(Case Study) Get to $2500 A Month By The End Of May

[treezie]

Okay time to give back to the community now that I've had some early and very modest success with Adsense. I now have 2 sites that make me about $300 a month and then another 4 sites that I am trying to rank presently. I have been a little slow in scaling but now that I'm in the groove of things, I am going to scale up big time and attempt to get to $2500 a month by the end of May 2012. Hopefully I'll get there faster. How will I get there? By making at least 25 sites with good content---hoping each site will average $100/mo. Like I said above, I have 6 sites currently operational so I would have to make 19 more if I want to stick to $100/site. I will post my progress here often and answer questions you all may have.


The Plan
I have a week off from my day job next week so I am planning on doing all niche and keyword research then. The hope is to start writing articles for the 19 sites so I can start building links towards the middle of January.


The Tools
To do this I will be doing all sites on Wordpress, using the Thesis theme. I will be tracking my rankings via Market Samurai. I will use Google Keyword Tool, Market Samurai, Traffic Travis, and Backlinkwatch to do keyword and niche research.


For backlinking, I will use several different tools to assess their effectiveness. Right now I am using BMR and UAW. I will add more tools to my arsenal soon enough.


Since I want to use these sites to interlink and to link to future clients if I go offline, I will use SEO hosting. Right now I am using Hostgator and SEOHosting (A Hostgator subsidiary) for my hosting needs. SEOHosting is pretty expensive so I'm thinking of switching hosts.



Backlinking

For the most part, I will be using Private Blog Networks and Article Marketing for backlinking. I may do a few forum profiles and blog comments here and there but no spamming (profile spamming or comment spamming). I won't be doing anything like scrapebox or Xrumer either.


I will also try to ask for links and link exchanges from other webmasters.


For some tougher niches, I will use a linkwheel.

Keyword Criteria

My criteria is pretty flexible and I want to try out a lot of stuff since I am still new to the internet marketing game. But right now the criteria is very basic and will probably change once I get more experience. All I need is 2,000 exact matches and a CPC of at least $0.75. For each site I will try to rank for the primary keyword and a secondary keyword.

Site Criteria


Each site will have a minimum of 15 articles. My first two sites have 42 and 54 articles respectively...so you can tell that I am a big fan of making thick sites. The goal is to not have any sites de-indexed.


EMDs don't matter to me.


How Will I Handle The Workload?

I will of course outsource all of the backlinking. As for article writing, I will outsource part of it and I will write part of it. I want the articles on the site to be top notch. As so, I will be editing a lot of the outsourced articles for accuracy, semantics, and syntax. So essentially, what I am outsourcing is the niche research and I will take the articles from my writers and rewrite until it fits my quality standard. Yes it is redundant but that comes with quality assurance.

My Site's Ranking (as of December 22, 2011) for the main keyword


Site #1 (CPC $6.49, 4,400 Local Exact Matches): Position 1
Site #2 (CPC $3.98, 6,600 Local Exact Matches): Position 1
Site #3 (CPC $2.60, 14,800 Local Exact Matches): Position 19
Site #4 (CPC $0.86, 40,500 Global Exact Matches): Position 36
Site #5 (CPC $2.10, 5,400 Global Exact Matches): Position N/A
Site #6 (CPC $1.72, 6,600 Global Exact Matches): Position N/A


Case Study Update 1/16

[bencal]

Good Luck, looks like you'll be quite busy.

[Riki Oh]

How long did it take you to rank sites 1-3? That's impressive.

[treezie]

Originally Posted by Riki Oh

How long did it take you to rank sites 1-3? That's impressive.

Site 1 took me three months (of backlinking) to get to #1. Site 2 took me 2 months to get to #1. Site 3 has been 1 month so far.

[RatRaceWatch]

Good luck with your study, just be forewarned, putting all your eggs in the adsense basket isn't a good idea. I had a website that paid over $500 one month, and then the next month the website hadn't changed at all and I had finalized earnings of over $1800, and poof, the ad serving was disabled, and the account was banned.

I say this because I want to forewarn you not to put all your hopes on this, because they can and they will very easily knock your site out of the program, even with a privacy policy, even with good content, low bounce rate, 15 articles, high rankings, etc. Trust me it happened to me and it is happening across the board to a lot of good publishers.

Either way, good luck with your test.

[Riki Oh]

Originally Posted by treezie

Site 1 took me three months (of backlinking) to get to #1. Site 2 took me 2 months to get to #1. Site 3 has been 1 month so far.

-Wow. Good job!

Originally Posted by RatRaceWatch

Good luck with your study, just be forewarned, putting all your eggs in the adsense basket isn't a good idea. I had a website that paid over $500 one month, and then the next month the website hadn't changed at all and I had finalized earnings of over $1800, and poof, the ad serving was disabled, and the account was banned.

I say this because I want to forewarn you not to put all your hopes on this, because they can and they will very easily knock your site out of the program, even with a privacy policy, even with good content, low bounce rate, 15 articles, high rankings, etc. Trust me it happened to me and it is happening across the board to a lot of good publishers.

Either way, good luck with your test.

-This is the only reason I steer clear of Adsense. You can avoid any troubles, however, if your sites are targeting physical/digital products that can easily be replaced by an affiliate program. But if you're going to do that, you're better off doing that instead of Adsense anyway, because your commissions are generally going to be better.

[treezie]

It has been awhile since I've updated. Things have been a little hectic and I am a little behind on the sites. However, I did finally find a marvelous native English writer for $4/article so I am extremely happy with that. I've ordered 100 articles from her and she has agreed to do another 100 for the same price. These are all articles going onto my site. I have another writer writing articles for me to distribute to article directories. Anyway, here is what the SERPS look like for my sites so far.

Site #1 (CPC $6.49, 4,400 Local Exact Matches): Position 1
Site #2 (CPC $3.98, 6,600 Local Exact Matches): Position 1
Site #3 (CPC $2.60, 14,800 Local Exact Matches): Position 16
Site #4 (CPC $0.86, 40,500 Global Exact Matches): Position 9
Site #5 (CPC $2.10, 5,400 Global Exact Matches): Position 91
Site #6 (CPC $1.72, 6,600 Global Exact Matches): Position N/A
Site #7 (CPC $2.08, 2,900 Global Exact Matches): Position N/A

My writer is currently working on about 5 more sites and the content should be up at the end of the week.

I am frankly very surprised that my Site #1 is still holding down the number one position on Google. The level of competition is pretty fierce and the competitors all have a lot more backlinks than me. But somehow, I'm still holding it down. I did move to number three for a few days but all I did was edit the article and add a few hundred words to it and then it popped back to number one. Although I can't say there was a causal relationship but there is some correlation there. I also did some supplemental backlinking using BMR to make sure it stays in first place. The CTR and CPC is highest on this site.

Site #2 is converting fairly well since I've changed the color scheme of the site. The bounce rate is also extremely low on this site so I am pretty happy that people are finding the information on the site useful. CPC has also gone up. It is averaging $1.13 CPC for the month of January.

Site #3 is really frustrating me. It broke the Top 10 for a couple of days and then it has remained on the 2nd or 3rd page for the rest of the time. I think it may be because I have over-optimized my anchor text. I'm going to try to vary up the anchor text a little bit and do some broad match anchor text. Also, Site #1 and Site #2 were SEOed using linkwheels. Site #3 isn't. Perhaps that may also be it. But I'm going to try varying up the anchor text first before building linkwheels.

What really surprised me was Site #4. It was jumping all over the place for awhile. Last week it was outside the Top 100 and then it jumped to Position 9 a few days ago and has stayed pretty consistent. I haven't built many links to it either. However, I have varied the anchor text for Site #4 moreso than I have for my other sites. So maybe that is why. I am going to build more links to it so hopefully it breaks the Top 5 in a couple of weeks.

I have been somewhat ignoring Site #5. I have been building some backlinks to it using UAW but I haven't done much else (such as building links via Ezine and BMR). So it's sitting at position 91 but I'm thinking it would go a lot higher if I just build some contextual links to it. Will start building links to this site via BMR tomorrow.

I don't know what is happening with Site #6 because it should have at least broken the Top 1000 at this point. I have about 16 links pointing to it and the site has been live for a little over a month. I haven't been sandboxed but perhaps penalized. I think I will need to vary up the anchor text a bit and give it some time.


I just started backlinking for Site #7 today so we probably won't see progress on that site for awhile.

Ad Placement
I have been playing around with the ad layout for a couple of months trying to figure out the best ad placement and I think I have finally figured it out. No matter the site, I put a 336x280 right before the content---left justified. Then if the articles are fairly short, then I will put another ad block at the end of the post. If most of the articles on the site are over 700 words, then I put the ad unit in the middle. For the third ad, I either use a link unit that is right below the header or a 160x600 on the left side. For site #1 the image unit was converting very well for me when I was doing text/image mix. So I thought if I switched over to just image ads only that my CTR would skyrocket. WRONG. There wasn't enough images to serve so a lot of the ads were not relevant to the content. So yeah my earnings were atrocious during those two weeks that I switched to pure images. So for the most part, text/image is the way to go.

Also, I have found that using the hex code 0000FF (for the title) converts better than most other blue colors.

[Mack Attack 77]

I find this thread interesting. How much income are these sites pulling at the moment?