I was thinking of doing something like a site of the month club membership site. Like for $xxx a month get an autoblog every month. The only problem is what happens if its successful and you wind up with 1000 members, how do you register, produce, deploy and then push that many sites without it being a full time business.

Or maybe instead of an actual live autoblog, you get a package every month with a pre-configured Wordpress site backup with a premium theme, a custom logo, a series of pre-written press releases, maybe a pre-configured content feed with PLR content and a few pre-optimized articles, pre-rendered motion graphic videos with a voiceover that the member would have to somehow put their domain name/url into. It would have to be up to the member to unique-ify it or I guess you could spin them. But again would need to figure out how to automate it to deal with a large number of members.

What do y'all think? I've got the skills to put together a branded site fast - i mean the site, graphics, motion graphics videos, etc. I usually do it myself in a Saturday night, I've got a system down. So I was thinking why not sell it as a service. The only issue I could foresee would be the cost of theme and motion graphics licensing. A $35 theme can become $2k for an unlimited license.

I'm actually working on a e-book product about what I do. So there's a cross promotional possibility here to do a tie-in. I'm just not sure if there's really a market for it. If I had a thousand idiots sign up and they all just threw the sites up I would have to figure out how to prevent duplicate content issues, etc.

Hmm, I think I'm convincing myself to do it. Poke holes in it and tell me what won't work. Hehe, and if I do it then I can do what nicho mentioned in his thread, document the process and then turn that into another membership site, and then document the process of doing that and turn that into a 3rd membership site.......

So basically you are another flippa except you're both Flippa AND the Seller. It can always work, like anything else - its marketing. But you're thinking this not a FT business???

If you're creating autoblogs why not just make them for yourself. If they are really worth buying they are worth more to you. Then once they've aged and you have too many to maintain you can sell excess ones on flippa.

If you are going to go ahead with your method though I'd say to get the level of automation you would need you would need a bot made to automate it. Probably Zennoposer with a experienced programmer would be needed to get that level of automation.

I wasn't really thinking of it like a Flippa type thing with basic autoblogs. I was thinking more of branded sites that look really good, packaged up in a niche site in a box, where I take a premium theme, come up with a brand, customize the logo and graphics, configure the layout of the site for whatever the niche and keywords are, pre-populate some quality content.

I suppose its more of an authority site starter kit in a box, with suggested autoblog feeds for continuous content. A hybrid site.

The member would get all the niche site materials every month as well as access to the member VIP forums etc. Backend monetization opportunities in offering hosting, referring premium plugin sales, etc.

DrScythe, thats what I've started doing now for myself, building up a network of autoblogs as part of my site portfolio.

What I was thinking is instead of building a site once, putting it on a domain and flipping it, why not build the base once and sell access to it many times over.

I googled a bit and it looks like there were a few sites that did something like this before, but they are defunct now.

Your main problem would be duplicate content and saturating a niche with multiples of the same site.

Possible solutions: maybe limit users by Location or total users. (X max users, or 1-2 users per state for US then maybe 3-5 per country for the rest of the world)
Of course Geographical limiting won't matter if it is a global niche.

Otherwise the package you send has to be fairly flexible for end-user configuration (and these settings must be forced to be set because half your user base will try to just do a clean install and leave it as is hoping for money to suddenly appear in their accounts.

Just me thinking aloud here

Hmm. Limiting it means limiting profit :-) If I use something like a developer/unlimited subscription to StudioPress or woothemes it might reduce the base cost. But I would expect the licensing cost to range between $500-2000 per site for the theme, video, audio, image rights.

Hmmm...wordpress dumps content out in an XML file right. Maybe I could automate spinning the content for each member and populating the XML file. Shouldn't be too hard to write a .NET program to do that.

The problem is how do I determine if there's actually a market of people willing to pay for this first. To some degree IM people will buy anything. :-) But this isn't just an e-book where your cost is basically just your time.

Spend some time looking at Flippa sales - that will tell you where the market is. The only other option is to go to another thread I saw just newly posted, a VIP member who sells sites is offering to consider representing sites for sale. Maybe selling through a broker with serious clientele is more to your advantage.

I heard that autoblogs are dead ... are they?