Look out money, here I come – all $100 of you will be sitting in my wallet every month come July 31.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read the Introduction to the Three Dollars Per Day Adsense Challenge, and you know that I’m going to spend the next three months building, promoting and monetizing three “Authority Sites” until my fingers bleed, with the eventual goal of making a little more than $3 per day (to total $100 per month).

Ultimate Authority = Messy Hair + Cool Mustache + Adsense Income

The Basics

I’ll be building the three sites using the WordPress platform, since: A) I’m not a programmer/coder/designer, B) I’m really familiar with WordPress, and C) I like making lists with letters.

I’ve chosen three niches, but will approach site building and SEO the same way on all of them. I’m expecting the three sites to perform differently in the search engines and on the money level, but I’ll keep as many variables constant as I can.

With the exception of how I’m choosing the domain names… I’ll be trying three different strategies here: One exact match keyword domain, one keyword rich domain with hyphens between the words and one domain with the keyword PLUS another word at the end. I’ve got my own theories on how they’ll perform, but like the judge who sent Charlie Sheen to rehab, I’ll hope for the best.

Building The Sites

Content. Content. Content… scratch that: Original Content. That’s what will ultimately make these sites stand the tests of time. Rather than writing for the search engines, I’ll be writing and organizing these sites purely for the readers. I think it’s safer that way. As Google’s witchcraft algorithm becomes more advanced, it’ll probably weed out the spam sites built specifically to game the SERPs. I don’t want that. In fact, if any of these sites are ever human reviewed, I want the reviewer to say “Damn, this is some good information. I better bookmark this for later.”

WordPress Posts Vs. Pages

There’s a lot of debate as to which is better in regards to wordpress sites, so I’m going to try something radical and use both!

To be a little more specific, I’m going to use pages as the main money makers. That is, I’ll spend more time focusing on keyword research for these. Whereas I’ll use the posts as support pages, targeting them towards goofy long-tail keywords that I can easily dominate, then put link in them pointing towards the specific page the post supports.

Oh, and regarding the pages, I’ll probably end up with several pages, sub pages, and maybe even some sub-sub-pages. The plan is to link them upwards to the main URL.

If I was a designer, I’d throw together an awesome illustration. Since I’m not, hopefully this will make sense.

Posts -> (link) ->Sub-Page -> (link) -> Page -> (link) -> Main URL

The idea here is that the Love Juice will flow upwards as I work hard to promote the bottom of the site. So as the posts develop PR and get first-page results, that Love will flow up to the ladder. That’s the plan anyway. Of course I’ll still throw in some backlinks to the main URL and top level pages, just to play it safe.

On Site SEO

To make sure I get the most out of each post and page, I’ll employ some very basic, yet very powerful SEO techniques.

For starters, I will only target one keyword per page or post. If the search engines find extra ones in there and list me in the SERPs for those, I won’t complain – but on my end I’ll only target one keyword phrase in each one.

I will use the keyword as the name of the page or post. For example, if want to target the keyword “Barf Pans” on the site I-Puke-Daily.com, I’ll set it up like this: I-Puke-Daily.com/Barf-Pans.

There’s been a lot said about the effectiveness of keyword density (how many times you use your keyword). I think that’s kind of old school thinking myself, but I will try to use the keyword in the first sentence and the last sentence of each page or post. Other than that, I won’t worry too much about it. Remember – I’m writing for the readers, not the Search Engines. If it makes sense and flows, cool. If not, I won’t do it.

I’ll also choose an SEO friendly WordPress theme. How can you tell if it’s SEO friendly? I’ll go into that later, as that’s the subject of another million-word post.

And to top it off, I’ll install the All-In-One SEO WordPress Plugin and write a solid Title and Description on each page and post. I’ll also set it to target just one keyword.

I should also mention that I’ll use a static “home” page rather than using the standard “recent posts” page. This is easy, just write the page (optimize it for the main keyword you’re going after), then set it as the front page in the WordPress settings. This will minimize duplicate content.

There’s probably one or two more things I’ve forgotten, but by and large THAT is my standard on site SEO strategy, all laid out in a pretty (and free!) listing. Hopefully you got some value out of that yourself.

Now, on to…

Promoting The Sites

What good does it do to build the best sites on the Internet if nobody knows they exist? (That’s a rhetorical question, you can put your hand down).

I want the whole word coming to these sites, and to do that I’ll be trying a variety of techniques.

But before I start rambling (as if I haven’t been doing that already), I’ll just say that most of the anchor text in the off site backlinks (and even the on site ones) will point to the internal pages or even the posts of the site, rather than the main URL.

Oh, and I’ll create three separate pen names for this challenge, one for each website. Just so you know.

Article Writing

I’m not going to break my back on this one, so I’ll probably just rewrite the posts and pages and submit them to Ezine Articles and GoArticles, with my links in the resource box.

Some people say that article marketing is dead, others swear by it. Either way, it makes sense to give it a shot.

Once the articles are published, I’ll ping them at Ping-O-Matic.

Blog Commenting

I’ll probably try to get out and leave some blog comments directed back to each website. Again, I’m not going to exhaust myself over all of this, nor am I going to spend hours weeding out NoFollow blogs. The point is to look as natural as possible to the search engines, and I think a handful of NoFollow backlinks achieves this.

Social Bookmarking

I’ll submit each page and post to places like Digg and StumbleUpon. I’ll probably create several accounts and spread my submissions out so I don’t look like a spammer (which I am, technically).

Squidoo Lenses

I don’t have any experience with these what-so-ever, and will only be building them for backlinks to my sites. I wish I could give more specifics here, but as of right now, you probably know more about this than I do.

Support Sites

Some people might call this idea a “link wheel,” maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But here’s what I’m going to do:

Start a free blogger blog (under an entirely new name) and randomly link back to my big site.

Create an entirely new website with a .info domain (under another new name) and link back to the big site. These domains only cost a buck or two, so the investment is minimal.

Naturally I’ll need to boost the rankings of these support sites in order to see any benefit to using them, so I’ll also submit the posts to social bookmarking sites and probably write a few articles on each one.

It’s important to note that, unlike a traditional link wheel, these support sites will ONLY link to the main site, not to each other.

Conclusions

Wow! This got really, really, REALLY long. Sorry about that. I laid out a lot of information here, and hopefully it all makes sense. If you’ve made it this far, you are either really anxious to see how I do, don’t have a life, or skipped all the way down here. Either way is fine – I’m not here to judge anybody.

That should conveniently wrap up my Three Dollar Per Day Adsense Challenge Overview, hope you enjoyed it.