Supergeek

I spent like a hundred hours developing a site, and all I've gotten so far is like 8 lousy bucks. Competing with my earning ability is like playing Operation against Michael J. Fox.

abednego

im in too, details to come...

egonitron

hehe, I was debating whether or not to buy it, and at 11:59PM I gave in. I haven't used it yet but I plan to very soon, I hope it's all it's cracked up to be.

egonitron

Ok, I have a couple of quick questions. They might be stupid, but I'm a n00b


I'm starting to work on getting content up. I'm torn though. I have some cheap PLR content that I can run through a article rewriter to prevent dupe content. On that I was thinking about putting up AdSense ads on a bunch of Wordpress blogs, and just hoping for SE traffic because it wouldn't be very human-readable and affiliate links wouldn't work well, right?

On the other hand, I could spend more and get all unique content written, put up on wimilar Wordpress blogs, but instead of AdSense, use affiliate links.

I got WP Cloner from dealdotcom and I guess I can use that for the different niches no matter how I go. i was also thinking about using WPMU like Mike, but I'd like to try this first.

Am I even on the right track here? haha. Which one of those would you recommend? Are they both profitable?

Mike

Okay. You're the man, Mike, and I know when to listen:

Soulja Boy Dance Videos

Using ViScript. Basically going to set it and forget it. BTW, ViScript is by our very own Blogging Guide Aequitas. It's very simple to use and you can have a decent video blog up in a very short (read: 30 minutes or less by hand) time.

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Mike

I recommend you use the method that you feel the most comfortable with at the moment. Get the basics figured out, then move on to the other methods. Don't burn yourself out trying to figure out complicated shit, when you could spend that same time on the easier stuff and have a site finished.

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springer

Yeah, I'm kicking myself in the ass. I looked at it but forgot all about it until Mike made this thread. CRIPES! If I'm going to do this seriously, I'm gonna have to bite the hard one and pay full-boat, I guess.

Even if it saves you only 5 minutes, (it ought to save you TONS more) over time it'll add up. I just wasted about an hour duping my favorite template over to another site. I suppose, after I get used to the changes, it'll go quicker... but with the cloner I could do it in mere seconds.

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Mike

Just to add to my previous post:

Here's the Public Stats for the Soulja Boy blog: Summary (Soulja Boy)
And the link to ViScript: ViScript - Video Blogging Software

I think I'll throw a few more of these video blogs up tonight for celebrities. I'll get you the links and stats' links for them later.

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turbolapp

*ooops nevermind, figured it out * Nothing to see here...move along please

JamesH

Hey mike, my pinglist is bigger than yours

Mike

LOL!! Yeah, but it's not the size of the ping list you use, it's how you use it

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elime

Any thoughts on how much of a difference a large pinglist like that makes?

Also, hi. I'm new around here (and to the internet marketing game in general, to be honest), but I might have a couple things that will be of assistance to those interested in the video blog idea.

I started one about ten days ago and for the past week it's pulled in $.50-2.00 a day. I modeled it after Mark's post on video blogs. Traffic-wise it's getting around 100ish UVs per day, with a high of 141 (last Wednesday).

Maybe this will help out anyone looking to start: the step that was the biggest pain in the ass for me was effectively ripping videos, converting when necessary, and finally watermarking. Here are a few things I found that helped:

• DownloadHelper Firefox addon. This makes grabbing any .flv (or other media for that matter) an absolute breeze.
• Before you go messing with videos, it's good to have some kind of codec package installed so that you can actually view and compress/convert them. I suggest the K-lite Codec Pack. Get the "Full" version (free) and during the install make sure it's also a full install (the most codecs).
• Converting: Avidemux. A super simple program that will allow you to convert video files. Also a note on compression: I personally find that using the MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid4) compressor keeps the file closest to it's original size with minimal loss of quality.
• Watermarking: VirtualDubMod is pretty simple. There's a guide here on how to do it.

So the above should help you brand your videos. I have absolutely zero doubt there is a much easier/more efficient way to go about things, so don't take my word for it.

Pardon the long post, I hope it wasn't too off topic.

Notius

I am thinking about setting up a couple of auto blogs but I noticed that you (SEO_MIKE) and Eli both talk about have VP Servers that you are using. Is it a must for auto blogging or just Cycle sites?

Dave_IL

This is great timing and motivation for me

I am in, I am going to try a cycle site starting tonight. Picked a niche, got a domain with privacy, picked up some throw away hosting in case it goes bad.

Says instant setup so while I am waiting I am putting together RSS list (SEO_MIke any chance of selling your RSS scraper script?) I have an affiliate offer ready to go, and am going to use adsense.

Hopefully have everything done in the next few hours, and I will update in a day or so.

Dave

Mike

elime: Great Post! +rep

Notius: No, VPS hosting is not a must have unless you are going after a true cycle site. Then VPS or dedi is required. You'll crash a shared server with a cycle site. If you need a VPS, check out my sig. LiquidWeb r0x0rs! Eli like's Softlayer, I've never used Softlayer, but I'll probably get a dedi box with them someday to test them out.

Dave_IL: Nope, I won't sell it. It's not my script, I'll check with the person that wrote and see if it's okay to give it out. But basically, all it does is load a keyword list, and then it prints the feed list to a page.

Here's a simple scraper that I put together. http://sempros.net/feed-finder.php

And the code, so you can host your own:

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dragondancer

I have accepted your challenge. Putting it here makes it time to put up or shut up, so here it is.

Considered deleting this message so I could think about it some more... Ya know, make sure I'd thought of everything

That really is one of my pet peeves, people that talk, talk, talk and never do.

So here it is...Join the Joyvolution & Change the World! - RainbowRiver is my start.

Supergeek

You guys rock. Your altruism in helping other people compete in your marketplace is a little crazy, but it benefits me, so I'm cool with it.

shinysign

Looks great so far SEO Mike. May be a bit early to ask, but how do you plan on driving traffic to these sites without using ppc?

I also noticed on your stats that your soulja boy website already has about 20 unique visitors a day, how are they finding the site?

Mike

That's the beauty of blogs. Whenever you add a post, it tells the blogging world that there is a new post on your blog. So, when people search for blog posts about whatever you wrote about they may pick your's to visit.

Oh yeah, for anyone using my script from above, you might want to update it. Icerocket won't let you pull their feeds. So, I edited it above and changed it on my site.

And another thing, WP-Autoblog DOES work with WPMU! Rock on!

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Dave_IL

SEO_Mike thanks so much for the script. Its crazy I am techie enough that once I have a script I can figure out how to change things, but I cant start from scratch to save my life. I have a PHP CBT from Lynda.com I should start going through, programming would definitely pull my skill sets together.

Quick 24 hour update on the semi-cycle site. I had pulled about 20 feeds by hand, Googlebot had been by within 5 hours of going life, and traffic has been 58 visits, 32 uniques. I am running the script to grab some more feeds so we will see where we are tomorrow.

Thanks again,
Dave

springer

I'm using a plugin called feedwordpress to grab RSS feeds. It's not automatic, in so much as you have to manually input the feeds, but you get to pick and choose exactly the ones you want. In my mind, that avoids grabbing a feed from a blog that may have made a single post on your topic on the day you set up your scraper and will thereafter be way off topic.

Therefore, my feeds are all very tightly focused on my blogs topics. It does, however, update automatically, as often as I set the cron to run or, I can make it update manually. It also avoids making a bazillion posts every time it checks the feeds. I get about 10 or 15 new posts per day this way because I limit the number of feeds I use. I'm not interested in waving too many spam flags at the SEs.

I find my feeds with the google by searching for my topic in their blogs search thingy. I get to look at what it returns and pick out the best feeds to subscribe to for my topic.

I'm also not putting a huge list of ping services into WP. In fact, I don't let WP auto-ping at all. I even take out pingomatic so I can control when and how often pings go out. I use an external pinging program that I run no more than once per day.

I don't know if it still does but at one time WP pinged after every post, including edits. If you made a post, it pinged. If you went back and edited, it pinged. If it's still set up the same way, in the latest version, and you're grabbing dozens or hundreds or thousands of RSS posts per day, you're sending out that many pings.

I'm thinking it probably still works that way because it wasn't really designed to be used the way we're using it. It was originally designed to be an easy way for someone to manually blog and I don't see the hard core bloggers who manage it changing anything for making splogs.

These are simply a couple of my opinions about what works for me. Your mileage may vary and, by all means, go about setting up your own blogs and scrapers in your own fashion.

By the way, I'm not competing in this, I'm just along for the ride and tossing out a comment here and there if I think it might help someone.

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Aequitas

LETS MAKE SOME FUCKING MONEY

Alright once again I feel its about time I earn my keep around here so this is what I'm going to do and I'm simply going to teach all you noobs how to generate around $5000 in 2 months time so about $2500 a month maybe more and maybe less depending on how well or how lazy you are with what I'm going to tell you here.

I read over this thread and it seems like most are taking the automated blogging route and as Eli would put it begin to build your very own SEO Empire which is awesome for longer term stable income but what happens if you want a little bit of play money sooner then later well don't worry its possible to sacrifice some of your SEO Empire in order to give yourself some extra cash to excellerate your efforts (I Apologize for the spelling mistakes I'm going to make pre-hand).

Ok so how are you going to make about $5000 in two months with as little investment and as possible, well the simple explanation is your not what I'm going to tell you requires a small amount of investment but not much. Basically your investment is all in the domains your going to be buying.

Simply put you'll buy 10 domains for this so if you buy them one at a time it'll cost you about $17 each for a total cost of $170 but remember your going to be making about $5000 in only two months from now so a very little investment.

What you'll want to do pre-hand before you even look at your computer is tell your friends and family that they are not going to see you for just over a month or so, tell them your trying to commit social suicide that always goes over well.

Now I know I've covered this first part already so I'm simply going to direct you to my own blog where that post lies, that post is called Proper Keyword Research Is Powerful and basically what is outlined there is how to properly buy each of your domain names and how to properly do your pre-hand research I cannot stress this aspect enough right now, take a day and do your research it'll make you much more money if you do this pre-hand.

Now I'm going to tell you in 2 months time your all going to go to sitepoint (Or somewhere similar) and flip the blogs I'm going to tell you and your goal will be to score a $500 sale of each blog, now 10 blogs is equal to $5000 give or take the amount you'll get for selling it.

Sorry if I end up jumping all over with this but its a bigger area to cover, what I want to quickly talk about is what makes a damn blog sell on SitePoint (And probably most others) but I mainly sell mine on SitePoint. Oh did I mention that I have done this more then once and know it works.

So what makes your blog sell, well I've found out a few trends which always seem to do decently and the first aspect is a good quick and to the point sales copy and now I could easily take the time to write this longer then it has to be but here are a few links of some active and non-active SitePoint blogs for sale or were for sale which have in my experince a selling pitch worth buying into.

NorthxEast
Alexa 100K
#1 Google

Now I don't want to post my newest auction for the sake that I don't want everyone to think this is a sales pitch post for it or some shit but fuck it click here to view it because I got a $100 bid in my first 5 minutes of the auction and I'm proud of that aspect.

What they all have in common is a super easy to read, to the point, honest aspect about them, they don't dick around they simply say hey here are the stats they speak for themselves buy this thing and most of the time they have no problem selling so remember simple, to the point, sales copies.

Ok back on topic with making your sites, what you'll want to do is think up hotter topics which people would love commenting on, the more comments your blog gets the better chance you'll get more money for it, interactive return visitors are valuable, so think of topics that you can get comments for.

Now I'm going to refer back to my (Well for the time being) Hannah Montana blog. This blog is the absolute perfect example I personally have to show you what your looking for in a site and I bet your wondering why.

The reason is that first off its a topic for young teen girls and we all know what they do, if you have kids you know they talk on the phone for hours, if you can remember back to your teen days do you remember the girls calling you and talking on the phone for days and days well that type of behaviour has basically carried over to the blog arena, this is an aspect of why I choose to do this blog its because I knew after the first little push of comments the readers would take care of the rest with there own comments.

Next I choose the site because of how sweet and tempting the pre-hand research for it was, simply put the term Hannah Montana gets searched something like 500,000 times per month in Google, now go look at the top 10 search results for Hannah Montana and check over how many backlinks each of those 10 sites have but to save you the time the answer is sweet fuck all and anyone with some unique content and some backlink building knowledge could kill the competition.

This is all selling features as well even considering when we sell our sites most probably won't be indexed in Google because of the method I'm going to show you, the reason for this is because the sites have the potential to be great income earners and if you show people that it generates excitement in a way. Look at a feature with Hannah Montana, the feature is low-competition with high search volume that is a possible great income earner.

So go out and choose your 10 sites, do your keyword research looking for lower competition but higher search types of niches and terms, next comes the part of building those 10 sites and honestly its not going to be easy for most but for me its easy only because I've been building sites, designing them, search engine optimizing them for a long time now and I've got a system of templates in place which make it go quick.

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Aequitas

The first part in building these sites are going to be a very targeted unique design, it is pretty easy to sit down and push out one of these designs, I mean look at me I'm no designer but I managed to push out a nice targeted unique design for Hannah Montana, also notice in my sales copy I stated that the design is unique and cannot be found anywhere else on the internet (Selling feature).

Next comes putting the content in the site and lots will say does it have to be unique and my honest answer is for this method no it does not matter and again look at my example for this (Hannah Montana) I swear none of that site has unique content.

If your site is going to be on a TV show make sure that show isn't past its second season cause if it is then it'll take a long time to catch up on it, so back to building content, what you can do is first think up some categories that will go good with the site, again refering back to the Hannah Montana site what you'll see is that I sat down and said ok what categories can I build upon for this site.

As you can tell I put videos, news, lyrics, cast biographies, and some free wallpapers. The reason I choose all of these things is because I know that each of those can be taken from other sites without being worried from others because well news is free content to everyone, lyrics are the same thing, wallpaper well you should put in your own touch, and videos are fair play to post on your site.

Now the trick comes with comments and as you post you also post comments until your users begin to also post comments, how this works is simple, if your posting a video from say YouTube simply post the YouTube comments for those videos on your site as well from there randomize it and continue to do that with everything so your whole site appears to have a solid reader base before it even does, this will encourage your visitors to post comments on your site, trust me it works for start up sites.

After your readers are posting comments then you no longer have to include the comments right after your posts because its done for you plus thats a bit of unique content for you so posting the comments on your blog from the source of the content is only to intice your inital readers to also post comments, stats also show if people comment on your site they are much more likely to return to your site.

And that is basically it, make sure you SEO it with some plugins and make sure you add a lot of posts over 2 months, by lots I mean in the range of 70 for each site, also each site should have around or over 200 comments (Across the whole site) then do some link building and flip that fucker for some cash.

I know this system is nothing new its been talked about time and time again but if you need some quick cash it does work you just have to take the time, all together for me being more advanced in site building it takes me about 1 to 2 full days to fully set up each site, that includes everything after that each one only takes maybe 10 minutes to update each week, so 10 minutes per day really, then I focus on link building the site.

You can also score some sweet traffic by downloading YouTube videos on the topic embeding your website url in them and re-uploading them to YouTube, and a wack load of other video sites, all will help increase the value of each blog.

I'll stop there and await any questions which I'm sure lots of you will have since this post was kinda scattered and fragmented.

But as Mike would say its all a matter of actually sitting down and getting it done, if you sit here and read all day long and learn thats great and all but you'll never make anything if you don't begin to try these things out on your own and put your own twists on them.

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Mike

Damn! Nice add Aequitas!

Well, for all of you that didn't have a plan before, there's a great one laid out point by point. Imagine telling your friends and family around Christmas time that you just made $5000 on the internet. Yeah, they'll shit all over themselves. It'll make for great dinner conversation.

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springer

Quotes like these that give me a hilarious visual or make me do a double take are the priceless kind of tidbits that keep me clicking the new posts button long after I should have left. I know they're rarely intentional but that's exactly what makes them so good.

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Supergeek

Great post.

Being told how to do something, and then hearing a personal account like Aequitas posted are two different things. I've read about site flipping before, but the personal touch really brings it home for me.

Have you calculated your hourly wage flipping sites, Aequitas? I made decent money at my "real job" but I've grown to loathe it because I have to do uninteresting shit. Building sites is fascinating and fun.

emp

Your wife still feeding you that line, eh?

::emp::

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Aequitas

Thanks Everyone.

As for knowing exactly how much per hour I would make doing this well I don't have an exact number to give you because I do so many things that make money its hard to calculate one aspect into it but what I can do is give you an estimate based upon the average profit made from flipping the site based upon the average time required to set up the site and get it sold.

Now I can usually get $500 for site flipping this is why I've given this number as an example and each site takes me initially about 10 hours of set up. In that 10 hours I can research the niche, buy the site, design it, catch up on content for the site, and begin my link building after if I wish to continue.

Link building I try to outsource more and more but I usually only spend about $50 bucks outsourcing some links, then I take about 5 hours total to do my own link building (Over a period of time).

So total it works out to be about $33 bucks per hour per site which in the town I live in is more money then 70 or higher percent of the people here make (I live in a low-budget town lol).

Now if you were to calculate that another way based upon total time from day one to sale day it works out to about $8 per day per site, not a whole lot right, times that by 10 and site flipping alone makes you $80 per day, $2400 per month or $28,800 per year doing it.

So in retro-spect it depends on how you look at it, it might not make sense to some people to do it but it might make perfect sense to someone else, honestly it makes sense to me to do it and I'll let you in on more of the mathmatics of the site flipping business model.

First lets say you've been doing this for a few months, really if you wanted a stable $2,000 per month you'd have to sell 10 sites at $200 each, every single month, now to get $200 per site should be fuck all to get after the site is live for 2 months and has some traffic, ect.

Now with a proper template system and after you begin to automate your backlinks more and get better at things you can speed things up a lot, you can easily push out 1 site each and every day, lets say you work 5 days a week and take the weekends off like normal people (But trust me we are not normal workers we are dedicated and work 7 days a week, well you will if your new and not making anything at least I hope your that dedicated).

But anyway thats 5 sites a week or about 20 sites a month your making, after awhile your selling 10 sites a month and banking the other 10, I say banking because what you could easily do here is take the 10 sites which could get you at least $200 so the ones that are about the 2 months old range sites, make sure these ones are your lowest income earning sites, sell them off and use a portion of the income to support and advance your larger earning sites.

See where this is leading, its a new model based upon site flipping alone, you can easily continually bank 10 of your more profitable sites per month, and loose 10 of your least profitable sites per month to advance your 10 more profitable sites but after awhile you'll have 100 or so banked sites because each month you are banking no less then 10 sites on top of the 10 last month.

This is building upon Eli's SEO empire in a way where you can support yourself to do this stuff full time and help pay for your empire, once your empire levels are built (Give it time even a year lets say) you will have built a large network of sites to support any larger newer and possibly more profitable sites you may want to have.

In reality its all about having laid yourself out a plan of attack because trust me (Had a 2 year learning experince with this) if you don't have a plan of attack or a set plan then you'll end up getting no where.

They say everyone should have a business plan to work upon even if your an individual working on your own company, I never knew how helpful one really was until I began creating and following through on it.

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BeerHat

Nice post Aequitas, I thought about doing this with cycle sites. For example I have one that has got about 4k links in 3 weeks time. These sites will eventually burn out (I'm guessing) so I was thinking why not unload them somewhere like sitepoint? Have you had any luck using autoblogs for flipping?

I mean it takes literally all of 30 minutes to set one up if you want to go with a standard wordpress template...so even if you get $100 it's not bad.

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emp

Gyys, I HATE to admit it, but what are you refering to as cycle sites?

I dimly remember a post at bluehatSeo... is that correct?
Someone enlighten me, I did not have enough coffee yet this morning.

::emp::

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BeerHat

Ha! I've already had my first cup.

Cycle sites are autoblogs with hundreds of feeds as the source. They pump out a few hundred posts a day...which equals almost as many trackbacks.

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emp

OK, thought so.
Thanks.

::emp::

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ubaidabcd

Really dumb question, what are feeds? Sorry I'm completely new to blogging, never read blogs, or write blogs, just started creating some for IM. I know what RSS feeds are. They can give you updates of somebody's blog, but this isn't the same thing is it?

I think I understand everything else like the simple stuff like installation and getting the designs done and what-not, but all the plug-ins stuff and feeds I haven't really looked into. So if you have links instead of explaining it that would help.

Aequitas

Honestly the plan I laid out above has to technically be done by a certain level of cycle sites, think about it if your working on 20 sites per month trying to make at least 60 indexed posts before you sell it for maximum profit then thats 40 posts per day or one post every 8 minutes if your working 5 hours per day, sure 16 minutes for a 10 hour day but thats a fucking headache to manage that many sites at once by yourself.

You've got to automate the process a bit differently when you automate the sites you plan on flipping, for instance you want to get as much indexed without getting the site banned, a proven fact well as far as I know your site won't get banned for 10,000 videos, so a cycle video site could do well but it also won't get indexed that easily without lots of unique comments.

However a bunch of videos mixed with duplicate news stories and some unique articles here and there could do well, fuck these days its like 10 bucks for shitty 1000 PLR rights articles, sure there not unique but most are more unique then what you'll get from a simple Google search.

It really boils down to keeping the site un-banned while keeping it automated, get at least 100 unique per day stable (Preferably more), and around 1,000 backlinks will show that the site has potential to become something. Also helps a ton if people are actively commenting, so how do you get active comments from RSS Feeds, well you post full text feeds instead of summaries, sure there a lot harder to find but there out there.

Basically when flipping your only trying to stay un-banned while raking in the traffic as much as possible, your not trying to make a full blown indexed site (Yes it helps and will be 10 times more profitable but its also 10 times harder and takes 10 times longer).

Really though your final selling feature lies in how much potential the site could have, while providing proven traffic stats and again even better profit stats.

Not hard think about it .50 cents per day = $20 per month, so tell the buyer the site makes $20 per month (Your being honest), now most are willing to pay at least $60 for a site making $20 per month, the investment is good but there willing to pay $200 or more if the site makes $20 per month with the potential to earn tons more.

See how that works haha.

The term feed is short for RSS feed just like RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication.

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turbolapp

I know how you feel. I've been working on something completely different for a while now but I knew I would need to dive into blogging someday. SEO Mikes post was perfect timing as I had just started with a blog. I hadn't really heard much about wordpress MU so I decided to try that as well. But after that I'm at a complete loss for what I should be doing next. I'm looking at plug ins and rss feeds but so far I haven't had much success (just look at thefirstgentleman.net I have this big white blank spot in the middle of the page where the adsense plug in should be showing ads) I got really frustrated last night and my husband made me take a break (I think he was a little scared of me as I looked something like this ) I think this really is a thread for the more technical newbies, which is great because I'm sure there's alot of them out there.

Anyway, here I am again today too ignorant to be able to figure all this out fast enough to completely follow along with you guys but to godamned stubborn to quit.

Mike

Turbolapp, if the technical side is screwing you up, then ask us. Somebody here can help, I guarantee it. WPMU is very technical. I should have mentioned that before, if you don't have access to a WHM cPanel and your http.conf file, you CAN NOT set it up properly on your own. You WILL have to contact your host's tech support department.

For those of you that are more technical and have access to both those items, here is a great installation walkthrough: Installing WordPress MU on a CPanel/WHM Server

Again, let me reiterate, the purpose of this challenge is to get people doing something. If you've decided to do cycle sites: great, flipping sites: great, one very unique blog / site: great. It doesn't matter, just do something you are comfortable with. If you are comfortable pushing your technical limits, then do that. If you feel more comfortable working on content rather than technical, fine, do that.

For the lurkers that are still confused, let me lay done a super simple project to get you started. This will eliminate the worries about finding RSS feeds, setting up a server, etc.

1. Start with an idea, and do your niche research. Go to Google and find sites about your niche, read blogs, check Wikipedia, etc.
2. Go to Wordpress.com, Blogger.com or Squidoo.com and sign up for a free account.
3. Personalize your blog / site. Set your options, etc.
4. Start blogging. Make it a point to get at least one new post out per day.
5. Once you have some content, at least a week's worth, start dropping small ads onto the end of your posts. Squidoo is actually the easiest to monetize.
6. Continue on this path until you feel you would like to start your own site on your own webhost.

Hopefully, that will get even more people involved. Out of the 3 sites I listed above, I think Squidoo would be the best to learn on. You have more options for layouts, personalization and monetization than Blogger or Wordpress.

Don't forget to ask questions if you get lost.

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Bofu2U

Very true. I've got about 9 or 10 WPMU installs, running over 1000 auto-content-generating blogs. Probably about 100,000 posts a day, give or take - depending on spidering activity. Let me tell you though, once you get going with it - it's worth every hassle and problem.

Turbo, I've AIM'd you offering WPMU assistance if you need it.

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JamesH

Great job guys, lots of good shit in here.

Mike

I agree. I think that everyone has done a wonderful job of keeping this thread on topic, and the people that have jumped in to help...well, wow!

Emp - he's the Newbie Guide for a reason. Great to have him here.
Mike Krongel - President of Copeac. Mike's one of those people that could easily say "Let others help the n00bs, I've got bigger affiliates to worry about", yet he's always right there to lend a hand to even the n00biest of n00bs.
Aequitas - Blogmaster supreme. I'm very happy that he jumped in here to lend support and help out. If you need to know anything about blogging, he's the man.
Bofu2u - Extremely dedicated and a super technical guy to know. He's helped me out with many PHP problems. Glad to have him jumping in here too.

And all the self proclaimed n00bs willing to jump in with both feet. That's the aspect of this thread that really gets me excited. I know we're just getting started, but I can't wait to start hearing about all of your successes, and to help you through the tight spots.

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turbolapp

thanks Bofu2u

You know everyone at wf (with the exception of a teeny tiny few) are REALLY cool people and I'm really honored to be here.

/sappy moment.

Dave_IL

Aequitas - That post on researching keywords was excellent. I have always been a weak in that area, and following your post I found a great niche that should work well for your idea within 20 minutes. The bonus part is the cycle blog I started 2 days ago is close enough in the same niche that once it burns out I can forward the links and they will be related.

Thanks again to everyone! Off to build out that first blog

gerMAN

Sorry,I´m not that much into that SEO stuff but how do you actually automate backlinks? I mean isn´t it hard to automate something that is very unique for every site you build?

Brilliant post btw.

morphy

what hosting resources do you need to handle 100k posts/day?? I got a few VPS' already running with a few 100s domains and I'm not sure if I can add this on them

Thx in advance

Aequitas

It can be hard to find a variety of automated backlink systems, because of the uniqueness of each blog but the RSS Exploiter from RuDeDoDg is a good place to start, after that quit or squirt your site, do a couple hours of building by yourself (When you have time) and then pay $50 bucks to outsource someone like Kemesh to do 1000 directory submissions, sure only a fraction will eventually stick and count as backlinks but all of which can and will help out.

One of the hardest parts of SEO is link building, well in my mind its one of the hardest parts because its a very important part, it takes the longest, and it can be the most boaring after doing it by hand for awhile.

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Supergeek

If someone would care to take a look at my site and give me some advice on monetization, I'd appreciate it.

ezsmiley.com

I'm a total marketing noob, but I got 800 visits yesterday and 700 so far today, and I want to know what I'm doing wrong because I've only made a couple bucks. I don't want you to give me fish... Teach a noob how to fish and he'll be able to buy fish sticks for him and his wfe for life...

argh01

This blog post here made me think.
Rephraser » Blog Archive » SEO Army

He says to build a network of blog links, no two link directly to each other. I'm not so good at going to each of 50 blogs and updating the links manually so here's a little something for you.. Yeah I wrote this and yeah you can do whatever with it. I'll be mentioning it out there in the wild shortly.

In a directory, create a group of files, one for each of your hosts.
wordpress.list, squidoo.list, et cetera.

Inside each file should be a list of domains, one per line.

Run this script, and you should wind up with a group of opml files that you can import into your link manager ( for instance, in wordpress, go to links, import links ).

This isn't the final version of this script, but gives you something to start with if the thought of figuring that out on your own gives you the shivers.

russ@badger:~/work/build_network$ cat wordpress.list
wordpress1
wordpress2
wordpress3
wordpress4
wordpress5
wordpress6
wordpress7
wordpress8
They should be unique.

modify the first line of this script with your "real" path to perl.
modify the third line of this script with your list of lists
#!/usr/bin/perl

@networks = qw( wordpress blogger livejournal squidoo);

foreach $foo ( @networks ) {
@{$foo}=();
open( $handle, '<'.$foo.'.list' );
while( <$handle>) {
chomp;
$value = $_.'.'.$foo.'.com';
push ( @{$foo}, $value );
}
close( $handle );
}
# read the files need to output the files
$modulo = scalar( @networks );

foreach $foo ( @networks ) {
# clean out the old stuff.


for ( $x = 1; $x <= $modulo; $x++ ) {
open( $handle, "> $foo".$x.'.opml' );
print $handle "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>
<opml version=\"1.1\">
<head>
<title>ourFavoriteFeedsData.top100</title>
<dateCreated>Fri, 02 Jan 2004 12:59:58 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Fri, 23 Jul 2004 23:41:32 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Random User</ownerName>
<ownerEmail>randomEmailWithAtSignEscaped</ownerEmail>
<expansionState></expansionState>
<vertScrollState>1</vertScrollState>
<windowTop>20</windowTop>
<windowLeft>0</windowLeft>
<windowBottom>120</windowBottom>
<windowRight>147</windowRight>
</head>
<body>\n";

close( $handle );
}
foreach $bar( @networks ) {
if ( $bar ne $foo ) {
$i=0;
foreach $baz( @{$bar} ) {
$j = $i++ % $modulo;
if ( $j > 0 ) {
open( $handle, " >> $foo".$j.'.opml' );
$opml_line="<outline text=\"something or other \" description=\"something else\" url=\"http://".$b
az."\" />\n";
print $handle $opml_line;
close( $handle );
}
}
}
}
close( $handle );
}

# close up shop
#
foreach $foo ( @networks ) {
for( $x = 1; $x <= $modulo; $x++ ) {
open( $handle, ">> $foo".$x.'.opml' );
print $handle "</body>\n</opml>\n";
}
}

snapcount

Disclaimer: I suck too at this, but here's my $0.02

The aff offers you're pushing on your site don't seem like a good fit to the demographic you're likely to get to this type of site. For example... you're metabolism ad says, "Attention women age 25-54!" buy our don't be a fat fucking waste of space anymore magic pills!

I would think your traffic is probably in the 11 - 22 yo range. i.e., middle school, high school, college, myspace and facebook types. I would say ringtone offers, free ipod touch, madden 08 zip submits, etc.

Again, I've managed to loose a bunch of money so far take it as you will.

bubbles

You can go even more targetted then that. What about that program that lets you add a gazillion smilies to AIM and email? Use that.

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LazyHippy

Great thread - loads of useful info.

There seems to be a bit of confusion about Eli's cycle site method, especially when compared to splogs or aggregated content blogs.

From what I understand, the aim of cycle sites is to get trackback links, not to get them indexed. (Eli suggested cycling them as soon as they start to appear in the search engine results.) A splog you might slowly build up over time, submit through SQUIRT/QUIT, gain links and aim to get a lot of pages indexed... A cycle site aims for massive amounts of posts (suggested, start with 10k feeds) to gain trackbacks on small percentage of them, then 'cycle' it after a month or so - replace WP and redirect where needed.

I started on some cycle sites using wpmu (seems ideal for it imho - works well), but on shared hosting... I very quickly got IP banned from Google blogsearch! Oops! I know I need a bigger variety of feeds (and prob to put it through a proxy too) but I've now listened to everyone and will be sorting out a dedicated box soon - due to the resources these use it is generally not recommended on shared or VPS hosting and a lot of peeps have suggest min 2Gb RAM on a dedi box.

A few bluehat pennies have just dropped for me and I've taken a step back to working on building the foundation sites - massive database sites that again I don't expect to make much cash but (hopefully) generate a lot of link juice.

SEO 'empire' building is a long-term game and I don't think cycle sites are the best place for newcomers to start due to the server resources required and their aim being to build links and authority, not necessarily making any more cash than paying their rent.

If anyone has them working well on shared or VPS let me know which companies don't mind your sites keeping the servers busy! Going by the speed my first db site is running I think I'll need a dedi for them too.. although that could just be my shitty newb coding!

Aequitas... great post. What's the deal with viscript now? Who's selling it. (Sounds ideal for the vid-blogs-to-flip method.). Not really thought about site flipping before - kinda amazed at how profitable it can be! Nice one. (Another thing added to the ever-growing list!)

I've only been in the game about 6 months and very much consider myself a noob, one of the big problems I've found is staying focussed on one project. It's often been the case of start something, hit a wall, go back and learn more.. then get distracted and move onto something else! Eli's 'SEO Empire' strategy has helped me focus more and see how all the bits can fit together - definitely recommended reading!

I'm still fighting the temptation to stop my very slow database site building and move to focussing on something which will make cash now....

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Mike

Great point LazyHippy about the Cycle Sites. I neglected to explain them much previously because I assumed (uh oh) that everyone would read Eli's post and understand that they are build-fast-die-young-get-you-backlinks type of sites. I guess I need to be more careful about what / how I post. Thanks for that!

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