Thread: $100 Per Month Case Study

yeah, if I could get tons of these links easily or cheaply (not that I condone link purchases for "Big Brother's" (aka Google) scraping of this content )...not that it is impossible. Just haven't built my personal "empire" to the point of having this much juice

So far, I'm really liking the referral traffic from SlideShare (I haven't done PPT uploads before this project).

I'm also really liking the Zinepal tool for making PDF's for content to post and share on Scribd in addition to Zinepal's site.

In a few days, I'll do an update on building and SERP status.

Kontera is up and running on the site now as well as Adsense to give us two monetization streams. That network is doing very well on an un-related, established sports site that I have up so hopefully it works out for this site as well!

Happy New Year to those who celebrate January 1 as the first day of the New Year on the board.

I'm working on two new sites that are both exact match domains with 5,400 and 9,900 exact match searches. The sites made it to #12 and #10 respectively. But over the weekend they dropped hard to page 29 and page 3. The site with more link building dropped harder. My theory is that there is a temporary new site bonus or a fresh content bonus rather than a sand box. But, it could be a sandbox triggered by the link building. The new sites generally do better after between 4-6 months.

1/7/2011 Update

Ok, I’m going to start keeping to a format (hopefully) for updates if I can remember. Here we go:

Traffic:
Last 5 Days we’re hitting > 120 uniques, > 150 Page Views…not bad for a site that is not yet 30 days old for organic traffic only…

SERPS (7/1/2012 for the Europeans, 1/7/2012 for the Americans)
I’m listing the top 5 now vice the top 3.
KW #1: 10 *Last week I think there was some strange Google account happenings to make the article show up higher than it really was.
KW #2: 50 ** Competition for this kw has turned out to be stronger than I thought. We’ll build it out and see where it lands.
KW #3: 7 *** I think that both Wordtracker and Google Keyword tool averages for this keyphrase were too low as a feeling from initial traffic in this position. We’ll see
KW #4: 4 **** Decided to track KW 4 and 5. These were posts put up after looking at the analytics for the first few weeks and seeing what keyphrases were bringing folks to the site. Equivalent to KW’s 2 and 3 in traffic and avg CPC.
KW #5: 12

Income:
Adsense:
January: Averaging just over $1 a day in January so far. The December earnings had some large click amounts ($2-4) that are atypical of this niche. We are back to what I think the normal is (.20-.80…closer to .3 for average)
Kontera:
January: Averaging about 20 cents a day in January so far
Total per day average: $1.20
Goal: $3.34 a day USD from Adsense and Kontera by 31 March 2012
Total Content Posted:
41 Posts, 1 main page
7 more planned in the next week or two
***Average length is well right of 600 words per article on the site.

I've also added Google Search in place of the default WP search box on the site since the last update. I picked the option to only search other sites that I own and manually entered those.

Building Status:
Had some unplanned delays on this front. That actually turned out to be a good thing, as I’ve shifted my tactics a bit for how I’m going to build out this site based on further research, etc.

I did expand the plugin footprint to 6 since last update and now include:
Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share, WordPress › Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share � WordPress Plugins

The other plugins I'm using are:
Askimet
All in One SEO
Google XML Sitemaps
Jetpack by Wordpress.com
Kontera Content Link


What I’m planning / working on now:
For the Top 5 articles:
1 x SlideShare, 1 x Scribd, and 1 x Zinepal that all point to the money content and root of the website.

7-10 Web 2.0’s that are unique articles (ie not spun), that link to the money content, 1 of the SlideShare/Scribd/Zinepad articles, and about ½ to the root of the site.

Post all of these links up as an RSS feed and then syndicate to > 10 auto approve RSS aggregators.

AMR posts that rotate through linking to the various Web 2.0’s, Slide Share, Scribd, and Zinepal

Post the approved AMR posts to an RSS feed and then to an RSS aggregator

Once done with the “Top 5” I’ll assess on if I’ll just do a single Web 2.0 per remaining article, or go all out like with the top 5. I think it will probably be better to plan on the smaller building effort on the remaining…if we even have to do this to meet goal.

I will be doing the SlideShare, Scribd, and Zinepal work. My builder will be doing the Web 2.0s, AMRs, and RSS work.

What I’ve Done Re: Building So Far:
1 x PR 3 sitewide link on another sports site that I own. It is on the same server, etc, so I only expect some PR to flow and not necessarily SERP juice from this.

For all articles:
Syndication to FB and then to Twiiter
1 x link of the main site to Digg early on to help with indexing
For KW #1:
1 x Scribd, 1 x Zinepal, 1 x Slideshare
8 x Web 2.0s
Built an RSS feed of the Scribd, Zinepad, Slideshare and Web 2.0s. Then posted this to about 12 RSS aggregators
For KW #2
1 x Scribd, 1 x Zinepal, 1 x Slideshare
For KW #3
1 x Scribd, 1 x Zinepal, 1 x Slideshare

Notes:
The RSS bit was new to me after doing some research. I’ll explain in a future post how to do if anyone is interested.

My builder is helping focus on finishing the building for KW #1, then moving to KW2,3, 4, and 5. We basically took the content previously ordered and have re-purposed for this new scheme from the old one that had only 1 x Web 2.0 per main article.

Will assess the site once we’re done with full build out through #5 on way forward with any remaining building.


All in all, if we avoid filters, etc, I think the site is on its way to meeting goal. I’ll update expenses next week.

wow, 15 articles in one day.

Hey Duck_Prince,

Little more than a day, but I'm combining outsourcing the content with a trusted writer along with doing some myself on this project. Hopefully we'll have some good progress to report this week!

Originally Posted by javanx3d

1/7/2011 Update


Traffic:
Last 5 Days we’re hitting > 120 uniques, > 150 Page Views…not bad for a site that is not yet 30 days old for organic traffic only…

I recently put up a two sites (5 articles each) on exact match domains with 5400k and 9900k exact monthly searches on the adwords tool. Site #1 is ranking no. 11 and site #2 is no .9 on the EMD. But traffic is not so high which I think is a matter of ranking in the "sweet spot" within the top 3.


The combination of social media and content seem to be working good so far.

Originally Posted by javanx3d

All in all, if we avoid filters, etc, I think the site is on its way to meeting goal. I’ll update expenses next week.

Both on my sites were filtered for a week. But I continued to add content and build links, and they came back stronger.

2/4/2012
Sorry it’s been a while since the last update! I see I have attracted 2 spammers since the last update too! I must be getting more popular…
Anyway, here we go:

Traffic:
Since, my last update, the site was filtered for about a week then came back stronger. For the past week, the site is now averaging > 400 uniques a day.
SERPS (2/4/2012)
KW #1: 6
KW #2: 55
KW #3: 2
KW #4: 2
KW #5: 4
Main Page (EMD Term): #1

Income:
Adsense:
Seeing $2 per day the past week. January finished out at a $1.10 daily average
Kontera:
About a.12-.15 a day average. My historical averages for Kontera running in parallel in the sports niche are between 7-13% of the Adsense daily take with one exception from December on another site. In that case Kontera == or exceeded Google for about 3 weeks... (> 10K a day visitors to that site in the timeframe mentioned)

Total vs Goal: Averaging $2.12 a day right now. Goal is $3.34 by 31 March 2012
Total Content Posted:
6 new posts since the last update to bring the total to 47. No new posts planned, though I may do 3 more to get to an even 50

Building Status:
Slowly getting there…keyphrases 2-5 all have 1 x Web 2.0 now (#1 has the larger number from the last update). All 5 have PDFs and PPTs posted to the doc hosting websites talked about before.

My builder is expanding the Web 2.0 footprint for these 4, and proceeding with expanding the backlinks to the first tier Web 2.0 properties and associated Doc/PPT posts over this month.
I was advised by one reader to take a look at posting my PPTs and PDFs to multiple sharing sites (ie put the PDF for article 1 on both SlideShare, Scribd, and other doc sharing sites). I’m taking a look at this. If I do it, then I’ll make sure that I use unique descriptions and titles on the repeat uploads so they are not 100% the same.

Next Steps:
At this point, I’m watching for any new terms from analytics that would be worth putting fresh content up regarding. Also, standing by to take over from my builder if he hits delays again so we can get the building plan done soon so it has time to take effect before I close out the case study at the end of March.
Everything looks promising. More to follow when I have something of note to post.

@Jimicleark, are you responding to some of the comments from earlier in the thread? If so, it may help the next go if you click the "Reply With Quote" button so we have the right context for your statement to better help others reading. Thanks for the input!

Doh! Attracted yet another spammer....anyway, for wasting your time on replying earlier, Google has done another round of PR updates. This site is PR 2 on its first update...not that the PR means anything for my goal(s) with this site!

On a related note, too early to tell if this is another jump in traffic or just a temporary bump, but the past 3 days we're seeing > 520 a day in traffic to the site.

I'm thinking to be solid on the goal it needs to hit > 700 on average.

J

Originally Posted by javanx3d

On a related note, too early to tell if this is another jump in traffic or just a temporary bump, but the past 3 days we're seeing > 520 a day in traffic to the site.

Can you tell us the traffic form the following sources?

FB
Twitter
Scribd
Zinepal
Slideshare
Organic
Web 2.0's

Originally Posted by javanx3d

1/7/2011 Update
Notes:
The RSS bit was new to me after doing some research. I’ll explain in a future post how to do if anyone is interested.

Can you explain how you set up the RSS in detail.

Do you think it was worth the effort?