First Stab at Niche Micro Sites

Hi Everyone,

I've been a bit of a lurker on BHW for a while here after having originally finding the site through research on whether a site I manage was going into black hat land.

I've been doing SEO for years now for corporate clients and have stuck to the strictly white hat, "blood, sweat, and tears" approach to SEO. After reading through these forums and learning more about different approaches to SEO I've decided to take a stab at applying a few of the learning's to some new niche micro-sites and let you all know how well they work.

In my quest I'll be using the following:

1) .info domain names
2) Host Gator hosting
3) Micro Niche Finder
4) Magic Article Rewriter / Submitter
5) All the cool stuff I've learned here

I don't have a particular goal in mind other than seeing how well I can rank for these micro-sites.

A huge thanks to all the great people who contribute here, I hope to someday contribute myself.

-Biff

Good luck and keep us posted.

A good milestone is earning your first dollar. People often give up too fast because they set the objectives too high...shooting for #1 is just silly. Here is a great goal that is achievable: Just get $1 in earnings and its all downhill from there. Lather, rinse, repeat...

good luck. and let us know your updates

keep us all posted

Good Luck... It will be better if you setup your goals and make a roadmap to achieve that...

no updates yet?

hey fellas, Im going to start a pretty much the same thing. Thoughts on using .info domains? Also, thoughts on registering domains for less than a year?

Leg0z said:

hey fellas, Im going to start a pretty much the same thing. Thoughts on using .info domains? Also, thoughts on registering domains for less than a year?

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lol ok Ill handle this before things get out of hand. First of all yes .infos are ok but you will find nothing but controversy about it on these forums, like I always say, trial and error. I dont recommend it but it could be a decent starting point.

Domains, as far as I know, you can't even register a domain for les then a year and why would you even if you could, a .info is $3. If your not willing to spend $3 in this game you're not going to make it anywhere.

My recommendation, do some research, real research. find a hell of a niche with fantastic keys, find an EMD if you cant find something you can make brandable. Reg it for 5 years, .com .org or .net.

Become an authority, write good LSI content, dont spam, be patient.

Give it a sgot.

Hoot

I'm pretty interested to see how a pure whitehat strategy works for you. I've always started out clean and used a few tricks later on as I gained momentum... I wonder if I would be more successful as a pure whitehatter? Who knows

keep us all posted

Sorry for the long delay in response, it's been one hell of a busy month.

Here's a quick little update on everything:

Since starting this endeavor I made $7.56 in July from Adsense and a whopping $6.12 this month so far. On affiliate links I've generated about $120 in total commissions, so that's definitely becoming a focus for me.

For the affiliate stuff I've been focusing on companies that have CPL deals as opposed to ecommerce based offers... the conversion on my first test there wasn't good at all, but leads are kicking butt.

GameCity, I was actually very surprised at the effect of having a .info. At $1 a piece from GoDaddy I figured it wouldn't work at all, but on one of my lead based keywords with 2,900 searches a month I'm already ranked #3 on Google, better than any of my other sites so far.

I've also been trying out The Link Juicer for the past couple of weeks and am pretty happy with it so far... to get initially ranked it's kicking butt, but since then the amount of backlinks being picked up by the engines is very low.

Outside of that I've been sticking to spinning good quality articles... a bit more time consuming, but it seems that it's having a good effect on things to take the extra time to make an article really legible, as opposed to a lot of the junk you see on Ezine and other sites.

Last week I purchased another half dozen .info sites for a few different keywords and am working this week on getting everything setup and initially ranked.

After spending years and years in Whitehat type SEO work I'm very surprised at how easy it's been to game the system a bit... it's definitely not like I have Big G's number, but after having spent thousands for clients through the years on WH only stuff and getting slow results this is pretty amazing stuff.

I'll try to keep the updates a bit closer together from here on out. I'm definitely happy with the progress. To date I've made just under $135 and between domains, tools, hosting, and other stuff I'm into this experiment about $300.

wow that is great progress man keep it up!

nice progress ... step by step and you will achieve your goal, don't quit

Nice one. Did you design the site and write all the content yourself?

gamecity said:

why .info, get a .com

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Info costs $0.89 and com like $10. Even if info had initial disadvantage in terms of SEO, the $9 more you paid for com could have been used for outsourcing some content or backlinks.

If you are running an ecommerce site or similar that needs all trust components in place, then you have an argument.

Great. Keep going ! Could you tell us about your traffic stats too and traffic growth ?

Yeah, for a few of the sites I coded out a really basic design with a 160px right column for affiliate/adsense links, then just made sure the template has all the onpage requirements for each page I'm building out. Way more manual, but I wanted to see the difference in rankings.

A few of the sites I've gone with Wordpress and the Prosense Theme, then have used AIO SEO and a few other plugins to get onpage taken care of. The #3 ranked .info site was the hand coded version, while the Wordpress sites seem to be taking longer to rank.

I'll wait it out, but I think all of the extraneous WP code definitely makes a difference to Big G, at least in terms of TTC ratio and such.

Traffic right now is hitting around a few dozen consistent visitors per day, though a lot of the hits are direct from who knows where, so that portion hasn't been converting for anything.

I've had a few traffic spurts, but looking in Webmaster Tools it looks like I'm caught in the middle of a Google dance, so my average positions overall are still rather low.