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  • November 2008
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Well, it’s the weekend and hopefully I can get caught up on some work on my sites. I have actually been outsourcing all of my articles and yet I still haven’t had time to get them posted. As soon as I get caught up on posting articles I will post an update of where I am at. After that I plan to just focus on one site for awhile as I have been spreading myself too thin.

In the meantime I need to try and stay awake! It was a bad week for just being sleepy and I don’t feel like I slept well last night, so maye this weekend won’t be so fruitful. Plus I have all the normal household duties to do and some shopping. It’s so hard not to spend most of my time at work just dreaming about quitting…

I have been so tired the last few days that I haven’t gotten much done. Usually I try to get a couple of hours of work in on my sites after the kids go to bed, but I just haven’t had the energy. That is very frustrating, but what can you do.

I really need to make an update here on each site here as this blog serves as a record of my progress. But first I need to stay awake past 9pm!

I have modified some of my previous plans on how to move forward with building my various niche sites. While I think it is good to have a solid plan and try to stick to it, the problem is that I am still learning. So as I realize ways that I think will work better, I have to adapt my plans. Right now I am trying to tie up some loose ends then I plan to focus in more and just one or two sites.

I have been busy working on my sites. Will make an update soon.

I feel like my progress has slowed but I am looking forward to some time off during the holidays to get some stuff done.

Just checking in with an update on my niche site building progress. For the last few days I have been feeling a bit under the weather along with feeling a bit burnt out, so I haven’t been very motivated.
 
I have 3 niche sites almost to a stopping point, I will do some marketing then build some new sites. I have 5 new domains already purchased for new sites but haven’t even thought about them yet.
 
Here is a quick list of where the sites stand:
 
Niche 1 - health
10 posts/pages live or scheduled
Squidoo lens with linkback
~ 6 social bookmarks
1 extra article for Article marketing
Outsourced - 1 article written and submitted to iSnare for distribution (not live)
 
Niche 2 - health
10 posts/pages live or scheduled
Squidoo lens with linkback
~ 6 social bookmarks
1 extra article for Article marketing
Outsourced - 1 article written and submitted to iSnare for distribution (not live)
 
Niche 3 - beauty
7 posts/pages live or scheduled
4 articles outsourced
~ 6 social bookmarks
1 extra article for Article marketing
 
I can’t decide when I want to submit the 1 article for niche 1 & 2 to the article directories since I have outsourced the writing and distribution of one article already. Not sure when exactly that will be complete and I think I would like to spread my marketing efforts out a bit. I am also holding off on more social bookmarking for that reason.
 
I know many people claim success going full throttle with social bookmarking and article marketing, but I still worry that the quick generation of backlinks will look suspicious to Google. So I’m holding off a bit for now.
 
Traffic on all the sites is minimal to non-existent but I guess I should expect that for now. Google hasn’t even indexed all of the pages yet on any of the sites.
 
I’m still waffling on how many pages to put on each site before sitting back to see which niches are most successful. I feel like the more content the better, obviously, but wonder what is the minimum amount of content needed to accurately predict long-term success. What if I see no results for a 10 page site, but 20 pages for the same site would have made a difference?
 
I’m thinking of letting the sites sit at 10 pages for now, but go back through and add a few more pages later once I get some new sites up and keep rotating through for awhile to determine which sites I should concentrate on. Since I am currently outsourcing most of my articles, that is an expensive gamble, so I’m playing it by ear for now.

The waiting game is the worst aspect of site building. Waiting for stuff you outsource to get done, wait for rankings, wait for traffic, yada  yada. It’s still early in the process but I am already impatient.

So I had a major setback in my niche building. Basically I decided to ditch a niche. It was the niche that I had the most hopes for because I expected the advertising payouts to be better and had potential for more creative linkbacks.

But as I did more research for writing articles I realized that it was a service I did not feel comfortable selling, not even through adsense. So I am dropping that site completely and moving on. Unfortunately, I have spent the majority of my time the last few weeks on that particular site and will never get those many hours back. Live and learn.

So that leaves me with just 3 niches at the moment, one of which may be too competitive. Found that out after setting up the site but I’ll give it go anyway. I’m feeling a little discouraged but all I can do is plow forward and see what happens.

I have decided to revise my strategy a bit. I am going to build each of my niche sites up with just 10 articles, then do some promotion, then let it sit and see how it performs. Perhaps the experts can know which niches will be profitable and worth the effort, but I do not. I think there is a lot of luck involved so I would rather build a few different small sites and then concentrate on the ones that show the most potential.

I have a few new niche domains picked out, but I’m not overly crazy about them. I would like to find niches that are actually of interest to me that I feel I could comfortably write upon without too much research, but it turns out I am pretty boring. Actually, the things I like just can’t be monetized well (like history) or are sorta broad categories (like parenting) so I will keep looking.

Now that I am one niche down, I currently have one niche with 10 articles either posted or scheduled to post. I am going to start some article market and Web2.0 building for that site soon. Another niche has about 7 articles posted or on deck, so I just need 3 more and then I’ll start marketing that site after I finish with the first. The last site only has 2 articles, but 4 in the works. I’m not going to put too much effort into that on until I make some progress with the marketing of the first two.

All of the sites have been indexed for a couple of weeks but traffic is VERY minimal. I do have some social bookmarks started on the one niche, but that one is also the highly competitive niche. I have been outsourcing all of the content now, which is a big help, but draining funds quickly.

Otherwise, I have been spending some time understanding article marketing and social bookmarking. Those two methods are not too difficult to understand, but I want to do things optimally. There is a lot of conflicting information out there so it can be difficult to navigate your way through.

That’s all for now.

Just checking in quickly. I have been working on the computer non-stop as usual but don’t feel like I have accomplished much. I need to start writing lists and goals to keep on track.

I did get my niche costs and keywords organized. I have someone writing content and that makes things much easier. I’m not paying much though so I am worried that won’t last long. I was worried about putting out money for content and not getting a return on my investment, but I figured I could likely sell any site and recoup most of my costs. Outsourcing the writing leaves me time to concentrate on marketing.

I’ve spent too much time on forums getting ideas the past few days. The Warrior Forum can be addicting. While that time spent is valuable for learning, I really should be working on content,especially for article marketing which I hope to start soon. Again, I need to write out a plan and not let myself move forward until I can check off essential tasks.

I have about 5 new niches picked out and I may go ahead and buy the domains and then just let them sit. It is difficult to find good domains available - that is where you really get a feel for how many people are working on niche sites. Although, it is funny, because many times a domain I want is taken, but if I type in the url it doesn’t exist. So there are clearly many people buying up domains but not doing anything with them.

I did get one Squidoo page up on one of my niches. I need to do some more work on it, but at least it is a start. None of my niche sites are getting much traffic, but the pages are getting indexed. I think submitting the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools helped with that.

Okay, soon I need to post some stats on my progress since the primary purpose of this site is to serve as a diary of my niche building progress. I’ll add that to my list whenever I get one.

Well, I modified the adsense a bit on my personal site by removing one of the ad blocks. Because of my low CTR I was worried about smartpricing.

The first day after I did that I had a high day so I was excited that my modifications were working. But sure enough, after a few days, things are up and down as usual. It’s funny b/c about 2 months ago I started re-positioning my ads and my revenue jumped up siginificantly. But after a day or two the numbers went back down.

I have a theory now that Google is just messing with me. As soon as I make changes to adsense there is a really good day and I get all excited and then, like a cruel joke, things go back to normal. Whatever.

Otherwise, I don’t have much to share. I did break down and started outsourcing some article writing. Hopefully it works out and I can make the money back. I was struggling so much finding time to write content that I felt the investment was worth it.

Nothing exciting going on with my niche sites yet.

I got my first adsense click on one of my niche sites. Yeah!

I am now $0.82 richer - watch out. While that amount won’t exactly pay the bills, it is very encouraging considering my sites have been only been indexed for 2 weeks.

I was also playing with adsense on my personal site after reading a few things about smartpricing. Mostly I cut back on the number of ads on each page and I had a nice spike in my adsense yesterday. It may be just coincidence so I’ll have to track it for a few more days/weeks and then report back.

I finally broke down and started looking for a content writer. I just haven’t been able to do anywhere near the writing I need to do so I decided I was willing to invest some money into the sites in hopes it will be worth it. I would really like to know if this whole niche site building is going to work out or not and that is difficult to assess without a lot of content.

I’m really struggling to stay focused on my job. I just want to be working on my sites. There is so much to do and I have so many ideas, but I just need to be patient. Not something I am good at.

Finally, the niche that was not indexed is now indexed.

I also loaded my 4 niches into Google Webmaster Tools and submitted sitemaps for 3 of them.

I am still struggling with writing content. Thinking of hiring a ghostwriter to get me over the hump but I am cheap. If I knew I would get the money back out I would go for it, but obviously that isn’t guaranteed.

Plus, I have some new niche ideas and some other ideas and there just isn’t enough time in the day.

That’s all I have time for today.

I an starting to get a little bit more traffic on one of my niche sites. I mentioned in my last post that I had one visitor who came to my site through “mykeyword” as their search phrase. I now have had 2 additonal visitors using mykeyword in their search as well as two other visitors with different searches.

I haven’t checked on my position on Google when searching for my keyword as I do not want to inflate the search numbers for that keyword. Maybe that is silly, but I am weird that way. I wish there was a way to search for your keyword position in Google without Google actually logging that search.

My other niche site that hadn’t been indexed is still not indexed, but the Googlebot did visit after I posted the second article 2 days ago. I expect it to be indexed soon. My other niche sites are all indexed but are sitting quiet. That’s expected since I haven’t been posting on them any further.

I am really hoping to make some progress this weekend writing articles. I am tempted to hire someone to write a few articles for my first nich since I am getting some traffic, but I am just not sure the investment is worth it. I am trying to do all of this with minimal investment as there is no guarantee I would ever make my money back.

In the meantime, I did some more niche research and picked out a few domains. That part is a bit addicting so I need to be careful not to end up with too many domains that I’ll never have time for, but I also hate to not move on a domain when I can. Still thinking about that one.

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