Monetization Research

[HairyHun]

I've did some research for niches. I found a couple that have good traffic, not to much competition and I got good keyword domains.

It would be easy to run them all and have many poor or average sites, but sooner or later, i would run out of time and thus my income potential would hit a ceiling.

Now my problem is when it comes to choosing one to push and make serious efforts to make it monetize. I'm willing to invest in link building and other seo services, but with SEO you only know months later how things are.

What are the criterions or steps or checklist that you use for monetization potential research? Or how do you pick between niches to know which one to run with?

Thanks
HH

 

[fm1234]

Float them and wait several months. Certain setups of mine, eg. social networks, I typically float at least 12 months before I even start approaching monetisation. Most content-driven static sites, three to six months. Blogs and other dynamic content sites 30-90 days.

Agressive advertising, sales pitches on the index page etc. tend to turn off the kinds of visitors who bookmark a site and/or share it with a friend, Digg it etc. Since the money you're likely to make in the first few months of a site's life is trivial anyway, why not forgo that money in favour of building viral traffic?


Frank

 

[HairyHun]

How many do you float at a time? (so I not too take too much time away from your other projects, yet still move these forward somewhat)

Do you invest in them in the beginning? ( if yes how do you decide how much?)


I was thinking about picking one and then having someone do some serious link building on it and optimization. But I can't afford to do that on like 5 or 10 sites...

HH

 

[fm1234]

How many do you float at a time?

Not to be flippant, but "however many" you know? Right now I have an absurd number of sites under dev -- about 75 -- and my rollout rate is at a crawl. So ideally it would be a lot less than that, but I'm a sucker for a decent domain, especially if it plays to strengths in my existing portfolio.

I manage the time resource demand by having a rigid priority system in place, which assures that at any given time it's "the right site right now" that's being worked on.

It goes something like:

Existing customer-dependent sites (Cash Right Now)
Stuff that's only being built to be flipped (Cash Real Soon)
Affiliate sites (Work Once for Multiple Cheques)
New customer-dependent site (Constant Work for Multiple Cheques)
Authority sites (No Cash in the Immediate Future but Tons of Traffic and Maybe a Big Payoff One Day)
Personal interest stuff ("I Have No Blog And This is Why -- It's At the Bottom of the List")

I have a tracking system for the time rather than doing it day-by-day; I'm a stay-at-home dad so if I had to start back at square one every time the sun comes up nothing would ever get finished. So over the stretch of a week there are x hours spent on customer-dependent stuff, then for every x hours accomplished there are y hours allocated for stuff to be flipped, with that formula being repeated all the way down the hierarchy.

As far as cash resources go, every spare penny is sacrificed. 1,000 manual directory submissions costs what, 50 hours of time minimum (3 minutes each?) A 600+ word page of web content including research is <$50 or I can spend a couple of hours per page myself, time that I just plain don't have. So any funds that can possibly be invested in outsourcing I do, in order to make the time that I spend working worth as much as possible.

If doing 5-10 sites at a time is too much strain on your bank, do whatever you can afford, and keep in mind how your own time is valued. If your time is currently returning you less than $25 an hour, then research and write your own content. If it's returning more than $1.50 an hour then definitely outsource your directory submission. Of course, you can also outsource the budget if you need to -- doing article marketing or designing WP themes or whatever your strong suit is in order to raise your outsourcing budget. I did this when I started getting back into affiliate marketing a couple of years ago, doing keyword research and content in off-hours to raise the funds to hire designers and other help.


Frank

 

[HairyHun]

Thanks Frank for the great insightful post! +rep

Do you use those web timers for the time management? (Start, Stops, gives time ) And all the Task management?

I'm in the process of developing a methodology using Basecamp. My time management needs some work tho.

HH

 

[fm1234]

Thanks for the compliment and the rep

I've never tried timers ... I break my work time into chunks due to non-work time constraints and just do my best to stick to those chunks. The "timer" I use is that little clock in the lower right corner of the screen.

One app that I have found useful for project management is Freemind -- it's actually supposed to be used for "mind mapping" which is not really my thing, but it's excellent for creating visualisations of how a project is going/will go, more versatile than a flow chart or Gantt chart.


Frank