There’s a reasonable chance I could be heading off to Indonesia in a few weeks so I’m working hard at tying up a lot of loose ends before I hit the travel trail again. I’ve put in a lot of work these past two months while I’ve been at home: I’ve done some link swapping, written a load of articles in an effort to get links, finished four new affiliate websites, updated another affiliate site, added articles to my moving to Sydney website, filed my tax return, set up three people to help me with new city sites, converted old HTML sites into CSS, and updated parts of my working holidays website. For the amount of time I’ve actually been sitting behind this computer I would have expected to have more done, but overall I’m pretty satisfied with my effort.
One loose end that I really want to get tied up is my living in New York website. It’s similar to Stuck in London and the first goal for the NY site is to attract search engine traffic and convert it into Adsense revenue. My London site went from earning $1 a month for several months in a row when it was first launched at the end of 2006 to earning over $120 per month six months later. I’m hoping to replicate this result with my New York site as quickly as possible.
The site has a good number of New York area guides and I have a few authors working on some how-to type articles and basic information pieces for my articles page. I’ve had some success using Textbroker.com and would recommend them. One author in particular has a ton of great article ideas and she’s a way better writer than I am. For less than two cents a word I am pretty happy to have found her and I’ll be loading up the site gradually with her articles. I will be heading back to New York in a couple of weeks to visit a friend, snap some photos for the site and to gather prices for my New York prices guide which I have yet to start.
I’ve already been working at link building and have outsourced some of the article submission stuff to a friend of mine so I’m hoping this site starts paying off sooner than the London site which I did zero link building or promotion for. Plus, based on a bit of keyword research, New York has more searches and pays more per click than the same London keywords. Overall, I really think this site is the key to bumping me up above $500 per month with Adsense and I’m putting everything I have into it right now.
So I just wanted to give people an idea of what I’m focused on at the moment. I’m really excited about the quality of the articles and area guides I’ve already had submitted and I’m looking forward to seeing how quickly I’m able to get this baby earning for me.
Will be watching
I just launched a new site http://www.koicare.org took a little longer than normal to get a little traffic coming in, seems like their is a time out period unlike a few years a go, the site was indexed in a couple of days
& just sat ou around the 500 mark for a few weeks now it is showing up for the correct terms in the right places in less than a month.
Do you spend much time on keyword research for your adsense sites? I imagine they are pretty competitive for things like “living in sydney” or “moving to sydney”. I’ve been doing some recently and looking forward to see how effective it will be targeting high search term with low competition in the SERPs. Have to get them indexed first though as they are new sites.
@goldfish I’m finding the same thing with all of my new sites. They generally appear for a short amount of time pretty high in Google and then vanish for various periods of time up to several months before coming back again. Might be the sandbox thing or it might be that I didn’t put enough (any) effort into building links.
@dan In the past I did zero keyword research. Since then I built two small websites based around keyword research but I found out later I was using the tool wrong so who knows how they’ll do. I’ve since figured it out but for this New York site I’ve only really looked up the major terms I’m targeting. Once I get some more content up there I will do some research to see which keywords I want each article to target and then tweak them to suit. It’s sort of doing things backwards but oh well. Once the site is up and running and has a good amount of content I will start having new articles written based around what keywords I want to target. I would rather have the site live and doing well first and then worry about that stuff later. ‘Living in Sydney’ and ‘moving to sydney’ seem like they would be competetive but I think it comes down to whether other sites are as targeted to those keywords as mine in and how much they build links with those keywords in mind. So far I’ve managed to rank well so maybe the other sites are focused on different terms or not focused at all, who knows. It looks like the competition for New York, especially for ‘moving to new york’ is a lot stronger so I’m curious to see how I do.