30 niche sites in 30 days: June 2011 tips to increase the Google Adsense earnings

This holiday weekend, I showed a few of my family members this post about Spencer Haws, a 33-year-old guy who quit his corporate job and now makes around $11,000 per month from running Google Adsense ads and other affiliate programs on his more than 200 niche websites.

It was a utilitarian post, one of those things that proved extremely useful in trying to explain my new philosophy on niche site building. Plenty of us know the Amazon sales tax talk, and the fact that Amazon kicked Illinois affiliates out of their associates program.

Couple that with the recent Google Panda algorithm update that forced some folks out of the online business and had them in tears, I’ve learned that spreading around my risk is a good thing.

To that end, I’ve been thinking more about buying one domain a day in June — and I’m already up and running with a new movie about dark-skinned black women, and another site about nail strips called Salon Effects.

Research, buy the domain — then use Google Alerts, Hootsuite and WP-o-matic to help build the content…at your own risk!

So here’s the real deal.

Over one year ago, I noticed all the buzz surrounding these new Shellac hybrid gel nails, so thank God I bought the domain — and then forgot about it!

But before I forgot, I’d done something interesting: I set up a Google Alert on the phrase “CND SHELLAC” in quotes to get the exact phrase mentions. I probably chose “Only the best results” (but sometimes I choose “all results” these days) and it seems like I would’ve chosen “as it happens” — because you can’t use “Once a day” when you send results to a RSS feed.

Anyway, I set up that Google Alert feeding to an RSS feed, and then I right-clicked the RSS icon to grab the rss feed link. (If you try to click on it, it would crash Firefox, so I just right click and then choose “copy link location.”)

Then I used Hoot Suite to add my Twitter page social account called http://twitter.com/CNDSHELLACNAILS, and I fed that Twitter account with rss feed tweets from the Google Alert rss feed that I’d grabbed from the “copy link location” doohickey.

I would then take the CND Shellac Nails Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/155573436.rss to feed my CNDShellacNail.com website via the wp-o-matic plugin.

The best thing about doing it that way is that the Twitter feed automatically cuts down the amount of aggregated web data to 140 character or less, so you’re not scraping a full post or article from anybody, but just a snippet, then providing a link to the original piece.

Secondly, even if you don’t choose to prepend text to your Hoot Suite tweets, it will prepend your Twitter name to the WordPress posts.

I had the WP-o-matic plugin set to check for new updates from the Twitter feed every 5 hours, and not to post any more than 3 posts at a time.

Perhaps it was something about the regularity of those posts that made Google like the site, coupled with the fact that it was a new topic that didn’t have much crowding in the competition.

I’d added StatCounter tracking code to the site, but I must’ve changed the theme and forgotten to update the code, because I thought the site wasn’t getting any traffic. I re-added the StatCounter and Analytics code and realized that the site was indeed getting traffic, and learned that people were now selling Shellac on Amazon, so that became a new source of revenue.

Of course, use all these tips at your own risk, because I got my WatchFreeEpisodes.com and CPTimes.com websites banned from Google for getting too wp-o-matic post happy.

30 new niche sites in June 2011, more auto-updating from CSV file product feeds to WordPress blog posts

So I’m trying a bunch of things in June 2011 to increase the Adsense income, as well as Amazon Associates and other income, including LinkShare and Commission Junction income.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t yet gotten as much LinkShare and CJ.com income as I’d like, but I am trying.

As you can see on my niche site helping people find where to buy products online, I’ve added a bunch of products by downloading product feeds from my LinkShare account, manipulating it in an Excel file then saving it as a CSV file to upload to the WordPress.org site via a plugin I found (thank you, Jesus!) called CSV Importer.

Before that, I’d been updating them by hand one at a time. I will let you know how much this increases my Google Adsense income, because I plan to use it for not only updating sites with tons (thousands) of products, but also with straight up government information I find by downloading things I find via a site:.gov Google search of interesting topics.

30 sites in 30 days…

I’m writing that more as a goal to keep me accountable of what would be a good goal for this next month.

If I research and buy at least one new dot com per day in June, that’s only $300 total cost (which will be expensed come tax time anyway) but the potential to earn on those sites is huge.

Think about all the new products and concepts and services you hear about every day. How much would it really take for us to research a good available dot com name by using Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find related terms (select “exact match”) and then sort by highest CPC or most local traffic, then download those results to a CSV file then pop them into GoDaddy’s bulk registration tool to see what’s available.

But before you buy, it doesn’t hurt to see what kind of competition you’d be up against by popping the search term in Google and seeing who holds the top spots and how many backlinks they already have. (Market Samurai helps with this…I loved the free trial, so I’ll probably but it.)

Then, either use a Google Alert on that search term emailed to you to prompt you to keep up with the content on your new site, or try and use my Google Alert RSS feed to Hoot Suite (they charge a monthly fee now for pro usage) to WordPress via wp-o-matic to automatically create posts and see what happens.

That’s one way to really figure out how much traffic a certain topic gets, and how easy or hard it is to get to number 1 for terms related to the topic.

I think Google still loves EMDs (exact match domains) that have the exact search term in the domain (preferably with no extra words, but it’s still doable.)

It’s probably a good thing I forgot about my Shellac nails site — because that gave it a good year to age, and when Hoot Suite started charging and my updates stopped on March 24, 2011, eventually I began adding my own original content to the Shellac site and increased the traffic, and therefore the sales.

I plan to do lots of different combinations of all these tips and tricks (like a combo of original and aggregated content), including the whole CSV upload to WordPress thing and much more to expand the income sources.

Even if a site averages 10 bucks a day, if you find a way to duplicate that 100 times over, you’ve got yourself a $1,000 day, which can make for a nice $365,000 annual income.

I believe it is possible, and I am playing and working and moving forward with gusto to figure out how to conquer this Google game, and bring others along with me.