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
Tags: link trading, niche sites
Hi Mark,
I’m getting ready to signup for UAW next month so this post was very helpful. Yes–boring and tedious is a good way to describe it. Right now I’m writing ezines articles for all my niche sites and sometimes I feel like I want to bang my head against the wall. But I’m dedicated to sticking with it because I know my hard work will pay off eventually. Can’t wait until I’m able to outsource some of that writing . . .
Amanda
You’ll get there Amanda! Keep up the great work.
Hi Mark,
Nice project you have going here. Thanks for the update.
You said these are old domains you are working with. How old exactly are they and is there a sandbox possibility with these domains?
When doing supporting blogger blogs do you have all 30 of them in the same blogger account? How about links from those blogger blogs. Do you have many links to these sites from one blog? Do you have other links at the blogger blogs to hide your money site links from google?
Where there any traffic to these sites before the project?
It’s very interesting to read future articles from this project. And thanks for this great site. Have got a great deal of knowledge and motivation from you guys. Sure going to try this method when I have reached my goals with affiliate marketing first.
The domains are 3 to 8 years old. I think they should be clear of the sandbox thanks to their age and the links they already had pointing at them.
I spread my supporting blogs across multiple email addresses.
Basically no traffic before I ramped up the effort – maybe 1 to 3 unique visitors per day.
Thanks for being here Sami!
Let me ask you this…
Do you ever get yourself banned by setting up a large number of wordpress and blogger domains? I have seen issues with this as of late, and wanted to know if you have… and what you do to get around it.
Banned from Wordpress and/or blogger? Banned from Wordpress yes. My sin was being “less than subtle” in my outbound linking from those sites. To avoid that issue, don’t get too greedy. Create original content for your supporting blogs, and link out moderately.
Hi Mark,
Great to hear an update and I have to say that I was a little shocked at the rate you’re building links to the site. Increasing your UAW submissions in regards to your main site by 20 DAILY is considered a lot in my book. On day 10 you would have 200 DAILY submissions creating links to your main site. I know your site has some age leverage but wouldn’t that be a lot for a brand new domain?
Secondly I am curious about your 30 blogger blogs. In your February seminar (which I saw for the third time yesterday) you mention how you use the blogs for linking but not where you get the content for those blogs. Do you write it yourself (or outsource it) or are you using the UAW email posting feature to “fill the sites” with relevant content to get some size into it?
Thank you for any answers you would like to share.
Regards,
Mikael
It’s no secret Court and I ramp up our linkbuilding more quickly than lots of people are comfortable with. Nothing negative to report about it so far. Keep in mind that I’m spreading those submissions across multiple posts on the same site, and I use LOTS of anchor text variation. I do see your concern though – if these were brand new domains I probably wouldn’t even use UAW for the first couple months unless I dropped the directories per day to something like 5.
I did outsource all the content for my supporting blogs. Paid a little over $1 per post. I haven’t used article directory content to fill out those blogs but that’s an intriguing idea…
Thanks Mark. I have had some concerns about using UAW with new domains but so far it seems to be going okay. Just like you’re saying I’m targeting several pages with a lot of different variations of anchor text but what I do differently is that I have only added ONE article (distributing 20 submissions a day) per new site.
That means I am keeping the daily rate per site at 20 instead of increasing it by 20 a day. It might be too quickly but so far it seems to be working for the sites. When the submissions “run out” (which should take about 6-7 weeks) I think/hope that the sites will be ready for a little heavier linking load.
Would you care to comment on the articles you’re using on the Blogger blogs? Are you only posting the article from which you link to your sites or are you also using something like the UAW auto email service to “fill the blog” with some themed content?
Thanks again.
Mikael
This is really fascinating, Mark! Although I have to admit that for a newbie such as myself, that much work sounds extremely daunting. I’m in the process of working on five niche sites (all brand new, recently registered domains, etc) and because I’m operating on a deficit, I have to write all the content myself. So the idea of setting up five sites *plus* a bunch of Blogger sites to support them and then doing article marketing for backlinking sounds like a full-time job.
Is that what it really takes to be profitable within the first month? I’d love to sign up for UAW to assist in the article writing process, but adding a $67/month fee makes me nervous when I haven’t even gotten my sites indexed yet …
Speaking of which, thanks to Mikael above for explaining how you ease a brand new site into marketing with UAW. I still don’t quite understand the program (since I’ve only ever read snippets about it) but it sounds pretty awesome!
Hi Mark
Good information and thank you for the update. If you are outsourcing, who are you using at $4 or do you have other’s to recommend. I would be curious to know what is the quality really like at $4 per post?
I think you mentioned someone in the past, but can’t find that post.
Is UAW producing the amount of back links you were hoping to receive for your sites after using that program for a few months now?
Make it a great day.
Darrell
Mark,
I, too, am curious about your blogger blogs. Are they keyword focused as well? Do you do anything to build up pagerank on these or are you just happy that they are indexed?
Mark,
What CPC, and volume requirements did you use for the keywords for this domain? I’m looking to do what you did but want to get it done right.
I’m neck and neck with you guys, except I’m working with 10 brand new domains on self-hosted Wordpress. The first five went live in early February; the second five went live last week. In between, I’ve:
-learned how to get a site indexed in three hours instead of two weeks (link to it from an older established PR2 site in a post with more than approx 250 words).
-signed up for UAW and now have 30 article backlinks to one of the sites and 6 to a second one
-ranked #1 for about 10 low-traffic keywords with two of the sites and am getting about 10 visitors a day to each one
-built 10 support blogs on Blogger plus a Today.com blog
-dug out a domain I’ve owned for 9 years and am building it into an authority site for passing PR to my AdSense sites and for getting indexed
Because the sites are all brand new, I’m holding off on AdSense until June, and I’m not really pushing UAW very hard (although I worry that I’m pushing it too hard with the one site).
I’m also worried about landing in the sandbox–it’s already happened with one of my affiliate sites where I stupidly didn’t nofollow my hoplinks. One day I was on SERP page 1 position 7, the next day I was invisible unless I did an exact search in quotes. I’ve heard that Google will front page new sites to test their keyword authority (relevance) for the term and am wondering what criteria it uses. How many people click? How long they stay? Or is this just one of those big-G mysteries?
Thanks for this post, you guys–I know you’re going to beat me, but it’ll be fun trying to keep up.
Nice report, Mark, it certainly helps refine my view/plan for April. I got a real kick out of this paragrapfh:
Sidenote: some people have some really funny ideas about link trading… what do I care if I’m giving a PR 1 link and only getting a PR 0 in return?
I often ignore trade and exchange emails … hint, the ones that us emy name and aren’t machne generated I do resond to … mainly becuase some folks are in this mode where theu feel “Link Juice” is something like 100 year-old Scotch, to be metered out by the microliter.
Especially with relativel low PR sites, and especially from internal pages, which are so often PR0 or PR1, what on earth will you really lose y link out … just gaining another person in my circle of cooperation and knowledge seems to be worth much more than my meager PR.
In general I link out quite freely, mainly to suites that resonate with me and that I thing my readers will ebjoy, and I really care not if the folks I link to link back. Some do, some don’t, qe sera.
The object is 1., have some fun, 2., be nice to people, aren’t you sick of the number of rude butt-holes there are in this world today, and 3. make some money along the way. Money and POR are only measuring sticks in life, you can’t live _for_ them.
Another webinar? I’m there will bells on. You’re first one was very very very helpful.
In terms of your satellite sites, where do you find such cheap content? I used elance but found the content that came back to me…less than stellar. I know the content doesn’t need to be great but I’d at least like it to be grammatically correct
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the update. When I here about other’s successes it really makes me motivated to keep working. I have 5 self-hosted blogs and a couple dozen hosted ones for linking. I have done articles for EA with links but not much traffic.
Do you do any social bookmarking for the linking? I know traffic isn’t worth much but I was wondering about getting the links just because it really doesn’t take very much time with a service.
Thanks for all the information you have provided.
I put you in my blogroll on a PR 4.
Thanks again,
Andy
do the blogger sites target only one keyword, the one that they link out to, or do they have different keywords to the blogs they link to?
where the heck can you get articles for a buck!?
I’d be interested to know how to go about finding good outsourcing for article writing? I guess when you find the right person you never let go of him /her but where do you go to find a reliable person? And I’m sorta cheap.
Thanks for the info. I really enjoy reading this stuff, but it can be a little overwhelming. I just went and sat in the park for an hour trying to sort out all of the info I’ve got spinning in my head from you guys and Grizz! I have returned with a few questions I hope you or someone else can answer. I apologize in advance for this being so long.
*I had the same question as above regarding what you link from support blogs with? I drew myself a little diagram and I think I understand that I should have each support blog focused on one main longtail (big blue widgets) and then use it to point an anchored link to a “big blue widget” post or page on my main site (”Everything Widgets”)…this Big Blue Widget page on the main site will then point the same anchored longtail phrase at the main domain’s home page…sound right? Do you recommend posts or pages on WordPress?
*I was also wondering if there is a minimum number of posts you shoot for in each support blog before throwing links out, and how many links you feel are safe coming out of a support blog?
*As I understand it, I should then use my UAW articles to point to the support blogs with anchored text “big blue widgets”,etc.
*I’ve currently got UAW submitting to 5 sites per day (only one article per domain right now but I guess I should increase this?). Do you only use UAW to point to support sites?
*One last question (sorry)…I also purchased the blog content wizard, but I don’t understand where these types of posts fit into the equation? Would they be for blogs even further down the chain build to support the support sites?
Whew…I hope that made a little bit of sense. See why I had to go to the park? Thanks in advance for any responses.
Wow I am amazed at how much you are doing to build links and generate traffic to your sites. I started increasing my UAW submissions and have already noticed a difference in traffic. Although one of my sites is only about two weeks old; it is getting around 30 – 40 visitors.
I am currently writing up 3 UAW submissions every week and adding my squidoo, hub and wordpress blog to the resource box. I set the submissions to about 15 – 20 depending on how I feel.
Do you think that is too many submissions too quickly? Maybe 5 out of my sites have already had one article run through completely without me doing any extra submissions.
However I have heard that more submissions is a better way to building links.
Looking forward to your response.
@Susan, I think that more submissions will always benefit you more as you would get more links to your sites. The only concern you should have is whether it will happen too fast so that Google will sandbox (or worse) your site.
Hi Mark,
Found this post about your linkbuilding and article marketing work quite interesting. I’ve been using Grizz’ Niche Support page as well as doing some article submissions for a new blog site lately, it’s tedious as you say but I’ve seen good results before.
On another note, you seem to be getting a lot of questions regarding the “supporting mini-blogs” you guys use for link building. I too am curious about this strategy as I haven’t really employed it. Will you guys be writing a future post about this for us? It would be quite helpful…Thanks again for all you guys do here!
I am like some of the others and don’t have the funds to outsource articles. I do have power article rewriter and was wondering about your thoughts on using it to rewrite my articles to post on supporting sites.
For anyone who does not have or can not afford Unique Article Wizard contact me and I will be happy to post an article for you; of course for a small one time fee.
Contact me at velezmarketing@gmail.com and I will provide you with all the details.
Susan
I would love to outsource article writing because I am just not that good at it, but I don’t know where to start looking for people. I would love to just do it through an online community. Can you recommend any?
@Matt Gio, depending on the amount of articles you need I would recommend the service http://www.need-an-article.net
It is a service where you pay a small monthly fee but if you need just a few article written per month it is well worth it and the great thing is that they know how to write articles for UAW.
Thanks so much for this great “how-to”. It really helps. An explanation in black and white.
what’s a reciprocal trade?
Hi Faith, it is where “site A” links to “site B” and “site B” returns the favor and links back to “site A”.
During the last few days I’ve read a large number of articles and the accompanying comments on this website. I was hopeful that I might run across a few URLs that I could look up and study. I wanted to see the actual content, the presentation, the lay out of websites that are working.
Pictures are worth a thousand words so I was wondering if someone could give me the five niche web site URLs. It would be unbelievably helpful to see the actual web pages that are being used.
I read these comments with great interest and have a whole bunch of questions…
a.) I built a single topic blog with 5 posts on a WPMU platform to experiment with the process.I created an about, policy and Terms of service page and staggered the posts over 2 days .
b.)It took nearly a week for Google to index me even tho I used social poster & rss aggregator to push my serp results and for my single keyword phrase I was on page 4 of Google using Mixx within 24 hrs.
c.)I am using an adsense optimised WP template from Dosh Dosh and I am linking to this blog from 2 x static sites which have a PR2 both related to the broad term subject of the site.
d.) As per Keyword Crash Course requirements hee hee , when I did my research on this niche the adwords KWT gave me a estimated traffic of 3600 per month @ a cost of $2.30 per click yet when I created an adgroup around the exact KW suddenly that figure ’s supposed traffic level was maybe 8-10 searches per day.and my adword cost initially was just $0.50.
Now I know from experience that I can get a QS 9 or a 10 on a focussed ad and landing page the way tthat this blog is configured which means that my adw costs will drop to a couple of cents .I dont understand – why the huge discrepancy in estimated traffic and potential income ? Im confussssssed !
My conversion rates for adsense are above 15% on some other sites I run x 22% ( my cut off adsense inc +/_ x 3500 ) is a nice return. But the above figures are confusing
So now my questions are as follows…..altho the google bot hit my site within 4 days the only pages indexed are the main page & the privacy policy when I run the “site :mydomain” search. If I run SEO 4 Elite the program tells me none of the big 3 have the keyword indexed and the PR on my site is still greyed out.
How do I limit a single post to a page with a WPMU sub blog ?
What is the fastest way to get indexed ?
How long must I wait before I place adsense on the site ?
What is the best linking strategy to use on incoming links ?
What is the fastest way to get my site on page #1 of the results ?
I really enjoyed the keyword Crash course and your and Grizz’s info but I am still a little lost
Thanks in advance
Michael
I think my last comment got lost in the crowd so I’ll ask it again.
What are the URLs of the 5 Niche web sites?
Hello Mark,
I am amazed that you are on track to earn $100/month from just 5 niche sites. I currently have one, Gelato Maker, and while it is only one site it does not make me $20/month by far. I make some cash when I submit an article in its name, but then the traffic dies down again. I am really surprised, because the site is #9 on Google and #1 and #2 on Yahoo. I know it’s in a small niche, but still.
How do you make so much money per site? Do you think I should go after more hot-button niche topics? Any help would be most appreciated!
HallyZ
Hi Mark, Court,
It’s now October. I wonder what’s the result of this project. Seems like was ignored when you launched the 100 post project.