Well, I’m back out of hiding – for now at least. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback so I thought I would make a post to update everyone on what’s happened since I left off in March.

First off, I obviously haven’t posted much in a while. The main reason for that is I pretty much got burned out shortly after I made my last post. I was really working in overdrive from about last August up until March and I think it finally just caught up with me. I needed to take a little time to chill out and relax a little bit, and that’s largely what I did. It came at a bad time considering I just had a breakthrough with my EPN sites, but overall I think a little R&R will make me more productive in the months ahead. I don’t quite feel back to normal yet, but I’m just about back to 100% and I’ve been a lot more productive over the last week or so.

Anyway, now for the updates…

100 EPN Sites

Obviously a ton has happened with this. I made the switch on all 100 sites, removing PHPBay from every last one in favor of EPN widgets. This in itself took me a long time, and was probably part of the catalyst for getting burned out. Anyway, much as I saw with my original test group, pretty much all 100 sites returned to the SERPS for their targeted keywords once they were indexed and PHPBay was no longer part of the site. In many cases the sites returned within the first 2 pages of SERPS, so this was definitely a great boost. Regardless, I’ll still have to do quite a bit of SEO work on each and every site in order to bring them all to full fruition.

Update 8/09/10

I’m afraid I was initially too quick to judge PHPBay. I recently ran an additional test… On one of my sites that I had removed PHPBay from and saw it returned to  a #2 ranking for its main keyword, I decided to try removing the EPN widgets and replacing them with a regular ebay RSS feed.  As soon as the site was spidered, it dropped from #2 to not being in the top 200 results. I replaced the EPN widgets and the site returned to its #2 ranking again. This tells me that the problem was not related to PHPBay, but rather RSS feeds. The reason I can really think of why this would happen would be as a result of adding all the additional content from the feed to a page already targeted towards specific keywords.

Results wise, my EPN earnings were up about 30% or so last month, from the previous month, and many of the sites were not indexed and didn’t begin ranking again until well after the 15th of March, so overall I’m pretty happy with the results. This month, I’m on track for about another 30% increase over last month, so that is definitely encouraging since I haven’t touched any of the sites since I replaced the code last month.

Micro Niche Snipers

I’ve got a total of 25 of these, most of which were set up between January and February of this year. For the month of March, these sites earned me just about $130 total. I figure that they costed me about $35/each to deploy, so I’ve already paid for a good chunk of them, which is making this look like a pretty decent investment so far. As it stands now, I don’t believe I’m going to top $130 this month – I might reach it again, or fall slightly short, which is still good. I haven’t done any additional promotion on any of these sites since they were deployed – save for maybe a couple of the first ones I built at the end of 09. Overall, this has gone well, but I still haven’t decided where I’m going to go with it. I have to decide between building more sites like it, or focusing on maximizing this first group. I’m leaning towards the latter right now.

Hosting

One of the things that really pissed me off over the last month was a problem I had with JustHost. I originally created an account with JustHost because I found a coupon that gave me the entire first year of hosting free. In retrospect, I wish I would have just paid for a hosting account with a reputable host instead. I’m not going to get too far into the specifics, but basically their setup is poorly run, their customer service is ignorant and extremely unhelpful, and they seem to actually be proactively looking for ways to cancel people’s hosting accounts. The long and short of it is, I had between 20-30 small sites hosted there, and my account was cancelled, leaving me to deal with the hassle of moving all these sites elsewhere. Based on this, JustHost is offically on my shit list, and I absolutely do not recommend them under any circumstances.

As a result of all this, I’m going to be taking all the sites from my JustHost account and completely redoing them as static HTML. The great thing about static HTML sites is that they’re super portable and require basically no maintenance. This means, there’s very little to worry about in terms of getting jerked around by a host, or security issues. Of course there are negatives as well – the main thing being that by using wordpress as a platform, you greatly increase the number of pages in each site. For example, if done correctly, 5 posts can turn in to 20 – 50 pages worth of indexable stuff for search engines. Also, the ease of installing wordpress and setting up sites is something I’ve really grown to like. Regardless, I’m going to be creating a handful of static niche site templates – from scratch – and design them to be super easy to set up and deploy. I’m going to test on this batch of sites, and based on the results decide how to move forward. One thing I know for sure, at least for now, I really don’t want to set up another huge quantity of WordPress sites that I have to worry about managing. Maybe that will change in the future, but for now I’m not interested.

Plans Moving Forward

So obviously I trashed all my March plans, for the most part, and haven’t really done much in the way of MMO at all for the last 4 weeks or so. Now I’m getting back into the swing of things, and I do have some plans.

The first of which is to set up the sites I mentioned above on new hosting as static HTML. I hope to have that completed by mid-next week.

Second – I’m going to choose a handful of my EPN sites that seem to have the highest potential in terms of earnings, and send a ton of links to them. Also, after another month of data, or so, I’m going to have to start looking at the effectiveness of the EPN widgets in terms of conversions. I want to have a good amount of data before I do so, and I want to have a good chunk of these sites performing close to full potential to get a really good idea.

Third – I’ve got plans for at least 2-3 new large sites. I really want to work on developing some quality flagship sites – I have a couple right now, and I feel like I should be working more on this. I think they’re the best bet long term, and it’s much easier to manage 1 x 100 page site than 100 niche sites, so if I can master building large sites like I have with niche sites, I’ll be in great shape and probably be creating less overall work for myself.

That’s basically it. I’m hoping to start posting more frequently here, and please keep the questions and comments coming.

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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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