Yea you could setup a little network, where you have your main domain where you sell your product or service, plus a few seo outpost sites each targeting a medium to high search volume keyword with their domain name. I wouldn’t make the seo outpost sites just one page landers though, one page sites don’t rank well in google results in my experience, you should power them with wordpress and write 5 to 10 posts for each one along with an about page, contact page etc. Google likes sites to have lots of unique content. You could link them all together for seo benefits, monetize the outpost sites with links back to your product and adsense, and rank for some good keyword phrases that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise..

I would start off by changing the title tag of SourcesOfInsight.com’s homepage to something like “Personal Development Training – Sources Of Insight”, with its Page Rank 4 it could rank for a medium to high search volume keywords (just need some backlinks with whatever keyword you are targeted as anchor text). The phrase ‘personal development training’ gets about 1600 searches per month, and the competition for that phrase isn’t too tough (’personal development’ is pretty locked up though as far as google top 10 results go, that phrase gets about 30,000 searches per month).

Also you might consider compiling some of your blog posts into a .pdf ebook titled something like “5 Secrets To Improving Your Life By 1000% Today” (some title that will really grab attention) and give it away in exchange for an email optin(I recommend using aweber to do with, and use them at gamesitebuilderx.com). Then you could grow your email list, and send emails once a week or so with affiliate links to good products. There is a lot of money in permission based email affiliate marketing, and personal development is a pretty profitable niche.

If you already have a domain and it’s not a great choice, what’s the solution? For example, does it ever make sense to buy more effective domains, create landing pages and send traffic back to your less-than-ideal-name domain?

There is a free Domain Background Check cheat sheet at http://siteriver.com/domaintest.php – just enter the domain name you are researching and over a dozen links are created to domain check, anti-malware, and other tools. You can quickly check if your domain name is ready for business or is still on parole.

Regards,
Alvin Tan

@Deneil – Yea you can rank high for keywords that aren’t in your domain name, but for example if two domains webhostinggeeks.com and deneilmerritt.com are both trying to rank for ‘webhosting’, and they both have the exact same keywords in their title, the exact same backlinks with the same anchor text, they are both pagerank 5, and have the exact same everything seo wise… webhostinggeeks.com will still ultimately rank higher because it gets that one extra point for having the keywords in its domain name(if you assign every ranking factor different amounts of points, like search engine algorithms do).

Ultimately search engine rankings aren’t all important though. What’s most important is that you diversify your traffic sources between many different free and paid sources, so that when search engine’s algorithm’s change and you ever lose your rankings, your business doesn’t die in one fell swoop. But you need a product(the best being digital information products or software) to do ppc or pay for traffic, which is another post in itself .