if your new start small.. but not too small.

I did what you did and now I have about 8 websites ranking from page 1-3 and I don't want to leave them hanging so I'm spending a lot more time on these smaller websites when I should jump into something larger.

When I mean small I mean weak competition, the exact searches can be huge!

Cost-benefit analysis: Will the benefits of ranking well for this keyword outweigh the costs of getting it there?

all thing is difficult before they are easy. if u insist perhaps u will have something unexpected.

Is it a "buying" keyword or an "info" keyword? I've bloodied my nose on that issue before.

What I mean is, are people buying after they search that keyword. I ranked a keyword page one above the fold on Google with over 8million broad phrase and found out they were looking for info. Now I'm working on turning info seekers into buyers. Not so easy sometimes!

It would have been easier to rank a keyword that "buyers" were searching. I have done this now. The keywords I thought were duds at first, due to low search volume for example, are my best selling (buying) keywords now.

Only took me 2 years to figure that out!

We all know that there is more to SEO than just keyword choice but that is what I personally have leaned on the most and have ranked several sites OK. It is slower however and I'm now working on other aspects of SEO currently. I'm not very techie but I am learning.

At least attempt to figure out what people who search your keyword are searching it for. Look and see if there is any PPC ads and then open the sites that are ranking for that keyword now and are they serious selling (commercial) sites. Are they vendor or affiliate sites. Are they product manufacturer's sites, Wiki's, reviews, etc? Are they ranked on authority "only" mostly? If you don't see much of the fore mentioned indicators do some soul searching on what you want to do with your chosen keyword.

There are a lot of strategies to consider on posts within this forum that may not show up on your post here. Search for them.

Good Luck!

Old Dog

P.S. I have also figured out that SEO is only one way to monetize websites. There are many other ways also. Thanks to a lot of great info on the WF and also applying offline techniques too.