Damn well I completely forgot to keep this thread updated.
I have made a few mistakes in that I keep getting too far ahead of myself and have started too many sites and bought too many domains already.
The first site is now ranking in the middle of the first page of google for all of 5-6 keyphrases I am targeting. It is making sales but the income is really small. I am consistently getting about 30 visitors a day but it only made $10 last month. All I have on there now is a review of one amazon product with affiliate links. Time to build the site up and add reviews of lots of similar products and see if that results in more sales. I am not sure how much time to dedicate to this one as while I can easily end up dominating that small niche the commissions on the products are really small. Adsense pays about $1 per click for a lot of the KWs, maybe just stick ads on there? I also plan to start building an email optin list on this site (and the rest of them).
The second site is also doing well, it is in the niche I said I thought I had miscalculated the competition in. Well as it turns out I now have it ranking from abotu 5-15 for 6 keyword phrases. The craziest thing is, and I cant figure this one out - I have inadvertently got that site to #7 on google for a related keyword that gets nearly 15k searches a month that I was not even intentionally targetting. So I am in the process of changing the site a bit to cash in on that particular one.
That site is also getting about 20 visitors a day now but sales are slow, approx $15 on amazon so far this month.
What is a good CTR for an amazon affil site? So far this month I have had about 600 visitors to both sites and amazon is showing ~110 clicks with only about 5% of those clicks actually ordering something. I have no idea if this is good or bad, probably not enough data to know either way.
I have launched 3 or 4 other sites since then but it is starting to spread me a bit thin already. LOL at the idea of running 100 mini sites all making small amounts of income as a business model.
One site I built around a search term getting 5k exact searches a month that I got an exact match domain for is now high on the 2nd page after a bit of link building with web 2.0 sites etc. Just the past few days I have been hitting 30-40 visitors a day for that one, which is odd because it is still on the second page. I am monetizing it with a clickbank product in the employment niche but have not made a sale yet. I have had about 20 hops to the sales page but 0 order form impressions and no sales. Too early to tell if its the product, sales page or whatever that sucks.
Anyway the good news for me is that the SEO etc is working and I am starting to get traffic to my sites. Now to work on learning how to monetize them better and actually start making some money from them.