3waylinksCaseStudy.com

This update is for the time period of April 25th, 2008 to May 24th, 2008.

Revenue has picked up a little since the last update, but not much. The revenue is mostly from Site #4, and the stats are down or haven’t improved much for the remaining sites. Here is the breakdown.

Site #1 - Zero revenue, 1 visitor from Google

Site #2 - Zero revenue, 1 visitor from Google

Site #3 - $.83 revenue, 22 visitors, 14 from Google, 3 from AOL, 3 referral, 1 direct , and one from an unidentified search engine

Site #4 - $10.99 revenue, 92 visitors, 81 from Google, 7 from AOL, 1 from Ask, 1 from an unidentified search engine, and 2 referrals

Site #5 - Zero revenue, 4 visitors from Google

Well there it is. $11.82 in revenue from Adsense. Site #4 is consistently bringing in visitors and clicks, while the others are hit and miss. Usually miss. It just goes to show you that you can’t depend on one site in one niche to make you money. You MUST diversify. Imagine I had created 10 or 20 sites, each with its own niche. Chances are two, three, or more of them would be having the same growth as Site #4. The initial investment would have been much more, but the return would have also been greater, month after month. Also, Adsense isn’t the only program that makes money. Certain affiliate programs and the 3waylinks.net system can be a killer combo also.

An an interesting side note, when I created Site #4 I liked the potential of the niche, so I created an eBay affiliate site using BANS based on the same niche. It is also doing well compared to other BANS sites in different niches I created around the same time. And yes, I did add the site to my 3waylinks.net account.

Untill next time…

 P.S. - Mario left a comment wondering about the site I am building with Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing script. It uses a plugin Mike’s team is developing called the Hyper Plugin. You can check it out here. It is going to be a pretty sweet site! I hope to have a big launch within the next two months, depending on the bugs getting worked out of the script. I may even give pre-launch access to those of you who would like to beta test the system.

It has been a while since I updated the case study, so I will break it down in a couple of posts. This update is for March 25th, 2008 to April 24th, 2008.

 Well things have gone down hill since the last update. Two of the sites managed to make nothing, and only one had any significant revenue, it you even want to call it that. Here is the breakdown:

Site#1 - $.92 revenue, 7 visits all from Google

Site #2 - ZERO revenue, 3 visits, 2 from Google and 1 from Ask

Site #3 - ZERO revenue, 11 visits, 6 from Google, 1 from Live, 3 direct, and 1 referral

Site #4 - $5.28 revenue, 44 visits, 39 from Google, 2 from AOL, 1 from Ask, and one referral

Site #5 - $.01 revenue, 36 visits, 30 from Google, 3 direct and 3 referral

A whopping $6.21 revenue from Adsense this month. It looks like the initial boost Google gave the sites is now gone. The links 3waylinks.net gives each site is maxed out, so now it is just a waiting game to see if the search engines will start giving the links some “juice”.

First of all, I apologize for taking so long to post an update! I recently purchased Mike Filsame’s Butterfly Marketing Script and have been spending countless hours building a new site that is going to be a cash cow! Anyways… on to the update.

It has been a little over a month since the last update, and the 5 sites have totaled $13.79. Here is the breakdown:

Site #1 - $1.10 Income - 42 Visits - 38 from Google, 2 Direct, 1 from an unidentified search engine, and 1 referral

Site #2 - $1.35 Income - 12 Visits - 8 from Google, 2 from AOL, 1 Direct, and 1 referral

Site #3 - $3.15 Income - 34 Visits - 32 from Google, 1 from an unidentified search engine, and 1 referral

Site #4 - $5.65 Income - 58 Visits - 48 from Google, 3 direct, 2 from AOL, 2 from unidentified search engines, and 3 referrals

Site #5 - $2.54 Income - 87 Visits - 79 from Google, 3 direct, 4 referral, and 1 from Yahoo

The case study websites for this update period averaged about 34.5 cents per day. I am still far from meeting the $47 per month membership fee at 3waylinks.net. In a 30 day month I would need to average about $1.57 per day to break even, not counting hosting fees and domain registration/renewal fees.

Even though I am two months into this case study, I am still hopeful that these five websites alone will reach $47 per month. I am not expecting that to happen in the next month, two months, or even three to four months. It takes time for the “link juice” to really be applied to any new site.

I also have other websites in my 3waylinks.net account, ten of which are eBay affiliate sites built with the “Build a Niche Store” script. These types of sites seem to do very well for me with 3waylinks.net. One site was dead in the water, and after adding it to my 3waylinks.net account, it started to make sales. The site only had ONE inlink before adding it to my account. The site is also based on a very broad niche.

I do not do any other promotion for my eBay affiliate sites other than link building. I built my first two eBay affiliate sites in July and October of 2007, and now they consistently make sales (many per day). Initially they both were on page one of Google for my main keywords, but soon dropped to who knows what page. They are both just now starting to regain position in Google. The one I built in October is currently on page two of Google for all three keywords I targeted in my 3waylinks account, I imagine because it is based on a laser targeted micro niche. It goes to show you that it takes time for any new site to rank consistently in Google.

That pretty much wraps up this update. Keep in mind, if you open a 3waylinks.net account and expect to see immediate results in the search engines with new websites, it just isn’t going to happen.

This update is for all the activity between February 5th, 2008 and February 18th, 2008.

Site #1 - One visitor from “type in” traffic, zero Adsense income

Site #2 - Three visitors, one “type in”, one from Google and one from AOL, $1.35 Adsense income

Site #3 - Fifteen visitors all from Google, $.65 Adsense income

Site #4 - Fourteen visitors, thirteen from Google and one from Yahoo, zero Adsense income

Site #5 - Seventeen visitors, sixteen from Google, and one via a link on a site in the 3waylinks.net network, $.67 in Adsense income.

Total Investment So Far:
Register 5 Domains: $33.49
Hosting: $19.90 for months 1 and 2
3waylinks.net membership: $94 for months 1 and 2
TOTAL: $147.39

Total Adsense income so far: $5.64

You can see this is getting very expensive very quick. Not including the domain registration, hosting and the 3waylinks.net membership fee is $56.95 per month. My 5 websites have been live for about a month now, and have averaged $1.13 each for the first month. At that pace to cover the monthly investment I would need 51 websites. Keep in mind 3waylinks.net only allows 50 sites per membership.

Hopefully in the next couple of months the inlinks will start to give the sites some power and raise them in the search results. As of now the organic traffic is from long tail keywords I did not target. None of the 5 websites are in the top 60 of the Google search results for the keywords I targeted.

Yahoo has started to pick up on some of the inlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer, but Google has yet to do so according to my Google ”Webmasters Tools” account.

Stay tuned for the next update. It may not be next week if there isn’t much activity to report.

I have been getting many questions on how I choose keywords to target for the sites I have in my case study of 3waylinks.net. If you can’t or don’t want to buy an expensive program to do this for you, here is an easy way to get a good idea if ranking on page one of Google for a keyword or keyword phrase is realistic.

Here is the keyword phrase we will be researching: “business cards”

A Google search gives us our potential competition. Here is a breakdown of the top 5 URLs returned with the search.

Finding inlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer: (Selecting “Except From This Domain” which will exclude links from within its own site) Note: You MUST include http:// for every URL your explore. Also, if Google does not include the www before the URL (green text in the search result), I do not include it in the Site Explorer search.

Inlinks for top 5 URLs in Google results:
Site #1: 21,900
Site #2: 107,000
Site #3: 14,100
Site #4: 5,410
Site #5: 185,000

I do this for all the URLs on page one of the Google results to get a good idea of what I am up against. At first glance it looks impossible to get on page one of Google for this search phrase! Not so fast… I will take it a step further and see how many of the inlinks for each URL contain the search phrase “business cards” in their anchor text!

Using Yahoo Site Explorer again, I use these search commands: “link” and “inanchor”.

The URL of the first result in the Google search is www.vistaprint.com/. To see exactly how many inlinks to this site contain the anchor text “business cards”, type this into the Yahoo Site Explorer search bar:
link:http://www.vistaprint.com/ inanchor:business inanchor:cards

The result is 255 of the 21,900 inlinks to www.vistaprint.com/contain the anchor text “business cards”. Here are the remaining results:

Inlinks:
Site #1: 255
Site #2: 307
Site #3: 81
Site #4: 76
Site #5: 169

Once again, I do this for all of the URLs on page one of the Google results. Now looking at the results above, I see that of the thousand and thousands of links the URLs on page one have pointing at them, a small percentage actually contain the anchor text “business cards”. This is very important in deciding whether or not to target this keyword.

If I were to build a site and target the phrase “business cards”, I know it would take some pretty good link building to get to page one. Even with the links 3waylinks.net gives me, I have to believe it wouldn’t be enough to achieve first page results. Although not impossible to achieve, I would have to continue my link building campaign outside of 3waylinks.

Side note: There is another link command you can use in Yahoo Site Explorer that gives you link information for the ENTIRE site, instead of only the URL you are exploring. Replace “link:” with “linkdomain:”. Do NOT include http:// before the URL. Take the www.vistaprint.com/ example above using “linkdomain:” instead of “link:”, it will tell you how many inlinks containing the anchor text “business cards” are pointed at every page in the site, not just the homepage.

You can also see that inlinks are NOT the only factor taken into consideration when Google places you website. If they were the site with the most inlinks would win every time. It is VERY important to implement good on-page SEO tactics to your websites. Google knows a crap site when they see one, no matter how many inlinks they have.

Here are the statistics of the 5 case study websites from when they went live in mid January to February 4th, 2008.

Site #1 - One organic visitor from organic Google search, Adsense income of $.58

Site #2 - Two organic visitors, one from Google and one from AOL. Zero Adsense income.

Site #3 - 17 total organic visitors, 15 from Google and 2 from AOL. I am unsure of the Adsense clicks as the URL channel was not tracking properly. This is fixed and I will have some numbers for the next update.

Site #4 - 14 total organic visitors, 13 from Google and 1 from AOL, Adsense income of $2.21.

Site #5 - 10 Visits all from Google, zero Adsense income.

Total Investment So Far:
Register 5 Domains: $33.49
Hosting: $9.95 for month one
3waylinks.net membership: $47 for month one
TOTAL: $90.44

Total Revenue from Adsense: $2.79

The sites are gaining links daily at a pace of approximately 3 links per day. Soon the search engines will begin to pick up on these links and the sites should start gaining ground in the search results for the targeted keywords. Hopefully the Adsense income will pick up also, or this is going to turn into an expensive case study!

Stay tuned for the next update!

I have finally gotten all 5 case study sites indexed in Google and approved with 3waylinks.net. The sites are gaining links daily, and traffic is also starting to trickle in. The sites that were first to be approved have already seen some Adsense income!

The sites are in 5 completly non-related niches. I used HyperVRE to create one, and Wordpress to create the other 4. The keywords that were targeted have low to average search volume according to the Google Adwords keyword tool. It is important to choose keywords with search volume in this area, as 3waylinks.net only gives each site 250 one way links pointing to the home page of each site. It would be next to impossible to rank for a competive keyword. It is also important to research the top 10 results in the search engine you are targeting for each keyword using Yahoo Site Explorer or a similar tool. If the keyword has low search volume, but the top 10 sites in the search results have thousands of inlinks each, it will still be difficult to rank for that keyword. You can further you research by checking how many of the inlinks have anchor text that contain the keyword your are targeting. This will give you very good insight to whether or not you will be able to achieve first page ranking for your targeted keyword.

Updates to the traffic and Adsense income will be posted weekly. Check back soon to see the results!

I have my first Adsense site up and running, but I ran into a problem already. Any site you submit must to 3waylinks.net must have at least 2 indexed pages in Google before they will accept it in their link exchange program .

The problem with this is, to get a site indexed quickly, I need to put up some links to it from other websites. This breaks the case study rule of not promoting the site other than by the links 3waylinks.net will give me.

To remedy this problem, I will put up links (from websites I own) pointing at my new Adsense niche site until it is indexed by Google. I will then submit it to 3waylinks.net and remove all of the backlinks.

Now that I have figured out what the heck I am doing, here is a step by step list of how I am creating my Adsense niche sites:

1. Research niche. If it is a good niche to pursue, I will select 3 good keywords to add to my 3waylinks.net account when I get to that point. These three keywords will be the anchor text in all of my backlinks. It is important to select keywords that have low to medium competition in the Google search results, but still have a good search volume. If I try to rank for “mortgage loan”, the case study will be dead before I even start. The websites on the first page of Google for “mortgatge loan” have thousands, if not tens of thousands of backlinks.  3waylinks.net will only give me 250 one way links per site. This is why my keyword research is a crucial step.

2. Register the Domain and change the nameservers. If possible, I get a domain that contains my keywords. 

3. Create the Adsense niche site using HyperVRE or Wordpress. The Adsense site I already have done was created using HyperVRE. This program is pertty good for pumping out Adsense sites once you get the hang of it. It also helps if you have the “Gold” version of the software. Since I only own the “Silver” version, it was pretty time consuming swapping out the articles it gets from directories with my PLR articles. (With the “Gold” version it is much easier to import articles to the site before you publish it.) Since I have no plans to buy the “Gold” version of HyperVRE, I will use customized wordpress templates or “Themes” for the remaining sites.

4. Add Google Analytics to the site to track visitors and how they got to the site. I will also be comparing this data to the tracking program in the control panel.

5. Create and add an XML sitemap to the site. This will help the search engines index the entire site.

6. Upload the site to the server. We are live!

7. Add the site to my Google “Webmaster Tools” account, and submit the sitemap. It is not confirmed, but I have a feeling this also helps Google index your entire site more quickly.

8. Link to the case study site from 2-3 other sites I own. I need to do this step to help get the site indexed by Google.

9. Add the site to my 3waylinks.net account after at least 2 pages have been indexed. Use the 3 keywords found in step one as the anchor text for my backlinks.

10. Remove the 2-3 links I set up to help the site get indexed. This will ensure a non-biased case study result.

 And there you have it. All I have to do now is find the time to get these sites done!

Welcome to my case study. The intent of this case study is to see if 3waylinks.net can do what is says for your website. I will be creating 5 Adsense sites from scratch using PLR articles and adding the sites to my 3waylinks.net account. No other linking or promotion will be done for these sites. We will see how many websites it takes to offset the monthly membership fee at 3waylinks.net!

I will not be releasing the domains for the test sites as to not skew the results.

The first step will be registering the domains for the test sites. I will then create the sites and add them to my 3waylinks.net account. Then we sit back and wait for the results!

5 sites should give me a good idea if the service is worth paying for. The sites will be spread across different niches, and will give an average income per site. I will then be able to see how many sites it will take to break even.

Stay tuned! I will be researching different niches and registering the domains very soon.