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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.
- Keyword Research & Phrase Selection
- Mass Site Creation & Maintenance
- 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
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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)
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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?
- How can we create and manage large amounts of sites, i.e:
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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.
- How do we track the rankings and traffic across 1,000 sites?
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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?
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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?
- Each of steps cost money, how would you pay to get it done on time?
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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.
Lot’s of questions. Here are a couple thoughts
Adsense has a 200 channel limit. Not to mention each site will probably have many channels to test effectiveness of different types of ad sizes positions etc. so you would have a lot more than 1,000 channels. There are scripts all over the net that will log an Adsense click as a goal in analytics, or you can use that to log it in a db or something with some special coding. These are not full proof and won’t be exactly what Adsense reports, but maybe for tracking effectiveness of each site’s ability to make money it would be enough.
I am from a coding background. I would put all the sites in a db or something and just serve them up in 3-4 different template pages so you could manage 1,000 real quick in doing that each site would be a little boring. But getting sites listed in SEO and getting Adsense clicks has very little to do with a polished flashy site, that type of stuff is for a user experience to drive a user to come back where as this model is really based on search engine traffic.
Sounds like fun, Good Luck.
Will it work?
1. Google has guidelines regarding small sites whose purpose is simply to make money on Adsense.
2. Combine that with manual review, or someone pointing out that you have a farm, may cause Google to give your site a second opinion. Google is both smarter and dumber than we think.
3. as long as you are not interlinking, I wouldnt worry about them being on the same host.
Is it feasible?
1. Probably, but I would only do a few at a time. $10,000 on domain names is expensive.
2. New domains take awhile to get ranked.
3. a single server could probably handle them since they are static, one page, and low-traffic. In any case, 2 servers could for sure, and regardless it would pay for itself.
4. biggest obstacle: time to build links and some content
contact me if you are serious about this idea. I might be, but would want some $$ to have to invest in it. maybe on a smaller scale
actually, I spoke with you on the phone last month as you and I are in the same town, and I was looking for some SEO projects–small world
one more note I forgot to mention, many have claimed that google gives better rankings to large, authoritative sites, rather than single keyword focused sites. this was in response to a few years ago when site owners would basically make each keyword in their business a separate niche/mini site. truth is, I dont know if I but it completely.
Would it be possible to point all the domains at the same blog but point each one to a different category then make sure you don’t link between the categories on you blog? It is an idea that might work with out having to change the guts of Wordpress.