results look a LOT more promising than my 100 EPN site experiment, so it’s nice to be on the right track this time.

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