EMD role with Main Money Site?

Hi All,

I am in the process of building my "money site", it is a legitimate e-commerce business. I built a previous site with about 200 hours worth of work for my previous company that now pulls in ~12kUSD per month. So i figure why the bother with adwords, and affiliate when I can build a company that will be at an estimated 20k/month in about 8-12 months(Building the site before and after my 9-5).

So the niche has tons of EMD (dotkom,dotnet,dotorg) available with 200-800 exact searches per month. I want to build up my main site as much as possbile, but I still now these EMD can bring in quite a bit of revenue and will rank extremely easily and quickly. Products that these searched for range from 100-500 USD, so essentially on the low end if the site brought in 1 sale/month the profit would range(with only a 10% margin)from 10-50USD.


I have a few ideas on how to monetize these without taking up too much time.

Idea 1:Wordpress blog on the product, with links to money site.
Idea 2:Create a similar ecommerce site on the product(s) and have all purchasing links go to money site?

Are these essiantly the same? I am inclined to go with option 1. I think this would be more legitimate and would lead to more conversions?

Now do you believe there are trademark/copyright issues with the domains having a brand/product name?

I've typed this up 100 times, but I'll type it up again, as it's really close to what I'm doing.

I have my money site that currently ranks #7 for the main keyword (150k exacts per month).

I have 105 EMDs. So far I have about 40-50 of them completed. They are all on different hosts with different IPs. Each site is a quality site, with 3-7 pages per site. Custom content, well written. The above serves 3 purposes.

1) As you said they are easy to rank, so they should be in top 3 in not much time. This generates traffic which you can funnel to the money site or whever you need.

2) With quality content and easy rankings, you are more than likely to get natural links from other sites. Often times if someone is making a blog post or looking for reference, they'll just quickly google 'keyword' and check out the first couple sites and use that site as a reference. Some of my sites have picked up links like this.

3) I try to build links to each site. So with my links and natural links, and linking to the money site, not only will it send traffic to the mone site, but it will send link juice as well.

As for your idea, I think idea 1 is the best best. I think form a customer standpoint they might get confused if they are jumping around sites when trying to order. NOt to mention if you do idea one, you can link to your money site and be like, "I have found xxxx.com for the lowest prices on xxxxx, and recommend you buy from them. This is not a referral link, I'm not getting paid for this, it's a direct link to the company." It seems more genuine. You know 3/4 of the stuff online today when someoen makes a recommendation there's an affiliate link attached, and I think more and more people are able to recognize this.

As for copyright, I found most businesses don't care. One site I have is productsideeffects.com and amazingly after only a few days it was indexed they found the site and sent a cease and desist use letter. What bugs me is I didn't even bash it. It was an affiliate so I down played the side effects. Oh well.

And lastly, for EMD searches, 200-800 exact searches is really low. Take the middle, and say 600 exact searches, you're looking at the absolute max 20visitors a day if you're number one. But you're also not going to be guaranteed to get every single visitor. I aimed for 1000-6000 exact searches per month, and I was even iffy on the 1000 ones.
I'm #1 for several terms that get several thousand exacts per month and you don't get nearly all the traffic. I'd say 50-70% you'll get being #1.

On top of that, you have to spend the time to rank it #1. I've had ones I thought would be ridiculously easy to rank #1 with almost no competition, and sometimes it's just not as easy as it seems. Add to the fact that the value of EMDs seem to be decreasing, it makes it even harder.

Thanks for the in depth post there, really appreciated.

I have emailed a few of the manufactures as I do not want any legal trouble, but I am questioning whether or not I will hear from them at all. They will be informational sites I do not see any other legal action other than a cease and desist letter.

What hosts do you use to keep your hosting fee's minimal when hosting the sites at different IPs? Sites would be built on wordpress. Currently the Money site is on a VPS with hostgator, not the best deal in terms of bang for the buck, but the support IMO is awesome.

I just look for various deals anywhere I can find them. A lot of the sites need very little room and bandwidth, you could also ask peole for a spot on their server/shared host. I try to find deals around $2-$4 per month. I try to pay for a year at a time to get better discount. of course the one I paid for 2 years up front is pissing me off and taking forever to get my site back up after being hacked.

Don't take this advice but, I just didn't bother emailing manufacturers because they would probably say no lol. But if it just comes up and they make money, then I don't think they really care. The way I see it is if you're trying to profit and screw them out of profits, than they'll probably be pissed. But if you're just bringing traffic which in the end gets a sale at their site, they make profit, then why should they care. Some companies will appreciate "we are not assocaited with xxxxxx" some where on the page. THe biggest concern is people getting mislead into thinking you're the actual company website, and they want to keep a certain brand image and not have some sloppy site that people think is the company's actual website.

And the way I see it, at most, if they have a problem, they will email me to to take it down. Which is what happened already with one of my sites.

In the end, just dont' rush it, and put out quality sites. In the long run you'll be happy you did.

Thanks for the advice there, getting one EMD signed up today..

Quick question, I did a private registration for all of the domains purchased. My goal is to not leave a foot print for google with the sites. So I can have the links to my site to purchase and not have any way/shape or form of questionable SEO activity.


So the list to cover this up would be..
-Separate Host/IP
-Private Registration/Different Registation
-Different Wordpress theme etc.

Anything else I am missing?