I have been building xfactor sites outlined in John’s ebook; Micro Niche Adsense Course for just a little over a month now. I now have 20 sites up. Obviously I have made some mistakes and posted them on a previous blog post, Learning From Mistakes On Building Xfactor Sites during my first month’s effort. If you have just begun building xfactor sites, I recommend you read that post first so you can avoid some of the mistakes I have made.
Yesterday I got caught up on reading Internetmarketer99’s thread in which he has so kindly laid out his method of building mini niche sites. As I was reading it, I was getting more and more tempted to try using wordpress blogs for this month’s xfactor sites. I mean everything just seemed too enticing.
- Wordpress blogs get indexed faster
- Google crawls blogs more frequently because blogs are usually associated with more content added versus static sites
- Blogs can rank pretty decently especially when in conjunction with plug-ins like ALL-in-One SEO
However; some people will argue that static HTML sites can hold steady ground in the SERPS without having to be updated with more content where as blogs can stop ranking unless you continue to add more content. If you stop adding content your site will slowly die and so does the income from it.
Now I can say that the second part of that statement is true in my case. One of my niche blogs that makes money only through affiliate product sales using Google’s affiliate network started to slip in rankings the past two months. For 7 months my niche blog was sitting very solidly for page 1 at position #3 and I was consistantly earning about $120-150.00 a month with it. I noticed that in September it barely hit the $100 mark. I went to go check out what the problem was and my site had been pushed back to page 2. So I posted 2 blog posts within a week of each other and I went ahead and submitted 2 articles to ezines and it is currently running 1 UAW submission for specific blog posts that I want to rank for the chosen keywords. It is now sitting on page 1 at position #7. Still not where I want to be with it so I will probably need to add a few more posts.
I think its probably best to have a mixture of both static HTML sites and wordpress sites. I plan on making my next 5 xfactor sites built with wordpress just to see if I have a bit more success with rankings and indexing.
My adsense earnings are still very inconsistent. Sunday I earned $19.89 and yesterday I only earned about $9.63. My 20 xfactor sites are only earning me about $2-5 a day total. But as I have stated with my learning from mistakes post there are many of my sites that are not even on page 1 (lost in the SERPS) or sitting at position 6-10 on page 1. many are still doing the Google dance and some sites never ranked due to adding on a word to the domain name.
The one thing I have noticed is that my hubs are getting more clicks and I am earning about $2-$4 a day from them. I have just under 120 hubs up and the few hubs that I am actually URL tracking through my adsense account, have showed me that I am getting $2-$4 clicks. I have been taking note of the hubs that are earning me $2+ in clicks and I plan to either article market them and start using comment kahuna on them as well.
I am slowly getting UAW submissions set up for the inner pages of some of the xfactor sites. I still have yet to find new keywords to build sites with this week. I think I will spend some time today doing that as well as posting up my last pages of content for sites #19 and #20.
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I too like to use blogs instead of static site. One site inparticular took off once I turned it into a blog. Plus I added content and it’s done very well.
Nice, I like to use WordPress because it’s easy to update and I can update from any computer I don’t need to code or do anything using an FTP.
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I’m also using primarily WordPress sites. If you’ve got Artisteer then you can generally knock out designs pretty quickly. I;ve found that WP sites do get indexed slightly quicker than static sites but they are in no way consistent. I had one site that got indexed in 3 minutes from my content going live and another site being indexed about 3-4 days later, its very weird. Both sites had the same plugins, hosted on the same server etc so it varies.
The other benefit of using WP I find is that when I use MNF, I put in all related keywords as ‘tags’ regardless of whether they are low or high competition, this adds to the number of pages being indexed. I do like static sites as you have 100% control over them however I think for wase of use and time saving you can achieve a high percentage of most tasks you want to do using WP anyway.
Just my £0.05 and hope it adds value
Zaheer
BTW Sara, well done on getting all those sites up, its very commendable. How long did it take you to get all your hubs up, Ive only like got a few…lol
Hi Zaheer,
It took me about 3 months to reach 100 hubs. I had outsourced about half of them so that was a big help. I did primarily target high CPC with low competition keywords though. My biggest problem was I never got around to properly back linking them. I have some hubs that have ezines and infobarrels pointing to them for back links but its not enough.
I pretty much gave up on thinking Hubpages would somehow earn me some decent coin and that’s when I went back to niche blogging and xfactor site building.
Wow, thats excellent Sara,
Thats really inspirational and got me motivated to start writing some more hubs. I’ve written a few and worked really hard on them but kind of given up that they’ll make me money but only focissed on the quality content and backlink value. It is annoying that your score does jump up and down like a yo-yo but I think I’ll start writing.
Hows the XFactor sites coming along? Are you starting to see any increses in earning yets, stablisation of rankings etc?
Zaheer
Well, like I have said before, you will make more money with your own niche sites versus using Hubs. I seriously thought that if I built enough hubs, I would hit $100 a day with them but I seriously think it would take like 1,000 hubs to achieve that. lol It’s better to invest time and energy and most importantly real estate i.e. a domain. Your return would be far greater.
My xfactor sites are ok. I have 21 sites complete and spent of my day yesterday doing new niche research and didn’t come up with anything too promising. I did find a keyword that gets 8.1k monthly searches but the competition is pretty steep. There are several PR 4’s on page 1. I will probably just go ahead with it and get my content up but not really worry about it ranking right now. If it is really struggling to rank, I will come back to it in 2-3 months or so. Gonna let it age a bit I guess. lol
I am still only earning about $2-3 a daily from my xfactor sites combined. I try not to get obsessed with my rankings but I peeked at a few today and they are pretty much in the same positions they were a week ago.
Hey Sara, since you’re thinking of going WP on your XF sites, I thought I’d share my experience with that. A while back I switched to WP for my XF sites. Once I got into a rhythm, it was so quick to push the sites out: a custom XF-type theme, plugins, etc. And for eleven, yes eleven straight sites, I was indexed in about 8 hours on average, and nearly all the sites landed on Page 1. For a while, I thought I found heaven.
So what’s up now? My last three sites, built using the same workflow as my last eleven, aren’t ranked and aren’t indexed. On some days, when I check with the site:domain.tld query, I find the main page, only to find that it has disappeared again in the afternoon. So it has been a week, and after witnessing this phenomenon with my third site, I paused. I don’t want to release more hard earned, or in some instances, outsourced, material if google is going to sandbox/slap/ban (insert your favorite google bad-boy punishment here) it.
Ironically, I’m beginning to suspect that in my quest to not-look-like the rest of the XF sites out there, and thus avoid any footprint, I may have inadvertently created my own unique footprint with my custom theme which some google human reviewer (or one of their bots) was able to pick up rather easily. Bummer.
I think I’m going to run an experiment because I can’t just sit along the sidelines and watch. I will use my custom XF theme for one site, and for the next one, I will use a XF theme built on top of Thesis, that wordpress theme that even Matt Cutts, the Google search rock star (in some people’s eyes) uses. What I’m trying to ascertain is whether my custom XF theme had anything to do with my recent MIA sites. I am assuming that the Thesis theme will fly not raise any flags whatsoever. Both sites are marketing to the same niche, so I’m hoping to hold pretty much every thing else constant. Some things I will need to vary, like the IP address. I’m not going to launch them from the same IP.
Hmm, so your sites are just not getting indexed as fast but they aren’t getting deindexed right?
I think the footprint of your own template shouldn’t matter. As long as you are supplying unique and quality content you should be fine. Google doesn’t care if you use the same template for your websites even if you have 200 of them. They only care that the site is supplying quality content.
Some people had posted a few weeks back on my blog comments that they did have some of their wordpress blogs take a few days to get indexed. So maybe it is just totally random and nothing to do with your template.
I’ll let you know how my blogs do with regards to getting indexed. I had 2 new blogs set up last night, I bookmarked them with Digg and Mister Wong. Today I used pingler on them and submitted the RSS feeds with RSS bot. My static sites were taking 6-9 days to get indexed so anything would be an improvement.
By the way these new blogs are using the Adflex SEO theme. I still really love that theme!
Theres no right way of getting Wordpress sites indexed in Google, like I mentioned above, I have many WP sites and they all seem to get crawled in different ways. Some take hours, some take days and some even weeks.
With regards to the templates, I’ve personally moved away from the XFactor template, I tend to design my own in Artisteer and whack them up asap, this way each site’s coding is slightly different and you have all that juicy content. I also saw something weird this week when another XFactor stie that was listed above me just completely disappreared from position 5 and noweher to be seen. Luckily my site does not look anything like it but that made me think that maybe Google are beginning to penalise these sites, the content was actually quite good so not sure really what to make of it.
Anyway, did you see ClickBumps post on how is he making $100 per day with XFactors method? Its very encouraging.
By the way, it is actually a good idea to be quite anal about your rankings, the minute you hit the first page, you do notice the difference. Now that you’ve got 21 sites up, do you think its maybe worth going back and tweaking them or are you doing this and also creating new sites?
Good luck
Zaheer
Zaheer,
Yes, I did read Clickbump’s post. It is very encouraging and interesting to see how people put their own spin on how to build and rank their sites.
At this point I am going to continue to crank out more sites. Maybe I will build another 30 or 40 and then go back and tweak and back link some more.
Thats excellent, its very rewarding once you get all those sites up, I think thats half the chellenge. Wish I could get that many up although my writers are on the case.
Are your sites full 5 page sites or 1 pagers with a few 5 page sites?
Zaheer
They are all 5 pages. I don’t see why people would bother with only 1 page sites when you will get more traffic to your site using the 5 pages concept with each page targeting a different keyword.
Sara, I am probably in the minority, but I actually prefer static sites over Wordpress blogs.
I’ve built a lot in sites with Xsite Pro and have it down to a science. Its fast and I think there may be other benefits. Looking back over a long time, I notice once the xsite pro sites get ranked they tend to hold the ranking better even if I do nothing else to the site. The blogs do tend to get indexed quicker, but not always. But they do seem to need more ‘help’ to hold their ground over time.
Frankly I’ve never understood the big deal of a site getting indexed in 24 hours or something – I’m more focused on the long run.
These are not absolutes and can vary with the niche, but in the long run I’ve not found blogs to do any better than static sites where it counts: Making money.
Bruce,
I have read on several occasions that HTML sites hold their rankings better than blogs and that blogs need to be tended to more in order to keep their rankings. I don’t have any hard evidence if any of that is true because I do have blogs in which I used google sniper on back in May that are still holding their rankings which were built with wordpress and I have not added any additional content since it was built.
I may go back to HTML sites since my blogs seem to be only doing ok. 1 out of 3 are ranking for the main keyword. of course this could just be picking rough competition and nothing to do with static versus blog.
I’m actually struggling with the wordpress vs static decision myself. I have many static and many wordpress sites, but as I’ve never focused on keyword research, it’s generally hit or miss. However, I do love playing with numbers and I’m come up with a few interesting results.
Of all the niche sites I have, 62% are built on wordpress and 38% are static sites. However, the wordpress built sites make 72% of my income and the static sites make 28% of my income. This tends to make me believe wordpress sites are better at generating income.
Of course, my sample size might not be large enough and that might mean the numbers are a fluke and would be proved different if I had more sites. I currently have 28 mini-niche sites.
Another thing is that I made more wordpress sites after learning more about how to best market affiliate products and I use adsense very sparingly on only a few of the sites. This could mean that I would make more money with static sites I built now just because I know more about what I’m trying to do.
Hi Sara – I stumbled across your site when looking for other Xfactor students and have to say thanks for the useful info you’ve been posting here.
I built my first site on Friday using the static method and hated every second of it – I love WP too much, Yesterday I spent most of the day coding my own WP template to have the Xfactor features and was able to build the second site in about half an hour. I’ll leave the first site static and then see how they fare.
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Hi Clare,
Yea, getting that first template up can be kind of annoying but once you get it down, things just seem to go faster.
That’s great you built your own WP template. I agree that WP is a lot easier to use and sure makes things really convenient. I’ve never really given the few xfactor sites I have made with WP a real chance. I currently have 1 site that has moved up from page 3 to page 2 that is an xfactor wordpress site but it never ranked right out of the gate and I think it is only ranking because of the traffic kahuna campaign I have been working on with it. I suppose time could also have something to do with it but I think TK deserves the real credit.
I’d love to hear how your WP sites do.