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.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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.

Popularity: 6% [?]