A little late, but I thought I should take a moment now that we are in the new year to talk about my goals for 2010. 2009 was my first year in competitive blogging and I have learned a whole lot from a lot of very smart internet marketers. Now, I am still not able to make a full time income from blogging activities and that is really the bottom line. So, without a doubt, that is my number one goal for this upcoming year. I want to make $150 a day, every day, for a total of around $4500 a month. At the moment, I am pulling in $7 to $15 a day across a handful of niche blogs. That needs to go up.

How to accomplish this goal?

As I have talked about before there are a couple of ways to make money blogging. The first is to operate a single or handful of dominant, traffic pulling flagship blogs. The second way is to own many, many smaller blogs that target only a keyword or two. I think that in the long term, the first option is vastly more desirable, however it also a lot more time intensive. So, for now, I think that the main goal will be churning out a lot of smaller blogs.

The first step is to start throwing out blogs. I am using the method of targeting keywords that get between 300 to 3000 exact searches a month in the google keyword tool. If I find a good keyword then I check the competition in google. I want to see some pretty weak sites in the first five spots, I am particularly excited if I see some articles in those spots. Then I buy the domain and start about researching content.

On content

There are a lot of diverse opinions on creating content. My take is that I am building sites for long term potential. I would rather get a lower CTR (click through rate) by writing quality content that will stand the test of time. The fact of the matter is that I think creating sniper blogs is somewhat dicey anyway as they could be frowned upon by the big G. But, if the content is excellent, then I think they can stand the test of time. Plus I think they might be able to attract natural links which makes their placement on the top of the listings somewhat self-sustaining.

This strategy is not entirely mine. I have borrowed it from some successful internet marketers who use it. The best proponent of this method is Ben K who has written a succinct guide to this method on his blog, How to Make Money Online Quickly. You can look into his blog if you want to see how he explains things.

Where I am Today

Thus far in 2010 I have created about ten niche blogs. I have not, of yet, put any adsense on them. I will eventually throw some adsense up there but I’d like to start getting some traffic first. Some of these blogs, which I started rolling out in late 2009, are already on the first page or two for their keywords. But many are not. In fact, though all the blogs have been indexed, most appear to be sandboxed. There may be a trick to get blogs ranking immediately but I am simply not aware of it. I have studied the couple of my blogs which shot right to the top of the SERPs and I can not really ascertain why that has happened. It could be niche specific and my other adsense blogs might have some sort of penalty that will disappear with age or content or links or some combination of the three. We shall see.

But, I am not lingering on one site too long. I get the site up, put a couple of thousand words over several posts on it, send a couple of article links to it, and then move on to the next site. Eventually, I intend to circle back around and give these blogs a little more link love. For now I just want to create them.

For the people who are thinking about making money with adsense on your own sites, I do have a little bit of a warning. Be prepared to work. If I am going to get to my goal of $4500 a month this year, then it is going to take a great deal of effort. I have several blogs that have 5-10 posts on them and bring in about $1 a day. In order to make $150 a day, I will need more than 100 of such sites which is hundreds of pages of content. And, remember that if you are going to be doing article marketing of any sort, you will need even more content in which to locate your links. So, it is a lot of work. But, the good thing, is that once you get your blogs up and ranking pretty well, they don’t require a whole lot of maintenance. I have sites that have been bringing in $1 a day since the summer time and I have not worked one minute on them. This leads me to believe that 150 (or more) niche sites will be entirely manageable for me.

The other thing that I am thinking, is that if I get 150 (or more) blogs and they are all drawing traffic, that I might be able to sell some advertising direct across the network. Though, we have to see about that as time goes on. I just think it would be entirely possible.

Traffic

All of my sites depend on the search engines to draw visitors. And I find that my niche sites should be able to draw 25 page views a day on average. To accomplish they will probably have to rank in top three for their keyword. This is why I focus on keywords that have lesser competition and less searches. It is my best guess that if I keyword gets more than 3,000 exact searches a month, that the keyword will eventually some competition. I hope that, for these keywords with smaller numbers, once I get to the top of page 1 that I will be able to stay there indefinitely. We shall see.

Niches

I am trying to spread my net as wide as possible. I am only purchasing one or two domains in each niche that I am targeting. If I find a niche to be particularly responsive, I believe that I can always go back in the future and look for more keywords to target. However, as I am still in the learning stage, I think targeting as many niches as possible is my best strategy. So, I do have to spend a decent amount of time researching to produce the content, as I am not yet an expert in every niche I intend to enter. But, I believe that with proper research I will able to produce stellar content in all of these niches.

Plans

The thing now is for me to budget my time as effectively as possible. Initially, I was planning to post to Paycheck Blogging quite frequently. I have decided to take a longer term view of this project instead. I’d like to post to this blog once or twice a month and not a whole lot more. I also, initially, wanted to do a lot of article marketing for this blog. Those plans are on hold as well until I can get these niche sites up and running. I will maybe do an article or so a week for this blog.

If you are curious, I am having fun being a part time blogger. I am enjoying the process quite a bit and I am really looking forward to the day that I meet my income goals and can myself full time. I am going to do whatever I can to make sure that that happens this year. 2009 was great for learning. 2010 is going to be great for earning.