n00bie Challenge

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Mike

Mike

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Jun 27, 2006
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On the firing line
We all started somewhere, and sometimes it takes a challenge to really get the blood flowing. So, I'm throwing down the guantlet, and challenging you n00bs to make some money.

A couple posts got me thinking about this. Check out:
The first post talks about making money with RSS scraping and auto blogging. Bam Bam is making about $8 per day with one of his auto blogs in his first month. Awesome! He took an idea that he found here and ran with it instead of sitting around doing nothing.

The second is from Eli's BlueHatSEO site. Eli lays out the initial framework and mindset for building your own SEO empire. If you don't already read BlueHatSEO, you need to. Take some time off from WickedFire and read his blog.

The goal of my challenge is:
  • Help you make money
  • Get you off of your ass and doing something
  • Teach you that persistence pays off
The toughest part of Internet Marketing is just doing something. I remember when I started, it took me 6 months of reading and thinking before I got the guts to try something. That's stupid. Once I started doing something, things started to pick up and I started making money. Now, I'm not Mr. Baller here, but I'm working on it. When I'm making 6 figures per month, then I'll be happy. :D

Here's the rules: you have to build sites, blogs, do ppc, anything. The guy with the most revenue / profit after 60 days wins. Simple.

What do you win? Self esteem, bragging rights, the money you make, skillz that you can expand on to make more money, and possibly something from WickedFire (I have to run that by the powers-that-be first).

I'm going to participate in this as well using a Wordpress mU setup. This is something I haven't tested, and now seems like the perfect time. Something I'll also do for you is post the links, niches, etc that I use. I don't expect you to do the same, but I'm going to. I think it will be a great way to get things started and if you get stumped, you can just steal one of my ideas ;)

Good luck to everyone! Can't wait to see what shapes up!
 


Alright I guess this means I have to finish trying to figure out wordpress. I managed to get it installed the other day and then the freakin themes had me yelling obscenities at the computer and haven't peeked at it since.:angryfire:
 
Alright, I'm in. I'm going to try a variety of projects, but I'll be keeping track of my autoblogging project here.

My plan for today is to finish writing the autoblogger I wrote. Tomorrow, I will set up two domains each with 5 autoblogs (on subdomains). Each autoblog will have a different niche.

I'll use Eli's QUIT tool to try and get indexed quickly. I'll try and build links by using Eli's RSS trick and by doing some manual link dropping. Maybe I'll try my hand at building throw-away blogs on Blogger.com and Wordpress.com and using those to link to my autoblogs as well. I just need to figure out the best way to attack it and automate it.

I'll start by just using AdSense, but I might add in other ads or affiliate links. My goal is to be making 50 cents a day per autoblog. I think it should be doable and I will hopefully have everything so automated that I can ramp up to several hundred autoblogs in no time flat, at which point the autoblogs would be making decent money and would also be able to provide my other projects with backlinks.

Let me know if you see any big flaws in my plan and if you have any niche suggestions for autoblog topics (although I could probably pick some out of a hat). It will be interesting to see how quickly (or slowly or if at all) my autoblogs ramp up in traffic.
 
Yep, I'm a noob here... been lurking for a couple of weeks and you people are just so fuckin funny. Well done Mike for setting up this challenge, I'm ready to go...

I'm going over to the links you suggest but can you please explain a little more about wordpress mu and what you'll be doing with it.
 
If you're having problems Lauren, PM me and I'll see what I can do to help.

Okay, here's my main page for the Wordpress mU site:
Welcome to X7G.net

It actually lists all of the blogs. I just went through and created all of those under the admin account. Don't bother trying to sign up for your own blog there unless you have an email address that is about 20 characters long and matches the bullshit one that I put in the admin panel for signups ;)

If you need a free blog account, check out Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or one of the thousands of others out there.

The blogs I just set up are off the top of my head or ideas taken from various sources. SearchEngineWatch has a good list of sites to get ideas from. Just for your info, my list is not necessarily even a good one, just shit I threw at the wall for now. I may throw some out, add others, etc. My personal goal for those sites is to have them skinned and some content on them by the middle of next week.

I'm going to be using Adsense primarily for these blogs, and some targetted CPA ads (mostly from Copeac, of course). The site is setup on a LiquidWeb VPS account, so I should have plenty of room to grow.
 
whynot said:
I'm going over to the links you suggest but can you please explain a little more about wordpress mu and what you'll be doing with it.
Click to expand...

Welcome to WickedFire!

Wordpress mU is a multi-user setup of WP. It allows you to create new blogs under one primary domain. It will setup the new blogs under a subdomain, or subdirectory. The biggest drawback to it is the setup. I couldn't figure out how to allow WPMU to do automatic subdomains, so I had to contact LiquidWeb to set it up for me. No big deal really, but still annoying.

If you can't get WPMU set up, don't worry, this is just how I'm doing it. If you're more comfortable building static sites: Great! That will work also. Check out OSWD for a bunch of free templates.

If you are more technical, you can try setting up some YACG or RSSGM sites. Whatever gets you going.
 
I'll take that challenge too.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing but it won't be the yogareflection.com site you saw from the n00bie thread (since I've already started it, I had a head start). I'll find something new and use it for your challenge.

I'm starting from a goose egg too, with regards to affiliate ads. My daily average for adsense is, uh twenty cents or so.
 
Mike, How about if you make this idea/challange one of your blogs? You can blog about your journey with WordpressMU and helping lead the n00bs along the way. That way we can spare this thread getting too big, and also we can see what you're doing in real time, and make comments and post questions there?

Just a thought.

This is good timing and gives me just the push I needed.
 
Hello, I am a newbie as well.

This is a good post. I am not sure which approach to take, here is the other approach from an earlier post when someone was asking what to do with 80 dollars:

"My final suggestion, do what Smaxor said- or hang on to your money and read your ass off for now, cuz you don't have a clue what you're doing and you will just lose it and give up."

So I don't know which is better, read for a while and learn or just jump in and start messing with things. Both have their advantages.

Advantage of not doing anything for a while is you don't lose needless money that you could of kept if you knew what you were doing. Of course you don't make money either. Advantage of doing something is you could make money, but also you could lose it and get frustrated.

Which do you think is the better approach?
 
Since I've gotten my custom site "finished" for the most part, now I can start pushing out the money makers. I'm game for this challenge.

I have no problem with the technical side... Marketing is my Achilles' Heel.
 
seo_mike.jpg
 
Mike, you're awesome :) I'm having the same problem. I keep reading around all day but I don't end up actually doing anything. I was going to start by setting up each blog on it's own domain, would you recommend saving money and putting then all on sub-domains even if they're different subjects?
 
I'll join in. I've got a video blog I started but never took anywhere. We'll see how it goes.
 
Awesome! Great to see so much participation so early in the game!

Looks like I need to clarify a few things:
  1. How you build your sites / landing pages is unimportant. I'm using WPMU, but that doesn't mean you have to. I may even do some static sites for shits and giggles.
  2. Reading and learning is great, but your learning will accelerate like crazy by doing. So, IMO, it's best to jump in with both feet.
  3. If you are uncomfortable with scripts like WP, but have some basic HTML knowledge, build a static site and go from there. If you need help installing Wordpress or another script, ask for help. If I can't help, then there is probably someone else that can.
Turbolapp asked me via PM what the next step is after getting Wordpress installed. Well, let's start by pointing people to this thread for the definitive answer. I'll provide the short answer.

After I get Wordpress installed, I'll upload several different themes and plugins. Once I get the themes and plugins uploaded, I'll go about setting all the options I want and turning on the plugins.

This is the list of options I change / edit:
  • Under Options, I edit the tagline, blog address (if needed), membership and what day of the week to start on. WP defaults to Monday, I like it to start on Sunday. Then hit "Update" to save.
  • Next, I go to the Writing tab and add some additional sites to ping under Update Services. This is the list I currently use:
    Code: 
    http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
  • Moving along, I go to the Reading tab, and change the Syndication Feeds to 10 and "Use Summary". I do this so that if someone uses my RSS feed for their own splog, they won't get the whole article. This will only work if you use the "More" button when writing your posts. For my splogs, I don't bother with this setting.
  • Under Discussion, I uncheck the email notification stuff (I get enough crap in my mailbox) and check the box for "Administrator must always approve a comment" This controls spam.
  • Skip Privacy
  • For Permalinks I use
    Code: 
    /%category%/%postname%/
    That way my URLs show up as
    Code: 
    http://www.my-blog.tld/category/post-name
    This is for SEO reasons. Not a big deal, but every little bit helps.
  • Skip Misc
  • Done
I like using Wordpress because: a) I'm used to it and can set it up very quickly. b) It's very widely supported. c) See a.

If you plan on building static sites, that's fine, just don't forget to ping the aggregators occasionally. This will tell them that your site / page has fresh content and hopefully draw the spiders (Search Engine spiders that is).

Umm...time for a cigarette...I'll add more later :D
 
Meant to add: The goal of the sites is to make money. Period. So don't get too attached to one site / one idea. Diversify. This is about numbers and doing something.

Momentum brings momentum. In other words, a rock rolling downhill only picks up speed, it doesn't slow down. If you are just sitting on your ass reading WickedFire and not spending any time working on sites, then you'll notice that your revenue starts dropping. But if you pile a heap of shit on your plate and just dig in, you'll see your revenue go up and your forum reading go down.

Plus as an added benefit, you're knowledge of what works and what doesn't will increase exponentially. The information you get on WickedFire is all theory and hearsay until you put it into practice. Once you start working it, you'll see what really works for you and what doesn't. The only way to get that knowledge is to do the work. You can't learn that any other way. Period.

/end one thought/

Another thing I meant to address was cost. I'm going to be doing this as cheaply as possible. I don't want to spend any money if possible. That's one reason I'm using WPMU. I'm not going to spend any money on PPC at all, I'm not going to buy banner ads or links, I'm not going to buy content. This should all be about getting dirty and doing the labor yourself.

If you are a TOTAL n00b to internet marketing and need hosting, domain name, etc, you can figure you'll spend about $20 to get started. $9.95 at Hostgator (or somewhere else) for hosting on a shared server, and about $7 - 10 for a domain (Use GB3 at GoDaddy and get .com's for $6.95). If you can't afford $20, then donate some plasma. They'll pay you at least $20.

Finally, if that doesn't convince to get something started, contact me. I'll be happy to get out the bullwhip and kick your ass.
 
I want to get in on this. Right now I feel like I've been throwing shit at a wall and watching it slide down all the while praying something will stick. So far, nothing is really sticking. I've also been trying to think of a way to contribute to this forum when I don't know what the fuck I'm doing so perhaps I can learn and help someone else at the same time.

This is what I've got so far and my plan. In all fairness I started about 2 months ago but I am in the red so in my eyes I have to make up the loss ( ~$800 ) just to catch up with everyone who started yesterday at $0. Also, this is a really long post so sorry.

The Plan:

1 - I'm running email and zip submits (non-incentivised) from copeac for 4 days now. Current strategy with this is voting pages. Two of these are direct from ad to offer via an instant redirect. The other three are ad -> my vote page -> offer. I have everything running from a CMS/App framework so I can put these up very quickly which is nice. I have my affiliate links cloaked... I think. The link posts to my site which does a redirect to the offer with my aff id... I figure more people will click if they don't realize they are about to leave the site and it may help a bit with SEO.

This is currently a looser overall. It's been running PPC from 7search.

Stats - 408 clicks @ $43.44 (0.11/AvgCPC), CTR - 162 (Vote -> Offer), Conv - 6 @ $8 (Entered email or zip), Net loss -$35.34

I tried running these with AW and the fuckers wouldn't start running the ads for 2 days and then they would jump in CPC drastically w/i a few hours. I did my best to optimize the pages (meta-tags, relevant content, privacy & contact pages, friendly urls with keywords in them and keywords in title)

With this I'm going to let it ride for a while as I'm guessing I haven't had enough traffic to really know if it will do well. Extremely open to suggestions on how not to suck.

2 - I implemented the Black Hole SEO idea from Eli's blog. I started with RudeDoggs software which worked great but I wanted something I could run from my server instead of my home PC with windows. I also wanted some diff features so I rolled my own with MySQL/Perl/Crontabs.

For this month it's made 2.5GB of rss files and consumed ~ 20GB bandwidth and generated ~ 2.5 million fake posts. I'm targeting 5 backlinks, 2 -> index pages, 3 -> deeplinks.

The two sites it's trying to get backlinks for are affiliate based sites (CJ offers)... content heavy to the niche. It's been running for about 1.5 months and I show 60 backlinks that I can attribute to fake posts in Yahoo and 0 in Google. The sites are ranking in the top 100 results on Google for several of my keywords though which is good.

I don't pay for any advertising for these sites and threw adwords up. Adwords has made like $3 though. I get about 40 uniques a day on each one. I also paid Kamesh to directory submissions for me for 1000 deeplinks and 1000 regular links. About 15 of those show up in Yahoo and 0 in Google after about 2 months.

Overall I'm about $300 in the red from buying the software from RudeDogg initially and paying for dir submissions. My plan here is to give the backlinks time to get indexed and drive traffic organically. If I can get traffic I will focus on getting the aff offers to convert. Hopefully adsense will continue to throw a few dollars in every once in a while. This is a longer term investment.

3 - I read the SEO Empire post from ELI. I auto-generated two db sites and can do them in about 4-5 hours now. The first one has ~ 23K pages the other has ~6K. I used Eli's QUIT tool on them and now have about 40 pages indexed by Google between the two sites. I put them up like 2 weeks ago. I have adsense on every page but neither of them have made any money yet.

Plan is to build more of these... I have 4 or 5 more content databases and have got my autogen script to where I can modify it pretty quickly for this type of site. I'm going to add links to each of these pages to the sites I spoke of in #2 above to help with SERPs.

That's all. Sorry for writing a fucking novel. If anybody has any questions about what I've done I'd be happy to answer them. If anything stands out as a classic newb mistake I'd appreciate the input... I've tried some other techniques as well but they failed too so I've decided to focus on the ones listed here.
 
I will take this challenge. I have been all over this forum over the last couple of weeks trying to soak in the insane amount of actual information. You guys are fucking great!:bowdown: I say actual information because most of the other sites I have found have been more about selling shit then teaching. So here is a big :thumbsup: to you SEO_Mike and everyone else here that don't fuck around (Unless it is funny:D).

I am not sure what my strategy will be yet. I will go through the links you have provided and figure out my niches and strats over the next couple of days and some sites up by the end of the first week.
 
1 - I'm running email and zip submits (non-incentivised) from copeac for 4 days now. Current strategy with this is voting pages. Two of these are direct from ad to offer via an instant redirect. The other three are ad -> my vote page -> offer. I have everything running from a CMS/App framework so I can put these up very quickly which is nice. I have my affiliate links cloaked... I think. The link posts to my site which does a redirect to the offer with my aff id... I figure more people will click if they don't realize they are about to leave the site and it may help a bit with SEO.

This is currently a looser overall. It's been running PPC from 7search.

Stats - 408 clicks @ $43.44 (0.11/AvgCPC),
CTR - 162 (Vote -> Offer)
Conv - 6
Earnings - $8 (Entered email or zip)
Net loss - $35.34
Click to expand...
(emphasis mine)

OK, you are paying 11 cents per click? You need to get your numbers straight.

This is why elementary school math is important kiddos.

at 400 clicks getting you 6 conversion and 8$ (yes, I am ignoring the 408, easier to calculate)

so 400 = 800 cents
1= 800/400
1 = 2

You can only break even when you spend 2cents per click.

I would say that campaign is fucked.
  • CTR seems ok.
  • Adjust your site to look more like the merchant page.
  • Maybe change the offer. (Who is looking at this, what are they interested in?)
::emp::
 
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