I thought I should give you guys a little update on what week one of this project (or I guess one week since I officially announced it on the blog) went. It was a little surprising to be honest. I made one rule for myself and that was not to make any judgement calls on it until I start getting sites into the money zone. Money zone represents getting to the top 3 for the specified keyword in Google. Without that it is next to impossible to make that sort of judgement call on whether I’m doing good or bad.
With that said, I can still make an assessment of how things are going and I’m certainly going to do that for your guys sake.
Total Money Invested: $178US
Total Money Made: $8.59US
Not a bad start considering none of my sites have hit the money spot yet (top 3). I thought I should give a general breakdown of things, so you can better understand what I’m looking at here.
I picked up 21 domain names that have a selected keyword in it. Most of the keywords will get over 3000 searches (roughly 100/day) a month. That is the exact number, not broad. I have a few 2900 and one 2400 search term. Top search volume is 12,100 per month.
Of these 21 sites, 17 of them are monetized completely for Adsense. One is an Amazon site and another is Clickbank. Two of my sites are a mix of Adsense and Amazon. I’ll say that I don’t mix them on the same pages. I’ll have either an Amazon oriented page or an Adsense oriented one. Basically I select what I think will produce the most money.
Okay, now onto the more interesting stuff. Out of the 21 sites, 8 of them indexed in the top 20 for their keyword. 4 of them indexed right on the front page. None of my sites are in the money spot yet. The closest one is ironically the Clickbank site and it is positioned at 4.
Currently Adsense has generated the cash so far. I’m not really sure what a good CTR is, but I’m not impressed with it so far. I think it is hard to judge it now because I’m just not getting the volume that I need to assess things properly. Most of my sites haven’t got a click yet, so this should skew the CTR, but overall for all the sites the CTR is around 4%. With the only sites getting clicked it is just above 5%. My best site is getting a 15% CTR which I think is good.
What I’ve been finding the most interesting thing about Adsense is the amount I get per click and how it varies between sites. The funny thing is that the sites I thought I’d get decent click values for are turning out to be pretty crappy. While other ones are surprising me. I noticed one site gets around 50 cent clicks, yet related products on Amazon cost $3. Another site gets on average 13 cent clicks, yet related products on Amazon are going for $50-$300.
Getting 10 cent clicks really does suck. Next round of domain names I’m buying are going to have a little extra research on what I’ll probably get for clicks. I can’t get an exact number, but I can come up with some conservative estimates.
I have very modest goals for this little project. Actually you’ll be a bit surpised. I want to make $1 per day per site on average. That’s about $30/mth, so it’s a Clickbank sale a month, a few Amazon sales per day, and a few clicks per day.
The reason I like this goal is because it isn’t a lot. I’m not looking to make huge money with my sites. If things work out I’ll make $21/day. That isn’t a lot, but an extra $630 a month is nice to have. The philosophy here is that if I can make $1/day/site on average, than a hundred sites will make me a hundred per day.
I know that I’ll have sites that make more than that. Based on some of the results so far, once a few of my sites hit the money spot they should be able to take in $5-10/day. We’re talking on average here and I want something that is at least conservative. If I make a hundred of these sniper sites I’ll make $100/day. But if they average $2/day/site, than it is just a bonus.
Another interesting piece of information is that I made $8.37 over the last 7 days. That means if this rate of return remains, I’ll break even in 21 weeks. Which means a $178 investment per year would produce $435 return. But this information is just really for mental masturbation. I suppose I could do this 100 times (2100 domains) and make $43,500/year (minus $17,800/year).
It’ll be interesting to see what things will be like in the money spot for these sites. Well, I’m past the 800 word mark, so I’ll end the post here.