Working a 10-Hour Week (for the AdSense Project)
In the introduction to the AdSense strategy that I am using for this project I said that I was going to be working on 3 sites at once. However, I’m only actually working around 10 hours a week in total on this project. In this post I’ll explain why that is and break down what those 10 hours actually consist of.
Why Only 10 Hours?
One of the reason I’m not putting in many hours to this project is necessity - I now write for two blogs, I’m learning PHP and have other bits and bobs to do work wise so although I now work on my business full time, there are only so many hours to dedicate to one particular project.
However if I wanted to I could put more hours in. I could probably find 15-20 hours a week pretty easily but there’s another reason why I wanted to limit it a little. I’m really keen for this project to be something that others can follow along with and act as some kind of benchmark for what can be done, how long it takes to make a decent income and so on.
Many people who are trying to make money online still have full time jobs and only have a few hours a week to work on this stuff so it can be daunting to see full time marketers banging out tons of sites very quickly. By restricting my work on this project to just 10 hours a week you know that any results I see are something that you can emulate too. If you don’t have 10 hours a week then scale accordingly.
Why 3 Sites at Once?
One of my weaknesses is that I have a habit of starting things and not finishing them - software projects and websites are my worst culprits! So at first I intended to work on a single niche site from start to finish before working on another one but there is actually a very strong reason not to do that - it looks unnatural to Google if a website suddenly gets a whole load of links right at the beginning and then the incoming links grind to a halt.
By working on several sites and rotating which one I am working on it will take around 6 weeks to get a site to completion. I’ll go into what I mean by “completion” in a moment. I could take it further and work on 5 or 10 sites at once and build them up even more slowly but then I really do run into the danger of never getting any of them finished so 3 is a nice middle ground for me personally. Pick a number that works for you.
The Difficulty With Dealing With the Unknown
I discussed in the launch post that each site would go through various phases such as content development and link building. Now in reality, if a site is not ranking number #1 in Google for the target keyphrase then there is more work to do but at the beginning, before the traffic starts coming in I have no real way of knowing whether or not the site will be profitable. All the research in the world does not make up for real-world testing.
A big problem with relative newcomers like myself is that I don’t really know how easy it is to compete on a given keyword. I may choose a keyword that looks great but find that I simply can’t compete so the site does not rank highly enough and thus does not get traffic. This is not necessarily a bad keyword, but just means that my SEO skills are not good enough to rank for it yet.
With this in mind, I have come up with a simple plan of work which should be enough to get my site ranking in the first 20 results of Google for the keyword phrase. If not, it should at least be getting about 25 visitors a day or more from long tail keywords. If neither of these things are happening then I have probably chosen a keyword that is too competitive for my current skills.
At the beginning I want to work with the low hanging fruit. I want to get a little bit of traffic so I can start working on optimising my AdSense so that I can get my CTR as high as possible. Plus there’s also the possibility that I will have picked a keyword that does not attract buying customers and if that is the case then I will not make much money with that site even if I get the traffic.
It’s all an experiment you see. I’m just a beginner so I want to start at the beginning. There’s no point in doing months of work on a single site to get traffic to find that I simply cant compete or the market is wrong and so on. That is why I am only doing a small amount of initial work for each site. After a few months the sites should be out of the sandbox and should be getting traffic. If not I can just leave the site for a bit longer or perhaps do more work on it if I have learned something new by then.
The Work Plan For Each Site
I have broken down the work that I want to do for each site and allowed around 1 hour for each thing. It varies of course but it gives me a benchmark to work with. This is the work involved:
Keyword Research
This involves researching a niche to try and find keywords which fit a certain criteria. I am looking for keywords with around 100+ searches a day, less than 50,000 competing pages and an average AdSense CTR of at a very minimum $2. This stage also involves taking a closer look at the competing sites and doing additional research to find extra long tail keywords to target.
Content Research
As far as I am aware not many people do this. Content research means looking at a keyword and doing research to find content ideas to write. I got stuck in last year’s 30DC when I picked keywords that looked good but I just couldn’t think of any way of writing for it! I want at least 10 unique ideas for each keyword to publish as articles on the site itself and then from that I’ll also want to write another half a dozen or so articles for link building.
Site Creation
This is all the techy stuff - picking a domain name, registering it, installing WordPress, the theme, appropriate plugins, setting up categories, installing Google Analytics and so on.
Writing & Promoting Articles
This is the bulk of the work simply because there’s lots of articles to write - 10 for the site and about an extra 5 for other stuff like article marketing.
If I add all that up I’m looking at around 18 hours per site. Allowing 10 hours per week means I should comfortably get 2 sites completed per month so my goal is to have 8-10 sites completed by the end of this year. By this time the ones I created at the start should be ranking and getting some traffic and I should definately be earning some money by then.
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Placement Papers
September 15, 2008
One advantage of building a lot of sites at once will be that you will gain links slowly and naturally.
Also its better not to put all eggs in one basket. Even if one site fails or performs badly, you will have other sites.
Come on! work hard.. Try to earn a lot of money and become a famed internet marketer. Just 4 years left till the end of the world..
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