Few questions from a newbie!

Marketing
1

Hi all,
I am an IT consultant working mum. I am fed up of not being able to spend enough time with my daughter. My job pays me very well, but having researched about ways to make money online, I am considering building a portfolio of niche sites…I plan to leave my day job in 2yrs.

I’ve done a fair bit of research, so I am hoping my questions won’t be very silly. If they are, please direct me to relevant info so that I cn read up?

  1. My plan is to build a portfolio of 100 sites, each making about £10 a day only via Adsense? Is this possible? If any of you have done it, please share your experiences. How do you maintain your portfolio? How do you handle tax issues?

  2. I have a list of 15 keywords that have 1000searches a month, low competition and returning less than 10 results for inanchor search. First page google results for all of these are weak pages and some irrelevant. Is this a good strategy?

  3. Would you advise I buy keyword rich domains? I have the exact keyword domain names for 2 of the above keywords

Thank you very much for reading through. You will see me around for a long long time hopefully - one day helping others like me!

Have a gr8 new yr!

-Tulipz

2

One more question to my list

I just found a keyword with 30000 global searches a month, low competition.

In anchor Search = 30 results
In anchor+intitle = 50 results

Exact keyword domain name available…shall I snap it up?

I won’t be asking this question for all my domains! Just one or two until I get the hang of it! Thanks!

3

[FONT=verdana]Tulipz,

I wish you the best of luck with these plans. But I would suggest that you are focussing too much on details, and not enough on the big picture.

For now, never mind about domains you should buy, or what keywords to focus on. You’ve got a much more important question to face: should you give up your high-paying and secure salaried job in the hope that you will make a reasonable living as a PPC publisher?

In particular, you spoke about building 100 sites, each making £10 per day via AdSense. I can tell you that might well be possible, but just think about the work that would have to go into it.

If you are thinking about creating the sites from scratch, where are you going to find the time to develop the huge amount of content you will need? For one site to earn £10 per day, you will probably need more than, say, 3,000 visitors per day for that site. For a site to be that attractive, it will probably need several hundreds of pages of unique, interesting and fresh content. Multiply that by 100 (because you are aiming for 100 sites).

You’re either going to have to either develop that content yourself, or pay other people to develop it for you. If you pay other people, it’s still going to cost you a lot of time to recruit those people, co-ordinate their efforts, and check their work - not to mention the money you will have to pay them. Either way, you’ll also need enough expertise in a hundred different subjects to allow you to authoritatively publish information on those subjects.

Or maybe you are planning to buy 100 existing sites. If so, and if the sites are capable of earning £10 per day each, then presumably the sellers will want a high enough price to compensate them for the fact they will no longer be earning that amount. Are you prepared to pay that sort of money?

One final point. If you’re expecting your entire earnings to come from AdSense, you will be putting an awful lot of fragile eggs into one basket. Right now, AdSense is - in my opinion - easily the best service of its kind. But who knows what the situation will be like in a couple of years time?

I don’t want to discourage you from finding a better way of earning a living. It’s certainly possible to make money from AdSense, and similar on-line efforts. But you will need to put a lot of time, hard work and investment into it (not to mention a reasonable amount of luck). By all means, give it a go if you really think you can do it - but think very carefully before you give up your day job.

Mike
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4

[font=verdana]

The first problem is that it isn’t as simple as saying “build it and they will come”. There’s no guarantee that you will get those levels of traffic. To build a successful website, you have to want to build a website about something.

Secondly, I think the scale of what you’re looking for is way, way too ambitious. A portfolio of 100 sites? Where are you going to get either the time or the ideas from to create 100 sites? And £10 a day from each site? For a start, that’s 10×100×365 = £365,000 a year … do you really think it is going to be that easy to make a six-figure sum just from running adverts on sites that have no history or credentials?

FWIW, I have an extensive site with a few hundred pages that has been running for over 10 years and gets about 3000 visitors a day, and I get on average about £5 in Adsense revenue. Sure, my main purposes on this site isn’t to maximise advertising income, or I would have done things differently, but that might give you some idea of the scale of the project that you are looking at.

  1. I have a list of 15 keywords that have 1000searches a month, low competition and returning less than 10 results for inanchor search. First page google results for all of these are weak pages and some irrelevant. Is this a good strategy?

1000 searches a month is not a lot. As I said, my website gets about 3000 visitors a day. And while some of those come from other sources apart from Google, equally there are plenty of people who bring up my site in a Google search and don’t click through to it. To build sites solely for the purpose of targeting an unwanted and unloved keyword is a risky strategy – what do you know about the subject? how will you ensure that your site is better than the competition? how will you know what link strategy to use?[/font]

5

Thanks for your inputs. Please keep them coming.

Just come clarifications:

I don’t intend to give up my day job until my sites start making decent money

Also, I am not looking at making $10 a day from day 1. I intend to achieve this amount in 2yrs time…is tht still very ambitious? Same goes with building a portfolio…is having 100 sites in 2-3 yrs too ambitious?

6

Thanks for your inputs Mike.

I am targeting virgin markets. Setting up local sites in a country where e-commerce/web is still in very early stages. My idea is to buy good domains and benefit when things pick up…

7

I agree that it is going to be a lot of work. Not impossible, simply a lot of work. Then I don’t know if you will miss your old job when you make it (I have no doubt that if you have the drive you will get there, at some point)

Even if your markets are virgin today, they will not be so in a few years so you may find that it will be harder and harder to maintain those figures as competition grows. Yes, you will have the advantage of being the first to target those markets but all kind of marketers are searching for new niches so someone else, or a few hundreds, will compete against you.

Part of the success of a site is to be able to attrack new visitors as well as maintaining the existing ones. That’s a daunting taks and I find it very hard to do it for 100 sites (unless you have a great team of collaborators).

I would say create 4-5 sites and do not depend only on ads but offer added value. Something that people will pay for.

8

[FONT=verdana]

Yes, to both questions. I think you’ll have realised that from the answers you have received.

Don’t lose sight of your overall goal, which is to spend more time with your daughter (a very laudable goal). Have you thought of asking your present employer if you could move to part-time working? Even if your salary was halved, you’d almost certainly still be making more than you could as an AdSense publisher, and you’d have more hours free in the day.

Mike[/FONT]

9

For a while, lets forget about my long term goal. I still want to start this to get some decent side income…

I’ve been researching for some keywords this morning. I found a nice one with over 10k searches, low competition. I googled the term and analysed the first few results. Top3 have 100+ back links. Fourth onwards, hardly 5-6 back links… I am wondering how these sites are ranking so well ? Any thoughts?

10

Tulipz, I love your courage and love for your daughter. However, making money online the way you have figured it is possible but tasking. Why not start now with one site instead of starting in 2 years time with 100 sites. That way, you will have practical experience because in internet marketing, what works Mr A might not work for Mr. B. Furthermore, getting on first page of Google is not all about backlinks alone and don’t limit your income projection to Adsense alone. You can include affiliate marketing as well.

11

Thank you Solar. That’s the idea. I plan to work on this project for 2-4 hrs every day - creating one site at a time. I am hopeful that in a few years my hard work will start to pay off and I will have established a good work from home business that will help me spend more time with my daughter.

12

[FONT=verdana]

That’s a much more realistic approach.

Hard to know without seeing the sites in question, but it’s likely they rank well because they have solid content that people find interesting and useful. Backlinks are not the only means of getting high rankings. Content is vitally important, and there are many other factors as well.

Mike[/FONT]

13

There are many factors that affect ranking and it is hard to know exactly why a site ranks well. Still, there are known factors that are important for ranking:

  • content is fresh and updated regularly (at least, once a day)
  • content is well written, easy to ready and with no jargon
  • traffic
  • competition (the lower, the better)
  • number of searches (the higher, the better, of course)
  • the site is highly usable and accessible
  • those sites have been there for ages (you don’t get 100+ back links in two years, unless you’re a huge company such as BBC or similar)

As @Mikl; said, 2-4 hours a day it is a realistic approach. As you @solar2005; said, you will not get those figures with advertising alone.

I will add that even if you work 2-4 hours, if you want to build and maintain 100 sites, you will not reach your goal for two reasons.

a) because you want to spend more time with your child and just maintaining one site with high traffic can be a daunting taks and take more hours than you think

b) These sites can’t be clones, each of them will have to have their own special and unique, fresh content, and they will have to be updated as much as possible. I personally think that’s not possible but you may prove me wrong

Now, if instead of creating 100 sites, you tell me that you want to create your own high quality site so you have salary of, let’s say USD 4000 per moth just working 5-6 hours/day… then we’re talking about something else.

And while definately I would suggest that you should use adsense (or similar), I will tell you that your income will not come from adverstising, really, but from your affiliate marketing, what you sell, and the service that you can provide online.

14

I thought this was MUCH tougher than creating a large portfolio of sites making little money each…

15

It would be easy if you just had to create one site and then clone it 99 times. But if you clone your site, search engines are going to put you in the black list and that means no traffic and therefore no clics and no ads.

Reaching the top is much harder than staying at the top, in my opinion. Since you pretend to do this in the long term, I suspect that you want to stay at the top (whatever your goal is) and that means quality. You can’t keep the quality of a hundred sites by yourself (you can if you have a good and a large team). You can do it for one, two or maybe even five but not much more than that and depending on your niche and goals.

To do as “little” as £10 per day and site, you’ll need a minimum of 1000 visitors per day (being conservative). Of course, it doesn’t matter if they’re new visitors or not, simply that they clic the ad. That means 1,000 x 30 days = 30,000 visitors/month. Per site.

You can reach there, for sure furthermore if the niche is not being exploited right now. But you’re understimating certain things such as:

  • the amount of work it takes
  • that you’re going to be tired, and fed up, and you will not have always the same energy every day
  • the amount of disappointment you will feel when you don’t reach the figures you expected when you planned
  • the amount of times that you will want to quit
  • the amount of traffic varies… one day you’re on the top and the next you have a hundred sites above you
  • it is continous work. You don’t do it and then leave it and get residual income. You still need to keep on going (although, it is true, that not as hard as before)
  • If you don’t love what you do, you’re going to be moody pretty soon.

You don’t choose a niche only because it looks like you can make good money. You choose it because you love the subject AND you can make good money.

And then, you have a plan B in case that plan A doesn’t work.

Your plan A is to build a 100 sites and get some cash from ads… what’s plan B?

In my opinion, it is easier to sell something (let’s say an eBook) and earn £100 per day than building 100 sites and earn £10 per day from ads.

But that’s just me. I could be completely wrong.

16

Whatever you do, I would focus on building a list of opt-in emails with those sites and then follow-up with that list as often as you possibly can which isn’t too difficult with autoresponders. The only real regret I have since I started my full-time “career” in internet marketing is that I didn’t start building my own list sooner.

I have worked with pros who did. That’s the real difference between a lot of the successful internet marketers and the rest of us little guys fighting for table scraps. They have tens of thousands of customer that they can promote to any time they have a product to promote. They have lists.

17

I actually own a few dozen exact match domains that I do for affiliate stuff. All of the domains are related to specific products - I would highly recommend against going for information type sites and Adsense as a whole since the monetization is dicey at best. You can have ads on the site, for sure, but I’d think of them as backup revenue secondary to affiliate revenue. Why this route? Because a 10% commission on a $50 product is easier to come by then a RPM of $5 on an information website.

Now the next part - you’ll need to be really good at on-page factors. You can’t just spam this out and let it sit - you’ll need to build it out, add content that will rival everyone else, and then give it time. I’ve had some sites that rank in the top three within a few weeks after going up, while others I’ve had to wait for 3-6 months for the same thing. Keep in mind these are all sites that target keywords that generate between 1,000 - 20,000 searches per month (exact match - very important!).

As for hosting, definitely go with HostGator since it’s only $15 a month. If you’re handy with Wordpress administration is cake. The crappy part is keeping some sort of content dripping over time, though it’s not all that bad. Doing this I have about 10 sites right now that each generate about $100 - $500 a month and growing. That’s considering that I started this experiment in July of 2012.

18

[FONT=verdana]Duffyace, I don’t agree that an affiliate site is necessarily better than one designed for PPC advertising. There are simply too many factors which could affect that. I’ve seen sites that have cleaned up on affiliate revenue but hardly made a bean on PPC; but I’ve also seen sites where exactly the opposite is true.

My advice to Tulipz (or anyone else starting out) would be to try both (not necessarily on the same site). Get to know your visitors, and what they are looking for. Then use your judgement to decide what will work best for you.

Mike[/FONT]

19

Hey Mike,

True enough - I was really talking from personal experience and in that I’ve seen affiliate sites do better, though you’re correct that monetizing with ads isn’t impossible and there are some good sites that are successful with it.