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.