Sorry for the slow response... I'll try and do better in response time here for this.
do you write in first person for everything and make up a pen name and even a persona for each site?
I do use a pen name for all my sites... different names as well. In fact I use names of people from my childhood for the names of the authors. I'm not looking to build a personal reputation; I just want to make money from the sites and could care less if one thinks it is me or not.
I am assuming you would do something like a Home page and an About Me page or something along those lines?
My home page is usually a decent size... I like to have at least 1500 words in it and pepper in gently some of the KWs I will be targeting but make it mainly a very general overview of the subject. I also do the About Us page as that is another way I can slip in some KWs without really writing about them.
For example I looked at your <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> blog
That is really not indicative of the kinds of authority sites I like to build... it is more of a sharing site as opposed to a money making venture and I set it up a bit differently.
The theme that I am currently using offers the slider on the home page or all of the pages. Would you consider using these on your websites, or think it is just better to keep things clean and simple?
I use a slider on some sites but not on those kinds of sites. I actually set up local sites and sell leads from them to various businesses and use a slider on some of them. I tried to use a slider on one of my larger sites but it was awkward so I bailed. I did not spend much time on that though as I really hate web site designing so a guy that likes to build sites would probably be able to pull that off.
shared hosting for the beginning or just going ahead and jumping into a VPS? And would you let an authority site share hosting with any of your other sites?
I use both shared hosting and private IP addresses; one of my partners and I own a private hosting service that we built for our own purposes (it is not for the public) and I use that for most of my sites.That being said, I also use some of the generic hosts that are out there as well as I like to mix things up a bunch.
When you initially set up your website do you have the settings for
http://domain.com or
http://www.domain.com. I know this is something very small and I have seen mixed things on it in my searches just curious what you think is best? I imagine it's just what you already have back links for from the expired/deleted domain.
If I am using an expired or dropped domain for a project, I will use what has the backlinks pointed at it, otherwise I use the
www.I've not seen any significant difference between using and not using the www myself but I have not done any extensive testing either and perhaps it would be wise to do that at some point.
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I've pulled off the eBay completely for montetization to see how something else works... for now I have just adsense on the site but am going to be looking at some CJ offers as well. I'll let the Adsense run for a while... maybe 3 - 4 weeks and see what happens there as to revenue.
Once I get the monetization down, I'll be giving the site to my friend... the whole site will be his. I'll be helping him along but the work and revenue will be all his. He is a good friend and one that could use a bit of a break and has shown that he does not mind hard work and that deserves to be rewarded even in a small measure such as this.
I'll continue to update here as I think that is appropriate as well.
