I thought I’d do a quick case study using the techniques taught in the Thirty Day Challenge.

I’ve followed the methodology on 6 websites this year, but without much luck; using the numbers specified in Market Samurai – competition < 30,000 , SEO traffic > 80 and phrase to broad match ratio > 15% -two of the websites haven’t made the top 10, two have nowhere near the traffic forecast by Market Samurai (in fact it’s the data from Google which is at fault, the tool is fantastic) and one has a #5 ranking and some traffic.

That website looked encouraging, because one of the first visitors clicked though to the offer and that first click through resulted in a sale. I thought this was going to be a great niche!

Alas, that is the only sale I’ve made and I’ve tried several different offers with no improvement.

And the sites that I haven’t managed to rank use the domain keywordbog.com rather than just keyword.com, so that might be the reason.

Anyway, I thought I would use the 30DC methodology rather loosely to get another result for a niche I’m already targeting. Currently I have #3 and #4 with two separate websites. The #3 result is from a website that is weirdly unstable; it’ll sit in the #3 position for days on end and then drop out of the SERPS completely for a few days. It then pops back to #3.

So, what I want to do is target the #1 position, by choosing a domain that matches the main search phrase exactly. The .com isn’t available – a completely wasted opportunity for the owner – so I just bought the .net instead.

Here are the numbers, which are well outside of what the 30DC methodology recommends, but should be okay as I already have quite a bit of content that can be re-purposed for the website and link network:

Searches  SEOT  PBR    SEOC     SEOTC

398              167     82%    910,000   2,020

So the plan is this:

1. Register the domain and point it at some webspace – DONE

2. Use WordPress Direct to install WordPress

3. Write homepage content and submit to Traffic Bug

4. Add offer

5. Write content for Ezinearticles and Articlesbase (the latter isn’t in the 30DC) and submit to Traffic Bug

6. Write some additional articles for the website and drip feed every 2 days

7. Measure results

8. Add articles to other Web 2.0 properties

9. Go back to 7

OK, I’ll do more of this tomorrow.