Forum Moderators: skibum
My latest venture is in an oversaturated and competitive sector, in an area I'm passionate about, with a slick and neat CSS design and manually re-written content being added at the rate of 3 or 4 pages a day.
This is a simple test to see if someone with some basic skills like me can actually get into a competitive area and get an independant income stream going in the range of about $10-15K a month from this experiment. I'm going to give this one about 120 days to work out.
Oh yeah, and I lied about the "from scratch" thing, I've got a couple of hobby sites pointing at this one with PR5-6 inbounds.
Given that I don't visit any other SEO forums, be assured that everything going into these sites is from various threads on here. I've used these so far, to get the keywords and domains researched.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
I'm not going to say if I followed everything or only bits and pieces.. its up to you to figure out what you want to do.
A couple of things that I have done, include navigation planning and setting up all the place holders and internal links. Have also done some very basic PR and link analysis on the top 3 results in Yahoo and Google for the top 20 keywords. Have not done any onpage stuff yet... all off page analysis.
Within a week I can report the site is being spidered by MSN, Google and Yahoo.
Next report in a week when the spidered pages start showing up well enough to start doing some analysis and adding some content and tweaking.
Now, if you don't see me at PubCon .. you know where and why I've been locked up. :)
If it's a topic you're passionate about, you'll do ok. But I think your time frame may be a little unrealistic.
TJ
Ok... I lied, I'm not that passionate about this area, but I do have a fair amount of useless information that I can put to use.
I've got a couple of hobby sites pointing at this one with PR5-6 inbounds.
Exactly how many is a couple? What is your target PR that you're shooting for?
Come on now you need a year.
manually re-written content
haha. That's the best kind of content!
I'm about to do something similar (as soon as I get one of my other projects finished, ugh).
TAKE NOTES. I've started taking notes on what I've done with my sites and the results (as easy as a notepad file on your desktop).
Good luck!
IMO without link bombing its difficult to surrive there!
Nah .. been there done that. If you don't rely on Google you can get to where you want in 120 days in terms of traffic.
>> thrives on buying links
No clue which industries do. ;) I'll will however set myself a rule on this experiment, no advertorialinks.
Got someone hired to actually put the content in over the next 10 days and then its a question of optimizing and getting out of the sandbox.
Someone asked me about the "not relying on google" part, just wanted to clarify that it means I'm not putting my eggs in the google basket and am counting on Yahoo and MSN to bring in decent traffic too.
It's that way for me at least.
Haven't figure out the formula to do well in all 3.
1) Done the keyword analysis. Since I'm keeping this competitive, I found a number of searches which range between 20-100K a month on overture. This lead to splitting the idea up into about 4 sites. Brought in a couple of old concept sites which never got developed much.. but have some vintage qualities associated with them.
2) Most of this month has gone into doing analysis, budgetting, interviewing for a couple of intern types to manage and work on this project. I'm working with a govt training institute and helping a couple of kids out with HTML and journalism experience. (govt pays their salaries and pays me a small amount of money)
3) Spent about 30 hours on sorting out some legacy (spagetti) code which I'm going to use in this project...
4) Already attracting visitors to one site through Yahoo. Have about 3 advertising enquiries that I have put off "until I get the brochures and rate cards ready" for this one site.
Still sticking with "no buying links", but do have a strategy to attract Dmoz, .Gov, .edu type links.
Still sticking with "no ppc".
A little bit of PR (the old sort .. public relations) also does not hurt.
Some key characteristics of this site, about 6 years old and has had a PR7 for ages. Its been kept on topic and a little bit of basic SEO was done (titles, h1, h2 etc) and its bringing in about 4K visitors a day after a month.
Revenue from 9 days: $391
Cool part about this was it blew away a lot of myths about "PR does not matter". The EPM is low.. but we'll get there in a few weeks when the design and templates are tweaked further.
Two other sites are sitting tight in the Google sandbox, have an intern / writer busy adding content to them. Yahoo is sending about 150-200 visitors a day and there are some leads which I'm making money on .. nothing significant yet.
Next update.. over a beer @ pubcon if you really do want to know.
I think I'd mentioned earlier that I'd have to bring some older domains out of hibernation to deal with the sandbox issue.
Next update.. over a beer @ pubcon if you really do want to know
Sweet! With your progress, looks like you'll be buying! ;)
It's like having msn.com with no ads and then putting ads. Instant revenue. I'd hardly call that 'starting from scratch' :)
I'm kicking myself for letting my unused domains expire.
Maybe "I'm going to try a $100-1000 day thing from my old, forgotten domains with PR 7 ..."
The older site was thrown in to ensure that there is revenue right from the begining to sustain the project.
is the old pr7 site your first attempt at AM?
Second attempt.
About the PR7 issue. Its easy to find sites.... keep your eyes open. :)
i.e. what's the lowest you can buy a pr7 site for? anyone in the biz of buying and selling domains care to chip in?
