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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.
 
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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?
 
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
 
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:
PHP: 
<?php
$keyword = $_POST['keyword'];

if(!$keyword) // if no keyword is specified, show the form
    {
    echo "<form action=".$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']." method='post'>
    Enter Keyword: <input type='text' name='keyword'><br />
    <input type='submit' value='Find Feeds'>  
    <input type='reset' value='Start Over'>
    </form>";
    }
    else
    {
    $wordpress = str_replace(" ", "-", $keyword);
        echo "Here are your feeds for <b>$keyword</b> just copy and paste:<br /><i>http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=" .urlencode($keyword). "&ie=utf-8&num=100&output=rss<br />
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/" .urlencode($keyword). "?authority=n&language=en<br />
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/" .urlencode($keyword). "?authority=n&language=en&page=2<br />
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/" .urlencode($keyword). "?authority=n&language=en&page=3<br />
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/" .urlencode($keyword). "?authority=n&language=en&page=4<br />
http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/" .urlencode($keyword). "?authority=n&language=en&page=5<br />
http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=" .urlencode($keyword). "&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m&n=100&format=rss<br />
http://wordpress.com/tag/" .$wordpress. "/feed/<br />
";
    }

?>
 
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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.
 
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?
 
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. :D

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!
 
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
 
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. :anon.sml:

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.
 
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.


 
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.
 
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. :D
 
SEO_Mike said:
Yeah, they'll shit all over themselves. It'll make for great dinner conversation.
Click to expand...

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. :D
 
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.
 
Supergeek said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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.

Code: 
if (coffeeGallons.value < 1){
  shitForBrains();
  }
::emp::
 
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