The 1,000 Site – 120 Day Challenge

Posted on 19. Jun, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in ioV Garden

If you had just 120 days to make 1,000 websites that each would make you $150 per month, how would you do it? Say your family was dangled over a volcano and they’d get dumped in if you didn’t make it. Without compromising your integrity, we want to hear you answer this question. It’s DO OR DIE!!!

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.

Clusterize Your Phrases

Posted on 12. May, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization

If you’ve read anything about seo, you know that the most important aspect to help you rank in the SERP’s is building links that contain keyword phrases in the anchor text.

Some people miss the "anchor text" part. Unfortunately, if you get a whole bunch of links with no keyword phrases in them or that contain your site name, then at best all you’ve done is help your site rank for your site name. Obviously, this is not the goal. Of course, you should be pushing hard to rank for relevant keyword phrases.

Now before you go out and start putting keyword phrases in your links lets stop and get organized first. This is where clusterizing your phrases comes into place.

Every page on your site has a good chance of ranking for a few keyword phrases. No page has a good chance of ranking for all your phrases. That said, you need to assign clusters of phrases to each URL. When that is done, you will know which phrases need to be included in both on site and off site optimization for each URL.

How To Cluster Your Phrases

Take one URL at a time and create its cluster. Lets use this URL to help explain the process I go through when clusterizing: skincarerx.com/obagi.html.

  1. Decide on the main phrase of the URL. In this case, it was easy to choose the main phrase–the brand name Obagi. Generally speaking the main phrase of the web page, and therefore the cluster, is going to be the highest searched for phrase that is relevant to the page.
  2. Use a keyword research tool like The Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help find the sub phrases of this cluster. Type in a keyword phrase and after the results show up, be sure to change the "Match Type" drop down menu to "Exact" instead of "Broad" and click on "Approx Avg Search Volume" to sort by that column.  After I type obagi and make those changes to the results in the Keyword Tool I see:

    obagi ss_1.GIF

  3. Choose the phrases that are the most relevant to the URL in question and that have the highest search volume. In this case, I chose:
    1. obagi
    2. obagi skin care
    3. obagi nu derm
    4. obagi clear
    5. obagi products
    6. obagi blue peel
    7. obagi skin care products
    8. obagi blender

I like to keep track of these clusters in an excel sheet with the URL listed at the top of its perspective cluster.

Once you have a cluster for a specific URL, you can then optimize that page for that cluster of phrases. These are the phrases that will be the anchor text in all the links that are pointed to this specific URL. As you get links, you can vary the anchor text and help this one page rank for all these phrases. The nice thing is that all these phrases contain the main phrase "obagi" and therefore every link will help the main phrase as well as a sub phrase! Don’t forget that internal links count as well. All internal links that point to this URL should include one of these phrases. (Most likely all internal links will say the same thing; they won’t be varied).

Also, the phrases in the cluster will be used to create an effective title tag and for best practice should be used within header tags and within the content of the page itself.

As you can see, I didn’t use all the phrases that the Google Keyword Tool showed me in this one cluster. It’s a good idea to limit each cluster to 10 or less phrases. All the other relevant phrases that are searched for quite a bit can be broken up into several clusters that each point to different URL’s.

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments down below. I would love to clarify anything that you don’t understand.