In the men time I will just keep creating new sites and supplement the income that way.

I tried adding brand new content to the older sites but they are yet to show up with any significant rank.

Amazon sales are improving daily and I have managed to salvage the traffic from one term that wasn’t getting an AdSense results with a range of Amazon products.  The products aren’t high cost but volume is pushing my commission rate up quickly.

The new sites (11 to 25) have lost their initial boost so I have to focus on working them back into some money making positions.

Here is the Table of Results for the last 7 days.  (I recorded this data a few days ago so it was inline with the other weeks, just too busy to post).

I did give oDesk a go but my first project has been quite dissapointing.  The communication from the project manager I hired (for content writing) was great but the work produced was terrible.   I’ll just try again I guess but if anyone has any tips for me on outsourcing I would greatly appreciate it if you can share them with me.  If you would like to write a post about it on the site then please let me know.

Onto the stats -

As you can see, a lot of traffic loss this week.  The weight loss site still hasn’t bounced back after the little sign of hope last week.  LES had a major drop in traffic too – this was due to a less significant brief rise in rankings.  PMD keeps shining and I am looking to expand on that site this weekend.

I am also going to try writing a new article for each of the original (first 10) sites to see what happens there.  They are getting organic referrals for new long tails but nothing for the established articles.

Well it has been another interesting week that resulted in me getting rather excited, only to be left dissapointed 12 hours later. My Weight Loss site made a brief cameo back on the first page for many terms as well as keywords that I haven’t ranked for since the original domain recieved a Cease and Desist. Pretty much right on 12am the day of the resurgance saw my traffic halt instantly, the keywords were returned back to the last few pages of Google (as before).

I have been told though that this is a good sign and to expect a permanent return in the next couple of weeks – very exciting!

The last week has seen me busy with other projects and a few fishing trips so productivity was a little lower than usual. I did make an effort to create my first ever video though – check them out here. It is a 3 part review of Market Samurai.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days

• Site 1 – Weight Loss – 379 UV (+) a lot of that was from the spike yesterday
• Site 2 – Home Improvement RAS – 332 UV (+)
• Site 3 – Health – LES – 330 UV (+) a never even noticed the sharp rise here.
• Site 4 – Beauty – LVL – 191 UV (-)
• Site 5 – Beauty/Health – HTC – 633 UV (-)
• Site 6 – Health/Diet – NFO – 173 UV (-)
• Site 7 – Beauty – BHR – 287 UV (+) 100% increase
• Site 8 – Amazon Site 1 – LEW – 425 UV (+) Large increase of 350UV
• Site 9 – Amazon Site 2 – CAD – 171 UV (+) This caused a big drop in Amazon sales.
• Site 10 – Amazon Site 3 – 79 UV – BAF – (-) Not much movement here.
• Site 11 – BSD – 147 UV (-)
• Site 12 – PMD – 723 UV (-) a bit of a drop but still in striking distance of very high traffic.
• Site 13 – CND – 24 UV (+)
• Site 14 – HND – 94 UV (-)
• Site 15 – SSS – 65 UV (-)
• Site 16 – CCT – 23 UV (+)
• Site 17 – PTC – 12 UV – will probably drop this one.
• Site 18 – BCC – 14 UV (-)
• Site 19 – AL – 20 UV (+)
• Site 20 – SL – 5 UV (+)
• Site 21 – SWL – 7 UV(-)
• Site 22 – LBS – 53 UV (+)
• Site 23 – TL – 9 UV (-)
• Site 24 – BL – 9 UV (+)
• Site 25 – WSL – 51 UV (-)

As you can see, there has been a drop in traffic with the new sites while the older ones are starting to return to previos levels. Promotion on the new sites has still been minimal with front pages still being required for the last 5 of them. I am hoping to get these ones sorted in the next week so they can all push 100UV/day.

The review is broken up into three parts so hopefully you can get through alive Click here to read the review.

Many people have tasted some sort of success but struggle to move from micro niche sites making only dollars a day to a piece of virtual real estate that you can build a real business around.  They get caught up with a process without seeing the bigger picture.

I am currently assisting a Warrior who is passionate about his niche but is struggling to get solid results.  We thought that it would be beneficial to other new internet marketer’s if we shared what we were discussing and learning to hopefully help them get a foot in the door as well.

As a marketer, I make a great engineer.  I love numbers and stats but you have to forgive my poor writing and communication skills.  If something doesn’t make sense then just hit me up and I’ll try and reword it into English!

So you want to create a new website to monetise but don’t know where to start?

Unlike many, I don’t start off with a monetisation method in mind and go looking for sites to target.  Limiting yourself to a set monetising method already cuts your potential markets and keywords to only a small slither of what is really available.  Getting in your head from the start that you are going to make nothing but an AdSense site means that you will miss all of the products on Amazon and EBay; there might be CPA offers available that are perfect for certain keywords in a niche or high paying Click Bank products.  Your content is also limited.

Say you make a site about weight lifting, if you were to monetise solely by AdSense then you can target certain weight lifting products but the ads being presented are going to be about the niche in general, usually not about the product.  A user after reviews or wants to know where to buy Mega-x hyper-viper 5000 weight benches will not be as likely to click on a new protein powder than on a link to Amazon that gives them more information about where they can buy the Mega-x HV5000.

If you are getting 100 people a day viewing that page then your sales copy should be good enough to sell a weight bench every day.  That will be worth more than the 5 to 10 AdSense clicks.

Another problem with limiting yourself to AdSense is the markets that have a generally low CPC.  Many people who have followed the AdSense manuals are encouraged to skip those words.  Instead of skipping the word find another way to capitalise on it.  There might be a high converting Amazon product that will fit right in.  Maybe you can capture the users’ email address and send them a PLR product or your own product in return.  Sell them related products or services down the track.

If you are making a site for Amazon products don’t ignore the related keywords that are asking for information about the niche.  Your site might be about the Mega-x HV5000 mentioned earlier but while researching you find that someone is looking for Mega-x HV5000 exercises.  They obviously already own the product but might be interested in AdSense ads or joining another mailing list about those exercises.  Create your page for that term targeted for those other methods.

Finding Your Niche Market

The amount of markets available is practically limitless.  Nearly everyone can be profitable in one way or another.  Have a look around the house; read the newspaper; watch TV.  If you don’t have a passion in anything in particular than just write down anything and everything you can think of.  If you do have hobbies and interest in some topics, write them down at the top of your list.

Do not get your mind set on a niche until you know you can get traffic to it.   You have to learn to let go of something that will never work.  If you really want to make a site about the Mega-x HV5000 but the competition is too tough or the search volume is too low and it limits your ability to expand in the future, forget about it.  Move onto the next potential as quick as possible.  It will take a while but once you find a site with truly easy competition you will keep looking for weaknesses in keywords and markets that you shouldn’t be worrying about.

The key to a successful website is quality traffic.  Your niche must have the potential to get this traffic and it is the first step in qualifying your niche.  I won’t enter a market unless I know it can get 1000 unique visitors per day.  This traffic doesn’t have to come straight away as the site launches.  It doesn’t have to come from 1 keyword but if a site I do launch does have success then I want to know that I can improve on it with little extra work. It will give you room to expand.

Just to recap -

• Be open to various monetisation methods.
• Do not focus on a niche if it isn’t working or going to work – know when to walk away.
• Create a list of markets and niches that you can think of.  Prioritise with what you enjoy or know about.
• Keep in mind you want a large potential of traffic – say 1000UV/day.

Let’s Get Some Keywords

Once you have your list of niche ideas it is time to start moving through the list to generate potential keywords.  The tool you use for keyword research really doesn’t matter.  They all just tie into Google’s database so the results will always be similar.  I like to use Market Samurai at the moment because I make wide use of the domain search feature.  The trial version is enough to get your going and the keyword research feature is always free. It has also integrated Domain Samurai so searching for available domains is also easy.

Create a new project for your research and enter in your first niche as the keyword.  Move over to keyword research and from the base niche keyword check Google Synonym Tool, Include Additional, and Google Search Keywords. Generate your keywords.

This first run will be used to find various micro niches inside your niche.  It will also help you find what the real world uses to find the market.  Sometimes what you call an item or service is different to a large percentage of people.  This is particularly true across different Countries.

Click on Analyse Keywords to be taken to the Keyword screen.  This is what Google thinks is relevant to your market.  Keep the Match Type set to Broad – we aren’t looking for keywords yet, just starting points, seed keywords I guess the term is.

Go through your list and add any good looking seed words to new tabs.  The very top of your list will be some very broad terms that you will learn over time not to produce any decent exact keywords from.  Look at the 2 and 3 word combos with a broad search of 2000+.  These seed words will be used to create more similar keywords so don’t waste your time by doubling up.  “Red Widget” will produce the same results as “Widget Red”.  It will usually get the highly searched keywords that the seed “red widget reviews” would produce so there is no point in seeding “red widget reviews”.

You want seed words that contain unique combinations.

You must use some common sense that can’t be taught but the next steps will help you master this first step.  Experience really does help and once you have tried a few times you will understand.  Always keep the process in your mind the next time you do something.

If your list of seed words is small or the search volume is low then skip that niche and move onto the next one.  No point wasting more time on it when there are plenty more to choose from!

Once you have gone through and tabbed out all of the seed words you can switch the match type over to Exact.  Select the filter under Total Searches to 78.  This will give you a list of all words that gets searched 2400/month for your main niche keyword.  I wouldn’t go any lower than that.  There are so many easy keywords available that you will kick yourself down the track wasting your time on them.

Save the list of filtered results to a text file for later use.  This text file will contain all potential keywords for your niche.  Once save, remove the keyword from Domain/Market Samurai and move onto the first seed word one that you created a tab for.

With the seed selected do keyword analysis on the word but this time change the “Include Additional Results” to “Ignore Additional Results”. It is unlikely the additional keywords will be any different to the ones you had earlier so it will just clutter the results.

Generate your fresh set of keywords and move onto analysing them, i.e. change the match type to exact match and set the total results filter to 78.  Save the remaining keywords back to your master list.

Repeat the process for all of the seed words you got out of the initial analysis.  Your potential keywords list should have quite a few results in it now and each one should get you at least a bankable amount of traffic.

Are the Keywords Worth Pursuing? – Competition Analysis

This is probably the area where most people fail when researching a potential niche and/or keywords.  The goal for a marketer who relies on organic traffic is to get into the #1 spot on Google for their targeted keyword.  The next best result is landing somewhere on the first page.  This is achievable for most keywords after an appropriate amount of work is put in but for beginners who haven’t tasted success it is best to aim for the words that are very easy to rank well for.

Firstly, the number of pages with the words in the title, URL, description, or contain the phrase etc are not your competition.  They can give you a guide to what’s out there but it gives no indication of the difficulty to rank well for a keyword.

A page will rank well for a keyword based first on its relevance and secondly on its trust and authority.  Relevancy can be achieved by anyone, trust and authority cannot.

The basic way a modern search engine works is that when a search is initiated it creates a pool of results that are relevant to a term and then re-sorts those results based on its trust.  The final result is what the user sees.

PageRank (PR) is a representation of a page’s trust for the Google search engine.  PageRank is generated through backlinks to the page (BLP).  On-site SEO as well as the type of backlink creates the relevancy (I won’t get into an argument at the moment about anchor text or content creating this relevance).

Our competition is everyone above the position we want to achieve – the top 10 of Google results.

Know that on-site SEO factors can be achieved very easily so not a deciding factor.

Knowing that PR and BLP are key factors to a well ranked page, we now look for sites where the PR and BLP are low.  There are several tools that will do this – Market Samurai (paid with a free trial), or SEO Quake Firefox Plug-in (free but a little more fiddly).

With your list of potential keywords that you created earlier, move through each one in your software of choice and start looking at the top 10 results.  Focus on nothing but the PageRank and Backlinks to the Page.

You don’t have to do this but I add the data to an Excel spread sheet for each keyword in my list. Each row is a new keyword.  The first column is for the keyword; the next 10 are for the PR to the page of the top 10 results; the next 10 are the BLP to the top 10.  I then have a column for the average PR and the average BLP.  I create conditional formatting to highlight the average PR cell (green) for any keyword with an average top 10 PR of less than 2.  I do the same for keywords with an average BLP of less than 20.

I sort the data from lowest BLP to highest.  If I have a bunch of keywords highlighted green then I know I am on a winner.  Each of those keywords will be easy to dominate with little external backlinking.  Make sure that the total traffic from your group of filtered keywords is enough to create a site out of (I am looking for 1000 uniques/day).

Here are a couple of screen shots from Market Samurai of keywords that I rank #1 for.  It will give you an idea of what an easy keyword really looks like.

These filtered keywords will be the starting point of your new niche.  If the traffic isn’t there due to excessive competition then once again move onto a new one.  If the traffic is there, don’t discard the keywords that failed the competition filter.  These words may still be achievable but just not ideal to get the ball rolling.  As backlinks, age and authority increases with time these other words can start to come into play.  Using a high broad match as the starting points for your seed words will also give you room to move and the potential for a lot of long tail phrases.

Before you commit on using the niche go through each keyword phrase and start creating a mental picture of the type of site you are going to create.  Think of a way to monetise each phrase to try and get the ball rolling.  Think of long term goals too.  The keywords may make you lean towards something other than an affiliate or either a PPC type site.

I also recommend that you repeat the entire process for as many niches in your original list of ideas before proceeding.  It won’t be until you have seen the number of searches and competition levels of numerous keywords and markets before you get a real feel of what an easy niche really is.

Keep your mind open and realise that you now at least have a group of keywords with a lot of traffic potential to build your first niche site from.

I thought I better give an update just so you can see the damage that occurred yourself. What has made matters worse is that while my sites were out of action Google released an algorithm update towards the end of April/start of May. With my site being down I have no way of knowing if my rankings collapse is due to the hosting issues OR the algorithm update. I can only wait and see I guess.

Knowing that it will take some time before I get any answers either way, I decided to try and compensate the loss as well as possible by creating a few micro niche sites. I selecting 15 keywords (as many sites as I already own) and hit them hard. It took me about 2 weeks to get the sites up and running with a bare-bones structure and I am about half way through creating the original content for the home page for each site.

My intention with these sites is to expand out slowly over time as the long tails start appearing. They are monetised with AdSense and Amazon products. While I was creating the sites I was worried about appearing like the hundreds of flash in the pan micro sites dominating the internet marketing forums at the moment but this fear was quickly dismissed as I got more and more involved with each niche. The potential for each site is just too high to waste on 1 keyword targeting nothing but AdSense.

Each of my front pages is written as a sales letter or a piece of link bait with the main aim to get users over to Amazon for a sale or to tell their friends about the content. I should still manage the 5 to 10% CTR from the impulse clickers but should also get Amazon sales from those in a real buyers’ mood. I am taking a hit on the AdSense to potentially make it up with Amazon. I get to diversify my income while creating more useful material for the readers with a higher quality site.

I have my keyword research under control now but still learning a lot after each site I make. One of the first completed sites has been bringing in over 100 unique visitors/day for the last week. Not bad for a site only 2 weeks old. The others are moving along nicely too.

With the new sites and the crumbs from the penalised ones I have managed to improve on my earnings from before the server down time. My health site was making the majority of the cash back then but now is making pretty much nothing. I am really looking forward to the day it returns to its previous position and hopefully doubles my income over night.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days

• Site 1 – Weight Loss – 136 UV (-) a drop over 600
• Site 2 – Home Improvement – 278 UV (+)
• Site 3 – Health – 52 UV (-)
• Site 4 – Beauty – 203 UV (-)
• Site 5 – Beauty/Health – 673 UV (+) A major increase but the landing page isn’t too well with AdSense CTR. Changed the content to Amazon products and waiting for results.
• Site 6 – Health/Diet – 175 UV (+)
• Site 7 – Beauty – 122 UV (-) Another big earner down.
• Site 8 – Amazon Site 1 – 85 UV (+)
• Site 9 – Amazon Site 2 – 80 UV (-) This caused a big drop in Amazon sales.
• Site 10 – Amazon Site 3 – 45 UV (-) Another big drop.

Now onto the new sites (the code is just for my future reference) –

• Site 11 – BSD – 217 UV
• Site 12 – PMD – 1004 UV – this one should only keep climbing too.
• Site 13 – CND – 19 UV
• Site 14 – HND – 94 UV
• Site 15 – SSS – 65 UV
• Site 16 – CCT – 23 UV
• Site 17 – PTC – 12 UV – will probably drop this one.
• Site 18 – BCC – 34 UV
• Site 19 – AL – 20 UV
• Site 20 – SL – 5 UV
• Site 21 – SWL – 5 UV
• Site 22 – LBS – 18 UV
• Site 23 – TL – 15 UV
• Site 24 – BL – 5 UV
• Site 25 – WSL – 65 UV.

The sites traffic drops as you go down the list as I built them in the order shown. I expect at least 100 UV/site in the short term and will expand from there.

The traffic loss might not appear much in the first group of sites but these sites all had a high CTR and very high eCPM. Once those sites start showing signs of improvement I will move back to expanding them into the large sites I initially had planned.

It has taken this long to get the correct backup restore and the databases converted over.  My rankings have taken a dive to oblivion but hopefully it is a short visit.  I will be making a handful of pretty thin sites at the end of the week to hopefully get my income backup with some exact domain name match websites.  Will be interesting to see how they go.

I recommend everyone who relies on a website to have another host that runs a mirror of your site to prevent this from happening to you!

I quickly jumped over to my email to see what had happened, but I couldn’t log in.

Last thing I did was decide to have a look at the Statpress statistics for the site and see if the rankings were just out of whack – then bam! My hosting account was suspended!

I managed to find an email from my host in my Gmail account (Spam folder) and found out that one of my sites was suspected of hosting a virus or had malware installed.  It was actually a WPMU site I setup to use for The Link Juicer project.  I received the email 10mins after I went to bed the night before so that was frustrating too.  I managed to get it sorted out in 10mins after finding the problem, thanks to the awesome support at SurfSpeedy.

The 12hours downtime appears to upset my rankings though with all of the rankings I mentioned earlier no where to be seen.  I still rank for the terms but it is for secondary pages such as categories and tags.  I at least know that my site wasn’t deindexed.  I just hope the rest shoot up pretty quickly.

I also have tweaked my AdSense templates lately due to some suggestions from some reader’s comments.  They unfortunately didn’t help my CTR but I did make one change that has done wonders.  It has given an increase CTR of 5%!  I will write a post about this soon.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days -

• Site 1 – Weight Loss – 727 UV
• Site 2 – Home Improvement – 195 UV
• Site 3 – Health – 279 UV
• Site 4 – Beauty – 312 UV
• Site 5 – Beauty/Health – 170 UV
• Site 6 – Health/Diet – 164 UV
• Site 7 – Beauty – 245 UV (3 month old)
• Site 8 – Amazon Site 1 – 46 UV (1 month).
• Site 9 – Amazon Site 2 – 297 UV (1 month).
• Site 10 – Amazon Site 3 – 264 UV (1month).

The Amazon sites rose a lot in the last 7 days and have made 30 sales so far this month.  Not huge dollars but a lot of potential as they become established.  As you can see the weight loss still made an improvement even though for the last 3 days the traffic has been under 20 unique visitors.  The improvement from my other sites and the increased CTR meant that the drop hasn’t hurt my earnings too poorly.

• Site 1 – Weight Loss – 533 UV
• Site 2 – Home Improvement – 201 UV
• Site 3 – Health – 233 UV (6 months old)
• Site 4 – Beauty – 218 UV (3 months old)
• Site 5 – Beauty/Health – 167 UV (3 months old)
• Site 6 – Health/Diet – 125 UV (3 months old)
• Site 7 – Beauty – 89 UV (2 month old)
• Site 8 – Amazon Site 1 – 98 UV (< 1 month).
• Site 9 – Amazon Site 2 – 217 UV (< 1 month).
• Site 10 – Amazon Site 3 – 76 UV (< 1month).

My main site copped a hammering over the last week, a drop of about 25%.  Earnings stayed steady though due to some rises elsewhere.

The largest improvement came from a site that I haven’t done any promotion other than RSS submission, some sitewide links, and automatic OnlyWire bookmarking. It doesn’t even have completed articles yet.  It also gave me my first group of Amazon sales.  I sold 8 items through it in the last week.  Not huge numbers but it is very encouraging to see that the site is pushing people over to Amazon and the leads are converting.

Hopefully this week will see the numbers back to normal.