how are you monetizing the site?
Just "ad sense" so far. I may add some "a mazon" book ads though because I think they'll sell based on my niche.
What sort of traffic are you seeing per day now for the keyword? Maybe about 30 uniques a day? (roughly 10% of the daily 250-300 visitors).
And any income?
Sitting at the bottom on the first page I really didn't see much traffic maybe 10-15 uniques a day. Hitting spot #6 traffic took a little bit better jump 20-25 uniques a day. Once I hit the #4 slot traffic spiked up to 55-60 uniques a day. I'm hoping it spikes again each slot I take over.
As far as my strategy goes. To start off, I don't ping anything,
ever. I want the links to be found naturally and if it takes six months to find a link, I'm fine with that. I really want my link profile to look as natural as possible.
Anything touching my money site is all manual choice links within my niche most of which have PR to them. I've passed on links with PR that aren't within my niche to have more of a natural link profile. I also manually did some selective bookmarking at the money site, not the spam bookmarks only the good stuff. I noticed that I got instant referrals from some BM's that gave me nice jumps in traffic immediately.
Besides those links the only other links pointing at the money site are my web 2.0's all of which have been SB blasted and BMD blasted. I've spent some time posting a lot on my 2.0's I'm actually getting followers on them and comments and such. One thing I've noticed is some of the web 2.0's start off as "nofollow" when just registered, but after hitting a certain number of posts some switch to "d0-follow."
Because I'm not pinging anything WMT is showing slow link growth. Its been just over a month and looking at WMT you only see 25 actual links. Of course there are more out there but they'll be found over time which is consistence with my natural link profile strategy. That's not even a link a day, but all of these links are good quality links within my niche and a lot of them have decent PR to them.
Using this natural linking strategy I blew past another EMD/TDL seo guy targeting the same KW in just a month. It's taken a little more effort and time but I honestly feel my positions are much more stable and geared towards a long term ranking.
I'll be sure to keep this thread updated.