I tried a $3/hour guy on Elance. His first project was excellent. Chose him because he was only one who capitalized his pitch for my project correctly. Super responsive and fast, I gave him poor instructions and he followed up on it. Very impressed.

is there any standard, trusted or approx. way to figure out how much traffic is needed to make x amount in ad dollars per month formula? for a new site starting out. either ad-sense or the other top alternatives. every time i search for this i see splogs.

No.

Not really what I work off is...

Run an adwords ad targeting the keyword I'm interested in to figure out the search volume.

Google has announced how much rev they keep (http://searchengineland.com/google-a...ue-share-42746)

You get about 68%.

You have to figure out what advertisers are paying per click...

spyfu / google keyword tool

Make sure there are a good amount of "relevant" ads for that keyword when you search for it.

According to different data sources #1 ranking gets anywhere between 26-40% of the clicks.

Just take the data you have available to you and figure out if it appears to be profitable or not. As you do this more you'll get a much better feel for it.

JoshK

so i found a domain available for 3 word search term that is being searched 40 million times per month. its a question. the website is not this but this is what i mean:

What is poker?
Domain availbe = whatispoker. com.

obv its not "poker", the term im talking about, its something else which i want to create blogs about. Ive already have about 5 essays written on the subject for college.

keywords tells me competition is "low" for this search.

there's other variations of the way its typed in, which i plan to create the titles of the blogs with. what my goal would be is obv rank on p1-2 for the exact question, I.E. What is "xyz".

Would it still be insanely difficult to rank high for the exact search term, by just creating a blog with the domain as the exact search result. (40 mill + searches per month).
am i going about this correctly?

or is it the other way around, where i should be searching for term with low monthly searches to compete with less sites and rank higher

40 million searches, are you using Google Keyword Tools "exact" setting?

(facepalm) obv way lower now lol. i guess the broad option search doesn't really help in trying to match for the exact question as a phrase?

Pretty much. The words "what" and "is" are in pretty much every article that contain the word "poker" at some place. This means you will get an insane number of results for a ton of unrelated topics.

The exact match search will actually be the words "what is poker" together as a phrase.

I threw this site together in may

http://picdazzler.com

its basic, and was just a prototype, and took me about 2 days to get up and running. I think the idea has merit.


http://picdazzler.com/assets/beforeafter.png

This is an actual photo edited by one of the editors. Ive been recently thinking about re-doing the site (I registered tenspotphotoshop.com ); making it better looking, better pitch etc etc. I could make this fairly automated fwiw. Do you think this is worth it? if it is, what is my best route to advertising it?

k ya im figuring all this out and reading this thread 2x. been playing around with the words and basically got (what "xyz" needs. com) , the domain isn't take, but its also the exact same name as someone well selling book. first page is a Barnes n noble reviews, and amazon and ebooks for the book. however the title is the exact domain.

2400 exact matches
6k+ broad matches in google.

is this a snap avoid because the title is someone else's book? does that matter?
is this a snap fold because the first page is already high authority sites like amazon, barnles n noble, and book review places, and my blog could never out rank them?

is this a snap get it in because google trends says the 3 word search phrase is on an upswing, and traffic can come from people searching for this book, but instead landing onto my super cool blog about the topic "xyz".

It's somewhat likely you could rank it now, but it likely won't last into the future. This is a search for poker coaching and a very unworthy site ranks based on owning pokercoaching.com.

So basically right now it seems like there are sites using "exact match domains" successfully but there has already been an "EMD update" to penalize this behavior and every smart SEO I know is expecting it go away, the question is when. That said, this has been known for quite a while and hasn't been addressed yet.

thanks u seem like u know what your talking about throughout this thread. i may not approach it as a question domain anymore. thoughts on the follow up question posted after? basically i can have
what"xyz"needs. com . but its the title of a well selling book. but has 2400 exacts searches per month.

So I'm supposed to write an RSS reader that grabs around 10 different feeds, gives a preview of the article it is grabbing, and then links to the full article (from separate domain) on my client's domain.

1) This seems kind of weird due to no citing of the original article, although my client never claims or implies the articles are his own.
2) I quoted this at 1-3 hours per unique feed added to his news page, and an additional 1-3 hours per unique feed he wants the full articles for on his own site. Does this seem reasonable?

I'm using php curl requests and parsing the xml, then fetching the articles link in the xml and when the link is clicked I execute another curl request via ajax to grab the articles full text.

Thats a lot of hours, Id charge less than 10 hours for this at an hourly of 1-150$.

I like this idea. There are several similar sites but no idea how much money any of them are making. When you outsource this, it's hard to loose money on this. The question is how many people are willing to pay $5. I'm willing to pay, but somehow never got around to singing up at any of the sites.

If I was promoting this, I would try to become the go-to place for online dating profiles and see if it gets decent reception. (Then focus on linkedin professional profiles, etc.)

There are also sites that do this sort of work for professional photographers on higher volume, higher-end level.

If it takes me that long, why should I charge for less?

Why is it going to take you 30-60 hours? What Im saying, is that if I were hiring for this job, someone taking that long would not inspire a lot of confidence. I may be way off base, just my opinion though.

I mean, I'm not sure how long it's going to take. That was an estimate. It took me 1 hour 45 minutes to write the script to parse the XML and have it load the full article script on my domain today (the full article text is not part of the XML and I have to request it server side via curl). I figured that since the XML structure will not be the same for each feed, and the structure of the site that contains the full article text will not be the same across separate domains, that my estimate was within a reasonable time. If it takes me less I'll charge less, if it takes me longer I'll charge up to my estimate.

You never answered my question though, and I was asking because I was wondering if there was good reasoning behind it, not to be a dick. Assuming the client says, yes, that's fine go ahead and start, why would I charge for 10 hours if it takes me 20/30/etc?

I don't think there is any reason to charge for fewer hours than it takes (unless it takes you longer than your estimate). IMO you should charge as much as they're willing to pay.

Things like simplexml and simplehtmldom should make it a pretty easy job though. I'd probably quote ~16 hours just to be safe.

Not trying to be a dick either, and I probably wasnt clear. If you quoted 30-60 hours already, stick with that. What I meant was, if you hadn't quoted them out yet, Id err on the side of higher hourly, and less hours, then less hourly and more hours. Fwiw, I have a perl script that will do this if you want it lol. It will parse a feed, pull a URL from the feed then download a picture from that URL (could be adapted really quick to text thought).

I've never worked with Perl before but I'm definitely interested in giving it a shot just for learning. If you could PM the link I'd appreciate it.

The thing about higher hourly/less hour quote makes sense, unfortunately when I was initially contacted they asked me for my hourly, which I gave them prior to knowing what the job was.

There has to be something out there already that does what you are wanting with minimal code change/refactoring.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this question but are forums/message boards dying? Are the becoming a thing of the past that are no longer worth investing in?

Is there anything specific that makes you say that?

To me, it seems like forums do have a lifecycle. They grow and prosper - but also many end up imploding or simply closing doors as interest in a given topic wanes. A lot of these sites are driven by a dozen prolific posters as everyone else chimes in from time to time. When the prolific posters leave, the site looks dead and fewer people post and people leave.

I know that FB has their Groups function, but it doesn't seem as good as forums and it doesn't seem like many people are using it. In theory, all these social sites should put a ding on forums, but I haven't seen it.

A non-trivial amount of the forums slowing down is because of the increased spam methods in the last 2-3 years. At the beginning of the year, the main Captcha for Vbulletin forums was broken and that led almost every VB forum in the world getting 5-20 spam sign ups a day. This was already happening at free options such as PHPbb, etc It becomes an extreme amount of work to police the forums, which rarely make any money for a website.