This past month I launched a few REAL dating sites. Yeah I know its insane and starting a site costs some serious money to get it going. The thing is that I had a bunch of niche dating domains that I was using as a whitelable with copeac. What’s odd is that my little one page landers were ranking for their terms and saw some normal traffic. This was great until I saw copeac’s leads had dropped to nothing. I am not sure if they killed the program, changed the backend, or if the code needed to be changed on my end. It never did as well as I had hoped it would when I started so rather than get it going again I dropped the program and researched into making these landers into real dating sites.

It took me a week to find a free script / backend that would work out the box. I was not going to pay to have anything made with my test since it would probably crap out anyway. I ended up using PHPizabi for my sites and despite it being a old POS it was simple enough that I could use the php/sql code to fix any problems I found and add new features. I highly recommend not using this script though! It is the biggest POS I have ever seen and lacked even the most basic of features. It took me 3 weeks of coding to get it to a useable state, heck it still needs more work but its good enough to run now until I decided on getting a script made later.

I threw up ads on facebook for m 4 dating sites across my niches and soon learned that some of them were way to much of a niche. Great for landers, but horrible for real sites. So three of them have died off a bit, they still get SEO members but it’s a slow trickle. In a year I should have a pretty good crop of users on them though. What’s left is the one site I didn’t expect much from but did very well on facebook. I was getting a sign up for less than a dollar and I invested $1,000 into the site for member ships. At one point I got to 1,100 members and that’s when I caused a major crash trying to fix some SQL BS with the backend. Through my own fault I deleted every member on the site with one button! Should have seen it coming but was in a hurry. After fixing the error i learned that the SQL backup feature of PHPizabi never worked and was just in the template but no code to execute I about died. I have since fixed the bug I caused and wrote my on backup script but it was a major set back. The members took it with stride though and most signed back up within a week. With SEO traffic and returning members the site is now at 762 active members and is growing.

When advertising I was making 30-40 in adsense and spending 100 in ads. It helped pad the cost at start up. Having now stopped the ads the site is making about 2-3 bucks a day in adsense which isn’t bad for a site this small. I may have 762 members but they are not all active everyday, if the site scales as well as it is in the future it could generate some serious income. If i had 10,000 members the site would do at least $30 a day in adsense alone and could be made more profitable with affiliate ads. Sure its not major money but its pretty good for an automated site which someday could grow to tens of thousands of users.

I have lots of other stuff to talk about but this post is long enough so I will schedule them for the following days.

As of right now my challenge has been a total failure, but this is not the fault of LFE. I had one specific site that I had just started and it was going to be the target of all of my LFE work. The offer had a high payout and I had already seen a bit of income from it. All I needed to do was rank and thats where LFE was to come in.

The problem I ran into was some serious trademark protection as complained about in Is Your Trademark Protection Out of Control? the site just happened to have been the target of this retarded trademark protection. Even after I attempted to comply to the restrictions they put into place I was still banned from the program for having a 301 redirect from the old site to the new one. I attempted to explain this to them but they didn’t care much and that was it. In two days time 3 weeks of my efforts had been destroyed and a fair bit of money along with it.

It was that day that I lost my new found drive to keep working. I had finally gotten back to some serious work and was getting into the groove of things when it was crushed. Rather than picking my self up from this mess and moving on I fell back into my old rut and started wasting time again. For the last two weeks I have been working on and off very little. I tried a few campaigns and they broke even, I couldn’t get them into profit. I checked stats and made sure accounts had money and other than that I haven’t done much of anything. Two weeks were wasted away with Global Agenda on Steam. To further beak me down during this time I found out that I was getting 0.01 per click on my eBay pages due to CPC.

Finally last night I got some good news my first bit of good news this month. I managed to get back into the program I was banned from via a private network that they ran. I have totally removed any chance of any trademark BS this time but the lack of a keyword domain is certainly going to hurt my chances. Better this than nothing though. At the same time I did this I decided to go back and check some of the other things that kicked my ass this month. My eBay CPC was now at 0.25 since I removed one under performing domain and even more good news when I checked adsense and saw may sites were starting to hit their $1.00 a day goal.

Some light has finally shown up at the end of the tunnel and I am grasping for it. Trying to get my efforts back in order and optimize what I can to help try and keep the ball rolling. I now have more targets for LFE and finally some ideas are coming back. Today is building and optimizing but tomorrow I will certainly be finally putting LFE to use.

The good news is that just the other day when I did my OS reinstall I found SEO Quake for chrome. Its a bit different from what I was using in firefox but its been pretty cool to see the seo stats of all of the sites in the sers when I search for a term. As far as I know this is the only fully working SEO addon for chrome but its doing a great job and is making the move from firefox that much easier.

Don’t have chrome yet? If you are still on the fence you really need to check it out. I use Chromium a open source build of Google Chrome. All of the benefits of Chrome and none of the Google data capture and spying. You can download and compile the source your self from or you can grab the latest compiled trunk release. Try it out and you will see why people are making the switch to Chrome/Chromium.

First impressions so far are that its super easy to install. This took all of 5mins you simply upload the script make an sql database and then go to the install script. Once it dose its thing you are all set up.

The next thing I did was set up some catch all e-mail accounts for the program to use. They have instructions for this on their site so that makes it easy. You basically pick a domain name, make a catchall email, create a sql database and put a php file in the root of said domain. LFE automatically goes to this script so it can’t be renamed which kinda sucks.

I was really lazy with this at first since I didn’t quite understand how it worked. I thought I could just make catchalls all over the place and then forward its mail to another catchall. I mean if all the “activate me” emails went to the same account it should be much easier right? Well yeah but the php script that lfe uses can’t work this way. You actually have to set up each domain with its own database and php file.

I learned this lesson after my first test of 500 blogs when I never got any emails and lfe never activated them. This is one of those times it was better to follow the instructions and not just assume it would work. I had to go back into LFE and delete all of these blogs since I was never able to use them. So only time and captchers were wasted in my mistake. I have since fixed this problem by making proper catchall domains, which I hope will work much better this time.

In case you were wondering LFE come with a remote repository of wpmu and pligg sits that you can grab rather than scrapping your own. Mines busy right now so I can’t give exact numbers but its like 5k wpmu and 5k pligg sites. Lots of these sites are from other countries, or have special requirements. Like one site said I couldn’t make a blog there since I did not have a .edu email. This is due to the fact that all of these sites were just scrapped from the serps.

What pisses me off though is that there dose not seem to be a good way to weed out the bad blogs. There is no button to delete them from the database on failure. So I will have to manually weed them out. This is probably one of the major causes of the blog creation problems most people have. “I told it to make 500 blogs, and it only made 200!” etc etc.. If you never remove these bad hosts from your list they will always error. This will take time but I hope to have a decent working list by the end of the month.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the program and ill try to answer as I find them.

EDIT: I just finished a run of 500 blogs. Many failed and I started to copy and paste a giant list to week out the one that failed. 30 fucking mins later I go back to try and find and remove them and every site I paste back into find is gone. So I do believe that LFE automatically deletes out bad wpmu’s when they error.

Campaign reinvesting is when you reinvest any profits made by a new campaign back into the campaign. This of course is pretty basic shit that everyone should know and if common practice for PPC campaigns. But it also should apply to any SEO sites your doing, since when working with SEO you need to be constantly adding new links and content to keep you rankings.

The thing to work on is the mentality of how we pay our selves. Often at midnight I will check though stats and say to my self “Nice, I made X amount today.” This in some ways is correct but also a horrible way of doing things since it leaves out any reinvestment you need to do.  It is much better to think “Nice, X campaign made X today.” as this keeps the idea of it being your money out of your head.

So what do I do to reinvest cash back into SEO campaigns?  The most common expense I have is outsourcing.  I have a list of people I go to when I need link building done, I have a list of content writers, and so one and so on. It is always beneficial to spend 100% of a site’s first weeks of earnings back into the site.  This way the site will gain more and more traction and should make you more money.

Each site I build tries to follow these lines.

Week 1: 100% Reinvestment

Week 2: 100% Reinvestment

Week 3: 80% Reinvestment

And so on.  Of course this all depends on the site and situation. Often I also use a new sites income to invest into some other part of my business rather than the site its self. This is how I acquire most of my programs and scripts such as WFReview, LFE, BANS, etc.  Often these scripts can even be used on that they were funded by which makes it even better. It is much easier to drop $200-300 on a program if you stop thinking about it as being your money.  Just remember that it is not your money until you accountant says so.

With 2010 a new year and decade I have decided to renew my efforts in my 1,000 site challenge, but I have modified the terms to just as many sites as it takes to make 1,000 bucks a day. Also no PPC campaign can be a part of it, as that will make it to easy. I want natural ranking sites that will make money with minimal effort. The idea still seems sound but will of course always be at the mercy of the search engines.

Now one of the major problems I was running into was that I did not have the capacity to build links for all of these sites as fast as I was building the sites themselves. Despite my skills as a site builder I wasn’t getting anywhere in the serps with out incoming links. I have a few link networks, sites, and services for link building but it was not enough to keep up with demand for new sites. This is why this time I have added a second smaller challenge to help support the first one.

I am planning on trying out a few programs for link building using various seo methods. The first of which will be Link Farm Evolution(LFE). I have had my eye on this script since it came out but it has been kept pretty low key by the people who use it. It hasn’t been as widely promoted across the affiliate scene so reviews of it are hard to find. What I have found has been good and the methods behind it are sound.

So with this in mind I will be buying LFE and challenging myself to earn the cost of the script ($297) within the 30 return period. I will be making new websites and promoting them with LFE in the hopes that I will be able to get these new sites to rank well enough to cover my costs. Depending on the amount of revenue generated by this method I will decide on if I will return the script and get my refund or if I will keep it and just work harder.

To give myself some set up time I have decided to purchase LFE on February 1st since this simplify matters and give me time to pick my targets. I will post updates and tips as they occur and I will report my final revenue at the end of the challenge so stay tuned.

Some of you on twitter (http://twitter.com/wfreview) might have already

heard the news, but Nick is passing the torch. He is still going to be

around and a part of our community but I will be in charge.

Nick and I are very excited about this change, especially because I have 8

years professional experience with programming in PHP and 6 more with Ruby

on Rails. I have written a book about programming for O’Reilly

(http://bit.ly/5FGkTh). I LOVE to program, and I am very good at it.

I am excited to start diving into the code for WFReview. It is a very good,

quality product and it should not be very difficult for me to add

enhancements quickly. I have been reading all the forum posts and getting a

sense of what you guys need and want, as well as checking out my

competition. In fact, I have so many enhancements lined up for the next

release that it is not even going to be WFReview!

The upcoming release is called WF Review Ultra! Here are some of the

upcoming features.

Game changing features

* central UPC dataset – append data from separate sources about the same

product to the same post

* expire post on a specific date – use custom CSV meta to set the date and

have the post moved from published to deleted

* content spinning

* adlib support

* much easier installation

* bulk redirecting affiliate links through cleaner internal links

* custom data to posts

* THEMES!

Better CSV Imports

* Import .gz files straight from CJ

* Much smarter CSV import, no longer worry about many of the format

issues

* assign the imports to a specific user

Better User Interface

* ability to choose different stars within the UI

* comparison tables

* the ability to sort posts by price or overall rating

* improved commenter names, choose a percentage of male/female

* improve commenter name data to be more realistic

* pre-populate comments from CSV

* avatar support for commenters

Better Editing Support

* no longer need cron to run scheduled jobs

* delete and rename templates

* warn before saving a template with the same name as an existing

template

* one-off post ratings

Better Developer Support

* disable loading the css and google api call on pages where the script

isn’t active

* ability to use “last rated”, “highest rated”, etc. as a function instead

of a widget so you can use them as hooks in a custom_functions.php.

With so many changes, this plugin is going to revolutionize your review

sites and it will work so much better and faster that we think of it as a

new plugin entirely.

Though it is a new plugin, it will be available to all WFReview users for a

upgrade price of only $49 FREE, more than half off the retail price!

On top of that we will be releasing the long anticipated Premium Placements

plugin!

Here are the timeframes I am working with right now.

By January 15th, release the Premium Placements plugin

By February 7th, release WFReview Ultra

By March 7th, release the first 3 WFReview Ultra themes

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this transition

period. I look forward to helping you all achieve great success with your

projects.

-Lucas

As one of the biggest if not the biggest advocate for WFReview I am happy to see the new owner is capable of taking this script to a new level I am also worried that it will not happen and that this will just be a repeat of what happened last time. When I get the new script I will be sure to post a review.

Now the problem that I ran into was that all of my sites were getting sandboxed. I mean all of them. I was busting out WP blogs with content I wrote myself, and started link building. I am well aware of link building red flags and I knew to do this slowly so I didn’t fuck myself over. But a new site I made two weeks ago only has 66 links and was still sandboxed. I was starting to go nuts and lose hope for this idea of getting any seo traction for anything. It felt as if I had wasted a few hundred dollars and well over a weeks of time! How did they know to sandbox everything I made? I am in like 40 different niches with different themes, scripts, wordpress, and non-wp sites.. How…the fuck.

This weekend I really started to look into the matter since its going to seriously kill my income if nothing I do can get ranked anywhere. Based on the information I had the only thing I could think of is that Google is either targeting me personally e.g. Name, Addy etc (though most sites have private whois, thanks namecheap), my namesever, or my ip. This is the only way they can cast out this broad net and catch most everything I make.

So assuming Google doesn’t have the power to find my name/company and all traces of my personal info on domain whois I passed this idea up. I am sure they CAN do it, but that’s a lot of fucking work on their end and I am quite a small fish. So if its not my name its my host/ns/ip.

I have been using a old hostgator account for like 5yrs for most new projects since it was easy to just addon new sites. $10.00 unlimited domains and SQL it was a nice setup. I think I had about 200 domains setup in that account and like 50 subdomains from various projects that I have done over the last 5yrs. Could they actually be the problem? I did a IP neighbors check on one of my old sites to see what all else was in there. What I noticed was a lot of garbage. Pure garbage everywhere… It seems everyone loves these $10 hosting accounts and just uses them for affiliate sites and spam. I didn’t see 1 legit looking site on my entire server with them. After seeing this it kinda made it seem as if I was not as crazy as I thought. I mean if you knew of a server ip range that was known for bullshit why not flag it? Its not like google cares about your business or anything they can do whatever they want.

So last night I had enough and did a full transfer using cpanel from hostgator to a new hosting account. (Btw, that transfer tool in cpanel is amazing.) I changed over all my info with my registers and went to sleep. If I woke up in the morning and my sites didn’t work id know something went wrong… After waking up and going about my business I made sure the transfer went alright and checked that everything was in order. So when will i know if I was right or not?

Well 10mins ago just out of curiosity I checked the serps for a keyword I was targeting. The site I had made got to like page 5 and then was removed from the first 20 pages.. that thing was long dead and gone. So I check the keyword.. and WTF!!! My site is now ranked #1 for my term overnight. A few other things happened to this domain so its hard to tell right now which one caused my site to go from sandbox to #1 but I think it was the hosting move. It is way to early to state the facts, nothing happens overnight. But this site having such a drastic change in its rankings has made me kinda wonder.. Ill continue to moniter things and see what happens and post a update at a later date to see the out come after a longer period of time.

Slight Update 4/6/2009:

The site that I mentioned in the post now holds the #1 and #2 positions for its keyword. So its gone from no serp ranking to 1 and 2 overnight.

This month I had to kill one of my very best campaigns. Conversions dropped EPC dropped and the way it was running it just couldn’t be profitable anymore. It’s sad to see it go since it was a large part of my income. Which is leading me to a problem I have been having recently with affiliate marketing. Offers.

Every network I am a member of is pushing the same stuff. (so it seems) When I look at my options all I see is Grants, Work At Home, Teeth Whiting, Acai, and Wrinkle/Anti-Aging. All of which are negative option billing offers, which seems to be becoming the way of things now a days.  From what I can tell there is some serious money behind all of these offers which is why they are so huge now. But I just can’t seem to bring myself to promoting them.  I just can’t seem to motivate myself to sell these products and I am having no moments of inspiration on how to promote them.

So I have taken it upon my self to go back to my old niche finding ways and promote the weirdest shit I can find. I want the offers that no one else is on! Or at least not millions of herd blogs. This should make things easier for me with less competition for traffic should mean a larger share of the profits. But I am just not seeing the same diversity that I used to when I first started in AM over a year ago. Where am I going to find these offers?

Which brings me to today. This morning I thought to my self what if I just had 1,000 websites that made $1.00 a day? That’s 365,000 a year – 10,000 on domains, and say 1,200 on hosting. Leaving me 353,500 in cash at the end of the year.  Well shit that sounds easy enough…. If I was to attempt this crazy but simple idea I could make my websites about anything I want. Heck even adsense ads could result in $1 a day per domain.  So any cpa offers or other ads/links I could earn out of it would be more cash. Even better is if 1 site goes nuts and makes like $50 a day!

Now this idea is sounding better and better in the back of my head. I already have a lot of domains…many still unused and many not even making that $1.00.  Now I want to know how I am going to undertake this somewhat massive project…

Ive decided to use a few of the tools I have acquired to help out. Namely WFReview (WFReview Coupon), BANS, and PHPBay. If I could send enough traffic to eBay and adsense and pump out these sites uber fast using these scripts this just might be possible! I can pump out 1-2 full sites a day using these tools with out much of a problem.

So each day this week I have started upon this nuts idea and I have built 6 new websites.  Its going to be hard going over so many niches and I highly doubt ill get to 1,000 sites but if I keep going it should get easier and easier as I stream line the process. Wish me luck as I think I may have gone insane!

So if you wanted to buy the new WFReview plugin but were on the fence here is a 25% Off Coupon for it! Its got a limited number of uses on it so grab your copy before the price goes back up.

Coupon: D7147

Enjoy!