Forum Moderators: mack
My strategy has always been going after niches that shouldn't have too much competition. So I decided to make a site about widgets, super-terrific-blue-widgets.com, and set out to write 30+ small articles about each specific widget. I made sure my site was well laid out, had a pleasant design, and I inserted some affiliate links giving the visitor several choices on where to purchase the product. I also included some adsense for good measure. I then submitted the site to major and minor search engines, and some indices, around August. I sent a bunch of link exchange emails, made a few exchanges, joined a topsites list or two, made a squidoo lens pointing to my site, and posted on a couple of forums, nothing spammy. I'm pretty thorough about this sort of stuff, and it used to work in the past.
The results: around 600 unique visitors in September and October, mostly from search engines (375 different keyphrases last month). Then I paid for inclusion in a minor niche spefic directory, and also bought a text link at a fairly big related blog. So now I'm sitting on the same amount of search engine traffic plus some decent traffic from that link. The good news is that the site converts well. I'm averaging about $.06... but at 20-40 visitors it's hard to really make money off the site, especially since I put a lot of work into it. Just to give you an idea of the size of my niche, the overture keyword suggestion tool shows about 2k monthly searches on the same keyword phrase as my domain, and there are many more related to this product.
If you've read my post thus far, I appreciate your patience. What is your take on the situation? I know my site doesn't have many great backlinks, and it's fairly new, but with another similar site I started getting around 200 uniques a day very quickly, and it has stayed consistent ever since, so fire away...
I then submitted the site to major and minor search engines
OK - your chops are a bit dated. The major search engines today will find you through links. I haven't submitted a site in years. In fact, Ask.com (well, a second tier engine) doesn't even have a submission form available.
Second, without a doubt, Google is the biggest traffic provider by far. Google today submits new sites to a serious testing, and they will not let the pages show up in serious search results until a level of trust is established. This is the so-called "sandbox effect". There's a really good thread in the Google Search Forum about this, worth a serious read if you haven't already:
Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust [webmasterworld.com]
