The Situation: Close to one year from now I graduate undergrad and my parents cut the financial lifeline that has kept me spoiled and happy. Therefore I have one year left to build another source of income so I can go on to PHD work without needing to work part time at some depressing job. My one goal is $200 per day with only 30% coming from adsense.
In a few weeks my summer vacation begins, this means I have 103 days of nothing to do and is a perfect opportunity to work full time on my site and bring its revenue closer to my goal.
The Plan:
Currently, I have a content site with 300 full (750-1000 word) articles. Looking over the keyword suggestion tools and my logs, I am finding that my niche has an unusually large “long tail”.
I have been looking for a way to exploit this long tail for over 3 months. The problem is that the long-tails keywords do not justify a full article to cover them.
During Spring break I visited my family in the UK (I am a dual US-UK citizen). One night my brother showed me this amazing service they have in England. Using a cell phone, anyone can text message ANY question to this company (I forgot the name) and they will give you an answer within 10 minutes. As soon as I heard it my jaw dropped, this was the answer I was looking for!
That night I developed my idea:
Provide a free “expert-advice” service for my niche. People can ask any question they want and I will answer them. Not only does this provide a valuable service, but it lets me attack my long tail!
Every Q and A will have its own page, target one long tail keyword, and be less than 250 words. This will let me create out 20-30 pages a day during the summer. Be cover one base, I asked the Adsense team if having such a small amount of content on one page was ok, and they said yes.
While each Q and A page might only bring in 1-5 person a day, after a month (at 20 pages a day) that is 600-3000 people per month, a pretty nice chunk of traffic.
To test my theory, I did a trial run of my service. The results only impressed me further: most of the questions asked were extremely simple, such as “Where can I buy blue widgets in Detroit?” or “How much does a red and blue widget cost?”. On average a response took me 5-7 minutes to write, format, and publish. Therefore 20 questions look me around 1.5-2 hours to complete.
The only problem I found was that some questions were repeated (or very similar), which waste my time to answer, but luckily a company happened to be making an ideal solution when I needed it. The 2005 version of their new knowledgebase software automatically suggests answers questions containing certain keywords. Therefore a question containing the word “blue” would bring up questions dealing with blue widgets.
By the end of the summer I hope to have 2060 Q and A pages plus 103 more full length articles. This should bring me within spitting range of my $150 summer goal and much closer to my one year $200 goal.
Any comments or suggestions would be most welcome.
