Thread: $100 Per Month Case Study

Hey,
Percentage of traffic the past 30 days (note these are percentages, I did not have time to remove the extraneous decimals tonight):

Search Engines (total) 85.7566277
Google 74.21373292
Bing 3.44146221
Yahoo 3.210933641
Google Mobile 1.712497942
Ask 0.823316318
AOL 0.757451013
Bing Mobile 0.082331632
Other (Search Engines) 1.514902025


Zinepal 0.411658159
Facebook 5.763214227
Slideshare 4.034249959
Web 2.0 1.152642845
Scribd 1.646632636
Twitter 1.234974477

I'll get some more into the RSS feed build process, etc tomorrow or Friday latest. The primary reason for trying that out was for additional, diverse backlinks to the Web 2.0's. Its hard for me to tell if the results of this site would be different if not doing that part since I didn't structure a specific test for it. I'm very happy with the progress of the site though, so off the cuff would say yes. But more on that process in the next two days or so.

Cheers,
James

Originally Posted by javanx3d

Hey,
Percentage of traffic the past 30 days (note these are percentages, I did not have time to remove the extraneous decimals tonight):

Search Engines (total) 85.7566277

Zinepal 0.411658159
Facebook 5.763214227
Slideshare 4.034249959
Web 2.0 1.152642845
Scribd 1.646632636
Twitter 1.234974477

From your numbers, 15% of the traffic is through social media. That's pretty good!

Slideshare seems to be a good one. What do you need to do to make a Slideshare?

Originally Posted by javanx3d

I'll get some more into the RSS feed build process, etc tomorrow or Friday latest. The primary reason for trying that out was for additional, diverse backlinks to the Web 2.0's. Its hard for me to tell if the results of this site would be different if not doing that part since I didn't structure a specific test for it. I'm very happy with the progress of the site though, so off the cuff would say yes. But more on that process in the next two days or so.

This seems interesting. Are you building feeds just to the Web 2.0s?

Yeah, I primarily did the slideshare for SEO purposes, but depending on the niche it does seem to give some good referral traffic. I've only been doing powerpoints/slideshows on there
but believe you can share PDFs and video as well.

PowerPoint Creation for SlideShare. net
For the PPT creation, I do the following:

Make it 6-8 slides
Link to the money content on each slide (no anchor text) in the header or footer)
Link 2-3 times using anchor text to the money content across the slides.
Link 1-2 times to the root of the site using anchor text

- Basically think of it as a "mini" article. I sometimes include an image or 2 on the slides.

- Write a unique description of the slideset (2-3 sentences) and include your link at the top of the description when posting.

I'm starting to expand the PPT sites I use (for other projects) to maximize the benefit of multiple referral sites. I'll post here once I have a few more that I'm happy with.

I did go back and do 4-5 to a tech site I have on content > 1 year old (ie stable rankings) that have not had links built to recently. On just a slideshare PPT upload, I saw positive movement for each term targeted. I did not do a Scribd upload on this test.

If you are anti-Microsoft, you can create a PowerPoint slideshow from Open Office. SlideShare.net appears to play nice with both .PPTX and .PPT...


For the RSS Feeds:
- First pass I do the Web 2.0's, Doc/slide posts, etc. I've been short of time since my last post, but I"m basically using a combination of a free tool and manual
editing to create the XML file that constitutes the feed. I owe a better "How To" on this, but no time since my last post...soonish

Anyway, back on the process, you then have to upload the feed somewhere....ie mysite.com/feeds/myfeeds.xml

Then, submit to RSS directories of your choice.

Main goal is backlinks to your backlinks.

I'm also doing for some of the article directory articles that are published as well.

One problem with doing these is you really need to do a number of Feed builds (ie the XML file where you list the article title, URL, desc) as you extend the number of articles you are posting. It really lends to writing a script that accepts a long list of input URL's (your Web 2.0's, approved article directory submissions, guest posts, etc), and creates a serialized XML file capped at 10 or 15 articles per.


Cheers,
James

That is a very good statical and step by step research i guess. I think you are doing worth and I hope result will be worth soon. I recommend you to keep your main focus on social fan page it will bring you real backlinks and users; but for making them stick with your site content must be very good and site must be well designed.

Ok, so this will be the final post for this case study. Reason, we have hit goal as of yesterday for making or exceeding $100 per month.

Income Specifics as of this post for the month of Feburary:
$92.00 – Adsense
$11.95 – Kontera
Total: $103.95

We made goal 5+ weeks ahead of the planned end.

What I learned (or relearned )
1 – Niche selection.
Of course we all want to make money right? I’ve found that niches which make me money 1 – I find personally interesting, 2 – Aren’t too, too hard with regards to competition. For this site, it was 1 – a topic I was/am into, 2 – Did not have extremely difficult competition across my first salvo of planned articles.
2 – Keyword Research
I think the best example here was the 49th or 50th article that I put up. About 1,500 exact monthly searches for US English searchers, $1.10 CPC. Although the competition on page 1 has good to high PR, there were not a lot of links built to these articles. Within 48 hours, the post was ranking nr 1 from site authority, FB Page, and Twitter links only….Taking the time to research, check competition, compare research tool results can never be emphasized enough. I don’t think there is any one tool out there that is perfect, btw, all have goods/bads.

3 – Link Building
It is hard to rank without links. I think if anything, there isn’t really a cookie cutter method to do SEO, its very case and personality dependent. For this site, I have still done 0 direct linking to the main content from article directories or social bookmarking other than FB and Twitter. Every Web 2.0 property up is unique, non-spun, and good enough to be money content on the site. Getting links to these properties; however, seems to be the challenge. I used a combination of RSS directories, SB, and article directories.
My biggest personal lesson besides looking at doing more of this with the Web 2.0’s on other sites is the document/power point sharing site lesson. I’m starting to slowly do these for my top 5-10 posts on all sites that I have. I’m also expanding the number of document/ppt sharing sites that I use. I’ve only really found one so/so service on another forum out there hawking a service on this front, so I’ll be manual on this front for now. More to come on another post on another day for the site(s) that I’m starting to use. No changes to what has been used on the site for this case study.

Anecdote – My link builder is stuck in the snowstorms in Europe….the goal for this site has been met prior to finishing the building plan!....we are going to proceed on what I’ve laid out, but I thought this was interesting….

4 – Size of Website
I have sites that range from 1 page to 7-800. When I started this project, I debated on the size. 50ish ended up being a good number for me. I’m probably going to start slowly expanding the properties that I have < 20 articles to between 20 and 50 to see what kind of effect that has on the traffic and earnings.

5 – Length of Main Content
Think everyone on here that has made > 1k in a month has at least one article that is thin (< 300 words) which has made them a lot of money. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the search engines are rewarding magazine-length content more in the SERPs from this and some other sites. Every article on this test site is > 500 words (some are > 1300). Avg is prob 7-800 in length. My new personal minimum length (unless unavoidable) is 500-600…

6 - Social
I haven't really gotten to the point of putting a lot of effort into Social on this site yet other than having the +1, Twitter, FB Like, and FB Share buttons on the posts, the Fan Page setup, and syndication to the FanPage and Twitter. (I guess that sounds like a lot to new folks )....Another thing on my (do for every site list) is to create the FB Page, add the sharing buttons to the site, and setup the syndication. I'm not selling a product, so looking into what to do for going to the next level on social is on the list


Anyway, I’ll leave the thread open for any folks who have comments, questions, or better ideas for building websites! I’ll also post anything new of note for this site that arises.

Realized I should have closed out the February earnings on this one:

Adsense:
$152.00

Kontera:
$37.42

Total: $189.42

For March the site continues to rock. Now I have to make myself create and stick to good plans on my other sites!

Anyone out there startup a new site recently and have some other lessons to share?

What was the total cost to develop the site?

Originally Posted by javanx3d

Anyone out there startup a new site recently and have some other lessons to share?

Not yet, but I recently acquired a 'geo' name with a decent amount of exact search volume (5400). With your journal as a guide I don't have an excuse to not give it a shot