Oh the joys of having my son home for the summer. He just cost me $93.29 and it’s not even 11 am yet. He decided to stick his DSi game card into the Wii disc slot and now its stuck inside of there. For those of you that can’t picture this scenario. Its like a shoving a puzzle piece into your car’s cd player. There is no way to get it out without them having to take it apart to retrieve it. *sigh*
Now onto the juicy stuff regarding my micro niche sites. Obviously taking the authority site route has been on my mind for some time. The one thing about Adsense is that it is totally unpredictable. One week your site could be doing very well with adsense and the next week do hardly anything. One thing that is clear is that there is no minimum amount of pages your site must have in order to rank. So you could essentially build a one page website and earn $20+ per day with it, of course it could also fail and bring in only $0.19 a day or worse. Likewise, building out a website that has 30-60 pages does not guarantee your website will bring in the big bucks either. I think that has been pretty obvious just looking at my first 3 niche blogs.
Here are those stats for those of you that are curious:
Niche Blog #1 – Success!
It ranks #1 on page 1 for its keyword and it had a pretty steady climb to its ranking and has sustained #1 for some time. Its 18 months old, has over 60 posts and brings in about $2-$6 daily with adsense for a total earning of $1,931.36 to date. This is the site that had an $11 day 2 days ago. There are 10,900,000 other competing sites and I am #1 with only 41 backlinks and I hate to say it but about 6 of the back links are from a UAW run. The rest seem to be blog comments and sites that picked up my ezine article and re-posted it to their site. Oh and the site has a PR1.
Niche Blog #2 – Medium success
It has never ranked for its keywords but gets traffic from many long tails. It’s 14 months old, has over 60 posts and has done only a total of $128.94 in adsense. It has done $139.89 in affiliate sales during this time as well.
Niche Blog #3 – Roller Coaster Success
It has 50 posts and ranked in the top 5 positions from its debut in December 2008 until October 2009. It has earned me $1,712.57 in affiliate commissions to date and $1090.95 of that was done during its prime of Dec 2008-Oct 2009 before it got sandboxed severely. I got it again to rank #5-6 on page 1 for about 2 months after doing Terry Kyle’s profile back links on it but after the Mayday update it dropped off the face of the earth again.
Taking Action For Your Xfactor Sites
With the Mayday update, which for me didn’t effect my sites until June 2, 2010; I have watched my income fall like a landslide. I am freaking out. I tried to be cool about it but I can’t. I can’t site back and pretend it didn’t happen and take no action. Although my last 3 days of adsense have been a bit higher than they have been since June 2, they are still low enough numbers that are alarming to me.
I need to take action. I thought just focusing on an amazon site would help me forget about my xfactor sites and just let them settle. Oh they are settled alright…settled beyond page 10!
I need to take some action. The problem is I have 100 micro niche sites. Where do I start? How can I move along in a matter which will update my sites and get them earning and ranking again? But 100 sites is just so overwhelming?! Perhaps some of you can relate to this.
Best niche performers, Thanks Xfactor
I don’t think that micro niche sites are a bad method to make money online. Everyday new people make micro niche sites with the methods taught in John’s eBook and they still find that a week or two later they are ranking for their keywords and earning money. But at this point I don’t need to create any new sites. Instead, I need to look at my portfolio and focus on the sites with the best earning potential.
Unfortunately, when I created my first niche blog I was naive about CPC. I just wanted to be an affiliate marketer. The whole idea behind my site was to sell affiliate products. Well, as an added bonus I decided to place adsense on the blog. It started getting a click here and there. After its first month it did $12 in adsense and 0 affiliate sales. Each month I saw the adsense amounts increase and still 0 affiliate sales. I learned that for this particular niche, either I was pushing products that didn’t convert well or that for some reason the relevant ads were more enticing to my visitors. Anyhow, the CPC is ridiculously low. The site receives about 10-30 clicks a day but only earns about $2-6 a day. Pretty crazy.
Now, if I take my best earners and build them out just like my main niche blog then surely my sites can have the potential to earn $15-20 a day since all of my xfactor sites have a significantly higher CPC than my first niche blog.
Here are some screen shots of my best earners. The sites in red are duds that I will end up taking the content from and using as article backlinks and drop the domains when its renewal time. The green sites indicate decent earners.
You’ll notice I had some real winners on there. Look at site #6, #16 and nearly doubled their previous month’s earnings. #30 is actually the site that Backlinks Philippines was working on. #33 also look juicy. #44 was also performing pretty consistently with $42.38 for the month of May.
Now obviously I didn’t run down my entire list of all 100 micro niche sites. I just am taking the top earners that have some age to the domain already. I’m going to let the rest of my domains continue to age and I am basically leaving them alone.
Going From Micro Niche to Niche Blog
Now that I have my best performers highlighted, I am going to pick just 1 to start with. I find I am better if I can hyperfocus on one site and one method. So now I will pick one site. Probably one of the sites that was doing $40+ a month. Here’s my plan in a nutshell.
- Convert my xfactor HTML site over to wordpress via Dave’s walk-thru
- Over a 2 week period I will write 60 posts (about 5 posts a day and 300-500 words) for the blog that will include LSI words in the content and post titles
- Put my blog on auto pilot by scheduling out the posts so that 2 posts are being published per a week. It should take approx. 6 months for all the posts to be published. This is done so that google sees that my sites are being regularly updated.
- Once all posts are written, I will article market with a link pointing back to the main page and the first 4 inner pages that made up my xfactor site to begin with.
At that point I will most likely outsource some profile back links for my sites using Backlinks Philippines. Then, I will move onto the next site on my list, rinse and repeat.
I realize that this is extremely slow and many of you will be discouraged from doing this yourself. It’s not easy. I did it once before and decided after my 3rd niche blog that this was just too damn slow for me and that it wasn’t earning me enough money. The problem was my poor keyword research. Now after seeing which of my xfactor niches are profitable and which keywords are profitable, I know there will be money here!
So starting today, I am gonna work on my first site which is gonna be……#44!














Hi sara, having followed your blog for a long time, I think your biggest mistake along the way was rushing out to produce 100 sites.
I think you have got the right idea now though, focus on handful of sites that are:
1. already earning
2. have good potential to earn more, i.e lots of other keywords in the niche so you can add more content – or maybe they are earning but only ranked at the bottom of page 1 or page 2, in which case you can concentrate on backlinking.
Just doing this for 5 sites over a month could double your daily earnings, or more…
My best ever earner is my first site too, a 7 page site, that i knocked up in a weekend. Low competition, low cpc, and more importantly low search volume, yet i get 200 uniques per day. In our rush to focus and optimize on one keyword, I think we are forgetting about the HUGE potential for attracting other low comp traffic.
Why does my site earn so well? It is ranked number 1 for loads of little keywords, which add up to lots of traffic. How did I rank it there? I dont know lol, i hardly did any backlinking. I think its because every page is packed with relevant content including LSI content, that i put there naturally. I also do lots of affiliate sales for that site.
I find it very interesting that both of our most successful sites are our first sites…. something to think about.
Thanks Dan. I have heard nothing but “authority site this” and “authority site that” for the past few months that only now that my rankings had dropped so dramatacially that I am starting to see how it is essential to have more content on these micro niche sites.
Yea, its hard to tell if age has something more to do with it or if it was LSi related. I think I naturally incorporated a lot of LSI words into in my writing because I was extremely passionate about that niche. The writing was easy because I enjoyed researching additional ideas for it so the LSI just flowed more naturally.
First, thanks for the link to my blog post about converting pages to WordPress. But, what really caught my attention was this post.
Years ago I did the micro niche blog route, using various systems and techniques and saw results like you see. A roller coaster.
Then I developed a new strategy, creating one page sites that require zero maintenance. Build it, forget it, earn from it. Now, with that said, yes, I have some that earn pennies a day, but I have ones that earn $50+ a day. The key for me is this. If it is going to be that volatile why would I want to be working so hard at it?
You said “So you could essentially build a one page website and earn $20+ per day with it, of course it could also fail and bring in only $0.19 a day or worse.”
So why not stick to that?
Especially if some of the other sites that take a lot more time to build essentially have the same earnings.
David Cooley recently posted..Weekly CyberCoder Tweets for 2010-06-20
Frankly, I just suck at hitting high earning single pages. I would love nothing more than to learn how to effectively do that. Are your one page sites earning with adsense or affiliate sales?
Most of the earnings are from EPN (eBay) and Adsense, sprinkled with Affiliates. Learned years ago, never put all the eggs in one basket. A slap from any of the big systems can crush your earnings.
David Cooley recently posted..Weekly CyberCoder Tweets for 2010-06-20
Today is my first day with both kids home for the summer. In the past I have always worked. Not sure I’m gonna make it
I know it sucks that you have lost alot of rankings, but you still have the real estate. Some sites could still recover. But one thing nice about having so many sites is you can now focus in on what is profitable.
The majority of my first (larger) niche sites didn’t make much money. Some I can guess why, others I have no clue. But if I had built more sites in more niches I would have had a better chance at finding a winner. So you are in a good position still.
Carrie recently posted..Article Backlinks – Ranking Update
Okay, that smiley face was suppose to be a sad face. See, I’m so beaten down already I can’t even get my emoticons correct.
Carrie recently posted..Article Backlinks – Ranking Update
Exactly Carrie! I think I definitely have an advantage as far as building up authority niche sites now since I can pick and choose from my successful xfactor sites.
Even some of the lower earning sites will still bring in a fair amount over the year so I suppose if the money is enough to cover running costs it makes sense to keep them?
Some of these levels of earnings make me more determined to get around to hosting my own niche sites, but yet I never get around to it – maybe one day!
Bristolboy recently posted..Monthly Update – May 2010
I plan on keeping the sites that can earn ontop of what it costs to run them. Basically I would like to see the sites at least recover the outsourcing content fees and domain registration fees. Even if a site only did $30 for the year, that would be some profit.
Wow! I can’t comment about whether or not it will be successful. But at least you have a plan. I think that is the most important thing. It seems like it might take a month or so to figure out if it will work with that first site during which time you will have finished a second site. If you see those earnings start to increase, then you can keep going. I wish you luck.
Kidgas recently posted..Creating Links for eHow
Sara,
Something else to consider: Instead of letting the under performers just lapse why not flip them.? Potpiegirl sent out an email today about a site she flipped for 600. It was a niche site making $30 a month between adsense and amazon. Here’s the link http://flippa.com/auctions/97619. I’ve seen some sites with no income go for $200.
Sandy
Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks for sharing that idea. Its definitely something to consider. Looks like she scored a good deal because its a .com and ranking #2.
She also has 110 backlinks that look like the majority are from Article Blueprint.
Yes she did really well. Also there was a guy on WF a while ago who developed niche sites. If they didn’t perform he flipped them…only he called it flopping lol.
Sandy
Sara,
What is your reason for changing static sites Xsite pro to Word Press format?
Gracias
This is so I can schedule the blog posts specifically through wordpress. By scheduling them, my site will have 2 posts published per week and it will be over a 6 month period.
Sara – like the plan. I was going to answer your question but your plan was pretty much what I was going to suggest:
pick your top earners and build them out.
I’m pretty interested now in what Dave Cooley just said….I used to live in Vacaville, CA, and there’s a super affiliate there (of sorts) named Marcus…hmmm….Campbell? I think. His system is “simple sites big profits,” same idea Dave just espoused.
I only bring that up because I think I’m going to have a mixed bag, but more focused on selling affiliate products from now on. To that end: building what’s already working and what is already getting clicks.
Now it’s just a matter of getting those clicks to convert to sales – which I only did ONCE on one page, and it worked like hot cakes.
I never returned to the idea simply because I was working everyone else’s plan (Xfactor style). All that to say, I’d recommend building one site for a bit, but then go onto another as you wait and see what’s working/if it’s working.
ArticleRanks, by the way, is a UAW-style (but easier to use) article submission service, and there’s a number of people claiming they have seen their sites increase up the SERPs. The reason being, the service incorporates high-ranking PR sites (as an incentive to earn free distribution credits, you can join and add a higher PR site to get more credits…so their network has more “authority” in it).
I first heard about them at [http://contentattack.com] and only bring it up because I think it might be worth a look on some of your sites that used to perform but now aren’t ranking. $2 = 1 distribution, great tracking system as well.
All links are in-context links, no resource boxes (btw, UAW allows that as well).
I use the ArticleRanks but I don’t see many benefits from AR links. My articles are always published on low PR blogs and most of them are not even indexed. Maybe I’m just in a wrong niche for AR…
Bujes recently posted..Features Of Cordless Rotary Tool
Haha I just saw a typo. “My sites that are dudes”.
If you want a cheaper solution than Backlink Phillipines that isn’t an xrumer blast, try linkaloha.com
Wish you all the best Sara!