I have put up adsense on 2 of my microsites last week to test the click rate. I am happy to report that the two sites have bought in $10 so far even though both of their keywords are ranked on page 2. Looks promising and I will be putting up adsense on 8 other sites which are already ranking to see the results.

Take care!

I have this link wheelish theory that I’m attempting to put into practice but it’s a little slow going because I’m kind of lazy… I mean busy.

I was thinking that if you made a link wheel of hubs, infobarrels, and such and linked them all together it’d end up being better than 1 ezine linked straight into a hub and 1 goarticle linking into a hub. Dunno but it sounds like it should work.

We’re going to run several experiments here over the next year. The first is the hubpage challenge. I don’t think that anyone knows for sure how strong hubpages really are because there are only two people I’ve seen document that they have done it completely and only Court has claimed he has done all of the steps he outlines. I think that micro sites are potential money makers too but that’s for another experiment.

I think it’s safe to say that anything done on a large scale is going to bring some returns. I see what you are saying there about getting the biggest bang for your time spent.

Personally, I have about 5 hubs or so. I have one at number one for the keyword I targeted. It’s received about 2000 plus visitors over the last year plus and has made me a few bucks. The same information on my own domain on the same subject matter had been my second highest earning site. This seems like a huge disparity to me too just like you’ve illustrated.

The key on hubs is three things in my opinion:

1. A large number of posts
2. Unique content
3. Links

While I do have reservation about putting all the content on the hubpages, I am doing it anyway to prove a point. That point is this. If you join the keyword academy and do exactly what Court says, what will happen?

And, that’s what we are going to find out.

Keep us posted on your niche sites as I am interested in your results.

Love your blog but I am going to play devil’s advocate here.

I strongly recommend that you consider turning you 100 Hubs challenge into 100 micro sites challenges. Here is why:

i) Exact domain names rank a lot hell faster than hubs these days. Somehow, hubs have lost a bit of their authority and they are not going to be rank as well as before without backlinks. Exact domains can. I did a little experiment where I set up a hub page targeting the same keyword as the micro site that I sent you. My site is now rank #19 while the hub page is nowhere to be found. Both have the same number of backlinks and the same amount of content initially

ii) Self hosted sites can allow you to experiment which key to learning how MMO works. With your own sites, you can create related posts to test new related keywords that you might have uncover from your search logs. You might also do that with hubs with you will not have the clout of the site’s authority on that niche. In addition, some keywords are really hard to write a readable article, but you can do so on your own site. Finally, you can also test your ad placement, affiliate products continuously with your own sites etc which you cannot do for your hubs. With 100 micro sites, it is like a huge test bed for your own experiments and you can learn a lot from them.

iii) You can easily create backlinks on your own micro sites to other related sites. Nuff said : )

iv) The last point is a bit like (iii) but different. I have learned, many times, that old domains have a lot of clout, be they targeted or not. I have a couple of blogs that are a year ago with more than 20 posts. These were untargeted posts but after a year, they started to rank for some of the terms contained in the posts. I optimize them and now these old blogs are able to ranks for anything related just by having the keywords in the post titles. One example I have is about iPhone games. Previously, I used this blogspot blog to talk about games and technology in general but after knowing I got ranking for some iPhone keyword, I optimise it using the SEO knowledge I acquired and now I can rank for almost every new iPhone game if I include the game title in my post title.

So the point is that if you have 100 micro sites that are going to age, you will have a hell of a backlink resource and maybe even a couple of niche authority sites a year from now.

Sorry for the long rant. Just thought if you are working to do the work, might as well get the highest possible return.

Just my 2 cents : )

Two side notes I want to share here. Domain names can definitely rank by themselves without backlinks for non competitive niches. I have a couple of domains I bought last Sept with only one post on them. This is before I knew what I was doing so none of these keyword domains are meant to be money makers, at least according to Court’s formula. Guess what, they are all ranking on page one now without any backlinks. I tested one of them which is bring in about 50 people per day with adsense and it is making me $10-$15 per month. This is in contrast to court’s formula which has given this keyword only $2 in value per month. Trial and error my friends!

Second point is that long rambling posts really helps to increase the traffic because of the long tails and these usually will bump your site’s earning potential up. One of my new sniper site is now bringing in about 20-30 people per day despite it being less than a month’s old. Its main keyword is ranked #20 but because of the long posts that I wrote, the number of long tails this site is ranking is quite remarkable. That is considering that I have not started any backlink work at all. I am quite positive that good domains will long posts can earn you quite a bit if you have about 50 of them.