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Comment by byoung2 | Hacker News Reader

Not bad for a few weeks. The most important things for niche Adsense sites are content and links. I made a few sites in 2009 and some are earning $150 a month each, but they all started at pennies to $1 per month at the beginning. Get some plugins to tweet new posts, and get some plugins to post content from RSS feeds (check with site owners first) if you aren't putting much content in yourself or hiring people to do it.

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Would you mind sharing whether your sites are long tail keywords and how much global traffic they receive? Would be very helpful in dialing in such metrics knowing they could be profitable to such a degree.

The long tail ones get 1000-3000 uniques per month, and earn $5-30 per month. These are random topics like feng shui decorating tips and electric model trains. I hired someone in the Philippines to write articles for $1 each and put 20 on each site, then used RSS to keep updating them. The big earners (if $150 is big) were in travel and shopping and these get 8000-10000 uniques. In both cases a few articles rank well for a keyword. One article on airline miles outranks the airline's site, and one printer review outranks the manufacturer's site. So I got lucky there. The goal was to build thousands of these sites, so that $10/mo average x 1000 sites would be a nice passive income. I may get there, but right now I only built a dozen.

Very helpful thanks.

How do you keep hosting costs down for 100 sites with each bringing in ~$30/mo?

I have a hosting account on Rackspace cloud for $100/mo for unlimited sites. The traffic is low enough, that I could probably do it on cheap shared hosting, but I already have the account for bigger sites as well.

"Get some plugins to tweet new post"

Done.

"and get some plugins to post content from RSS feeds"

Done.

Thanks for suggestions. Is it a big problem in pageranking if articles arent unique?

Duplicate content is not a problem if you link to the original. If you are lucky, sometimes the source site has poor SEO, and you can outrank them.

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