One of the biggest unknowns when people start out building a private blog network is just how many sites they need for it to be powerful enough to rank their money sites.
Quite clearly the question will depend greatly on the niche they are in and how competitive the target keywords are but my usual answer to this question is: you will need fewer sites than you probably think.
There are other factors at work besides the competitiveness of the niche such as how you use your network sites, especially how many links you put on the homepage (where all the juice is).
While it is not always an option for some, I tend to only put 1 money site link on each network site . I do this partly because my money sites are spread around in different niches and partly because I want to squeeze as much juice out of each link as possible. I also think it reduces the risk of leaving footprints that Google might spot.
So just what can you rank with X network sites? Let me give you some examples:
1. With 11 network sites (all with a single money site link on their homepages) I have managed to rank a web 2.0 page of mine in the top 5 for a Clickbank product name. Quite often I am 3rd behind the official site and a big forum in the niche.
With this position I have made $400 in commissions between October 2013 and February 2014. Ok it doesn't sound like a lot but $80 a month of passive income going forward will be very welcome. The total cost of those 11 sites is probably around the $400 mark including content so I've broken even after 5 months - not bad but we can do better.
2. I have a site in a high traffic niche where the competition is fairly moderate until you get to the top 5 of Google where it gets extremely tough.
I built a PBN of 11 domains all with just one money site link each. I also purchased a small package of manual blog comments to even out my anchor text a bit (I was fairly aggressive with my keywords for my PBN links).
2 months later and I now hover between positions 6 and 8 for a term with 1 million searches per month (on average). This month I am on target for 8,000 unique visitors and 20,000 page views.
Total cost is around $350 as I haven't yet added that much additional content to the PBN sites. I will continue to do this though so the cost will slowly rise towards $400 - $450. But I am already making around $100 from this traffic and I am collecting 5 - 15 email addresses a day that I can monetise at a later date.
3. As an experiment I tried to tackle a highly competitive financial term in the UK. Leads in this market would sell for £30 - £40 each to a broker.
I was just curious to see what a PBN could do but I didn't want to push things too much. I built just 7 links to this site and this was enough to get it onto page 4 of Google for what is one of the highest traffic terms in this niche.
I didn't use a single exact match anchor text in this instance so I will try changing some of my links to be a bit more aggressive and see what happens.
Total investment of roughly $250 and if I wanted to I could recoup this because my money site gained a PR4 just from those 7 PBN links and a single homepage link would probably sell for £300 per year.
As a further experiment, I'm considering tackling a local keyword too because given the low competition for some commercial terms, I believe I can rank a site with just a handful of PBN domains.
If you are smart about the keywords you target then even a very small PBN can get you to page 1 of Google. So don't think you need to be buying hundreds of domains for it to be worth it.
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