My background
My name is Derrick Barber. In 2004, I stumbled into the industry of creating niche content websites. I had written an article in 2003 when I was in college that showed students ways they could save money on textbooks. I didn’t know what I was intending to do with the article when I wrote it, but I just felt inspired to write it. In 2004, I used the skills I learned in an HTML basics class to launch a really ugly website, which became the new public home for the article I had written. I stretched it over 4 pages, and did some basic search engine optimization based on some tips I read in an Ebook. After a few months, I received an email from someone who wanted to purchase a text link ad. I didn’t even know what a text link ad was, but the person explained to me that they basically wanted a small advertisement, in the form of a link… and they would pay me $20/month for that link. Being a starving student, I was happy to take $20/month for an ad on my website. Eventually, I ended up selling some more ads, and even added Google Adsense to my website once I learned about that program. This website ended up making a passive residual income of approximately $200/month for several years.
After realizing the potential opportunity of creating niche content sites, I got really excited and started to make more and more of them… back then, the formula for making a semi successful niche content was pretty simple…
- Use keyword research tools (Overture or Google Keyword Tool at the time) to research search queries that have a decent quantity of searches, but not such a high amount that the niche is already being adequately served by an existing authority.
- Search for and register a domain name that preferably matches the search query chosen.
- Write (or hire a freelancer to write) 4-6 high quality articles related to the selected niche.
- Design a basic web site, and optimize the website for search by adding proper meta tags, title tags, and sprinkling relevant keywords throughout the text of the site.
- Once the site is launched, source 1-2 quality inbound links and wait until the next PR update…
Eventually, many sites would achieve good PR (Pagerank) & search rankings this way.
I ended up creating over 60 niche content websites, to varying levels of success.
Of course, things changed over time and search algorithms became very good at detecting paid text links, and lower quality sites that didn’t typically update content or add new high quality relevant content.
About CM Library
As of 2013, it became obvious that many of the websites I made that once enjoyed success and high rankings were falling into the content black hole that is page 10+ of Google search results, and the revenues for these websites were no longer even covering the cost of an annual domain name registration.
I have decided to let a number of the domain names expire, but it felt a shame to still have all this great content go to waste, which is why I started this CM Archives website.
CM Library will be the location where I place all of this high quality archived content which used to have a home on their own niche website.
In the future, I plan to gradually improve the actual site design and features. In an ideal world, it will become a mini content hub on a wide variety of subjects, however as I said… the main point is that I can’t just let this content go. A lot of it is very good and was written by professional writers… I believe it still has a place on the internet, even if it’s a very small and relatively unknown place.
Thank you for checking out the site. I hope you can get value out of some of these articles. If you are interested in purchasing the rights to use one of the articles on your own website, please let me know. I just want to find a good home for this great content.