I started following Xfactor’s Micro Niche Course 26 days ago. I had a rough start with my first 6 sites not getting indexed for 7+ days and I am thankful that in that time I have found methods to help me getting indexed in 4-5 days. Here are my steps for getting indexed in 4-5 days.
1.) Submit a Sitemap with Google’s webmaster tools
2.) Submit to Digg
3.) Submit RSS feed to various RSS directories. I use RSSbot for this.
4.) Social bookmark with Bookmarking Demon
Up until yesterday, I have had 13 xfactor sites built. I would say on average I was only getting 1 or 2 of them to receive clicks each day and the sites never had clicks on consecutive days. Meaning maybe 1 day I have site #4 and #5 receive a click and then the next day maybe it was only site #1 that received a click. It’s 3pm here and as of today 3 of my sites have received clicks and one of them has even received 3 clicks.
I have noticed that even though the minimum cpc keywords I was targeting for my sites was $.50, I did have a $0.03 click on one of them this week. That was rather frustrating. But I suppose they just sorta balance themselves out because then I will have another xfactor site that receives a $2.29 click.
Ezine Update
I still have yet to get a response from ezines about my suspension. In the meantime I have been using UAW to help rank my inner pages of my first couple of xfactor sites. Over the next couple of days I will continue to work on UAW submissions for my sites. I had my first UAW submission go out for my #1 xfactor site but it doesn’t seem to be helping it as of yet. It is still on page 4 and is slowly slipping position towards page 5.
Turning up the Xfactor heat
Last night I put up another xfactor site, bringing my total to 14 sites. Mike gave me a swift kick in the pants about my monthly searches for my previous keywords and feels my research is what is causing me to struggle with my rankings and earnings. I am taking his advice and shooting for a higher number of monthly searches than I have been. I was targeting 1500-1900 monthly searches because I might find a juicy one with a high CPC but those haven’t earned me anymore money than shooting for higher monthly searched keywords that have a lower cpc.
I was able to find a nugget. 6.6k monthly searches with cpc of $1.00-$4.71. I was able to get the .org for it. I am waiting to receive my content back from my article writers for that baby.
I am also taking Peter’s advice regarding holding off on placing adsense on them until they are indexed. So starting with site #14 and onwards, I will see if that makes a difference in ranking for my keywords faster.
RSS Feeds
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Wow, congrats Sara, looks like you’re just churning them out, its not an easy thing to do.
Are all of your sites now indexed in Google?
Also, what kind of numbers are you looking at in your keyword research? It may be that you’re not seeing some success becuase of keyword research, backlinks or just that the domain is too new.
I tend to go for the following;
Monthly Searches (Main keyword) – above 2,500
Exact Match < 20,000 or if I can <10,000
SOC ideally < 10.
Also, for added measure what I do is open up Firefox and use the SEO for Firefox plugin, type in the keyword phrase I'm targetting and evaluate the competition.
Straightaway, I'll be able to see the PR of the pages, hwo long the domain has been registered for etc. What I look for though, is how keyword rich the domain is and the PR, anything upto PR3 and I know I can compete, if they are all abive PR3 then I tend to forget it.
Also, I've seen some terrible long tail keyword selections on other XFactor sites I have dicovered on my travels. People sometimes stray away from the keyword phrase in the domain. The closer it is to this, the better chance you have of ranking.
Anyway, just my £0.05 and good luck with it all. I think it'll all kick in soon.
Zaheer
Thanks Zaheer!
For competition I pretty much look and see if there are PR0-3 in the first 5 spots. If I see more than 1 PR4+ then I forget it.
I was targeting keywords that had 1500+ but I was primarily concerned with CPC. If I found a CPC of $10-17 but only had 1500 monthly searches, I would go after it because even if I would get less traffic, the higher clicks would be worth it. But now I am targeting 2900+ only. I am going to try that for my next few sites and see if things improve.
All of my sites are indexed now except for #14 which I just built yesterday and #15 that I did today.
I used to have a similar approach but found that its actually better to target higher search volumes with a slightly lower CPC. If you can rank for the $10-$17 keywords then excellent but its always difficult. You may get the occasional click here and there which is always nice but not regularly. I know becuase I’ve also got domains like this.
I think we may have to call you Sara XFactor soon at the rate you’re going…lol, this time next year I think you’ll be eleasing your course from 0 to $5k per month, don’t forget my discount rate…lol
Seriously, I’m actually really excited for you cos I soooooo want those sites to start kicking in as soon as. they have the potential to earn thousands per month. Are your niches ones which you know anythign about or just taking a punt at them?
14 in 26. Wow. Just about one every other day. Congrats. If you keep pushing that hard, we may just have to call you mini-mike
You know the one thing that’s really annoying about this xfactor thing is the scarcity of the domain names. If I can’t get the dot com/net/org, I pass up the keyword phrase. Unfortunately, a great deal of these juicy long tails no longer have their domains available. That’s fine – first come first served. But the maddening thing is that whoever those guys are that bought the names haven’t done squat with them since the beginning of August, sometimes earlier. I mean, c’mon, you get the sneaking suspicion that the domain purchases are xfactor-inspired, but hey they should turn them into sites, and not just hoard them…
Oh well, I’m venting. As you may have guessed by now, I ran into too many of those scenarios today. Anyway, congrats again. 14 in 26 !
Oh yeah, Sara, quick question about bookmarking demon, if you don’t mind so much. I think you’re using this right? I was looking into getting it, but was warned by some friends that version 5 is rather junky. Are they just pulling my leg?
Hi Stacey,
BMD 4 was actually pretty good, its not particularly intuitive like any Microsoft product and there is a learning curve but it can be quite useful. Ive had BMD 4 for about 6-7 months and never really harnessed its full potential but am starting to see backlinks appear like after a few months which is good.
I’ev also read that BMD 5 is quite clunky and not really worth the money although it does look pretty impressive. Was reading this from existing users so decided NOT to install Version 5 which is a free upgrade.
What I did read however was that there is another product on the market called BookmarkWiz which apparently is supposed to be excellent. It only targets the top 25 social bookmarking sites and thats it. Unlike BMD where you can add as many scuttle and pligg sites as you like.
It does look promising but again don’t really want to spend any more money on software unless someone can prove this actually works!
Zaheer
Haha “mini-mike”. That is quite a compliment.
To be honest Stacey, from the little amount I toyed around with BMD 5, you may want to hold out until they make some updates for it. When I tried BMD 5 I was unable to load my profile accounts from BMD 4 which means I would then have to go through and create new accounts. When I tried to create new accounts as instructed in the manual, none of the automation for the account registrations were working. They all kept timing out. I read that some people have said that they had to register the accounts to every site by hand which obviously can take hours.
Zaheer is correct with BMD 4 being a really great product. That is the version I am using since I am all set up for it. It just really annoys me that they have not made a way for the BMD 4 accounts to be able to be loaded into BMD 5 even though the manual states it is possible. I did have success copying and pasting 1 BMD account profile into BMD 5′s account profile setups but the annoying thing is I would have to copy and past the profile information for every new site and for each account so it’s just as bad as registering new accounts all over again. I have yet to read where someone had success loading their BMD 4 account’s file into BMD 5. Some people spent a good chunk of money on already created accounts for their BMD 4 so I can see why they would just stick with using 4 still.
One thing I have seen with BMD 5 is that there are more sites that you can bookmark. Quite a bit more actually. So if you don’t mind the initial pain in the butt of account set up/registration with all those sites (which I did have to do that with my BMD 4 to get set up to use it) then it is worth the investment.
Also, if you own Roboform, you can definitely speed up the process of registering for each bookmarking site much faster with that. I actually did have Roboform when I first got BMD 4 and it probably took me about 6-8 hours to register 4 different account profiles for all the bookmarking sites in BMD4.
Edwin does offer 60 day a money back guarantee and he definitely honors it so at the very least, you can try it out for yourself.
I seriously think I was only able to pop out so many sites due to outsourcing my content. Each week I have writers writing the content for about 4 new xfactor sites. So I buy the name, make a list of content I need outsourced with my OneNote to keep track and then I assign a writer 10 articles to write for me (5 with the keywords for one new xfactor site and another 5 for a 2nd xfactor site.)
Also I do know what you mean about the domain hoarders. I did register one domain with an add on word to it and it is no where showing up in the SERPs so I now only buy the exact keywords in the .com/.net/.org are available. If not, then I move on to another keyword or niche.
What about the articles for the article directories? Do you write this yourself?
Well up until this week, I have had writers and my rewriters write them for me. I won’t be using rewrites anymore though. I think for now, I will write my own articles that are short and based on the same niche but not targeting my keywords and just have my writers write my xfactor content.
@Sara
Thanks for the heads-up with BD5. I think I will wait for updates to it. I don’t understand how the author could release it given that it is not even close to functionally stable from what I can gather. Some have accused the author of making it look pretty, but forgetting to make it work. It’s that lipstick-on-a-pig concept, they argue. In the meantime, I do have Roboform, so maybe… oh, I think I will flip a coin. I’m anxious to preserve one of my new xfactor sites which got indexed last night and promptly landed in the middle of page 1 and it has extremely minimal backlinks since the EZine articles haven’t kicked in yet. It’s gonna need consistent backlinking, coz I sure would hate for it to get lost forever in a google dance…
@nettech
Thanks for the tip about bookmarkwiz. I will look at it and maybe flip a coin between it and BM5 if I’m still on the fence…
Great tips! I think I may need to step my game up in locating keywords with a higher # of searches per month. At the lowest, I wouldn’t pursue a keyword with less than 1,000 searches because there are quite few goldmines out there — however, I think I may split test these types of keywords and the total amount of traffic/CTR they produce vs. keywords with a higher overall search volume.
Sometimes you find some real gems with those low searches but if you do, be prepared for clicks that come in maybe 2-3 times a week. It is better to target 2.9k+ monthly searches because I find I get steady traffic which means more clicks! I usually stick with John’s recommendation of trying to get a total of 5k searches per mini site. So if my main keyword gets 2.9k searches, then I will need to have my 2nd page keyword with no less than 500 monthly searches, and the 3rd keyword page with no less than 500 etc. Although; I tend to target the additional page keywords with 1k+ monthly searches.