How long should I expect to wait for results?

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Matthatter

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Hey everyone, this is my first post, and I'm excited to have found this forum. There seems to be a lot of great information here. Excuse me if what I'm about to ask is covered elsewhere, I've looked around but haven't found anything directly covering it.

As I'm sure everyone here can relate to, I don't want to get a full time job and I'm sick of the part time job I have now, I'm an independent kind of guy and I want to spend most ofmy time on topics I find interesting. Which brings me to my idea for a couple of websites. I want to make some websites (with blogs) relating to psychology and spirituality.

Rather than just make one, I'd like to make anywhere from 5-10 specialized around certain areas (for example, "spirituality" versus "religion", psychology of myth, evolution of thinking, etc), linking back to posts and articles on other websites. I'm also considering making a forum, and maybe even setting up some kind of social network (but I'm not sure if the returns will be worth the time investment on that). I have very limited start up money. If possible, I'd like to keep my spending to hosting and domains, then maybe once I start seeing some success, using adwords.

My first question is whether or not making a number of inter-linked sites will increase popularity and traffic. Is this a good idea, or will it not work any better than just having a single site?

For money, I plan on using adsense and maybe other similar PPCs, as well as lseeting up an Amazon account to put book links on the sites. I'll also add a paypal donations link on each site in case someone wants to donate.

To market I plan on making a myspace and making many friends, and using Digg as well. I'd like to use a number of social netwroking sites, though I don't know of many. Maybe use facebook too. Not sure if it would work well, but maybe try to use a youtube account and have videos related to my topics, and post on other people's videos. I plan to enter blog carnivals and post on many different forums. I saw a cool linked post ont his site about making screensavers, which I am also considering, with a description and links to my site bundles with the download of related screensavers.

My first goal, of course, is to make these sites successful enough, moneywise, to live off of. Does this seem possible? If so, I plan to really dedicate myself and make frequent, unique posts on the sites weekly, maybe even daily for some of them. I do, however, plan on pasting some information from other sites, which I assume I should cite on the webpage.

I'm sure this is a difficult answer to know, maybe it is even ridiculous to ask, but how long do you think it might take until I am making, say, $2,000 a month?

Thanks so much for any critcism and/or ideas!
 


To answer your quesions yes, inter-linking will increase the traffic and popularity although it could be by only a few users however, it will still increase your traffic and popularity slightly. How well it will work is the question and no definite answer is available.

To answer your money question you said you want to have anywhere from 5 to 10 sites, that means to meet your goal you would have to do between $200 to $400/month per site. Very easy to do. Could be done in a month if you work a decent amount and with a little luck on your side. (actually it has nothing to do with luck but you may accidentally do something that just happens to work out really well.)
 
Thanks for your reply CShoemaker! So, just to clarify, it is pretty easy to (quickly) make 200+ a month per site with only PPC ads?

Is there anything I have to do that I've missed? I'll be studying up on SEO, but I am not sure if there are any magic keywords I'll come up with... I'll probably just use "psychology" + whatever keywords distinguish each site (in domain name, on homepage, frequently found in posts, etc). For example, "spirituality", "religion", "chakras", "Atheism", "Evolution", etc.

I'm not too confident with the possiblity of people frequently typing in "psychology" with any of these terms, or any of the terms with each other, though, so that's one reason I'm unsure of how often people will come across the site in the search engines. I have a lot to learn about all of this though, I'll be reading up.
 
I might be difficult in your niche because I have no idea what kind of site you can make in about psychology. Websites that provide a solution to a visitors problem usually do the best as far as making money. With psychology I don't think you are catering to a problem, you are just going to put information on the site.

If you have a site about getting out of debt you are more likely to get people to clicks on ads, buy products thru your affiliate link, etc because they are looking for a specific answer to their problem. If you have like an informational site about ponies you are just going to get people that are looking to see pictures, read stories, look at information and it wouldn't be a money making niche, of course you may get the occasional sale of some pony products and a few clicks on your adsense or whatever. They have no reason to leave your site thru ads(assuming it doesn't suck) because they don't have a problem with a solution they just want to read and since there aren't really any sites paying for clicks on google content network that don't make the owners money, sites that are just "informational" aren't going to be advertised as much.

This is just the impression I get when I think of a site about psychology, people are just reading and learning not looking to fix a problem. Sometimes you just got to find a happy medium from creating a site about something you enjoy and something that makes money if it isn't just a hobby unless you have plans on how you are going to monetize the traffic and how you will even get the traffic (you won't be making $2,000/month for a WHILE if you are just going seo.) I might suggest picking a different topic. I hope this makes sense.
 
Totally makes sense, thanks. I think I think I'll present the site as a means of personal development, which is my goal, but I worry how I'll be able to compete in the searh engines against what I imagine is a very large assortment of personal development sites.

I'll definitely have to careful with keywords, though. I'd like to attract people looking for a unique kind of personal development site, one focusing on spiritual matters through a psychological perspective, but I'd like adsense links to come up relating to personal development products, or anything people might consider (for that split moment) checking out, rather than say, psychology degrees from specific universities (unless online, maybe) or some aura-balancing retreat in new mexico haha.
 
Stop thinking about it and just do it. Put 5 blogs... thats a shits load of work brotha.

It takes most websites 6-12 months to make any amount of money large enough to live on. With good marketing, you could do it in a couple months.

If you just started right with PPC.. you could make money your first night. I wrote on a blog for 6 months on and off. It made maybe 10 dollars. The first night i did ppc, I made around 50 dollars with a very small campaign. I'm still in my first week of PPC, but I generally see a profit of 110% - 250% a night. :p
 
you have many ideas you "plan" on doing yet have implemented none. that's your personal development problem right there.
 
If your just starting out, I'd say start with one site, and focus on driving traffic to it and making it profitable. Try a variety of methods, PPC, linkbait, some content focused on getting good search rankings, etc. try some different things and see what works. ONce you have one site making some money, you can branch out to a second, then a third, etc.
 
If you are a total noob, then start with one site. Brainstorm and think about what you are going to do, and do it. You want to make basically 1 mother site. In about 6 months, when you branch out and create other sites, your mother site may change. You want to use this site as a learning curve. Learn SEO. It will be your best friend, and the success or failure of your site. Using PPC is basically a fast way to drive traffic, but if the site isn't 'designed' right, then that traffic may not convert anyways and waste your money. So learn SEO, and try to get your site ranked well with Google. Most people shoot for the first and second page of google. Say in a few months, you get 100 unique hits per day. You can play around with placement of Adsense, affiliate offers/links, ect to find the best way to monetize your site. Using free traffic to get your site perfect to get visitors to convert. You could then venture to PPC and drive targeted traffic. If you site is about basketball, you want to drive basketball traffic and not sports traffic. I really don't do too much PPC though. I like free SEO traffic.

Then venture on to more ideas. Maybe set up a site selling Amazon products, or a phpBay (ebay affiliate) site. There are tons of options out there. I feel learning SEO, how to find the right keywords, and land on the first page of google will help you out the most. Once you get that down, your options are endless. Even if your site makes 10$ a day, it doesn't seem like much at all. But what if you ran 10 sites?

Also remember, just because you aren't into cars, or sports, doesn't mean you shouldn't make a site about it. I agree with not creating a blog about something you aren't passionate about. But go where the money is.
 
Nature "teaches" man lessons daily.
Growth Processes are stage by stage,
When we KNOW...we have learnt and gained experience.
We are that much Wiser & richer in the scheme of life.

2008....Young people's attitude is "INSTANT GRATIFICATION"
they desire to BYPASS all learning,
thereby becoming a VERY selfish, Uncaring, Greedy,Murderous generation.
 
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