Splogging in 2018

[SEOMadHatter]

Honestly, I'm not big on new years. I always have the massive desire to slap anyone in November or December who starts a sentence with "In the new year I'll..." But I started my Splogging journey a few months ago and a bunch has changed since then. And since the journey is expanding I might as well update the title to 2018 as well.

In December I made a little under $2000 profit with 100% automated content. Kind of cool but not the interesting part.

I started my original journal mostly to work on a more scalable version and test the fuck out of things to see what was working. I've got a bunch of different tests up at the moment, more variations in development and I've reverse engineered a lot of splog networks which seem to be having varying success. I've finished a lot of the original code, scaled my backend development hardware and (far more importantly) started to see some traffic and longtail rankings already.

In fact today I noticed a page 1 ranking for a longtail with the content design which I think is the highest quality and has the most potential. If you didn't know what you were looking at you might mistake it for a real site.

Still, loads of testing to be done but I'm starting to narrow down what works. Ideally, I want to be able to focus on scaling the system and adding more to it. But my big time bottlenecks at the moment are:

• Keyword research/content sources.
• Setting up and customising sites.
• Setting up accounts and landing pages for the parasite splogs.

I've automated huge chunks of all three so I do a lot less of it than you might imagine. But there are some things a human can do better and the quality just wouldn't be the same when automated.

I had/have a JV partner. The deal is anything they do the initial setup for earns them 50% of all revenue. They make a lot less from this project than I do because they haven't really set much up. I'm trying to incentivize that and I'll see if that works in the next week or so.

I'm also looking at hiring a VA who can handle at least some of the basic stuff. I've had... mixed results with this in the past. I'm not relishing the idea of having to deal with the interviewing and training but if I can find someone half decent to handle the setup I have a huge to-do list of things I want to implement.

In the short term, the focus at the moment is to launch more sites and finish a new parasite system I've been working on. I think it's almost there maybe another day or two if I can make the time to properly work on it.

I prefer the idea of splogging on my own domains so this is the bulk of my testing at the moment. But I won't turn down free traffic from other sources and my theory is they'll rank faster so it's a good way to test content concepts rather than my own domains which will likely take months.

So that's pretty much it. Scale the stuff which works. Test the fuck out of everything I come across to see if it works better. Stop wasting my time with mundane tasks and either sort out my JV or hire someone.

 

[ContentExpert]

In the new year I'll make more money.

 

[kamilari]

can you just give little details about content sources
thanks

 

[SEOMadHatter]

can you just give little details about content sources
thanks

I can't go massively into exactly what I'm doing since I don't want Google seeing a bigger trend than I'll be creating myself. But to be honest the variations I'm using at the moment are miles apart and if you start digging into longtails in your niche you'll likely see someone doing something similar. There are some ingenious folks out there testing some weird shit. But basically, if you're in my niche I'm probably using your site in some way or another.

Small updates:

I've had a few unproductive days. Broken tooth. Abscess. Trying to sleep off the pain for a few days until I can get it sorted out. Looked through some stats so far. $120 from this yesterday while I slept yesterday so that helps. Not as much as the painkillers, but still. Seeing a good positive growth of traffic. Still slow, but looking steady.

Unsurprisingly an old existing site ranks for new keywords faster with automated content than a new domain. I didn't expect this to be any different but the hope was that using older sites would give me a better indication of how well the different types of content would rank. I've had a couple of page 1 rankings in a few days for the crazy longtail stuff. Others sitting anywhere from page 2 - 6. Newer sites are sitting between page 5-15 for the most part so a pretty noticeable trend there.

The goal here, of course, is to catch as much traffic as possible not rank for specific keywords. But if these rankings move in the right direction over the next couple of weeks that'll give me an idea of what is working.

In the meantime, I'm fairly certain I'm onto something which means starting up new sites and trying to streamline the workflow as much as possible. I'm also working on a new parasite method which might be a massive bust or potentially the fastest ranking out of everything. I have no idea what the moderation is going to be like but I'm enjoying writing it and it should only take a few days to complete.

 

[aidenhera]

are you automating something like these guys from nulled wordpress themes and plugins websites are doing? they launch a lot of popup ads when you click download and you dont even get the file in the end

 

[SEOMadHatter]

are you automating something like these guys from nulled wordpress themes and plugins websites are doing? they launch a lot of popup ads when you click download and you dont even get the file in the end

I'm automating as much as possible but it's all custom code no nulled theme and plugins. Not currently running pop ups/unders but I wouldn't rule it out. Any downloads exist. I've either created them myself (I have downloadable programs and eBooks), repackaged something or it's an affiliate link to an existing product behind a paywall. My goal is to create automated sites which actually provide value to the user (and revenue of course).

I bought a product for a few hundred bucks a couple of months ago from a splog without even realizing what I was looking at. I don't think automated has to necessarily mean complete spam.

Don't get me wrong - some of the tests I have running just now are ridiculously spammy looking. They're getting traffic and I'm comparing them to the more readable versions which I'd rather make. But I'll scale whichever gets the traffic.

While I wait for code tests to run I'm doing non-work related things on another monitor and I keep stumbling across curated copied/curated content without even looking for it. The internet has a lot of it being used to drive traffic in a bunch of different ways. I'm finding it a pretty interesting project to try and automate.

Pain has subsided a bit so I've got a chunk of this new parasite code done. Starting to take shape and I might have pages going live tomorrow at this rate.

 

[Unavailable]

Isnt this a duplicate thread

 

[Mr.Boss]

Isnt this a duplicate thread

thats for 2017 and this is for 2018.

Another great journey mate. Following the thread.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Isnt this a duplicate thread

The irony would be pretty funny if it was.

Speaking of which here's an example of a splog (no connection to me) pulling this exact thread for some content. I can see a couple doing it. If an owner reads this can you at least go and stick in my cool avatar?

thats for 2017 and this is for 2018.

Another great journey mate. Following the thread.

Cheers. Hopefully, I'll come up with something interesting to show for it.

Updates:

Wrote the publishing for one parasite and the content creation for another. This is backwards since it means neither is ready. One day I'll learn to stick with a single project and maybe get something live on time.

Trying to fix both up now so I can get them live and leave them to build while I go back to scaling the self hosted ones. Improving the workflow and (hopefully) the traffic with this build. It'll come down to the parasites moderation I guess but I won't know until I fire it up.

The grind is pretty real just now. I have a few friends making bank with crypto and while I don't rely on motivation to get work done it doesn't hurt. I don't want to fall behind them and SEO is already slow not to mention I'm in pretty uncharted territory for me here. So my only way to compete is to get the content out at scale. If nothing massively catches fire I have managed to make a lot of the workflow more efficient in the last couple of days. It's slowing me down for the moment but I think it'll be worth it.

I'm keeping my focus on doubling down on what I can do. SEO and automation. But after chatting to a couple of traders I *did* spot a repeatable pattern we were able to back test pretty quickly in crypto swing trading. Teaming up with a JV or two to put something together for it early next week so that'll take a little time but the focus is still on scaling this.

In other news:
+ Stats for the self hosted sites going the way I'd want. The lines are slowly going up.
+ More first page longtail ranks. Good proof of concept for the method.
+ JV has been fairly active. This is good and we should hopefully start generating sales there which might help keep that going.

- Dip in earnings for the moment. Expected since a % of the affiliate sales are physical so that and the dropshipping is down after Q4.
- Dropped my laptop. Touchpad seemed a little screwed. Damnit.

 

[kamilari]

Any progress on this journey.Can u please up date on this
regards

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Any progress on this journey.Can u please up date on this
regards

Honestly, it's an SEO journal and on top of that, I have no idea of what works at scale so most of this stuff will probably flop. It'll likely be a while before there are any serious result changes. It's far from a dead journal but most of the updates are basically just "automating more shit" and waiting to see what works.

Updates:

I know a few folk making money with both mining and trading in crypto. Invested a bit of time into some code and catching up on things. I might be a little late to the party missing the alt coin craze lately but I wanted to test something which has eaten a bit of time this week.

But that's something to play around with. Splogging is becoming more of the main project now. Starting to see charts go the right directions on the site builds I like and I'm almost done reducing the workflow needed to keep them scaling properly. Trying to balance this out with scaling the parasite splogging side of things so I can get some results on that but it needs to not step on the toes of the self-hosted sites.

Put some scaling together with the JV which is going to take advantage of some splog content put together a few months ago which didn't have any monetization. Picked up a sale already which is a good start but it should really help the current income levels which will hopefully be a good motivation to keep scaling with the new systems. Might take a week or two to start showing results there's some setup to do and it'll take a while to complete.

Scaling the two new parasite setups and tying it into a third one so the whole lot works on one workflow. If I can get my head down I'd like to have these all up and running over the next week and keeping my servers tied up and busy so I can play with crypto some more.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

Two guys sit in my living room discussing how crazy it is that I get paid more than them while sitting at home. I'm sitting coding and learning how to work with a web-based front end. They're smoking weed.

It's not the government with the problem guys.

Needed to give the JV (and hopefully soon the VA) a better way to interact with the workflow so I remove myself as a bottleneck in the setup. I was working with .Net apps before but this is easier for them to use and a lot easier for me to deal with and pdate.

While working on this picked up another sale from some part of this project and I seem to have forgotten to include a TID so I honestly have no idea where it came from. I mean if I'm going to have a problem tonight it might as well be that I don't know where a sale comes from.

 

[dkv023]

How do you avoid DMCA notivication?

 

[hiteshthecool]

Can you plz tell me how to do splogging so I can also earn some cash cuz I can't find any methods about splogging so plzzzzz

 

[krinko25]

Op, whats your aproach regarding linkbuilding to the splogs?, im doing some tests of my own but when you have 5k Pages indexed gets expensive to buy links... at the moment i can live with the views im getting but i was trying to push more keywords to first page, thanks !

 

[SEOMadHatter]

How do you avoid DMCA notivication?

I don't worry about it much. If someone contacts me with an issue I'll take the page offline.

Can you plz tell me how to do splogging so I can also earn some cash cuz I can't find any methods about splogging so plzzzzz

This is not a winning mindset.

Op, whats your aproach regarding linkbuilding to the splogs?, im doing some tests of my own but when you have 5k Pages indexed gets expensive to buy links... at the moment i can live with the views im getting but i was trying to push more keywords to first page, thanks !

The side parasite splogging project is interlinking with the self hosting splogs so that creates some deep links. If I can free up the time I want to repurpose an old outreach script I have somewhere to see if it can nab me some decent homepage links. For the most part I'm not worrying too much about the links at the moment to be honest.

Updates:

It's been a little slow lately. Even for an SEO journal. I haven't had a whole lot of time to develop lately and honestly I've been pretty burned out. The little I have got done has mostly been learning to make the web front ends do what I need. That's gone well at least and it's making the whole workflow a lot easier to have neat buttons without having to screw around with .net clients.

Splogging, like a lot of this, seems to adhere to the 80/20 rule. Some of the sites seem to get traffic pretty quickly while others putter along. The ones with my preferred style of content have been doing well which is great. I have a little tweaking and tidying to do and I think I'll be porting more of the sites over to this style. It's taken some time (as expected) but it's looking like a fairly solid proof of concept so I'll be looking to start really scaling soon.

Parasite splogging has had some... mixed results. Some fast rankings with a quick drop off I'm kind of waiting to see if they pick back up. One project picked up a few hundred bucks on the first few days which was promising looking but needs some work to hopefully get that stable. I've got a potentially big part of this project going live within the next two weeks or so. I try not to get too excited about projects but if the vendor is happy with the traffic that could be a pretty immediate and potentially big earnings boost.

Slow going but it's getting there.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

The more I play with content curation the more I want to play with it more.

While I'm improving the quality of the generated content as I go I don't have the PhD army and server farms Google has so understanding content isn't much of an option. As part of a parasite project I'm trying I build a bit of a hybrid curation front end tonight which turned out surprisingly better than I'd originally thought. It prepares the content and then this web front end makes it pretty quick and easy to see everything and edit if need be.

This is, of course, 100% a bottleneck in the system but it's still able to produce a crap ton more content than you would normally and even a few minutes a day moderating a site like this could really improve the quality and this front end makes it easy enough for a JV/VA to handle without me having to get involved.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again. I'll build whatever type of site is going to pay. But if I can make quality sites at the same rate (or close enough to) I'll opt for that.

 

[SEOMadHatter]

The new projects hit some setbacks. Some expected and planned for others... downright baffling. But that's the game. Putting some tweaks in place and running more tests. One of them is pretty much guaranteed to add a few thousand a month into the JV project. A sample run is adding about $1k a month and the proper batch is almost finished which is something like 20x that traffic. It's *potentially* not the most reliable project but it's passive and doesn't hurt to have while I'm working on the newer stuff.

Speaking of which - some pretty insane news yesterday morning. After hitting almost $200 in profit for one of the projects the previous day I went to look at some of the stats. Turns out another test I ran around October actually worked and was making sales. It confirms some of my splogging theories and some pretty serious scaling will be in place for it over the next few weeks.

So lots to do. It's been a very busy week and the setbacks cost me some development and testing time but that's how it goes.

So. Other news. Potential big life changes coming which will have a big impact on this project. It should be pretty obvious by now I ramble so feel free to skip ahead for the TL;DR. Anyone who works with me knows I like to think out loud even if I'm talking to a wall.

I've always been pretty clear that I don't sell to marketers. I don't sell to the make money online niche at all and I don't see that changing anytime soon. So the benefit here is I don't need to claim I make $5,000 a day and try and sell you some shit. I've been a full-time SEO/affiliate marketer in the past. I've had $10k months while I sat playing WoW or whatever I was wasting my time with. My interest and methods have gone back and forth and since then I've worked 15-hour a week part-time jobs for next to no money and honestly I'm not sure which one I was happier with. I'm not really big on money. My clothes are torn and my phone is held together with duct tape. The same has been true regardless of how much I've made.

But I've always been big on freedom. Which is why I don't entirely understand how I've got myself into this position.

Currently, I work a full time 40-hour job from home as a dev which spans over 6 days. I also work 7~ hours a week on the 7th day as a climbing instructor. I kind of fell into the dev job as I was getting into the climbing instructing and kept both on because I wanted to keep my toe in. And considering I had never worked a proper full-time job for someone else before this has been a crazy step up - and I've kept this on for about 2 years now.

On top of this, I have my side projects. I'd say I started putting real time into them maybe around October or so. This has consumed most of my other waking hours. If you're new to IM and reading this journal that's kind of how it goes. You're incredibly unlikely to make a job replacing income early on. I was originally very lucky my first SEO site hit $1500/month pretty early on which replaced my part-time work at the time but when I went back to this last year I didn't instantly quit my jobs.

So, yeah I've been making money. I'm not complaining. I chose this path and I'm sure there are plenty who would love to be in that position. But it's just not for me. I don't really have the mindset for a 9-5 for someone else, I don't need the money and honestly, I don't trust the management. If your employees don't feel safe they're not motivated and they're not looking to stick around. They've had a staff turnover issue and I have real motivation struggles with the work which I otherwise really do enjoy.

I'm talking to both workplaces at the moment. Meeting Monday morning with the dev job. The ideal is they're willing to keep me part time around 20 hours a week. I still won't trust the managers but I feel I'd be back to my old motivation with the work because I wouldn't feel like the job owned my life. If that happens I might be dropping my contracted work as a climbing instructor so I can be a little more flexible with the days I do as a dev and I'll pick up a few days here and there to keep a toe in.

This would give me more of my own life back. More free time and less burnout. Flexibility to put more time into this and more energy to be effective with the time I do put in. Less capital in the short term but still in a position to scale.

If the ideal doesn't happen I might just be handing in my notice. Maybe not financially the smartest move but this isn't (entirely) on a whim. There are more important things in life than money and even if all of this disappeared tomorrow I think I'd still be happier for it. What that will mean for this project is either I go full time with it or it takes a back seat for a while and I take more of a step away from the desk, at least for a while.

I'm not big on planning ahead for the most part. My life has had some... surprising choices and I'm a little curious to see what happens next. But it won't involve 50 hours a week for someone else.

TL;DR: Potentially blowing up my professional life because fuck it.

 

[kamilari]

You said your theory of splogging- Can you please spell them out at least in broad terms
thanks in advace

 

[dkv023]

Aren`t you afraid of Adsense ban for copypasted content?