Let's take a look at our first Florist website. We registered the domain on the 11th of September 2009; in fact we also secured the top 14 cities in NZ in the same format (FloristsCity.co.nz) there is a reason for this thinking, as you know TLD is a strong supporter of keyword domains; so these domains include two keywords each. The first is obviously Florists, which is what we have researched to find is the most searched term out of Florist, Flowers and Florists. The second keyword is the city which helps both the user and Google to understand our targeted region. However equally if not more important is when you start to type "Florists.." in Google, Google automatically make suggestions that include most of out city location domains.

We launched the website in Feb 2010; we added Google Verification to the site and waited with baited breath to see where she would rate for the search "Florists Auckland" (without quotes). Once the site was indexed it showed up on page 3 for New Zealand searches and Page 4 for the web. We need to realise that a site full of affiliate content is not seen by Google as very authoritative and often has little unique content. Affiliate sites often end up with little page Rank as well, currently FloristsAuckland.co.nz is PR0.

So Page 3 or 4 is not going to make any money right! So the next thing we did was submit the website to about 10 business directories in New Zealand. I will point out that some of them are now useless for SEO as many have added rel="nofollow" to their links and therefore pass no value (Vote) to our website. Anyway this activity moved us up to page 2 after a couple of months. Still no good eh!

Auckland is the most competitive market in NZ and Florists are up there next to Rental Cars as the most competitive and tough industries to rate for in NZ and the world I would guess. But then we had 2 sales... This was the shot in the arm we needed. This was our first attempt at affiliate marketing and we could really only give it "Spare time" as an experiment. What we did next was build 4 page websites on the other 13 city focused domains and crosslink then to each other. That is we linked from Florists Auckland to all the other city sites and they all linked back to Auckland as well. After several weeks Auckland was sitting at number 14 so part way down page 2 for our keyword search. But at the same time our other sites were all on page 2 or page one for their domain search (Florists City)!

The money came rolling in thick and fast..... ok not really lol

• March we had 2 sales
• April 1 Sale
• May 17 Sales (Mothers Day so artificially high)
• June 6 Sales
• July 14 Sales
• August 26 Sales
• September 27 Sales
• October 34 Sales
• November 87 Sales

So its building slowly, when you consider hosting cost and domain renewal the profit is not high, however it is higher than you would get for adsense on the same domains. For every $100 a month profit we get; we would need to have $24,000 in the bank at 5% interest to make the same amount! Makes you think right?

 Update: 2010-11-05

 As you can see from the above sales figures, they are growing slowly. We have recently added more content and also added 8 more cities using the same format of keyword domain. The smallest is FloristsGisborne.co.nz with a population of around 34,000. So we now have 22 websites all with local and relevant content for the city and all legitimately linking between each other. November sales have started stronger than before so it will be interesting to see the result.

Update:  2010-12-12