It’s been another wild month here, and I haven’t posted in quite a while, but things are starting to move along real smoothly again. I think taking a step back from everything in March and taking some time to evaluate things really did me a lot of good, and I’ve been making progress across the board for the last 4-6 weeks.

As far as my niche sites go, I finally got just about all of my domains that were hosted with JustHost moved to new hosting and rebuilt as static HTML. It took me quite a bit of time to do it, and it will probably be a while before they are re-crawled fully and return to where they were previously at, but it feels good to have that done. I haven’t built any new niche sites since March, and I don’t have any plans to do so in the near future. I really want to focus in on maximizing the potential of what I’ve currently got in my portfolio, weed out the junk, and then move forward on bigger projects.

The first way I plan to do this is by taking a hard look at my AdSense snipers. Right now I’ve got about 25 that I set up over the last 6 months. Overall the project was a huge success and I’m really close to meeting my short term goal of $50/day in AdSense. That being said, there are pretty clearly some sites in the group that are performing a lot better than others. My plan for managing this is to take one of my well performing sites each month and build it out – meaning, add more content – posts and pictures, spend some time building out a good looking theme, and just generally transform the site from a basic “sniper” into a good looking, good quality site. This might result in some short term loss in earnings, but I think in the long run I will get a lot more out of these sites, and I don’t have to worry about having a portfolio of Junk tied to my AdSense. I think what I have right now is ok overall, but I want my operations to be as white-hat as possible.

On the flip side, I also want to take at least 1-2 of my low-performance snipers each month and transform them as well. Traffic isn’t necessarily the issue with these sites – in many cases, I just don’t know if adsense is the best way to monitize for them. So I will give the site a makeover, possibly add some more content, and then swap out AdSense for Amazon, promoting very specific products, and see what kind of results I get.

If everything goes according to plan with this, I should end up transforming this whole batch of snipers into good quality sites that should perform over the long term using either Amazon or Adsense. Like I said, I’ve only got about 25 of these, so it shouldn’t take that long to fully complete this project if I stick to my timeline.

That’s the AdSense snipers. As far as my EPN sites go, I can see I need to do some work here as well. First and foremost, my EPN earnings have been up quite a bit overall since March, so I’m happy about that, but my earnings specifically from my 100 EPN sites are still pretty lackluster. One issue is traffic. One of the things I’ve noticed really quickly, is that when I removed PHPBay from these sites and they were re-crawled and appeared to start ranking normally again, the sites that began ranking the best, by far were the ones with exact match domains. For example redwidgets.org ranks FAR easier than redwidgetsguide.com. Adding the random extra word into the domain definitely appears to make a huge difference, and I have a pretty even mix of domains like that, and EMDs. So I will obviously have to do a lot more linking if I want to fully maximize the potential of a lot of these sites. I’ve also noticed that out of the chunk of these sites that are getting a lot of clicks and impressions, in many cases, the amount of actual bids and winning bids is pretty low. I have a couple sites that are performing pretty well, but I have quite a few that have a good click to impression ratio, and very few, or no bids at all. This tells me that either: A. The EPN widgets aren’t as effective for generating winning bids as PHPBay was, or B. EPN isn’t the right monitization method for the site. At this point, I’m honestly not sure which is the case. I’m not in a huge rush on these sites, so I definitely want to continue gathering data, but at the same time, I am also planning to switch a couple of these sites that are getting good traffic but no sales over to Amazon to see if pushing specific products leads to higher conversion rates. Overall, I’m OK with the progress on these sites and my earnings are up so I’m not complaining. I’m only a few months away from the 1 year anniversary of the sites, so that may help with rankings as well. We’ll just have to see.

As far as MMO goes, the main thing I focused on this month other than restoring my former JustHost sites, was finding a really good quality domain name to build an authority site on. I spent a ton of time on this throughout the month, and April as well – in fact, I spent a lot more time on it than I ever expected to. The good news is, I finally got a nice domain about a week ago that I can get cracking on. I won’t go into huge detail, but it’s a good .com domain name with 2 nice, general keywords for specific niches, 9 years old, DMOZ listed and has a decent backlink profile. I lost a lot of auctions for other domains I really liked, but overall I’m pretty happy with this one that I ended up with.

Instead of doing the keyword research via Micro Niche Finder, I decided to use Niche Refinery for this project, and I’m going to try to follow the TKA method for building “supersites”. I’m pretty sure this is a foolproof method, I’ll be targeting keywords with much bigger potential, and overall I think my earning potential will be a lot better with this site as long as I see it through to fruition.

So right now I’ve got 1000 csv’s processing in Niche Refinery and within another day or two (hopefully) I should have a huge batch of keywords ready to target. Once I’ve got the keywords, I’m going to get a massive amount of articles written to go on the site, and additional articles to use as backlinks for each post. I’m really planning to pull out all the stops on this project – I’m going to spend a lot of time making sure I’ve got a really nice looking, unique theme, I’m going to try to add pictures to every post, and I may even try to work in a fair amount of videos as well. I ultimately want this site to be an authority and be able to dominate this particular niche, and I think focusing on that, rather than focusing on getting AdSense clicks right away is going to lead to much more long term success.

So for this month, I want to have at least 20 posts fully backlinked on the site, possibly more. I plan on working almost soley on this project all summer and I’m really committed to learning how to do this right, and making it a winner. If I can learn to build up these authority sites as well as I can now build niche sites, I think I’ll have a clear path to a huge long term passive income. Plus, I’ll be able to gradually whittle down the amount of small websites in my portfolio so I’ll have a lot less to manage overall.

In general, I’m really excited about this project and I’m putting my best effort forth. I’ve been looking for a good domain name since about March because I wanted to have one that would be good enough for me to put my best effort behind. Now that I’ve finally found it, it’s time to really get to work on the project this month. If all goes well, I feel like I should have a good idea whether this project will be a success within hopefully the next 3 months. Then I can think about maybe starting another large site, and if I’m confident in my ability, I will probably spend a lot more on the domain name, as I think getting a good domain is a critical part of this process.

In addition, I’ve got a really large aged sites that I’ve had forever that makes between 0 – $5/day in AdSense. Nothing to scoff at, but considering the age of the site, traffic, and quality of the content, I think it’s performing way under potential. My plan to ramp up the earnings on this site is to do 2 things.

1. I’m going to take one of the pages on the site that is currently getting very high traffic and add a ton of content to it, as well as promote an Amazon product specific to the content on that page. I think if a page is getting 20-30 visits a day minimum for a very specific keyword, I can be making a lot more than what I currently make with AdSense on that page, so I’m really going to try to make the page even more informative, and push a specific product through Amazon. If this is successful, I shouldn’t even need that high of a conversion rate to double what the SITE is making daily now, so I really think this will be a good approach.

2. I’m going to take another page from the site that isn’t necessarily getting a lot of traffic right now, but clearly targets a specific type of product. I’m going to again add a ton more content to the page – probably enough so I’ll end up with upwards of 2500 words at least including some pictures and videos as well. Then I’m going to again promote some specific Amazon products, and last, I’ll start sending links to that page. I’m hoping that vastly increasing the amount of words/content on the page will help me rank it easier, and that promoting specific Amazon products will ultimately help me make a lot more money off this site in general.

I plan to have all this work done early here in June, and hopefully I’ll have some nice results to share sometime later this month or early next month. This approach is a lot different than what I’ve been doing previously, but I think it’s kind of a no-brainer if you really think about it.

That’s basically all my MMO plans for the near future.

I also mentioned in last month’s recap that I was thinking about trying Bookmarking Demon. I did finally pull the trigger, and I started working with it about halfway through the month. This is something I was originally going to do last fall, but I read a ton of negative reviews of version 5, and I decided to go with Bookmark Wiz instead, which I’ve not really mentioned here because I don’t really use it. I’m actually glad I finally changed my mind about BMD, because so far I really like it. The big downside with this program is that there is a HUGE learning curve. It took me at least a week of working with it before I felt like I had any idea at all what the hell I was doing. Finally, I now do feel like I have a pretty good grasp on it, and I’m pretty happy with the results so far. It is a little time consuming, but it does get the job done. At the moment, I’m strictly using it to bookmark my existing backlinks – NOT for bookmarking my main sites. I think it will probably take a while before I can see the full results, but if it succeeds in getting my backlinks all indexed and juiced up, I’ll be extremely happy. I’m going to hold out on fully endorsing it for now and it may be another month or two at least before I can give a fair evaluation, but at the moment I will say things are looking good so far. I also own Blog Comment Demon and I decided to blow the dust off that and start using it as well. I have no idea whether it will help much or not, but we shall see. I might start looking into a good solution for directory submissions. I used to do a lot of directory submissions via an offshore company, but I’d like to find something easier and possibly automatic for that.

That’s pretty much my recap for May. I’ve made a lot of changes, but I really feel like I’m on the right path now, and even though it’s going to be harder work and the money isn’t going to be as easy right away, for the long term, I think I’ve finally got the roadmap for success down, and it’s now just a matter of doing the work and staying committed. I’m hoping my supersite project goes well so that I’ll have a lot of new information to share about building, managing and linking strategies. Only time will tell…

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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.

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