boxfish

I'm in on this little competition.

I actually regged my domain yesterday (I didn't know about the competition) as I wanted to try something out that I haven't before, monetising a website with adsense but I might as well include that development in this competition as it could be useful for people/me to see the progress.

Adsense a new area to me, but after adding it to one of my pages on an existing site and making ~£6 a day I'm interested to see what else I can do with it.

The Niche:

I started looking for areas that have high searches but quite low organic SEO competition, after quite a short rummage I decided that a jobs based site could be quite good.

Example of search figures:

Morrisons Jobs - 90,500 exacts
Next Jobs - 74,000 exacts
River Island Jobs - 49,000 exacts

The organic SEO competition for these is quite weak, I'm pretty sure I can rank top 4 for most, if not all of them.

Now these show very low exact CPC ranging from 7p to 26p which is pretty rubbish (although the traffic should be there) but there are some quite decent 'retail job' phrases which go up to £1 CPC and some management terms which are a few quid so if I can get these displaying it should make at least some money.

The Domain:

I initially started to look for a generic jobs name with some exact matches but then thought about what I was trying to do. If I was trying to rank for these high traffic phrases there is no chance of ranking top as the sites there will be far too authoritative, so I'm looking at ~4 for each term. With that in mind I started looking for domains which would promote a bit or urgency and give the impression of 'new jobs, just updated listings, start straight away' something along those lines in order to try and get the highest CTR from my quite low serp position

Ideally I would have preferred latestjobs.co.uk but that was regged, the .org.uk was available but I don't like them. I then found immediatestart.co.uk and immediatejobs.co.uk and went with the latter, although I think both would work.

This morning I installed wordpress and a basic theme I had been working on, put up privacy and contact info, so it's sitting there ready for the content.

My thoughts about the theme are less is more with a view to getting more adsense clicks - I believe that's how it works.

The Plan:

My plan is to get a couple, literally one or two links to it to get the site indexed then add all my content. I'm then going to record my rankings, buy a couple of cheap link packages and report what increase in serps I get. I want to do this as a lot of people starting out don't seem to understand what importance links play in search engine rankings.

Once I have the rankings/traffic I will then add adsense and do a bit of tweaking to see what gets the best CTR.

As a fallback, if Adsense is pretty crap, then I can look at promoting CV writing/Work from home or something like that.



Any thoughts?

Blossom

Nice idea, I think you'll pick up more money from the long tail. Interested on why you chose jobs (other than ranking reasons) - is it a sector you're interested in or have experience in, or was it at random?

boxfish

It's not a sector I've done anything in before, it was just random really.

I was doing a few random searches, I think to do with application forms, passport application forms etc, just getting started really and the term 'nhs jobs' popped up on the list with 1.2m exacts a month - that got me thinking and went from there.

boxfish

I've got a few pages up on the site now and some more will be slowly dripped onto the site over the next fortnight or so, there's about 24 pages in total at the moment.

I've written a few pages of content myself but have outsourced most of it to someone on the a4u forums.

Total costs so far, domain and content is £108.06

I've been thinking about coming up with more related content that is a bit cheaper.

One of my ideas is to approach the various company groups on facebook, tesco, asda etc and offer a prize for the funniest work story, it may make some decent linkbait too. Have to see if I can come up with a good format and pitch

theonemanyuri

Good write up so far, I like hearing the thought process behind the decisions. I bought a cheap link package on the recommendation of another project thread on a4u, had mixed results, but that was with other factors such as Panda. I'd be interested to see how you get on, I know the general consensus is don't bother but the proofs in the pudding.

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boxfish

Thanks

Just wanted to give a little update so I can keep track.

My pages have started to rank between page 4 and page 7 for the terms I'm after, that's with just linking from the forum, no other backlinks as yet.

I'm currently getting a handful of longtail results each day. I now plan to start adding backlinks to the site.

Just went on Fiverr.com and booked three backlink gigs, just linking to the homepage with the url to get started, that cost me £9.87

I don't really expect to see much increase in rankings from these initial links, I just think they look more natural than adding anchor text backlinks straight away.

I also have a few on-page tweaks I want to make over the next couple of days, mainly increasing relevancy between internal pages, a bit more internal linking and also link out to some relevant sites.

I don't really want to go over £200 testing this site out so I plan to try and get one page ranking minimum, then use the money from adsense to get the other pages ranking, if the page I get ranking doesn't make any money then i'll know not to bother trying to rank the rest.

Total spend so far: £117.93