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I have been sick again and haven’t gotten much done since my last update. However, my backlinks continue to grow. Here are where things stand:

Niche Site 1 - health
Indexed: ~Oct 3rd
Current Pages: 16 posted
Scheduled: 8 posts
(~7 posts written but need editing)
Yahoo BLs: 132
Google BLs: 3
2 Ezine articles published
1 Website article published (same as EZ)
1 GoArticles article published (unique)
1 Squidoo Lens

Google is now showing some backlinks. Two from a blog I commented on and one from GoArticles.

I have seen just a teeny bit of adsense income from this site - 3 clicks for a grand total of $0.55 for December and $2.63 since the site was started. Traffic is still just a visit or two per day, so I have a long way to go.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost 2 weeks since my last post. Knowing that, I feel like I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I had hoped.

I said in my last post that I was planning to focus my effort for awhile on just one niche site. I have done that, but I was sick and then Thanksgiving holiday, so despite a few days off I still have alot of work to do.

Here are my current stats on the site I was focusing on (updates in italics):

Niche Site 1 - health
Indexed: ~Oct 3rd
Current Pages: 15 posted
Scheduled: 9 posts
(~7 posts written but need editing)
Yahoo BLs: 60
2 Ezine articles published
1 Website article published (same as EZ)
1 GoArticles article published (unique)
1 Squidoo Lens

I’ve had a nice jump in backlinks although Google still doesn’t register any, but the big G is stingy that way. My next move is to get those final 7 articles edited (I outsourced those) and scheduled to post. I schedule my posts to publish every 4 days. I also have an additional 2 articles to edit and submit to Ezine and then some other directories.

As I mentioned, I was sick for awhile so I had some motivational issues but I also had two days off from work and didn’t get as much done as I should. I realize now that I should have had a list of what I needed to get done and planned my time better. To often I drifted off to read a forum or a blog when I should have been getting backlinks or writing. I can see where a lack of focus could be disasterous when working from home, so that’s good to know ahead of time.

Well, back to work tomorrow but hopefully progress will chug along. I have a few more things I would like to get done on this particular site then I plan to move to another for awhile.

Well, today seems like a good day to update my progress on my niche sites. One of my kids was up a good part of last night so I am too short on sleep to focus on content writing/editing which is what I should really be doing.

Here is an outline of where things stand

Niche Site 1 - health
Indexed: ~Oct 3rd
Current Pages: 13 posted
Yahoo BLs: 5
2 Ezine articles published
1 Squidoo Lens

Niche Site 2 - health
Indexed: ~Oct 3rd
Current Pages: 11 posted, 5 scheduled
Yahoo BLs: 4
2 Ezine articles published
1 Squidoo Lens

Niche Site 3 - beauty
Indexed: ~Oct 10rd
Current Pages: 10 posted
Yahoo BLs: 3
1 Squidoo Lens

Niche Site 4 - business
Indexed: ~Nov 8th
Current Pages: 4 posted, 6 scheduled
Yahoo BLs: 0

Niche Site 5 - health/lifestyle
Indexed: ~Nov 1th
Current Pages: 3 posted, 7 scheduled
Yahoo BLs: 0

Yahoo BLs are backlinks showing in Yahoo Site Explorer. The Ezine articles are all showing up, but the squidoo lens backlinks are only showing for Niche site 2? I also see one of my social bookmarking sites (Mister Wong) on Niche Sites 1-3 which reminds me I haven’t bookmarked sites 4 and 5.

Just a reminder, for my first niche site (not listed above) I had a change of heart after a few weeks and ditched. Unfortunately, I had put a good amount of effort into that one. Niche 4 and 5 are my two newest and I don’t plan to do much more with them for now. I just wanted to get them started up with 10 pages and then I will just let them age. I don’t have many plans for Niche 3 either unless it starts getting some traffic - I find it a boring topic.

Now that I have at least 10 articles on each site, my plan is to just focus on Niche 1 for awhile. Since I have been struggling lately to get much work done and feeling a little de-motivated by lack of progress (traffic), I decided I was spreading myself too thin.

Niche 1 has a high CPC, but it also has a lot of competition. But, it has picked up a couple of long tail keyword traffic so I am hopeful. After I focus on Niche 1 awhile I will evaluate the other sites to see which looks the most promising and focus in on that one.

I have been outsourcing all my content which is a huge help and found some good writers, but the cost has been too high. I have been spending some time at the DP forum trying cheaper writers, but so far cheaper has been a waste of time for the most part. I have also already been scammed out of money by two people on DP for content. Guess that is part of the cost of outsourcing online, unfortunately. Hopefully some day I will have some income from my sites and can afford the better writers.

My plans for Niche 1 now are to get more content on the site and do more article marketing. I also need to do some more social bookmarking. Seems like I had other plans but that is all I can remember for now.

Traffic on all my sites is virtually non-existent. One of the articles on Ezine for Niche 1 is getting some hits, but not many. The rest of them (two I outsourced for direct Ezine submission) are getting almost no views.

That is where things stand for now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the end of my last post I said:

And just an update on my sites – my one niche site that wasn’t indexed the last time I posted still is not indexed. I may write a short article for that site just to get another ping in, but I’m not going to sweat it for now.

Not entirely accurate, I did sweat it a bit and went ahead and wrote a post for that site to try and get it indexed. It just was bothering me that it still hadn’t been indexed after more than a week when all my other sites had been indexed by Google.

So I published an article last night, let’s see what happens. I’ll check my awstats later to see if the Googlebot has stopped by for a visit.

And after my negative review of PLR in my last post, I actually had some luck in that area with this particular site. I came across a free download of PLR on that exact niche and the articles were actually pretty well-written. I did a quick search and found only one site using the article I wanted to post, but I did an 80% re-write anyway as I just don’t like slapping up PLR. It still seems too good to be true - why would someway give away good PLR?

On a sidenote, I also noticed yesterday that I had one visit to one of my niche sites using my keyword phrase as the search term. My domain is mykeywordphrase.com and the visitor who came in from Google had search for “my keyword phrase”.  I need these small victories to stay motivated.

With the weekend ahead of me I am hoping to get a few more articles written. I am already feeling burnt out which isn’t good. I’d like to make good progress on one site and then take a small hiatus so I don’t get completely burnt out.

 

 

 

 

I am making very slow progress with my niche sites. Writing the content is what is killing me. I am a slow writer and I can only write in the evening after my kids go to bed and by that point I am just tired. I have a bit more time on the weekends, but not much.

I was starting to feel a little bit discouraged this week as I really want to devote more time to building my sites, but with a full-time job and 2 young kids I am already tapped out. But I keep reminding myself that any progress I make is good and I just need to keep plugging along even though as of yet there is no reward in sight.

That seems to be the most difficult part for me. You spend so many hours working on your site and yet it could be months before you see the return. And some sites may see no return no matter how much time you put into them – some of the success seems to be dumb luck. Hard work is definitely involved, but niche site building seems to require throwing a large net (many sites) to end up with just a few good fish (profitable sites).

As I search around reading various blogs and forums talking about niche site building I start to feel like everyone and their grandmother is giving it a go. I always worry about some of these internet marketing methods that seem to be popular as there is 1) a saturation concern with too much competition and 2) I always wonder when Google will catch on and learn to avoid the methods.

The one saving grace I see though with niche site building is that there must be a high attrition rate as writing quality content in large quantities is difficult. Some people will quit after trying to write a few articles, some will rely on PLR junk (and not rank well), and some will bail out when they see no return after a few months. To “make it” in niche site building, you just need to avoid falling into those groups and stay committed. At least that is what I hope.

As far as my own unique content creation – I have learned already that I must write my own stuff. I purchased two or so PLR packages and one unique batch of articles and I don’t think I will do it again. The advantage of buying PLR or a cheap batch of unique articles is instant content, but PLR obviously requires some re-writing and even the unique content was nowhere up to snuff. I am sure hiring a good ghostwriter would generate higher quality content, but paying a minimum of $10 for an article on sites that may never be profitable is too much of a gamble for me.

I haven’t given up completely on using PLR or cheap unique articles – I’ll write about that another time. But for now, I think I’ll be focusing on writing my own content no matter how long it takes. I am anxious to actually start working on backlinks as that is more fun for me, but I am holding off until I can get more content on my sites. I am still trying to decide how many pages of content I should have up before starting to market for backlinks – 10 articles?

And just an update on my sites – my one niche site that wasn’t indexed the last time I posted still is not indexed. I may write a short article for that site just to get another ping in, but I’m not going to sweat it for now.

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