I have had some PM's since napsters last post here about doing this journey with other folks. So, here is what I would do different. When I went into this I did not know a lot about SEO, so I had to spend some time learning it, that cost me some time. I would have an SEO plan in place prior to getting my first site. There is some lead time from the time you order until you get your site, so you can research then. I didn't start until I got my site. I did a lot myself on these, outsourcing might have been better.
I think, and napster or someone else can say if this theory is accurate but it appears the sites that took longer to rank had more backlinks when they came to me, so link diversity came into play in ranking, they needed more links for google to not think they were what they used to be. I have one site that still gets ten visits a day from a site related to it's old niche linking into it.
I have vacillated back and forth on what to do with these sites going forward I finally decided I am going to keep them. I believe that I can sell five and recoup my entire investment but I am going to go play with media buying and I think these sites can provide a long term passive income stream for me. So, once a month I am going to take a day to look for better opportunities to monetize these sites but in the meantime I am going to let them run. I have a VA that writes and posts two articles per month to each site somewhere between 500-1000 words for each article, native english speaker, high quality articles. In addition to this, I am going to go find two service providers.
One to consistently month after month build backlinks to all ten sites, and a second to provide social signals. Ideally these will be providers that will be completely hands off for me, rotating the URL's within the sites and keeping it growing. I am hoping the link provider will do tiered links. I will be searching BST's for these providers over the weekend.
edit: My ongoing seo idea above would not be my plan from day one, these sites need a lot of new links in a hurry for the new content on them (I think) but they are aged domains with decent page rank (two sites have gone up) so they can take just about any links you can throw at them. I was looking and on one of these sites in a very challenging niche I have added about 15000 links since I got the site from napster.
So over time I hope to see these sites grow to be huge, ideally I would like each to provide me with $1000 per month income. If I hit that goal I will pop back into this thread and update and will from time to time jump over here and see if any questions pop up.
Oh, and I am buying two more sites from napster, and I am going to be providing the niche so that I have sites I can monetize them with products from amazon.