Sometimes a failure is a Success !!

I have a content site on extreme sports. It had a fair amount of traffic ~200 uniques per day and I was earning ~100 per month in link sales. Adsense practically nil.

Well I decided to try and sell the site here on DP and on SP (paid the dam $10 listing fee) hoping to get close to 10x monthly revenue. Site is great design, solid PR5 hundreds of pages of content. I did everything right, starting the bidding low to get some interest, good communication with interested parties, posted all stats,etc.

Unfortunately, my highest bid was ~$600 and the buyer wanted me to move it as part of the deal.

So in an effort to make it more appealing by upping traffic I targeted popularity, ie., MySpace. I made a couple of Myspace Layouts with Extreme Sports themes, and SEOed the front page for those terms and repositioned Adsense.

Success!!

Within a few days I was ranking numero uno (#1) on the big three for 4 keyphrases, traffic is up to 500 per day steady for 30 days and .............................................................

Adsense revenue for one month ............... $175 buck-o-roos

How happy do you think I am that my site did not sell for $1k?

 

cool story..

now to do that with any other sites you have - double the traffic

 

hmmm

I can open a gas station across the corner from another gas station and nothing guarantees the traffic on the road will increase.

Another site would also cannibilize some of your own traffic.

Of course do it with enough sites on different servers and locking domain data, you could possibly corner the front page.

This can also be done in PPC.