As well as purchasing a niche site for $155 I have also decided to try and build a niche site from scratch myself.
Ultimately the goal is to build 30 or so niche sites, find 5 that do well and grow them into authority sites. Then either sell off the rest or just keep the monthly income.
My Progress So Far
I started my niche site at the beginning of August 2012.
I purchased a exact match domain (.com) of a term that gets 1,000 searches per month with little competition.
I have written 4 or 5 articles (mostly over 1,000 words) and done some minor backlinking. I write 2 articles for ezinearticles and I am also using SocialAdr to build social bookmarks.
Traffic and Income
$0 in income so far but yesterday I had a breakthrough! My first traffic from Google. 2 visitors. One visitor for the phrase I am targeting and one for a random phrase I am not targeting.
Next Steps
I now want to build out more content. I want to have 11 articles as a minimum and I will do this over the next 6 weeks. I will keep tracking my keywords and see how I am going.