I feel for you, had lower back problems for over a decade and last year managed to pop a disc!! Had back problems so long (2 degraded disks) didn't go to the docs for 3 months as was 'normal' to be in pain. Waiting on an operation, (disc fusion) I'm UK based so will be free, but the wait (was meant to be a 5 month wait, in month 6 now) has tempted me to spend savings on the op, but we bought a house 2 years ago that needs about £30K in renovation work. Had the surgeon told the truth about the wait I'd have gone private and screw the house. I've been doing similar to what your planning for about 3-4 years in my spare time, (most of my time goes into SEO consulting) own over 100 domains with 50 odd WordPress blogs and over 100,000 pages indexed in Google. Didn't plan much of it, whenever I had spare time I'd create something, what I created depended on what I felt like. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and have never found a content writer that was good enough, so done everything myself. As long as you have a fair amount of unique content targeting money SERPs (at the start of this went for any content which meant some makes no money) then long term success is in the links, fortunately I do really well with links and have PR6 pages (used to have PR7), still it's not easy for a new site even with access to PR (linking from my other sites), I personally don't consider a site successful until it pulls in 500 visitors a day, so most of my sites aren't successful yet (some never will be, too niche). Realised it's easier to make money selling products than from AdSense (visitor vs visitor) and so moving towards offering something for sale on new sites I build rather than just content for AdSense etc... The theme site I link from the sig is a good example, it's not doing particularly great traffic wise (400 visitors a day last month), but I tend to sell a couple of AdSense themes a day and so in a month it doesn't do too bad (that site pays the mortgage . With 400 visitors a day if all it relied on was AdSense at best with a 5% CTR (getting consistently over 5% is HARD) I'm going to get 20 clicks a day. Even if each click made $1 a click, (which that site doesn't make) one theme sale makes more money than AdSense a day. Not saying you can't make money from pure content sites with AdSense on them, but it's much easier to make money selling products. I wish you luck, hope you get your op soon. David Law
Fantastic thread, especially for us newbies. Especially interested in the SEO optimization piece. I seemed to be doing pretty good for awhile in my niche, was on the 1st page of the google for my keywords. Then after a week it crashed and burned. Need to continue to focus on link building and content again, not sure what happened. Really didn't change the site significantly to cause it to fall so dramatically.
It is great to taste success, but then be careful with your domains and host I had an incident of my host running away with my domain and website which was earning close to 400$ per month and was the biggest earner of all my sites Be careful
This is a fantastic post. A very nice planning and aiming. Please be very carefull when you are choosing the sub-niches/keywords for your web sites. It doesn't mean that a low competiton & highly popular niche will always get adsense ads! I mean sometimes people don't pay for the advertisements for some hot topics! This was a bad experience for me to see that i was doing 120 uniques/day but adsense was only showing "public ads" and my content was not hot(!) for the advertisers of Google! Just want to add my 2 cents here...
Has it started yet? what is the result now? Show me and tell me your time spend for these sites and how you solve the traffic problems (if you want to share)
Great thread! How are you fairing so far? I to say be careful not to go after keywords with too high of an adspend, as those advertisers will mostly focus on just the search network, and not AdSense! Great to follow your story tho! Cheers! Don
This story is an inspiration for me. I was getting tired of working on my sites, but your story has got me going again. Thanks and good luck.
I bet you know what I am going through in my lower back. It sucks honestly. I am patient though. I am positive I will make enough money to get rid of the malady. To have created 100,000 pages must have taken iron clad dedication. I am not a writer myself, even though I can express myself clearly in english. My writers have gone through a good process during selection. I did not accept them based on 1 or 2 samples. I am very happy with their performance and they have won my trust to an extent that I pay them all in advance for a month. I have been studying SEO since past 18 months. I have subscribed to services like SEOMOZ mainly to study opinions, case studies and understand different viewpoints. I then went ahead to experiment my skills on 3-4 websites. I have managed to rank well in both Yahoo and Google for all of them. I don't pay attention to them anymore. They were mere experiments. I agree wiith you regarding putting all eggs in one basket. I am not planning to do that. In a previous post, I mentioned that, I am in this for more than adsense. You will see what I mean in due time. Thanks for your good wishes. I am positive it will happen.
I have noticed that google gives a chance to new sites by ranking them for low competition keywords for sometime and then it removes them. I have seen them come back after few weeks/months, depending on the competition. I don't think you have done anything wrong. This is from experience though. I maybe wrong. Other than that,, you may have stopped updating your site.
I agree with you and I hope I won't fall into it. I did nearly 6 months of research before starting this project. So far, I have tested each niche with Google ads and not a single public service ads. While testing, I had 3 clicks for 85-89 cents each. Thanks
Good going. All the best for your endevour. And your health too. It is the main priority. Earlier I use to work early morning as well on my sites, now I have sacrificed my morning for the GYM... Not an advice, but let me give a suggestion. Do your own research. Google is going to crack down on thin sites soon. They have to. Look at adwords. All the thin sites that used to have good QS have now been slapped. I'd say better safe than be sorry. This is what I do, and you might do too. I am assuming that you are creating those 10 unique pages based on keyword research data. I suggest you add more and more articles around the niche but not necessarily on those keywors. You can use this pages to link to those 10 important sites. But the idea is to have 100 articles (500 if possible, at 200 I start to get authority).. Those 100-200 article just need be unique. No need to be great. You don;t even need to link to them, except via a sitemap. I am saying this since youhave long term goals.. All the best again.
So far in the last week, the visitor average has been between 25-40, all from Google. I hardly spend anytime. I have timestamped articles in Wordpress till 30th of June. So, they will post automatically. The Link building is taken care of by an expert. As of now, I am only monitoring the growth and planning(expansion) further.
Looks like we share similar thoughts. My goal is to have 100 articles per niche and about 30-40 of them targeted on keywords, but the rest covering everything else. My long term goal is to have at least 10,000 pages of content totally. I hate thin sites, so I won't build one. Thanks again.
I can't find the subscribe button, so I will just post a reply and auto subscribe A very inspiring thread, I wish you all the best in your endeavour. BTW the post you replied to with I am not sure if you have asian language support on your browser, If you only see ???? then you may not.. I used Google to translate it and used the auto detect language setting. and got the following... Ha ha, your inspiring them in China to mate Keep it up! Cheers James
UPDATE I have decided to modify the plan a bit at this point. Since, I finished 10 niches successfully and the Link Building is going on perfectly as planned, I have decided to expand the content within the 10 niches itself, rather than moving to a 11th niche. I may change this later, but for this year mostly, this is what I will stick to. I was researching yesterday and discovered that the 10 niches I picked are deep rooted(lots of stuff to write about).
I wanted to suggest you this before! Definitely a good choice! Great! Many times once you completed around 150-200 quality articles that people will link to naturally at a later date and have a decent SEO campaign, you can start to rank as an authority (depends on the niche).