I’ve been building xfactor sites for almost 2 months now and I am stuck at the $5 day earning rut. With 22 sites this has not only been bothering me but it has also been bugging Mike. So the other night Mike asked if he could take a  look at some of my sites to evaluate their rankings, competition and monthly searches etc. After he took a look at some of my sites and asked me some more questions like: how many sites receive 2900+ monthly searches? how many sites are on page?; he had guessed that I maybe only had about 10 xfactor sites that fit the criteria necessary to rank properly.

He was close, I came up with only 8 websites that were ranking on page 1 and of those 8 only 4 of them get 2900+ monthly searches. Ouch! So Mike says “Earning $5 a day with only 4 true xfactor sites is pretty good. You just need to focus on building a lot of sites similar with the keyword research you did for those.”

Now Mike was kind enough to help me with my sites and I didn’t ask him to. He is just an honest, good man that whole-heartedly wants to see me succeed with earning an income from home. Please do not run over to Mike and bombard him with requests to look at your sites. And if I find out that any of you did, well then I will tell Santa Claus to not only leave you coal in your Christmas stocking this year but that your kids’, kids’, kids will receive nothing but coal! And don’t even get me started on what Rudolf will do to your car. Seriously, do not pester Mike ok? He is working hard to build a full time income too and he doesn’t have to time to evaluate everyone’s sites. I just figured by posting this and giving you some more tips, it will help you evaluate your own sites and strive to target better keywords.

Ok, so here are some tips to help you with building your xfactor sites empire:

1.) Only target 3 word keyword phrases (2 words can often be harder to rank for and 4 keywords will be harder to article market with ezines since they only allow 3 word anchored text in the resource box)

2.) Only grab sites that receive 2,900 or higher monthly searches (do pay attention to local and global searches only if there is a major discrepancy such as the local search is showing 1,000 but the global is showing 6,000.) I use “phrase” match when I am conducting keyword research. I have seen a slew of sites during my research where people targeted keywords that only receive a monthly search of like 1,000 sites. Even if the CPC is high, you might be better off just moving onto a keyword that gets higher monthly searches because if you build sites with a lower monthly count like 1,000, you are going to have to build 3-4 more sites to make up for the income you would be earning if you have just built 1 site with 2,900+ monthly searches. So which would you rather do, spend more time on good keyword research and build 100 sites and earn $50+ a day or build 300 sites to earn the same $50+ a day?

3.) Only grab a domain if your exact keyword is available. If it isn’t, move onto another keyword. I have 4 xfactor sites that had an added word to the keyword phrase and unfortunately all four have yet to make it to page 1.

4.) Mike’s best advice: “Do not be so mechanical with your keyword research. If I had done that, I would have missed out on a lot of good keywords that are earning me some decent money now. After you build enough sites, you just get to the point where you can easily take a look and know without a doubt on whether or not you can take the competition”. In other words do not go after a word just because you see only “x” amount of PR0 sites which is 1 less than “ideal”. Likewise do not be too confident and go after words that have too many PR4’s  on it. You really gotta listen to your gut feeling with your keyword research. I know this seems hard for many because they feel they do not have enough experience with keyword research or page 1 domination but just take a look at your first xfactor sites? How many PR 4’s are there on the page? If you look at your previous sites, it will give you a  rough idea of what sites you can take on competition-wise.

5.) Mike’s juicy new tip: If you have built a site and it is ranking on page 1 and earning money, go back and snag any available same top level domains for it. Meaning if you are ranking the .org then go back and see if the .net is available. If so, grab it and build the site using a different design like a wordpress template. The reason why you will want another template design is because if it ranks nicely too, you don’t want Google to look at both of your sites and think they are exact copies since they will obviously already be using the same main keyword. You want to please google by making your second site give your visitors value. Also make sure the content is not identical and that you target new keywords for the other pages of content.

The reason why this is good is because you know that domains act as real estate so if you own 2 positions on page 1, you are dominating twice as much traffic and twice as much earning potential.

On a good note, I did earn $21.82 in adsense yesterday. That is now my highest adsense day!