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!