I won’t answer for Mike but until he has a chance to read your comment and reply, I’ll chime in with my two cents.

I never hold on to any website long-term (at least I haven’t to date). The reason for me is I get bored with them after a while, or I just have too many other websites and projects on my hand that I can’t give a particular website the attention it deserves.

The Internet is becoming more and more competitive every day. You can’t effectively manage more than a handful of websites. If you try to manage more websites than you can handle, its likely one will get neglected and just won’t perform as well. And if you have a website that is making good money, you have to give it regular attention to maintain its rankings and earnings.

Travis

With your fantastic skills at creating websites that actually make money, what keeps you from just holding on to them and generating long term passive income? Is it a maintenance issue?

Have to admit I am not a fan of keyword research but I totally know the importance of it.

Must do better, sounds like my school report card!

Love the site index page, you mentioned it before and I bookmarked it then.

Sally

For an allintitle search I look for 25,000 results or less if I want to rank quickly in the top ten. If I have a site I’m going to be working for a long time, then honestly I don’t really care what the number is but in general anything under 50,000 is a good sign. It’s just that anything over 25,000 results will take a little more time and effort to rank.

For backlinks, anything under 1,000 is fair game to me but for someone new to Internet Marketing, you obviously want as few backlinks as possible. I’d say anything under 100 is a green light. The only reason my threshold is so much higher is because I only develop sites that I’m going to hold for a while before selling so I’m fine if it takes a little longer to get the backlinks necessary to bump someone out of the top ten.

As you can see, the numbers depend on your goals. If you’re looking to build something that you’ll flip immediately, then concentrate on 25,000 and 100 respectively. If you’re building something long-term, then you can adjust those numbers upwards.

Travis

Would you mind sharing what the typical comparable numbers of your method would be if compared against a level of say 50000 competitors for a phrase match search.

Do you also look for less than 50000 results, and what amount of backlinks would you consider worth going up against in your first page results list?

Regards
Andre

If your sites are earning money and you’re attached to them, why sell them? As long as they are making money and are growing, why feel compelled to sell them? Hang on to them and let them mature until you get bored with them.

I only allow myself to get attached to one website at a time. Meaning if I am managing 4 websites at once – which is all I typically will do – I’ll only attach myself to one of them. So maybe instead of getting attached to each one you develop you pick one and only one that you’ll stick with.

Travis

I won’t speak for Mike so hopefully he’ll see your question and respond but I *believe* he checks competition via phrase match (i.e. “keyword”). At least that’s what I do.

However, since Google caffeine rolled out this type of competitive search isn’t as effective as it used to be. I’ll be doing a post about this soon.

What I use now is the allintitle search operator (i.e. allintitle: keyword). Then I’ll also check the number of backlinks going to the sites in the top 10 for my keyword. With these two bits of information I can usually get a great idea how competitive the keyword really is.

Travis

The extra time is really not much at all compared to the hours all ready invested when your dealing with a custom made property, its just that you really do have to wait a good 60 days or more for those efforts to kick in. My problem is once I get a site earning that I’ve been tweaking for a few months I get attached and I’m like man, they can’t have this one! I think outsourcing more of my marketing will help break the attachment, that way I can just keep developing and let sites mature in bulk so I can still flip on a regular bases.

Salah

Nice post with lots of short and to the point advice.

Just a question though – when you do competitor research, is the 50000 competitor threshold applicable for broad, phrase or exact matches for your keyword phrase? And is there perhaps a ratio between these which one should be looking at?

Regards
Andre Roux