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.

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.

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.