The Challenge

Have 1000 websites live in 60 days (Aug 15th, 2008) with each making $150 per month after 60 more days (Oct 14th, 2008), in total 120 days.

The Landscape

Each of the 1000 sites will be small, with a minimal amount of content to begin with and designed to rank for only one keyword phrase and is based on Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniper Idea. These phrases will be selected by a combination of their demand and profit potential ($150 per month). We will meet this 120 day challenge by monetizing each site with AdSense. The competition must also be low enough for us to rank each site in 2-3 months with minimal marketing. We will use a customized WordPress template and SEO plugins to optimize our site better than the currently ranked top 10. Due to the volume of sites we need to create, each step in the process must be as streamlined and as cost effective as possible. We have a process for each of the following 3 steps. The obstacles we’ll face will deal largely with the scalability of each of these processes.

1. Keyword Research & Phrase Selection
2. Mass Site Creation & Maintenance
3. Marketing & Driving Traffic

After the challenge is complete we will revisit the sites that meet a base level of traffic and income potential and they will graduate into phase II of what’s known as the Sprouts Mission. This will include more content, more marketing and perhaps even other monetization models.

The Hurdles

• Domain Names & Hosting

  • Where can we purchase bulk domain names? $4 for 1,000 sites would be better than $10 per site.
  • Should we get hosting and domains from the same place?
    • If they’re separate will setting the DNS on 1,000 domain names be difficult?
    • Are there possible problems with hosting all 1,000 on one server?
    • Do we need a dedicated server?
    • Would there be problems with using a virtual server that hosts other sites as well?
    • Will we be affected if all our sites are on a single IP address and all our links are roughly from the same IPs? (They won’t all be exactly the same)

• WordPress

  • How can we create and manage large amounts of sites, i.e:
    • Way to add all 1,000 sites simultaneously to a hosting package with unlimited domain addons?
    • Install identical WordPress installations, templates & plugins for 1,000 different sites?
    • Make simple "empire-wide" changes to all 1,000 sites?
    • Update WordPress, install plugins & change themes across all 1,000 sites?

• Tracking & Analytics

  • How do we track the rankings and traffic across 1,000 sites?
    • We’d like to use Google Analytics on each site…
    • Do we create an account for each 1,000 or just add them as a Website Profile under one account?
    • Can we just put the same Google Analytics code in the template of all the sites?
    • What tool can at LEAST weekly track the rankings of 1,000 sites for 50-100 keywords a piece without bogging down the tool? We use AWR for our clients, great tool, but that may take too long to run for that many queries.

• Adsense

  • Can we use the same Adsense Code across all sites?
  • If channels are necessary can we have 1,000+ channels in AdSense?
  • Is there a way to get code for that many channels besides the usual one by one process?

• Financing

  • Each of steps cost money, how would you pay to get it done on time?
    • Start smaller and have each site pay for the growth of new ones?
    • Trade services?
    • Credit cards?
    • A loan?
    • Investment money?

• What other obstacles seem apparent that haven’t been mentioned?

The Question:

Q. If you only had 120 days to make this challenge real, how would you answer the questions above? How would you finance it? How would you solve the technical issues without creating future headaches? A. Leave your DO OR DIE response as a comment below.

You never know just what life will throw at you. At the beginning of March life hurled ioVentures, Inc. a curve ball. Thankfully we had been preparing for just such a time, but somehow it seems like I’m never fully ready for "those times." While it’s not important what the curve ball was, I do feel that it is important to the storyline that you know we lost one of our main streams of income due to forces out of our control.

Our initial solution consisted of an idea that Courtney Tuttle discusses called "Keyword Sniping". We adapted the idea to our circumstances, added and tweaked a few things and the ioV Garden was born: 10 money generating "Sprouts", systematically created for the purpose of growing into greater things. Each Sprout website was setup with a specially designed SEO WordPress Template from Courtney Tuttle and a birage of plugins that we’ve found to be essential over the years. Each has only ten pages, one keyword focus, an affiliate product to begin with and some in house as well as some automated and outsourced link loving.

Well, after spending a couple weeks focusing as much attention on our Sprouts as we could we determined that to face our financial challenge head on we needed our focus elsewhere. That being the case, our Sprouts were left to fend for themselves in the harsh environment of the web (they are after all, just little guys in a "content is king" world). While circumstances led us to decide on spending our energy elsewhere for the present, we felt that our initial effort was sufficient to prove Courtney’s Concept. We’ll report on this concept every now and then. Here’s the first of several checkins. Looking at the Google Analytics from March 16th – April 15th:

1. angular cheilitis: 378
2. run your car on water: 248
3. how to jump higher: 196
4. save my marriage: 50
5. how to stop snoring: 62
6. natural anxiety cures: 109
7. adult dyslexia: 218
8. how to play the piano: 71
9. tmj treatment: 83
10. learn to speak German: 66

Total, these sites received 1481 visits during their inaugural month. No conversions yet. This is our report.