Last year I started venturing into buying and selling websites as part of my business and have accumulated quite a few sites over the past 6 months.
In June and July of 2011 I bought a little more than 200 exact match sites (the domains were the exact keyword the site was targeting) that were being monetized just through Google AdSense.
Out of the 200, probably 190 of them weren’t ranking in the top 100 for their keywords and not bringing in much revenue. I fixed up some of them, but for the most part have left them to gather dust.
Over the past few months I’ve sold about 80 of them and clung on to a little more than half. Last week I decided to start spending a few minutes a day blowing the dust off of 8 sites that haven’t made anything the past 6 months and aren’t ranking in the top 100 of Google.
I figured it would be a great case study on how easy (or hard) it is to get exact match sites in the top 10 of Google and making money.
I love building small sites as they’re generally easy to rank for 1 or 2 keywords and don’t take much time to build and maintain.
The goal for most of these niche sites is to generate $2 a day. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s $730 a year per site. Multiple that by 200 sites and you’re at $146,000. Plus each site I work on less than 8 hours, so for less than a days work I’m making $730, not bad.
Also long term once I get a site making $2 a day, I can generally sell it for $700 to $1000.
My Niche Challenge
So over the course of the next couple of weeks/months (however long it takes), I’m going to take these 8 sites which aren’t ranking and turn them into an average of $2/day profit each. So once I hit the $16/day average for these sites, I’ll consider it a success and most likely sell them for about $6000 or more.
Also I’m not going to be spending hour and hours working on these. My Goal is to work smart at getting these ranking quickly and get them making money with the least amount of work I can.
I’m not going to be revealing my domains, but here is where they stood as of last week. I’ve already started working on 1 site and already have it in the top 10 in less than a week (read below for details).
Site 1
Niche: Construction
Local Exact Match Search: 320 (yes, that is lower than I’d waste my time on, but the average CPC is $10.08)
Current Google Rank: Over 350
Site 2
Niche: Finance
Local Exact Match Search: 1000
Current Google Rank: 258
Site 3
Niche: Construction
Local Exact Match Search: 720
Current Google Rank: 262
Site 4
Niche: Food
Local Exact Match Search: 1300
Current Google Rank: 335
Site 5
Niche: Food
Local Exact Match Search: 880
Current Google Rank: 191
Site 6
Niche: Electronics
Local Exact Match Search: 880
Current Google Rank: Over 350
Site 7
Niche: Software
Local Exact Match Search: 1300
Current Google Rank: 7 (it was 141 last week and I got it ranked in top 10 in under a week, read below how I did it)
Site 8
Niche: Automotive
Local Exact Match Search: 720
Current Google Rank: 85
So as you can see I have a little work cut out for me.
First a quick note on building niche Adsense sites. I generally prefer keywords that get between 1000-1800 local exact monthly searches, but I chose a few that were less than this for this case study. Just based on my experience I think I can monetize the little traffic in a way that I won’t need as many visitors for a few of the sites. However it could come back to bite me and I don’t suggest exact match sites for keywords with such little clicks generally.
What I’ve Done So Far
As of right now I’ve only started working on 1 site (site 7) which is in the software niche. The site had a home page, 4 content pages, contact page, about us page, and the privacy/terms of service pages.
What I did was went to Text Broker and ordered a 1500 word home page article from a 4 star writer. The cost for that was $32.20. Yes it’s a lot but worth it as it turned out to be really great content for the site (Google loves good content). I also ordered 4 additional 500 word articles that I dripped into the site from 3 star writers. The cost was $26.80 for the 4 articles.
Total from Text Broker: $59.00
Next I went to Build My Rank, where I have a monthly membership, and submitted 15 posts with my main keyword, and 5 posts with other keywords (for a little keyword diversity).
I could have written the posts myself, but I’d rather pay someone to. I found a guy on Freelancer.com that wrote 20 posts for $12 (they are 150 words each and aren’t meant to win any writing awards. Check out Build My Rank for details if you aren’t familiar with their service, however they have recently closed their membership to new members for the time being).
Total From Build My Rank Writing: $12
Total Spent On Site #7: $71
Before I started working on this site it was ranking around 141 in Google for the keyword I’m targeting. Within a week it’s ranking number 7, which it just moved up to last night. The top 3 spots for the keyword are Wikipedia pages, so that might be tough to outrank, but I’m optimistic. I’m already starting to see traffic coming to the site.
I’ll keep you updated each week with where I’m at with my case study.
Feel free to ask any questions you have below.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
This is exactly the “beginning” step I am getting my wife ready for when she quits her job in 3 months. Start with simple EMD’s to learn and get a good plan in place and move up to more authority type sites.
We need to buy more.
Yeah, they are a great starting point. Not that difficult to rank and start earning income.
Hey Logan -
What length are the 4 additional articles you bought – 1,500 words ?
Thanks!
Oops, forgot to mention that. They were 500 words each.
Ah, gotcha –
So – What’s the AdWords competition like ? Are there plenty of advertisers bidding on these keywords? Have you analyzed them with SpyFu or anything similar to get an idea of how the ads are performing?
Hi Dean, yes, I check out competition with SpyFu and compare it with AdWords average CPC to get an idea of average cpc and amount of ads. All but 1 of the sites have a lot of advertisers. The one that doesn’t I figure I can get to the top pretty easily without much work, so I figured I’d give it a try as just a test.
Awesome – I’m looking forward to reading some income reports.
Also consider targeting related keywords once your website is ranking for main keyword it is east to dominate other related kws for me it took one article each to rank 10 more kws
Yes, good point. With most of these sites I have about 5 related kw’s I target that generally have a little less monthly searches and are easier to rank for. Thanks.
That sounds awesome, great case study! I will definitely keep an eye on this. Since that one site has landed on the first page, has it brought in any money? Do set these up blog style or more of a static site style with different articles as pages? Thanks again for sharing!
The site that is ranking is now sitting at spot #8. It’s now getting 15-20 visits a day since Sunday and has made $2.39 this week (off 1 click). I’ll be playing with my adsense placements to try and get more clicks from it. All the sites are setup on Wordpress (except 1 which I plan on moving it to). There is 1 main article on the front page than multiple posts which are linked to on the side bar for similar keywords. I’ll do a write up in the next few weeks with an example site. Thanks.
Very cool, thanks for sharing. I have a few emd’s I am going to try this with.
Hi Logan,
It’s my first time visit your site. Very nice. I jut want to know, how to check google rank like you did? Any free tools for do it?
Thanks for stopping by Nata. To check Google ranks I use a software program called Rank Tracker. You can check it out at http://www.loganthompson.me/ranktracker
I’m going to do a post about different rank trackers that I’ve tried and pros and cons of each. Check back in a few days and I should have it up. Thanks so much!
Hi Logan, thanks for the link. One thing, when I use rank tracker, the result shows me that my site ranking, let’s say on 28. But, when I manually check it at google search by typing my keyword, my site is not sit on 28 position. Could you explain me something about this?
Thanks anyway
It could be a few things. 1) are you signed into Google? Google tailors its results for each user. Rank Tracker checks ranks signed out of your account. 2) if you use proxies it could be checking it from another location. 3) Do you have the correct Google selected? I.e. there are different Googles for different countries you are trying to rank for.
Sorry for missing this. So did you mean I must sign out from my google account prior to check my rank with rank tracker?
Nata,
No, you don’t have to logout. What I mean is that when you are checking manually you could be logged in. Rank Tracker is logged out when it checks which is one reason there could be a difference.
Cool case study. Looking forward to hearing about your results.
Can you comment on, or make a post about how you determine the strength of competition and finding seed keywords or ideas? Also, are you buying unregistered names, or ranked domains?
Thanks
Hi Steve,
That’s a great idea for a post and I’ll get one up next week. For this case study all of these domains I bought last summer and they have been sitting around doing nothing since then. When I bought them they were all about a year old and had very few back links (less than 10) and none were ranking in the top 50.
These sites are a little different than I’d normally start with if I was building them from scratch as far as competition research. I actually didn’t do much research other than doing a google search for them since I bought them in a pack of 200 established sites. That was definitely not the smartest way to go about it and when I build new sites I do a lot better research. I think I’ll write a post on that as it could be kind of lengthy to write it here. Thanks so much for stopping by and commenting.
Do you notice that your Build My Rank is being de-indexed?
Just today I started seeing a drop off in backlinks being de-indexed which have caused some ranks to drop in a few of my sites, but nothing significant yet.
I am about to abandon my money blog in order to start building niche sites. Been doing a ton of research and stumbled upon your site. One question, as I haven’t seen anybody else mention this… why do you look at Local monthly searches rather than Global?
Thanks for all of the great info – will definitely be following your blog, as I plan to start a new one myself which will be similar to yours.
Hi Matt, good question. I look mainly at local as that is showing me the searches in the US. To me it’s easier to focus on the US market with my sites and try to rank in the US version of Google. If I rank in other countries thats icing on the cake.
One example I have is that a site I had ranked #2 (in US Google) for a term that got 105,000 global exact match searches. The site got about 5 visitors a day though as the local for the US was less than 100 local searches. Everyone was searching for that term in other countries.