SEOMadHatter
Elite Member
- Aug 15, 2015
- 1,808
- 2,470
It's been about a year since I started my first Splogging journal on BHW. Pretty sure it was just before I started traveling I vaguely remember it being cold and wet when I was writing the original setup.
I still own a lot of those sites and they churn out a profit. But, since then, I've learned a lot and experimented with other traffic sources. So here we are. Splogging V 2.0 with some big changes and a much bigger scale.
Common Questions/Comments
What is Splogging? - Also known as spam blogging or autoblogging. Call it what you want it's a site posting content automatically.
Duplicate content doesn't rank. - Chuck a stone in a SERP there's duplicate content everywhere in various forms.
You should stick to white hat. - I've seen multiple whitehats go out of business in the last year alone to Google or social sites shifting the goal posts. If this isn't your cup of tea that's fine but it's what I'm doing.
How are you profiting? - Monetization doesn't matter. Get niche traffic and send it to relevant offer. It's really not more complicated than that. Some sites are CPA others are affiliate sales or lead gen.
What software? - Everything is custom build with the exception of BuzzSumo and AHREFs. You could do something similar without my twists using WP-Robot and IFTTT. There are other specific public Splogging tools out there which I don't think any of them are worth your time.
A quick disclaimer: I feel like I'll be giving out enough to motivate anyone else to try this with your own tweaks. But there are elements I won't be giving out the specifics of. It's a journal, not a complete guide on how to compete directly with me.
Changes in V 2.0
First of all the bottleneck. My splog design is not the same generic sites with a few different templates over and over. Between the branding and the copywriting it was time intensive to set up sites. The ROI was good but I don't have the temperament for boring repetitive tasks.
Is should have scaled this up a lot more originally but even though I'd improved the original bottleneck it was still a task I never wanted to do.
The new design is roughly 20 minutes to go into a new niche. And most of that is automated so my actual workload is maybe 10 minutes. If it performs well then it takes maybe an extra hour or so for some custom code at a later stage but by that point it's a proven niche. I can reduce the time further but that's manageable for now. This includes everything from going from niche idea to having a site live.
The biggest change is the inclusion of social traffic. But I'll get into that more in a moment.
I've reduced the costs so the margins can be thinner and I can go at a much bigger scale without as much capital investment. It also handles a lot more content a lot faster now away from the moronic hosting situation I was dealing with before.
The Traffic
Traditionally autoblogs are all about the SEO traffic. There are autoblogs out there making big numbers and crazy traffic with the years and backlinks behind them. I have much younger ones pulling in consistently profitable traffic.
But a couple of things.
I've seen several of the public tools for this kind of thing post misleading numbers. Hit counts are meaningless and even unique visitors are bloated with foreign market traffic.
Non-English speaking SERPs and some niches like physical products are much more lenient with duplicate content. But just posting up content in a competitive niche and waiting for that tier 1 traffic is a rough game.
Your content method plays a major role here and takes a long while to test, especially if you're not also throwing backlinks at it.
SEO will eventually build up for these sites. I know the content will eventually bring in traffic but an SEO journal is as interesting as watching paint dry.
So, partly to speed things up and offset the setup time with some profit and partly because I'm curious to see how well this works, social is going to play a much bigger role this time.
This ties in a bunch of other projects and twists but the basic gist is when the sites posts content it's also going to social media. You can get similar results with IFTTT. The post rate depends on the size of the niche and the network it's posting to but, basically, if the niche exists on the social network it's getting posted there too.
The one part I don't have yet is Facebook groups. It's been a long while since I've done anything with groups and I'll need to build that from scratch. It also means a little extra setup time picking the groups per niche but could be worth it for the traffic.
Some networks will product short term traffic meaning (hopefully) short term profit. Others will take some time to build up but they're still a heck of a lot faster than SEO. This should make it more interesting and will hopefully cover my time in the short term.
The Journal
Most of this is ready to go. We'll track site count, traffic and profit. I'm not getting individual leads and social stats because I'm lazy but if traffic and profit goes up then we're doing something right.
The goal is to make *at least* 7 sites a week. They're not all created equal and the niche will dictate how big they can grow. Initial niche research will need to be done in batches then I'll probably do a couple of sites at a time but as long as I'm averaging 7 a week minimum.
I still own a lot of those sites and they churn out a profit. But, since then, I've learned a lot and experimented with other traffic sources. So here we are. Splogging V 2.0 with some big changes and a much bigger scale.
Common Questions/Comments
What is Splogging? - Also known as spam blogging or autoblogging. Call it what you want it's a site posting content automatically.
Duplicate content doesn't rank. - Chuck a stone in a SERP there's duplicate content everywhere in various forms.
You should stick to white hat. - I've seen multiple whitehats go out of business in the last year alone to Google or social sites shifting the goal posts. If this isn't your cup of tea that's fine but it's what I'm doing.
How are you profiting? - Monetization doesn't matter. Get niche traffic and send it to relevant offer. It's really not more complicated than that. Some sites are CPA others are affiliate sales or lead gen.
What software? - Everything is custom build with the exception of BuzzSumo and AHREFs. You could do something similar without my twists using WP-Robot and IFTTT. There are other specific public Splogging tools out there which I don't think any of them are worth your time.
A quick disclaimer: I feel like I'll be giving out enough to motivate anyone else to try this with your own tweaks. But there are elements I won't be giving out the specifics of. It's a journal, not a complete guide on how to compete directly with me.
Changes in V 2.0
First of all the bottleneck. My splog design is not the same generic sites with a few different templates over and over. Between the branding and the copywriting it was time intensive to set up sites. The ROI was good but I don't have the temperament for boring repetitive tasks.
Is should have scaled this up a lot more originally but even though I'd improved the original bottleneck it was still a task I never wanted to do.
The new design is roughly 20 minutes to go into a new niche. And most of that is automated so my actual workload is maybe 10 minutes. If it performs well then it takes maybe an extra hour or so for some custom code at a later stage but by that point it's a proven niche. I can reduce the time further but that's manageable for now. This includes everything from going from niche idea to having a site live.
The biggest change is the inclusion of social traffic. But I'll get into that more in a moment.
I've reduced the costs so the margins can be thinner and I can go at a much bigger scale without as much capital investment. It also handles a lot more content a lot faster now away from the moronic hosting situation I was dealing with before.
The Traffic
Traditionally autoblogs are all about the SEO traffic. There are autoblogs out there making big numbers and crazy traffic with the years and backlinks behind them. I have much younger ones pulling in consistently profitable traffic.
But a couple of things.
I've seen several of the public tools for this kind of thing post misleading numbers. Hit counts are meaningless and even unique visitors are bloated with foreign market traffic.
Non-English speaking SERPs and some niches like physical products are much more lenient with duplicate content. But just posting up content in a competitive niche and waiting for that tier 1 traffic is a rough game.
Your content method plays a major role here and takes a long while to test, especially if you're not also throwing backlinks at it.
SEO will eventually build up for these sites. I know the content will eventually bring in traffic but an SEO journal is as interesting as watching paint dry.
So, partly to speed things up and offset the setup time with some profit and partly because I'm curious to see how well this works, social is going to play a much bigger role this time.
This ties in a bunch of other projects and twists but the basic gist is when the sites posts content it's also going to social media. You can get similar results with IFTTT. The post rate depends on the size of the niche and the network it's posting to but, basically, if the niche exists on the social network it's getting posted there too.
The one part I don't have yet is Facebook groups. It's been a long while since I've done anything with groups and I'll need to build that from scratch. It also means a little extra setup time picking the groups per niche but could be worth it for the traffic.
Some networks will product short term traffic meaning (hopefully) short term profit. Others will take some time to build up but they're still a heck of a lot faster than SEO. This should make it more interesting and will hopefully cover my time in the short term.
The Journal
Most of this is ready to go. We'll track site count, traffic and profit. I'm not getting individual leads and social stats because I'm lazy but if traffic and profit goes up then we're doing something right.
The goal is to make *at least* 7 sites a week. They're not all created equal and the niche will dictate how big they can grow. Initial niche research will need to be done in batches then I'll probably do a couple of sites at a time but as long as I'm averaging 7 a week minimum.
