Scaling the micro niche sites...

Amazing to me that no one seems interested in this. Is anyone out there producing a large amount of niche sites profitably?

I am very interested and have been wanting to try a massive scaling approach.. But.haven't gathered up the courage to go all out. Plus, people keep posting about google banning them for no reason.. How have you produced so many sites so fast? are you doing keyword research?

-j

I would be assessing your strategy somewhat, because 70 sites, each an average of 5 pages in size, is still quite a large amount of content for the relatively small income you're currently making.

You should be focusing on doing better keyword research, and - perhaps, by the sound of it - more backlinking, to increase your search-engine rankings (if you're not currently in the top 3 for most of your keywords), traffic and thus the number of clicks you're getting.

The biggest problem I find in scaling a niche website is volume. So say you have a website on cordless drills because that was the only good drills keyword. Then you need to move to screwdrivers etc, but then you run into not having an EMD. I've built one authority website and I can say that 90% of the pages are a waste as only a few actually generate income after fairly intense backlinking. It is all about the keyword and not about simply having content for the sake of having more content.

You're doing it wrong, I'm getting 1k sites up every 2-3 months and I only have 1 VA.

Automation.

wouldn't it be better and maybe more cost-effective if you build a larger site and add pages that target each keyword niche?

Hey Justin, I've been at this for 3 weeks less than you, building out a single site, and doing all the work myself. I'm averaging about the same income as you with about 33% of the amount of content.

I tried the micro sites thing and never got anywhere with it. With the exception of 1 site (where I ended up putting in about 20 pages of content) I never got onto page 1 with any of them so didn't get traffic and didn't make money.

I think the single site (or a small collection of 'authority' sites) is the best way to go these days. My site is totally unaffected by the 'google dance'. It goes up and down in the serps for individual keywords on a daily basis but overall traffic is steadily growing week by week.

im doing similar work but alone and managed to create around 5 sites last year. My suggestion is that just keep building content on the pages and backlinks through article directories and text link ads or something.

Traffic will improve. It is easier to make $1 from one site a day and make 10 sites rather than getting a site to make $10 a day. You are at it. But it is not an easy task at all, best of luck..

The worse part about this technique is that google might not like this method. So my suggestion would be to add at least some relevant content into the sites as it will make your business more stable. It will be more relevant for advertisers and google will be happy from you too ..

Thank you, Kevin!

@M Thompson - We will for those that are at least making a little revenue. We were thinking for those that are making (well) under $1 a day, we might bundle them together. It would be hard to sell one making $3/month for much I imagine, but bundled with others at $50/month it might not make for a bad offer?

I don't see how scaling such an empire of mini adsense sites provides any real value. Lets be honest here and not kid anyone. You can tell me till your blue in the face that you are providing a service to consumers and I will come right back at you and tell you B*LL S**T.

Why not concentrate on building a few sites that you could focus on. With your outsourcing I am sure you can really grow them out, less dilution, allowing you to really make those few sites a labour of love.

I scaled the mini adsense model to over 120 sites and that feeling of not accomplishing or providing any value really made it not a passion, but a chore. I certainly don't miss those days where one day I am an expert of garden lawnmowers and the next a source for boat part reviews.

I ditched all my sites apart from a select 5, worked on them daily. Each have over 250 pages of content and I am doing quite well ;-)

it is pretty awesome to work with small niche and the best way is try to rank it for spot number one or two as this is the life of your online business. small niche are easily to do with quick work but big site need time and most ppl give off when got no result

So .... where did this end up to date?

How many sites?

What kind of serps were achieved?

Daily adsense revenues?

Wow, it's been a while!

We continued with the project, creating around 50 sites/month Dec - Mar. We've found success here and increased to 2x in April. 90-100 sites. We're a bit behind on site creation with the scale-up, but have around 260 sites up now in total, with another 35 or so domains purchased and getting ready.

80%+ (I don't know the exact number) of our Dec/Jan sites are sitting on the first page for associated keywords and they bring in a full 65%+ of our revenue, currently.

We're just under $60/day for the month of April. The project is now self-funding, through our selling some of the AdSense site networks on Flippa. (We're under the username TryBPO) and we should be able to continue to self-fund as we scale. Right now, we plan on staying at 100 sites/month through the next couple of months, with a chance of being at 300-400/month by December. (hopefully)

It's definitely profitable for us, but it's a real grind. My business partner and I have had to be more involved at different points in the process with so many sites, but we're still working our way out further. Instead of scaling personnel here, we decided to turn various team members into Project Leads, where they outsource much of the work to others and merely supervise the process.

We sold our second auction for 5 sites on Flippa today for $1,500 and my business partner is in San Diego, CA at a coffee shop in a meeting with a Google AdSense rep as i write this...going pretty well!

Wow, an old thread but I would like to see updated results as well.

Your revenue seems awfully low from 70 sites, what are the total traffic figures?

Thanks TryBPO!!!

Great update.

Will be interested to hear how the meeting with your G Adsense Rep ends up like.

Please keep us updated.

Interesting...

So I just got off the phone with my business partner who just finished lunch after meeting with the Google AdSense rep and here are a few highlights from that meeting.

- We were actually invited to this meeting...I thought it was sent to everyone in the area and those that replied got in...nice!
- They want people that are creating sites...not MFA sites. Our sites, although boring, are not considered MFA.
- You MUST have 100% unique content. (We do) Do not duplicate content from elsewhere, use auto-blogs, etc.
- They really do manual reviews...but manual reviewers do NOT have the authority to shut down AdSense accounts...ours would be fine as-is.
- Contrary to popular belief, they do not shut down AdSense accounts on a whim, unless something REALLY bad is going on with the account. They will give any reasonable publishers fair warning on what needs to be corrected.
- We messed up (and are a little stupid) by simply using the code provided from our WP templates and not matching them to our AdSense account ads. Therefore, Google doesn't know which blocks/ads are performing better and have not been able to optimize for our sites. Very stupid, rookie mistake on our part and (wink wink, nudge nudge) she told us we might do much better by fixing that.
- Good luck getting an "actual" account rep...reserved for top .00001% of publishers. (Think New York Times level)
- 250x300 and skypscraper blocks are generally used by the premium advertisers.
- (In our particular case) We're better off going with 2 blocks and a link unit, rather than 3 blocks and a link unit. (250x300, skyscraper, and linkunit)
- Although we have personal AdSense accounts and a business AdSense account...don't bother mixing/matching there at all. Although it's acceptable to have those accounts, you might throw up some flags there...better to be avoided... (We asked about this as it would allow us to track more URL channels)
- Some major publishers have tested wrapping text vs. not wrapping and not wrapping generally has won out.
- Our tactic (And xFactor and others) of putting the ad block right below the title is aggressive, but acceptable. Putting something like "Click Here", "Hot Deals Today" etc. would be going too far.
- AdWords targets heavily by whether you're logged into your Google account or not. If logged in, it will try to show ads that are good for YOU and not as heavily based on content. (Shoe ads on a funeral site, for example) If not logged in, the weight goes to the content.
- Very helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly

What a cool experience! I only got to talk to my partner for a short period of time, but we have some things that we think might greatly improve our income and are anxious to test them out.

Thoughts?

Thank you for the update.
Your post about the meeting with the rep. was super helpful and very reassuring.
Keep up the good work, keep us updated, and best of luck with your business!

Thanks for posting the info, very interesting - some of it I'd never heard before.

I have about a dozen sites and am currently pulling in between $200 and $250 a day - but I wasn't making that much in the first few months after I launched my sites. If you have quality content it takes a few months for your content to "mature" and rise to the top - use that time to keep building good sites, and soon you'll have a steady stream of sites you built months ago reaching critical mass and starting to earn real money. I'd say you could easily be making hundreds a day with a network like that.

very interesting... i have considered a similar scaling of micro niche sites... have you used any other monetizing methods to supplement adsense?

one question - what are your yearly domain-name costs for 100+ sites? this is the one area that i was wary about the scaling, as each site would have a fixed cost associated with it?

Recurring domain costs aren't much of a concern for us, really. If the sites, on average, make us $10/month each long-term, the $8 or so per year for a domain renewal is not that big of a deal.

For those few (Most likely under 5%?) that made us less than the cost of the domain over the previous year we can just let the domain expire and re-purpose the content or something. At this point it looks like that will be quite rare.

It's aggressive, but I'd like to have close to 1,400-1,500 sites up by the end of the year. Cost would be around $11,000 per year on renewals, I'm estimating? Still...7% (or less) of gross there, right?

great! been reading through the site, interesting to follow your progress!

i guess adsense is great in this sense because you don't require customised monetization for each site. do you also factor your hosting into the set-up charges?

i actually came across your sites on flippa by accident too. nicely presented. i might be interested in taking a few off your hands to add to my adsense portfolio, and to get an idea for how the micro-niche sites work, so let me know when you are next selling some!

Just sent you a request @ skype

This is one of the most wild questions I've ever seen asked. You've given us no numbers on CPC or number of global searches or even your CTR. If your not making over $2/day/site you should read the link in my sig. Your CTR must be over 5%.

Make it try to rank for different keywords and add more valuable content.

In that way - Your sites will become authority sites and you will earn more money.

Add more content too and DONT make it an autoblog.

I am developing 100 sites too.

Lets see what happens..it will be a 200K turnover if I flip them all(Lol)

I am pretty serious about my project and you should too!

Thanks

for us beginners we will learn a lot from this experiences .looking forward

Sure micro niche sites can work, onbly have to look at some of the big names in the classifieds who survive strictly on Adsense revenue, just continue what you are doing, rinse and repeat and before you know it the $50 per day milestone will be passed

We've passed the $50/day mark already, averaging $53/day in April. We should be at right around $100/day on average in June, but it will depend on how many of the sites we sell off over the next 4-6 weeks, heh.

You are going about this the wrong way IMO. You would make a heck of a lot more money and have less costs just by adding more pages to your existing sites instead of making 1000 5 page websites.

Google would prefer it as well

this is a nice go! Could you tell us how much you earn from those 300 sites monthly?

I'm an Adsense publisher myself. I have done a ton of Xfactor sites. However, I find my best income coming from adding more articles to each micro niche site. Even 10-20 high quality articles seem to be magic formula in quadrupling the income of each individual site, or even more. I had clunkers that became viable earners just by the addition of articles.

The key is HIGH QUALITY well-researched articles, not just keyword-optimized ones. Google seems to examine quality signals coming from different articles, that's why Panda slapped all the big article directories that just pump out ****e content with zero quality but keyword-optimized.

The easiest way? Go to free magazine sites, download relevant magazines in your niche and get your writers to rewrite them. You can target keywords but I find by just doing this alone, I'm getting high quality traffic that's translating to adsense clicks.

Scale it to hundreds of high quality articles on a single site and that's when you see the sheer power. I mean... Look at eHow. They're going to hit revenues of $200 million in Adsense income a year purely from this model.

Something to think about?

Can you explain a bit more on the personal account vs business adsense account?


I'm earning a decent amount on my personal account, but I'm thinking of getting a new business account. Mainly because I'd like to grow it as a business, and also as a safety net if something goes wrong with the personal account.

Is there anything questionable about this?

Love this thread. It keeps me motivated

Nice thread but there's something on my mind. You mentioned that an adsense rep took the time to see you, but you're based in the Philippines. Does google have adsense reps in the Philippines? hmmm....

Hey Freddy,

I can't speak to your specific situation because I don't know all the details. I can say that we don't link our sites together, new to old. I don't know that this had anything to do with your situation, however, as it seems you're having problems with some of your non-linked sites as well?

Yes, we're using the same things across the board...all public information. To be clear, we've had a few sites disappear. Some of them came back to an even better position than they were before. Others did not come back to the same spot or barely appear in the SERPs now. It's not a big concern for us...it's accounted for and doesn't seem to change the overall average for the sites. When one site goes away, another seems to step it up and earn more during the same period.

I'm pretty sure that the more sites you have and the more diverse the topics, the more you'll find stability with average rankings, UV's, earnings, etc. Even still, our earnings have bounced quite a bit. We were at a $40.13 low on 5/13 and a $82.34 high on 5/16, but we've still seen a steady rise in income.

In fact, here's the cool thing. We're currently tracking our average income in the first month for all sites, second month for all sites, etc. For example, the sites we earned in Dec made $X on average per site in Dec (Month 1) They made $Y on average per site in Jan (Month 2) and so on. With a few months history now, we've got some fairly consistent numbers and you can review them here and compare if you'd like:

Income Report - April 2011 | AdSense Flippers

Click on the image about halfway down the page to take a closer look.

As it stands today:

Month 1: $0.56 per site
Month 2: $3.60 per site
Month 3: $7.03 per site
Month 4: $10.75 per site

And so on.

The data gets much less reliable as it goes further out, because we have less sites in there in comparison and used to get the averages. Additionally, I made the silly mistake when I set it up, basing it on the URL purchase date. In April/March the URL purchase date and the date the site was actually setup varies by up to a couple of weeks...I should have based it on site setup date...ugh. It means, most likely that the sites setup in April/May will show lower earnings and harm the averages (skew the numbers) a bit....I might have to go back and change that in the future.

Anyway, we've tried to be as honest and as transparent with the process as we possibly can. We're really doing nothing that's terribly special or unique at this point. We didn't buy a magic bullet WSO or anything...just pulled information from the boards here and put it together. The IMPORTANT things that I think stand out for us are:

1. We have a team of low-cost labor employed by us and working for us directly through our company.
2. We've taken a heavy process-oriented approach from our experience at scaling processes in other industries via outsourcing and applied to this process

We're pretty skilled at tracking as well and think our organization has added to our success.

Hey Justin,

I have one question for you. Do you use dedicated IPs for every website or do you use shared ones?

Thanks and good luck with your project!

when i recharece a keyword all time i affried about number of indexing page.ther have a keyword so low competition and hug amount search volume such as 80,000 [er month but this keyword make 25,00,000 search result.So can i build so much backlink and can i get 1st position on this keyword?

Jeremy,

Interesting strategy. We have an off-line client that we're talking with about a similar approach, using the mini-sites to build his authority sites traffic. We're talking about testing it out with 50-100 sites for him and seeing where it goes from there.

Thank you, TryBPO, for an incredibly inspiring post! I am currently building niche sites as well, manually, why it takes a bit of time. Build up 4½ so far, and I am planning on building 50. Keep this thread going - Amazingly interesting!

Sorry if you've answered this question before but.. how many websites do you have right now? and how much are they making in total?

The reason why I ask is,

1.Having many websites seems like a bunch of excessive work
2.Creating content/backlinking for all of these websites month after month will get tiresome.
3.Losing track of each website will be easy
4.Maintaining all the websites will be hard
5.If you get slapped, they'll all probably go down with it.

I know you have outsourced workers but doesn't it make sense to focus on higher search volume keywords with the same competition? And find something that works and scale that? Maybe spend more time on keyword research?

I mean I'm finding keywords that have 10-30k exact searches/month with EMD's avail and in about a week I've landed on my the first page making me 10-20 a day. I haven't outsourced anything I just know which niches convert.

I would spend all this time creating an authority site that will bring in 100-200/day.

Thanks for sharing Justin. Out of interest, have considered using an ad server that would help manage you ad blocks and also allow you to use affiliate and CPA offers on a page-level basis?

I recently did this myself and managed to double the income from the sites in question.

Yes, we submit sitemaps to GWT for each of our sites.

Many people take the approach of trying to be "sneaky" with Google, trying to "trick" users into clicking ads, etc. and we think that's a bad approach. We'd rather be overly transparent. We feel it builds trust and helps other open up, providing us tips and tricks that we never would have learned otherwise.

We (try to be) very engaging with the people that are active on our site and hopefully learn from them as much as they learn from us. We're by no means experts or "gurus"...we're just like you, but happen to have a cheap labor source readily available to us and experience in running outsourcing campaigns.

Google is a woman very demanding, so you need a multi-tiered approach to please him. Take advantage of the PageRank of web traffic to other sites, but also build your website you have built up trust if you rely only on a mini-sites or Web 2.0s, or sites of authority.

I also use the Network functionality in Wordpress for my army of small niche sites. It makes life so much easier. All my sites share a single copy of the themes and plugins directory. Thats makes it a snap to update themes, tweak ad layout across dozens of sites, update plugins and update wordpress itself.

Yes, we manually submit sitemaps to GKT and use the Google Sitemap XML plugin available for Wordpress.

Nice!

We just got our AdSense channels bumped to 500 from 200. That will make reporting on individual URL's much easier. You can check out our May 2011 income here:
Income Report - May 2011 | AdSense Flippers

Quick update: We're up to 391 URL's with around 350 sites up. Someone asked us recently if we use one hosting account or multiple. We've continued to use one, unlimited hosting account via GoDaddy. In our experience, people mention hosting account for two reasons:

1. Hide from Google
Unless you're breaking the ToS, doing something shady, etc. this seems a bit silly to me. They can find you so easily with the other tools we use, that this isn't an issue for us, honestly.

2. Avoiding server downtime
A bit more valid...there are times where we noticed all of our sites were down, loading slow, etc...but you would still have these problems, they'd just be split up over multiple accounts, unless you had a dedicated server...and even then there are problems. According to Joe who's a bit more technical than me, the traffic and storage we have on our sites is negligible and any heavy loads or slow load times would probably be from someone else on the server.

Thanks for all the brilliant info!

Are you still using SeNuke X to build links, or has that changed?

The the OP, it sounds like you have done all the hard labor work already. If you stop making sites now and concentrate your efforts on link building to get the majority of your sites ranked 1-5 then that would dramatically improve your earnings.

But then you already knew that right? Not sure why you havnt wanted to do this sooner rather than making more sites

Wow...

So we just had our first $100 plus day strictly from AdSense earnings! We've had a couple of $90+ days, but this was our first day of breaking that barrier.

Thanks so much to everyone's that's helped us along, taught us so much, etc. It's quite a bit of work, but we've been able to make it happen within 6 months and we're very excited about the future. Due to the fact we're scaling up, we'd really like to be at the 9K - 10K/month range by December...we'll let you know how it goes!!

I have also wanted to go all out and scale up. Just scared of the outcome when I'm not really ready to take on so many at a time. Still fairly new to the system.

Not sure if anyone asked this yet- but I was wondering if you could shed some light on a couple questions i have.

1. where do you find the pictures that you use on your sites?

2. I notice that your main post on your home page is the keyword you are targetting.
How do you come up with the titles/keywords for the other articles on your sites.

Anyway thanks for this thread and for your site- learned quite a bit

Great- thanks for the info!

Really helps out a lot. I was kind of stuck at this point.

Cool thread.

I have to agree that going for 1st-3rd is worth it most of the time. Remember that about 50% of all searchers click the top 3.

Hey again - have some further questions if you dont mind

Had a peek at some of the sites you had for sale- i noticed that you have filled in all the fields for all in one seo for each and every post.

Can you give me your thoughts on this? The reason i ask is that i had some sites built for me in the past and the person said it wasnt necessary to fill in all the info for all in one on every post- ie descript and kw.

Should i be doing this? Is it better for seo purposes?

THanks

Hey there! :-)

I noticed you used SubmitYourArticle to build backlinks for the new sites. Have you considered using Article Marketing Robot, or is there a reason why you chose SMA?

Hey Halfdan!

No particular reason, really. We were looking at UAW and SYA and I had a conversation with an outsourcing client (non IM, but does some IM personally) that said he went through the same decision-making and chose SYA for the ezine submissions. (I don't know...maybe UAW didn't do ezinearticles at the time?) Anyway, we went with SYA and didn't look back.

Funny thing, we no longer use SYA to submit to EA. We take the unique content and submit to EA first and then submit various versions to the network on SYA.

I've actually used SYA for article marketing for AdSenseFlippers, but chose not to spin the articles at all...just good content syndicated through their network. I might lose some of the benefits of the uniqueness, but since I wrote the articles I just didn't feel good about spinning them at all. I've been wondering about spinning overall, but that's for another discussion, I guess.

Hey Joe,

I just read a couple of posts on your Blog concerning your use of Market Samurai and your Keyword Research methods. Very nice process, but brings up one question in my mind.

Is there a reason you do not use the Adwords CPC figures in Market Samurai and prefer to use the information in Google Adwords Keyword Tool? It just seemed like an extra step since the numbers are available in MS.


FYI for anyone who has not read those posts, you should...They are here:

Our Keyword Research Strategy Part 1 | AdSense Flippers

Our Keyword Research Strategy Part 2 | AdSense Flippers

Great thread here of the Warrior Forum and very informative blog...Thanks for all the great info.

Barry

Hey, Barry...thanks for the KW strategy mention!

We do use MS to get a cpc estimate, but since we're in the Google Keyword Tool in part 2 anyway, we double check the cpc stats that MS pulled. We're there anyway and it's a quick head-check. Not to mention the fact that MS can be a bit off. We've seen it off by as much as 4x what we thought we were going to get vs what Google Keyword Tool shows.

No tools are perfect or exactly correct, of course, but it's a good way to verify the numbers look good...especially if you're getting down to it and about to purchase domains. I'm going through this step as I write this, actually.

By the way, a friend of mine wrote a book titled, "Hey Joe" about the craziness of living in the Philippines. Whether you live here now or are considering coming out here, it's worth a read if you want to check it out:
Amazon.com: Hey, Joe (9789719303312): Ted Lerner:...

You mentioned adsense under post titles is "aggressive" are you still doing this and can you comment any further on it as related to tos?

Hey there,

The AdSense rep we met with used the term "aggressive" which is why we mention it. It's hard to hear my tone when I write it, but basically she told us it's fine.

What would NOT be fine, however, is if your post title was something like this:

Click here for the best deals:

We avoid post titles that would encourage people to click on the ads...that, I think, would be too far.

TryBPO, thank you for letting us know your great business.

I'd like to ask your goals if you don't mind. For example, when are you going to stop creating new sites? when you reach 100,000 microniche sites? or even more maybe