The Information:

Site: Codename: Karma
Domain: Exact Match Domain dot info

Keyword: Three Word Long-tail
Exact Monthly Search Volume: 3600 Global | 2400 Local
Google Contextual Targeting Suggested Bid: $3.06
Adwords Competition: 1.00

Experiment:

The experiment here is three fold.  The domain is a ten year old domain that has never been dropped!  This sucker is ten years old!  It had no PR which is actually kind of cool because the first part of the experiment is to see what this kind of age can do for a domain in new rankings.  The second part of the experiment is that it is a dot info.  I have never used one.  Some say they can’t rank.  Some say they are treated the same.  The third part is that it is truly an exact match domain.  There are no extra letters at all.  Straight EMD, playa.  Let us recap… The three factors of this experiment are:

• Testing Easte of an Aged Domain of Ten Years
• Testing Ranking Abilities of a Dot Info
• Testing Boost of a True Exact Match Domain

Expected Revenue:

This will be interesting because, although I will be targeting long-tails for inner pages, they are all pretty poor.  The only term worth anything is the main term.  And it is in a very competitive niche.  Perhaps the most competitive niche…  Let us calculate just for the main term.

• 3600 exact monthly searches x 40% of the searches in the top spot / 30 days per month = 48 visitors per day
• 48 visitors per day x 3% click through rating = 1.44 clicks a day
• 1.44 clicks per day @ $3.00 x 68% revenue share = $2.94 per day or $88.13 per month

I know this is such a low-ball number for what this site will really earn.  I’m going to figure out some kind of “expected versus actual” revenue multiplication factor and go back and add it to all of the past case studies as I get enough to test.  I’m guessing this one will be more like $300 to $400 a month range.  We’ll test that prophecy at the end.

The Competition:

Again I present two screengrabs.  The first is from Market Samurai, which is one of my number one top programs.  I use it mostly for rank tracking, but it’s a beast at sorting out tons of keywords using tons of customizable filters.  The second is from SpyFu.

This is pretty rough.  Maybe one of the toughest keywords I’ve gone after.  But we’ve got two things working for us.  We have a ten year old domain that’s an exact match.  Good thing, because look at those domain ages.  Most are 14 years old.  Eight of them are 10 years or older.  The PR’s are up there as well.  Two PR5′s and three PR6′s!  Holy crap.  They all have quite a bit of backlinking to the pages and domains.  So here is the thing.  These pages all have off-page SEO working for them.  Lots of link juice.  But they have very crappy on-page SEO.  You see all that green on the right side?  Yeah, that is where I will kick it’s butt.  I already have a 100% on-page score from SerpIQ for the keyword.  They will pay for that, and the exact match nature of the domain is going to slide me right up there.  The age of the domain helps me combat some of the off-page factors.  Links I can do over time.  This is mine, suckaz!

Mmmmm… look at that CPC and those advertisers… oh yeah… that’s the deal right there.

The Journal:

Day #1

Four days ago I snagged a domain in a private Skype chatroom I was invited to from a guy who bought it for someone else who found it but didn’t have an account with the registrar.  Between buying it and passing it off, the dude split with a bunch of people’s money.  The guy who was stuck with it said he had 50+ domains waiting to be used and didn’t want this one and sold it off cheap.  I checked the domain history and then snagged it for $35 smackers.  That was four days ago.  Yesterday I build a wordpress site and slung up all the plug-ins and redirected the nameservers and built the databases and made an addon domain and all that crap you have to do.  Today I wrote the homepage and slapped up the lovely ads.  I found it already indexed as a parked domain with no content, so hopefully within a few days I’ll see it ranking somewhere.  I got a high PR comments package and had some of them pointed at this domain… now for the TL;DR version:

• Content: Homepage written
• Backlinks: ~16 High PR comments (PR2 – PR5)
• Ranking: +∞ but indexed as a parked domain
• Expenses: $35

Day #5

It’s still indexed as a parked domain, so I’ve added it to Google Webmaster Tools for two reasons… to see if there are any notifcations about penalties and to submit a sitemap to try and help speed up crawling and reindexing.  I read something the other day about G indexing parked domains but not ranking them.  I think that’s why I’m seeing the site around #8 for a “site: ” search.  We’ll see what happens.  EDIT:  Worked like a charm!  Now indexed as a regular homepage.  Not ranking in top 1000 yet though.

Day #7

Slung about ~2500 blog comments at the site without pinging.  I’m not understanding why it’s not ranking somewhere after those High PR links, unless they were discounted for going to a parked domain.  Not sure.  I think I’m just being impatient.  We’ll see.  As soon as I get the homepages done for three other sites I’m doing in this batch, I’ll hit it with some Top 20 Social Bookmarks.

•  Backlinks: ~2500 blog comments

Day #11

Today I randomly decided to check the rankings on this as I remembered sending the big batch of comments at it.  I did end up ordering the Top 20 bookmarks as well, but I doubt they are done yet.  However, with the rankings I saw a nice jump.  A very nice jump.  With that being said, I’ve begun outsourcing a boatload of content, so I’ll have the writers smash out some articles for this site as well.

• Backlinks: Top 20 bookmark sites
• Rankings: #128 (+∞)
• Expenses: $36.30

Day #14

I woke this morning and checked the rankings and by george!  The Top 20 bookmarks did the trick.  This is an old site that just is waiting for an excuse to rank.  The bookmarks started small and easy and gave a great bump in ranking… all the way to number 11 as of right now!  And it’s still in the A.M.  I’ll report back tonight if there is a significant change.  To celebrate, I added two articles I had outsourced and ordered a 1000 bookmark blast that should push it even further!  That’ll be done within four days.  A week from now we should be looking at a high front page ranking, I bet.  Cha-ching!

• Backlinks: 1000 bookmark blast
• Rankings: #11 (+117)
• Expenses: $66.30

Day #15

Today I started slinging backlinks at all kinds of sites, so I put this one in the loop as well.  There was a nice ranking boost from the previous link building work done as well.  We have busted the front page!  Woooo!

• Backlinks: ~200 article submissions, ~800 wiki blasts
• Rankings: #10 (+1)

Day #17

Yesterday saw about 30 high pr blog comments aimed at the domain.  I pinged them and today I’m finding myself situated at #14.  That could be some backwards movement before a forward jump, or just a backslide.  Either way it’s insignificant at this point.  Got lots of articles to add as soon as I get the chance.

• Backlinks: ~30 high PR blog comments
• Rankings: #14 (-3)
• Expenses: $75.30

Day #24

I got busy with Christmas and everything and didn’t do much until the past couple of days where I slapped a ton of content on the site and started slinging a steady 600 or so comments at the site every day.  I also ordered a PR5 blog post to the site as well.  I plan on easing up on the home page some and hitting all the inner pages with links for a while.  I have a nice little funnel set up that should help the home page rise as the inners do as well.  Rankings are stable as of now. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention… the site got it’s first click for $6.75.  Gangsta!  I’m going to hold off reporting income till the end.

• Content: 11 articles
• Backlinks: ~1800 comments, and one blog post on a PR 5 domain
• Rankings: #13 (+1)
• Expenses: $107.30

Day #35

Since the last episode Karma has received quite a bit of work.  This includes eight articles, six PR3 comments, and 33 PR2-4 domain blog posts.  This moved the site back to the first page and even earned a good $15 this morning.  I’ll include all the earnings in the total at the very end.

• Content: 8 articles
• Backlinks: 6 PR3 comments, 33 PR2-4 domain blog posts
• Rankings: #10 (+3)
• Expenses: $132.30

Day #39

It’s time to start backlinking the crap out of this beast.  It’s had some content on it for over a month now, and the domain is 10 years old anyways.  So to kick things off I just ordered a 105 PR 0-6 blog post package.  Had a little forward movement from the previous linkbuilding done as well!  It’s been getting some clicks!

• Backlinks: 105 PR 0-6 blog posts
• Rankings: #9 (+1)
• Expenses: $136.96

Day #45

The outsourcer who did the last batch of blog posts gave me another 30 since I helped him out with a review.  I’ve got a batch of articles to add to the site that should complete all of the content for the site.  I’ll add those soon.  We’ve had a little movement and still am getting clicks.  I can’t wait to report on all of it!

• Backlinks: 30 assorted blog posts
• Rankings: #7 (+2)

Day #55

Oh man!  I’m so excited about this site.  Yesterday I build 800 wikis and 100 articles and then backed them up by 10,000 comments.  I woke up this morning to find the site sitting at #6!  It has already equated into more cheddar.  So I also snagged 550 blog posts on unique domains.  That should give it another solid push in the coming weeks as all of this gets indexed.  This sucker is going to kill it at number one!

• Backlinks: 800 wikis and 100 articles backed by 10,000 comments.  550 blog posts.
• Rankings: #6 (+1)
• Expenses: $149.46