Micro Niche Sniper Case Study – A Complete Update

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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Tags: micro niche, micro niche finder, Micro Niche Sites, micro niche sniper, niche sites, niche sniper

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Micro Niche Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.