Hello everyone I've been lurking on this forum for a while. I wanna thank many of you for sharing useful information about web marketing. For last few months I've been working on my first serious(that could make money) site and now its 90+ % finished. Conceptually it seems to be very different from sites that people are reporting here so i have some questions about content, driving traffic, profiting. Its basically web 2.0 platform that has dynamic content, user generated entries, interaction etc, somewhat like urbandictionary or wiki or yahoo answers. What bothers me is that i dont have specific niche long tail keyword that most people seem to go for while building sometimes hundreds of simple sites. Or to put it this way: Most people go for keywords like "general keyword about niche that repeats throughout every page" + typical titles/pages that can exist in most small sites about anything. I will be trying to rank for one of those random titles that can be about anything as main keyword, and then just pump up entries about something that actually makes sense to write content for. According to Google Keyword Tool There are thousands of phrases with "my keyword"+something with low or medium competition and solid cpc, so it seems to have potential. 1. I'm wondering will I be able to rank in page 1 for my keyword where typically first 5-6 results contain my keyword, rest don't have all words but often have a lot broader content than i will be able to provide with my site. How realistic will be ranking in 1st page what you think? 2. Also i write my content by basically mixing up information from other sites(top 20-30) into a 400-1000 word posts. I borrow max 2-3 sentences per page that way, while mixing up words. Is it normal, to what extent Google tolerates/can detect it? 3. I plan to use adsense but I'm not sure will it show targeted ads on every page because site as a whole can be literally about hundreds of different broad subjects? Soon i will start posting content with dummy users hoping that real ones will register soon. What would be your guess, am i on the right way?
you should not expect real users before 6 months of hard work by yourself, if they come before 6 months then good for you, but you should not expect any the first months. you should first take a step back about keywords and think more of the type of audience you want to come to your pages for adsense, that is western audience, non technical, ideally in active mode (buying mode, problem solving / looking for a solution) so once you have topics, you can do as per your method of mixing. Keep in mind that maybe the many articles way is not the best, what if instead of creating another article you add the words to an existing page about the topic? You will have a few wikipedia-like pages about your topics instead of many small ones. Something to keep in mind... Don't worry about adsense job, it is good at it, just focus on your job as ad placement decision maker and content producer, just keep your pages compliant with adsense's tos at most times.
I don't want to discourage but such sites take quite some effort to yield results, however, once they kick off they pay rich dividends. You might want to try Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc for drawing social media traffic. If your friends are interested in your niche then they can become the first users of your site. Try and build on that. Is it based on Wordpress? There is one wordpress plugin (I don't remember the name) which allows Adsense ID sharing. If you can use that, you may be able to attract more users when they will see the opportunity to earn money from their activities on the site.
Good luck with it and don't give up but it is hard to find users for any type of site but this does not mean you shouldn't stick with it - keep at it and keep marketing and sooner or later the users will come to you. In the mean time you can outsource to some cheap writers who will add content to your site for a small fee to make your site look more established