First of all, dear reader, i want to apologise for the lack of updates this month. I was intending to keep a regular update going in the blog, but i have been so busy with other things this month. However i am still ahead of myself when it comes to site building.

Whats been happening?

In terms of sites, i had to go and rebuild my previous content. A number of reasons for this:

1. Originally i was using a somewhat laborious method to add google analytics code to the site template. I then discovered a much easier way to do it. However i lost track of the previous code and had to redo everyone.

2. I also wanted to add an extra adsense unit to the template. So i then had to rebuild the sites.

3. I also made a mistake in adding keywords to the pages which meant the link text had absolutely no relevance to the page content. More rebuilding!

However i have still managed to build new sites, encompassing lessons learned and therefore i am still ahead of target in terms of sites built.

Revenue and Traffic

The good news - i have made some adsense revenue from sites built in February and also the EPC has been high! The bad news - not as much as i hoped for. The reason is due to low traffic. So i have been experimenting with new techniques that target long tail keywords in my niches which should get the niches ranking well - and quickly - for searches on these keywords.

In May i will be providing you with some hard and fast stats from the project so far. So stay tuned!

However as this is definitely ’gaming’ and as the social sites dont want trash, this strategy may become less and less effective. In fact DigitalPoint have recently banned services related to social bookmarking, but not before i had time to test them out.

I chose a couple of services that included stumpleupon book marking and also services to bookmark my site across 100 or so social sites. I did my first round of tests at the beginning of February. The tests included the launch of a brand new site as well as sending traffic to sites displaying adsense.

The new site got traffic very quickly, over 100 uniques a day and sometimes over 200. I was actually selling a product on that site but would probably have made more money by displaying adsense. Summary, high traffic, low real buying visitors.

My adsense sites - ones that are not part of this project and have been around for awhile - did well. Google seemed to refresh its value of my pages within its index, therefore i saw higher Google traffic and better earnings per click. There was no increase in or decrease in CTR, that stayed the same but clicks did increase because of higher trafic.

I have reached a number of conclusions with these tests:

1. Social bookmarking will bring you traffic from their sites.This traffic is just as likely to click on your ads as your existing traffic. These visitors are likely to be ’topic interestors’. They may not be buyers.

2. Google likes these links and will up your listing in its index accordingly, but only for a certain time frame - i saw my rankings drop back again after about 10 days. However my search terms are very competitive so a longer effect may be seen with the long tail.

3. The effect of bookmarking on your google indexed pages only works for sites that have been around for a longer period of time

4. Google undoubtedly gives you better EPC if your traffic is coming from their index.

5. By using channels in Adsense i am able to look at where my high paying clicks are. If those pages are not getting a lot of traffic i can use the bookmarking strategy to do 2 things: 1> immediately get traffic into those pages to get more clicks 2> get more one way deeplinks from authority sites these will have a temporary positive effect within google.

I discovered one of my channels - a directory within one site - was getting huge click value, but low impressions. So at the start of March i did another round of bookmarking to see if i could get more money and better traffic from that channel. At the time of writing - 2 weeks after doing the bookmarking - clicks and revenue are up in that channel and the cost of the bookmarking has been returned. Based on the February test, i should expect to see better increases in the last week of March.

In April i will be submitting a single, re-written article from each of my 13 niche sites to a blog network that has high Google PR. I will also submit the same articles to an article directory that also has high PR. The strategy here is to see what kind of spider and human traffic comes into the content network. If human traffic comes in i should be able to test things like CTR and EPC stats from my Adsense account.

Towards the end of April i will also be submitting the index pages of each niche site (at the end of April that will be approx 35 niche sites) to an automated 1 way links system.

The overall strategy here is to slowly overlay different SEO strategies ontop of each other, the intended result being a long term effect of naturally gaining large numbers of one way back links, increasing page rank and sustainable inclusion in the search engines. In terms of revenues i should hope to see a monthly increase in daily earnings per site.

All i have done is set up the sitemaps in my Google Webmaster account and wait and see what happens. There are no links between the niches. All the niches link back to the main site home page.

The test will provide me with some information on how Google Sitemaps works, and how quickly it is responsive to my site.

At the time of writing, googlebot has been and had a sniff through all of my sites.

Will keep you posted.

So at the end of February, i have 13 sites across my content network. March will be time to begin doing some SEO work and seeing if they bring in any revenues.

Updates to follow.

The main news is that i have now found a way that i am comfortable with to basically build these websites myself. This rocks. Its means i am not having to spend money on a web developer or even manage the process. I am putting a site together now in less than 20 minutes.

My building tools are:

1. A article tidy up tool to sort out my PLR text files

2. A content producer to put everything together such as templates, keywords, articles and ftp details. The same piece of software will also upload everything for me.

There are also neat tricks such as being able to delay uploads of content and also parse RSS feeds through the pages as spiderable content ie. not using a rss to javascript solution that is useful in terms of SE spiders.

More news as thing develop this month.

The main change is that i am NOT doing a domain a niche. I am going to put all niches into a single domain name using folder sub directories. There are several reasons for this which i will go into in a later post, but the key motivation is things like avoiding too many similar footprints across multiple domains. Also i have decided that the website / domain will have a master theme which makes all the niches in the sub directories relevant. Again i will explore this with you in a later post.

So in summary instead of 132 domains, there will be one domain with 132 sub directories, each one with specific niche content. Hope that makes sense!

Stay tuned as the building process will beginning in a few days.