2 Niche Sites Built Today & 2 Different Approaches

I enjoyed this story Caroline; it’s nice to feel like I am not the only one still trying to figure out all the pieces to the puzzle. Keep sharing your experiences!

Ahhh that darned google sandbox. I think making money with adsense probably takes the longest since you need to build good content and work on your backlinks before you can start raking for the content you’re posting. I find that it can take you up to 6 months to begin ranking, depending on how agressively you’re building content and promoting your sites. I like affiliate marketing a little better because you don’t necessarily need to wait to rank, you content and campaigns and keywords just need to be relevant.

Charlie, I’m still interested in the program you are following similar to the 30DC. I hope you read: the comments here.

I’m reading the keyword sniping article now (thanks for the link). It uses some tougher numbers to compete than the 30DC. I guess it’s either too advanced (too difficult to attain ranking for me) or better than 30DC method.

I was not aware of Courtney Tuttle’s method…Makes sense though…Thank you for mentioning it. I love your other blog too Caroline.

Great idea to create two sites and compare them. It’ll be interesting to hear how that works out. About the Google sandbox… did you participate in last year’s challenge? Ed taught us a few ways to create links that really shortened time in the sandbox. Some sites were even getting indexed within a week. Last year’s material on that is still on the 30DC site I believe.

Great post Caroline I too am trying to set up some niche sites and to follow your progress shows me what I am doing right or wrong!

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Barbara, I don’t think Caroline is talking about getting indexed. All she would need to do was create a link from her blog’s main page and the sites would definitely be indexed within a week. I think that the “sandbox effect” refers to the inability to rank highly in a periode of time after launching a new site.

Caroline, I also enjoy building new sites but don’t you think that there are some huge disadvantages of building a lot of low quality sites in a short period of time (low quality because you will not have the time to create high quality if you need to take care of all sites at once)?

Regards,
Mikael

Mikaels last blog post..Achieving Top Ranking for Sure

Caroline, your website looks great. Are you sure you’re not making money? Well things don’t have to be perfect. Knowing some stuff is actually more than most people and in the 30day challenge certainly you’ll learn more.

Caroline,

Have you ever noticed that some domains never go into the Google Sandbox. Did you ever wonder why?

Did you ever consider whether relevance and competition (or lack thereof) might have something to do with it.

Something to ponder.

GuruBob

GuruBobs last blog post..gurubob: Using Google Reader to manage and respond to posts in the #30DC forum, just register the forum RSS feeds and you’re away…so easy!

@charlie, building content and backlinks is part of the 30DC too so in that respect only the monetization method is different so far.

@Koen, Court is quite the expert when it comes to SEO so he knows he can compete for much more competitive phrases. The 30DC is aimed at complete beginners so they use far more conservative phrases to begin with.

@Barbara, it’s very easy to get indexed quickly – you only need to get one single backlink from a popular site such as Squidoo, EZine articles etc. The sandbox causes rankings to be lower which is a different thing.

@Mikael, the emphasis here is on SMALL sites, rather than low quality. Each one will have perhaps a dozen articles which is what will allow me to create them quickly. I’ve seen quite a few systems around to allow you to mass create a ton of sites from scraped content and that is not what I am doing here – I write all my own content from scratch and I don’t consider anything that I write to be low quality :p

@rob, not sure what you mean… I’m making plenty of money on this site. It’s my niche site that I created last year that doesn’t earn much and nobody has seen that.

@GuruBob, no I don’t ponder these things much. That’s what you guys are for! I’m catching up on Immediate Edge material while I go through the 30DC so perhaps I’ll find the answer in there :-)

Caroline, I wonder if you’ll mind sharing what’s been the most profitable way for you to earn from this blog. Or is that too personal? It is ok if you don’t want to answer.

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@ Caroline, I didn’t mean that you produce low quality when you write :) – I just didn’t get that you wanted to create small static sites. It’s true that you can create a lot of small sites if you don’t have to update them frequently.

Mikaels last blog post..Achieving Top Ranking for Sure

Hi Caroline

I’ve been doing the handbuilt Adsense site thing you’re discussing here for a couple of months. I find it works best to do the set up for several sites at the same time, then work on filling each one with content. I certainly can’t do a whole 8-10 page site’s worth of content in one day, but maybe you write faster than me :)

All mine except one have been sandboxed and are just now starting to come out of it. The exception? A blog with just 2 posts, most recently 6 weeks ago, which G seems to love – it shows with a toolbar PR of 4! Once I’ve finished my current project I have to go back to that one and work on it.

Mind you, that’s not the one which earns the most money. The best money-earner has had almost no G traffic but I have a very successful Squidoo lens pointing to it which brings in enough traffic for $3-$7/day in Adsense. If I could work out why G likes that Sq lens so much and repeat that, I’d be laughing.

So, the articles and blog posts (Court’s are excellent) and eBooks which tell you how to do this are often good starting points, but what really happens to your site doesn’t necessarily match what they say to expect!

Kevin

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ps Caroline – with your 2 test sites, you’re not going to use the same content on them both are you? I’ve found that G often really does pick one copy and ignore the other(s), which would make your comparison invalid.

@Erum, go back and read the archives, in particular the monthly stat posts. It’s all in there – I share details of every penny ever earned.

@Kevin, everybody works in different ways. Personally I find that I like doing the setup but I dislike writing the content so if I used your method and did the setup for a whole bunch of sites, I’d just end up with a truck load of unfinished sites with no content on them! So seeing as I’m just starting out, I prefer to do one whole site (well 2 in this case) in its entirety before moving onto another.

And no you can never really predict things with any accuracy which is why I really don’t sweat the details too much. And to your last question – no, all content for any site is unique.

work hard with it and you can achieve great search engine traffic… keep up the goood work

I can’t wait to see how you do. Good luck. Are you building your site using Wordpress like the video’s you put out?

@Owen, yes of course!

You Wrote:
Basically the essence is to do some market research to find some keyword phrases that have high enough traffic and low enough competition to be a potential target and then to test that market to see if it spends money.

In my humple opinion that is the wrong way to start making money. You should go to the markets that are spending money already and create a product in that niche. Find the most popular products on eBay, Clickbank etc. Products that you KNOW are big sellers. Tap into those markets either as a product owner or affiliate.

Chris Rempel has written some exellent ebooks on this. You can read more about it in his e-books and .

@Morton, I would only do the keyword research after I had already chosen a profitable market to explore. Though I wouldn’t necessarily pick a product to promote – that’s one approach of course, but not the only one. That’s why I’m building 2 sites that are monetised differently. I don’t want to tie myself down to just one method.

Caroline, my post wasn’t directed at your sites at all, I was only referring to the text I qouted from the 30DC approach.
I know there are many different ways to skin a cat, we all have out own approach. :)