It feels like forever since I’ve updated on my progress. The summer went really well for me. I got a lot of things on track, focused in on maximizing what I have in place, and I (luckily) have also been able to enjoy a little more leisure time this summer getting some much needed relaxation and spending time with friends and family. Anyway, summer is winding down, and I’m ramping up my efforts.  My plan is to post an update on the various projects I’ve got going on here, and then hopefully make some more specific posts over the next couple of weeks.

100 EPN Sites

It’s now been over a year since my 100 EPN site project. Overall, the first year did not go even marginally as well as I had originally planned. I finally feel like I have a handle on things now, and it took me up until about a few weeks ago to really get to this point. If you have no idea what I’m talking about regarding this, here’s a refresher:

I started out at the end of last summer creating 100 unique, content-based EPN sites. After a few weeks, I noticed that each site basically completely dropped out of the SERPS and were receiving barely a trickle of traffic. At first, I thought they were sandboxed, then after many months of waiting I tried removing PHPBay from the sites, and realized that most of them almost immediately returned to ranking well. Then, I started seeing that the EPN widgets I replaced PHPBay with didn’t seem to convert well at all. I ran some additional tests, and found that adding a regular EPN RSS feed to my sites made them drop right back out of the SERPS again, just like they had with PHPBay. So first and foremost, one of the main things I discovered was that there is absolutely nothing PHPBay specific that was causing me any trouble.

After all of this, I was pretty much left back at square 1. I now had a large amount of sites that were actually getting traffic, but not converting many sales.  One thing I knew for sure, is that a vast majority of my EPN income throughout this whole period has come from existing PHPBay sites that I already had. So I already knew for a fact that PHPBay does convert much better than EPN widgets – by far. As a result, my main goal was to try to find a way to work PHPBay BACK into as many sites as possible. My goal with the whole project was to create good quality sites that will stand the test of time and be helpful to the end user, so with this in mind, I took a handful of sites and individually reworked each one so that they have a custom, clean and professional feel – this includes logos, graphics, etc. I then re-added PHPBay to specific interior pages of my site, and used custom graphics to help direct traffic to those pages.

So far the results have been excellent. In almost every case, I didn’t see any decline in rankings, and in one case I even jumpled from position 3 to position 1 for my main keyword. In the one case where I did see a dramatic drop in rankings, I sent some new good quality links to the site until it reappeared at the top of the serps, and it is now in position #1. I’ve also enjoyed a nice bump in earnings. Truthfully, I’m still not anywhere close to where I expected to be earnings-wise from this project when I originally started, BUT since the end of July I have seen a marked improvement and I now feel that I’m on a clear path to making all of these sites a full success. The bar is pretty low – I mean I only need to get each site to earn $10/month in order to bring in $1000/month in earnings, and most of the sites I have customized so far are doing far better than that. Additionally, I have been working hard on link building for all 100 sites, as my main focus is to bring them all to fruition in regards to ranking #1 for each site’s main keyword. What I’ve found so far is that the number of links needed to achieve this can really vary – in many cases the magic number for cracking the first page is between 20 – 40 quality links, in some cases it’s been as few as 10, and in some cases it has been many more.  Overall, it seems pretty doable in almost every case, it’s just a matter of continuing to send good quality links until the goal is achieved. The main drawback to the whole thing is that it takes me quite a while to fully customize each site to the point where I’m satisfied with it, and i don’t want to cut corners in this area, so it’s going to take me a while to complete all 100. At this point, I’m probably only about 10 – 15% complete on the project, but I’m trying to knock out a couple each week at a minimum. I’ve also switched 2 sites over to adsense and 1 site over to amazon because they weren’t performing that well with EPN. I don’t anticipate doing this on many more sites, but I proabably will for a few.

Micro Niche Snipers

Back in the first quarter of this year I ran a mini experiment setting up micro niche adsense sniper sites, and did have some nice success, bringing in over $100/month with the 25 sites I set up within the first couple months of the experiment. In fact, this went so well that I was extremely close to scaling up the experiment to several hundred sites. Luckily, I decided not to, and I am extremely glad that I did so. The main reason I decided not to at the time was because I didn’t want to manage another several hundred websites. My opinion on this hasn’t changed at all. In fact, there was a time when I was even considering selling off some of my 100 EPN sites for this same reason, but I thought hard about it and I didn’t think I would be able to sell them for enough to be worth the time and investment I initially put in, which is why I doubled my effort to get them all ranking at the top. Anyway, the other thing that popped up with the Micro Niche Snipers was the “Mayday Update”.  I specifically remember the day when I noticed that my AdSense earnings from my micro snipers was way down from what I was used to. That’s how I first found out about the Mayday update. Luckily, it didn’t really affect any of my sites besides the 25 micro niche snipers I built, but basically all of my snipers took a huge dive in the rankings. If you don’t know about the Mayday update, it was basically an algorithm change to weed out MFA sites, and from my experience, seemed to specifically target exact match keyword domains along the lines of what I was doing with my snipers. I think the main reason they did this was because of the rampant X-Factor style adsense sites out there spamming up the SERPS.

So basically around the beginning of June, I lost about 90% of the income I had built up from these 25 sites. My solution to this was basically the same solution I used on the 100 EPN sites – make the sites look better, and send more quality links. I have just started doing this on my two best performing micro niche snipers, and over the last couple weeks I have brought them both back to pretty decent earnings again. I’ve got my EPN sites taking priority over these right now, but I plan to continue working on all 25 sites until they all reach fruition.

Authority Site

Around the time when I was last actively posting, I was talking about focusing all my future site building efforts on large autnority sites. I had purchased a nice expired domain name for a couple hundred dollars and have been working on developing it ever since.  The site now has a really nice custom theme and graphics, pictures on every post, and a solid layout. Right now I’ve got about 40 or 50 quality articles on the site, ranging in size from 500 – 800 words in length. I’ve been making ~$10/month in adsense off of it so far, so nothing to really write home about, but I am in this one for the long haul. The one area where I tripped up, I believe, is in the link building. I actively built links to each post as I posted them, and frankly I think I just sent way too many links early on and may have gotten this site sandboxed. On the plus side, I’m still getting traffic and earnings, and it is getting a LOT better, so I’m just going to keep on posting articles and building links until I’ve got this site making over $1000/month, which I could reasonably see happening in a year’s time. I also plan to start another large authority site some time in the next couple months, and focus more on posting articles, less on building links early on, and see if it gets me to a faster start. Overall, I’ve worked really hard on this project, I’m proud of what I’ve gotten done on it over the summer, and I’m feeling REALLY positive about the direction it’s going.

Content Production

This is a big area where I’ve made a lot of  changes. Over the last couple years, I have used several different companies for content production. Additionally, I was getting all my content almost exclusively from www.simplythebestwriting.com for about the last year and a half. I was always satisfied with the quality, although at the same time it wasn’t anything spectacular either – just solid overall. Anyway, I did a pretty high volume of business with this guy and got my price to 0.01/per word pretty early on, which I was happy with. He treated me like a VIP customer and I was very pleased with the setup. Well come the beginning of the year, he began taking a long time to respond to my emails, taking a long time to complete projects, he didn’t want to accept PayPal anymore, and finally had the audacity to tell me that he was going to raise my prices and acted as if he were doing me some huge favor by selling me $3 articles for so long.

Well this was exactly the reality check that I needed. It made me fully realize that I was wasting my time and money building what I thought was a good long term relationship with a service provider I trusted. It’s not like I didn’t think I could get 300 word articles for $3.00 anywhere else – quite the contrary.  I knew the whole time that I could easily get that kind of deal on articles, and I was really salty about the way I was treated, so I completely woke up and made a huge change to the way I was doing things.

First off, in the interim, I started getting all my articles from www.thecontentauthority.com. This is a great source for articles, especially if you need them in a hurry. Immediately I found the quality was actually far better than what I had been getting, and the turnaround time was light years better. Additionally, they have a great web based interface for placing all your orders, and their customer service is just unbelieveable. So this is a service I can truly wholeheartedly recommend. I’ve did quite a bit of business with them so far, and will continue to do so.

Second off, the biggest change I made was pulling together my own team of writers. This took me quite a bit of time to do, and I’m still working on it in some areas. I do so much work with websites and SEO that I really need a higher volume of articles than I can get from a company. I started putting together a team of full time writers a couple of months ago, and the improvement in all of my web properties and SEO projects has just been absolutely incredible. I would basically look at it like this, if you’re going to be spending over $500/month on content, you may want to strongly consider outsourcing it yourself. If you aren’t doing that much, then definitely use The Content Authority.

Things I learned this summer

I learned never to give up on any projects.

I learned to stop starting new projects while I have so many existing projects at less than 100% complete. (I haven’t started any new websites since my large authority site back in late spring).

I learned not to expect anything out of people you do business with just because of the business you’ve given them in the past.

I learned that I CAN make money off Amazon (I will cover this later).

I learned that I didn’t do nearly enough work in the first year on my 100 EPN sites, and I can do better.

I learned that I gave up on PHPBay way too easy.

I learned that SEO is much easier than I originally made it out to be. I just wasn’t working smart before.

I learned that I get a lot more work done when I wake up earlier.

Conclusion

Overall it was a great summer for me. I had a really rough beginning of the year, but now I’m doing better than ever and feel like I really am in control of what I’m doing now. I plan to keep on working like crazy this winter and I still have a few goals on my list I need to cross off, although I have tackled quite a few. I even managed to lose about 50 pounds this summer by eating Primal and playing plenty of basketball and disc golf.

Over the next couple weeks I HOPE to get back in the habit of regularly posting again, as I have a lot more details on various projects that I can’t possibly squeeze into this post.

Until next time…

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.

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.

I guess it’s a little premature to actually say results, since I haven’t built a site using the keywords I’ve found with MNF yet, but I wanted to drop a quick update on you. As I mentioned on Monday, I decided to give Micro Niche Finder a shot. I bought it at the end of the day on Monday, and before I went to bed, I already had a list of about 35 new keywords I really like – and that’s only from maybe 30 – 60 minutes of using the tool – not only that, but I literally installed the program and started cranking out searches, I didn’t need to read the manual or watch the videos or anything (although I did do that the following day to fill in a couple blanks).

Initial Reaction

Well, I can honestly say I’m blown away so far. In fact, if the results reflect my initial reaction, I will be kicking myself for having not picked this up sooner. For one thing, I ran a good handful of niches I used in my 100 EPN site challenge, and they all (the ones I tested) had the maximum SOC rating (strength of competiton), which explains exactly why they were all sandboxed. On the other hand the keywords from my micro niche case study all fared much better.

One of the best things I liked about this software is the brainstorm feature – just click the brainstorm button and MNF will bring up a page of 25 keyword ideas. I’ve found that on average, I find a good keyword every 1 and a half searches or so. So i can just sit there for an hour brainstorming and moving keywords with potential to a project bucket, then go through for deeper analysis, all without really having to do too much thinking.

So, so far I’m really encouraged by the results. I narrowed my first project down to 10 keywords that I think look really good – 5 exact .com keyword names and 5 .net, all with very very low SOC – I believe under 30, which is pretty low. I’ve got articles in production for each site, due back with plenty of time to spare before the end of the month. I’m also trying 300 word articles this time, as opposed to 500 word articles, as I want to see if there is any big difference – If I can use 300 word articles and get the same effect as 500 word articles, I can get about 40% more articles, and that either means I can make more sites, or have more backlinks right away. So I plan to bust these out all next week, and see what happens. With the amount of time I can save on keyword research with this tool, I can probably put up at least a good 10 – 20 of these micro niche snipers each month with no probs. The main thing is, I want to see how many of the 10 don’t get sandboxed, meaning I can rank them and get earnings quickly.

Micro Niche Sniper Case Study

Brief update on this – I still haven’t seen a lot of movement on anything yet – the site I did social bookmarking on and directory submissions on is still hovering around the 100 mark, the site I did 10 GPS submissions on is not on the radar at all – I think this is the most competitive niche of the 4, and the site I added blogroll links on is in the top 100, but has yet to crack the top 50. I’m still pretty hopeful for that one, though. The bright spot, is the one site that has been in the top 10 pretty much since I launched it has been holding strong – not only that, but I added AdSense to it on Monday, and it has been averaging about 0.75/day this week with a CTR around 30%, not too shabby. Not only that, but one of the additional 2 micro niche snipers I launched last week has also earned me about 1.00 over the last two days. For my latest two micro niche snipers, both are in pretty specific niches in the automotive area. They are both specific keywords from a more broad root keyword that I already have a successful site covering. The sad thing, is the successful site was banned by G a while back, so I can’t send any links from it to my new sites. The good thing is, even though it was banned, I get great yahoo and bing traffic and it is one of the rare sites that I do well with both AdSense and EPN on – so my idea here was to take advantage of these keywords I know convert well and are pretty well untouched by other IM’ers, and build the sites correctly so they don’t get penalized by Google. I sent 4 GPS links to one of the micro niches, and I gave the other one a quality contextual link from another automotive site I have that has some decent juice. So far the site that I did GPS submissions on is the one that’s earning, although both appear to not really be ranking for their main keywords yet. It’s a little early to tell. If I can hit on 2 out of my first 6 sites, I will be pretty stoked about that. A 33% success rate will make me quite a bit of money and the other 66% of these sites will eventually get ranked most likely.

2nd MNF Test

So while I’ve got this going on, I also have another idea I’m going to try. I mentioned above that I have an automitive site with some decent backlinks/PR. It’s a preowned domain I bought a while back to use for SEO on some serious money sites, and I’ve mostly just been adding articles for contextual backlinks. Now, my plan is to use MNF to try to uncover 50-100 really low competition automotive related keywords, and add 1 article to this site for each keyword. Then, backlink the articles individually as needed. As opposed to building 100 new automotive micro snipers, I’m going to just treat each page within one site as it’s own separate entity and see what happens. I think by doing this, I will be able to get this automotive site earning something daily, and I’ll also increase its value as a tool for linking to my other sites. Probably the most important thing about this, is it is a really easy way to target keywords containing trademarks. These keywords are in many cases easier to rank for, but they aren’t as good for niche sites because you have to use the trademark in your domain and risk getting it yanked, or not use it and lose the exact domain bonus. It shouldn’t be a problem going after some of these terms using a generic automotive domain with exact page names, and I won’t really be risking anything. If this works, I know several niches I can exploit with the same methods very quickly, so it should be interesting to see the results.

Overall, while I’ve basically written a really positive MNF review, I’m still holding back from giving it my full recommendation. I love what I’ve seen so far, but the results that will do the talking will come in the form of Adsense clicks. I should know for sure within the next 4 weeks whether this thing is the real deal, and I’ll give it my full recommendation at that point.

Today I bit the bullet and bought a Micro Niche Finder license. I’ve heard a lot of good things about this tool, and I know for a fact there are a lot of people who are having some nice success with it. Also, if I can find a viable alternative to the traditional keyword research I’ve been doing, then why not? Especially for these super focused niche sites.

Keyword research takes me a lot of time, it’s one thing I can’t really outsource, and most of my BEST keyword ideas come to me out of the blue, not during a keyword research session. Not only that, but the keywords I’ve been selecting for my niche sites lately seem like they are not specific enough terms to avoid being sandboxed. Even with my most recent micro niche site experiment, I’ve only got 1 out of the first 4 sites I created that’s ranking on page 1 right now, the other 3 are not even in the top 50 results.

So for all those reasons, I’m going to give this tool a try. My main short term goal right now is still to crank my AdSense up another 10-15 dollars a day, and I believe I can do it relatively easy with these highly focused niche sites, so I’m hoping this tool will help. It came down to a choice between MNF and Niche Hoard. Niche Hoard is a newer tool, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about MNF, so I decided to give it a shot. I’m going to be using it, and launching 10 new sites with it ASAP. If I see promising results right away, I will go ahead and amp things up – otherwise I might also try Niche Hoard out and see what I think about that.

As always, I’ll be sharing the results here. I will also be posting an update on my micro niche site case study hopefully some time this week. I’m going to add 2 more niches into the mix and utilize a couple additional promotion techniques.

Ok… Thought I would drop a quick update since I have been falling behind my pace of 3 posts a week that I set out to accomplish. About a day after I wrote the micro niche sniper case study post last week, I got hit with a ton of things that needed to be resolved immediately, so I didn’t have the time to attend to this that I was expecting to. So just to recap, all 4 sites have relatively similar traffic and competing search results:

Site 1: This one is already ranking on the first page, and getting automated bookmarking

Site 2: This one is in my opinion the most competitive term, and is getting the 10 article submissios

Site 3: This one is getting the manual directory submissions and social bookmarking

Site 4: This one is getting 10 x 300 word articles

So for the update:

Site 1: Sadly I have not had time to do the automated bookmarking, but I will be starting this very soon. I still plan on full steam ahead with this one. This site is still sitting on the first page for it’s main keyword, so I’m not going to push it too hard, but I want to try to drip at least a few social bookmarking links in every day.

Site 2: Got the articles submitted at the beginning of this week, most have been published. I decided to completely forgo the typical Ezines, hubs, etc, and I went with 10 TKA GPS submissions instead. I been having good results using the GPS so far, and want to see how it translates here. I think I have all but 2 posts currently published, and all on quite relevant sites, so I am liking what I see so far. Now, I’ve got it on my list to send some backlinks at the GPS posts, which I will probably do via some kind of automated bookmarking, and see what happens. This site still is not on the radar, so I’m hoping it’s not too competitive and got sandboxed.

Site 3: Got the manual directory submissions and bookmarking done at the beginning of this week. So far, the results haven’t blown me away, but I have seen a little movement. I went from not on the radar at all to cracking the top 100 results – barely. Still not great, but it takes a while for all the directory submissions to sink in, so we’ll see what happens. The fact that this site reappeared in the top 100 is a positive sign.

Site 4: Changed my mind on this one. I decided I’m going to just send a few links from some of my existing sites on different servers. I have a whole bunch of loosely related sites, so  I can probably send a good handful of links if need be. I just added 2 blogrolls today – hopefully that won’t be coming on TOO strong, but I think it will be ok. I’ll watch and see if there’s any movement, and sprinkle in some additional links throughout the next couple weeks if need be. I think I’m going to try blogrolls only for this site – I have a couple more sites on tap that I might use one to try a few contextual links on. Blogrolls are a little easier because the topic can be a little more loosely related. Right now, this site is sitting in about the 50′s for its keyword, so we’ll see what happens.

That’s about it so far. Nothing too earth shattering to report – I was going to save this for next week, but couldn’t think of anything else great to write about today. One of the things I’m kind of seeing so far is that, while all 4 of these sites have relatively similar numbers, only 1 site jumped out to a great start. Frankly, I wouldn’t be shocked at this point if the other 3 sites all start off very slow. Part of this game is getting lucky, and I basically had an easy hit with 1 out of the 4 sites I built. That means a 25% success rate, which actually isn’t that bad at all – especially compared to my EPN experiment where none of the sites have really excelled at all. So at least I know I’m on the right track – it will be interesting to see how things play out over the next week or two.

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.