On February 17th I talked about setting up five new sites with the goal of creating $5,000 in new income by around September 1. I just wanted to give you guys a quick update on how those sites are doing, and what I’ve done with them.

Right out of the gate I added about five posts to each site – I wrote a few of them myself and outsourced the others for around $4 each. I love outsourcing. I get adequate content at a great price, and my outsourcer gets a nice side income for doing some easy work.

After adding the content to the sites, I decided that I should dedicate my link building effort mostly to one of the sites so I didn’t spread myself too thin and get nowhere. I set up a Unique Article Wizard submission schedule that looked like this:

• 2 submissions per day:
• 1 submission for my main focus site.
• 1 submission rotating through my other four sites.
• All UAW submissions set to 20 directories per day (to keep things kind of slow at the beginning. These are aged sites with some backlinks, but I didn’t want to get too crazy too fast).

I’ve done okay with my UAW submission schedule, but I’m probably behind by a few days.

I also went straight to Grizz’s link support page and sent about 70 emails in one day looking for link trades. I didn’t keep track of how many I got from those emails, but it was quite a few. I managed to almost completely avoid direct reciprocal trades; I send links from one site in order to get them for my money site. That being said, I did a few direct reciprocal trades because they help too, just not as much.

Sidenote: some people have some really funny ideas about link trading. When people offer you trades it’s in your best interest to accept them. Because finding trade partners is so costly in time, Court and I regularly accept link trades that don’t appear equal on paper just because it a) it gets us links and b) it’s not like we’re cutting off a limb – what do I care if I’m giving a PR 1 link and only getting a PR 0 in return?

After working my way through Grizz’s support page I set up about 30 supporting mini-blogs on blogger and worked those URLs into my UAW rotation so they’d all get indexed. Many of them are now indexed so I’ll start using them to improve the link profile of my money sites.

And that’s about it. Where I’ve been lazy and need to improve is getting individual links from places like ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com etc. There isn’t a lot of leverage in those links (takes quite a bit of time for not so many links), but those are some authoritative domains and getting a link from them does help.

The site I’m actively building links for is starting to see traffic and clicks, albeit just a trickle really. On Feb 17 the site got 10 unique visitors; over the last three days it’s averaging about 50 uniques per day. I only have adsense on two of the sites right now (mostly because I’ve been lazy about adding it to the others) and the new sites are on pace to earn about $100 this month. Nothing too exciting, but I thought you’d like to see that it’s boring and tedious for us in the early days too. I still fully expect to reach my September goal, or at the very least make some serious progress by then.

Another point of interest might be that I’m targeting multiple keywords with all these sites. The method we usually teach is one site, one keyword – and that obviously works great. But it is possible to turn small sites into big sites, and there’s a lot of money to be made when you pull it off. I’m pretty sure our $24 webinar for March will teach something along these lines. Court and I will finalize plans for the session and I’ll probably announce the details Monday.

Have a greet weekend!

Mark