I have decided from now on that chopcow.com is going to be my home base. For years, I have been one of those guys who has so many sites and when someone asks me “Hey, what’s your website?”, my mind instantly goes numb, due to the over 200 sites that I own.

Of course, 200 sites sounds impressive to the inexperienced Internet user, but if you realize that they are all mostly mini-sites, then it’s really not that big of a deal. Each site takes about 1 hour to create, so in reality, 200 sites is like 200 hours worth of labor.

Ok, so now that I have my home here on this blog, I am going to use it to chronicle my progress with achieving my goal of creating the $1/day formula. I’ve researched this over the Internet for hours. I even found other blogs doing this same thing and I was always disappointed that after a month or so, they stop posting their progress reports. Perhaps it was too cumbersome to post an update. Whatever the reason, I do not intend to follow this same pattern.

I think I might fare better at keeping my progress reports updated, because I don’t follow any prescribed schedule for posting everyday. I will just post when something major has happened….a major development in my quest to create the $1/day formula.

To start this chronicle off, I should make it clear that I purchased 33 domains on October 1st, 2009. I already have a webhost reseller account, so I can create space for each of those 33 domains in seconds. The sites have all been set up and are based on keywords.

Here are the standards I used when deciding on my keywords:

Choosing Domain:

• Domain must have keywords.
• Domain can not be longer than 3 words long.
• Domain must not end in anything other than .com, .net, or .org.

Keyword Popularity:

• Free WordTracker tool shows more than 100 searches for keyword phrase.
• Keyword Discovery tool shows more than 100 searches for keyword phrase.
• Bing Xrank shows at least some activity for the keyword.
• Spacky show that Google, Overture, and Microsoft show at least 10,000 searches for the keyword.

Projected Income:

• Estimated EPC for a given keyword phrase should pay at least $1 per click.

Competition:

• Google SERPS do not show more than 50,000 pages for the keyword phrase (in quotes).

With these standards to stick by, I created an Excel spreadsheet and used it to keep track of which domains I checked out and what their results were.

As you can see from the excel spreadsheet, I indicated the standards I was looking to match in the top row. I used color coding for the cells to indicate the following:

Grey = Does not meet the standards.
Green = Meets the standards (or just barely meets the standards).
Blue = Far exceeds the standards.

I also decided to purchase a few domains that didn’t meet my standards, just to see if all this research was useless to begin with.

My goal is to find a pattern of where I can sign up domains and know with a percentage of certainty the likelihood that the domain will be an earner in the future. It’s important to keep these records or you will find yourself a year down the road with some sites bringing in money and not knowing what you did differently with those sites to make them earners.

In later parts of this $1/day site series, I will provide additional input on the layout, design, and marketing of these sites. How much of the site was original content versus duplicate EZineArticles content.

Stay tuned!