I was given a rather nice Mad Hatter coffee mug for Christmas which reminded me I've let this journal lapse a little. To be honest it'll probably be a case of update when there is something to update now.
Earnings the last 30 days: $
1768.97
There was a little more than this but that's the bulk of it. Not bad for a passive income. Some of that will be a quarter 4 spike no doubt but there are daily sales coming in.
I have a bunch of tests running. Different variations of doing this to see what works. Some a lot spammier than others. Some a lot more scalable and some requiring a little work - though my JV running these is a little unreliable at the moment.
Some content builds are straight up spam. Others... honestly you might not know you were looking at an automated site. I've enjoyed building the higher quality ones because in theory, they should have a longer shelf life. But it'll come down to entirely what the search engines make of it.
Some findings so far (in no order just as I go through the stats):
+ Bing doesn't give a fuck. It ranks the spammiest content pretty quickly. Since it's automated it might be worth doing this just to farm Bing. Doesn't matter they have less than 10% of the market share if it pays the bills.
And I've worked as a Bing manual reviewer. The spammy shit would still pass their review process.
+ Some sites doing pretty well already. Averaging 1500 UVs from the search engines - mostly Google. Not bad for the first few weeks.
Annoyingly these are the more obvious builds I think will have a more limited lifespan. That said they're also the easiest to produce so maybe it's time to make a shit ton of them and milk it until Google catches on.
Other sites with the same build are struggling. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I do think there's some randomness in the algo. And of course, different niches work differently. Some sites are sitting with 0 (or close to that) in traffic. I'm alright with the 80/20 principle when it's all automated I can mass produce them and drop the ones which don't start to perform in 6 months or so.
+ The less competitive niches are (unsurprisingly) ranking faster. Ones without obvious affiliate links are also performing better.
+ Backlinks matter (no duh).
Updates:
Dealing with a few tech issues. After scaling the dev servers to keep up with the load I have to rebuild all of the proxy stuff to get everything whitelisted. Was putting this off for weeks but it needed to be done.
Some weird issue with Google indexing https versions of sites which don't have an SSL cert... alright Google. I think I read something a while ago about them trying to index https first but surely they should just detect the lack of a cert.
Parasite splogging works. As with any parasite SEO in a new niche, it'll generally rank faster and doesn't require hosting or domains. The trade-off is not only the lack of control and risk that the account gets slapped but the scaling is hampered. Accounts mean proxies and registration which becomes a major bottleneck in the scaling. That said I recently put together a pretty nutsy amount of parasite splog pages. I need to write a little code to get monetized properly but that should be an interesting one.
The additional advantage is some parasite targets come with their own traffic or pick up some pretty quick rankings. Not a substantial amount, but it's nice to see a few conversions here and there while building it up.
I prefer the idea of self-hosted splogging. More control, more scalable and the only update I need to worry about is Google - not the parasite. But I think I'm going to focus on both for a bit. If the self-hosted stuff starts to perform I'll switch purely to it.
I have a fairly decent size test going live tonight to test monetizing lower competition niches. If this works as I'm hoping it will then the plan will be to saturate lower competition niches with both self-hosted and parasite splogs. If I can replicate this 1500/month within the first 6 weeks or so even 20% of the time I think this will be a winning project.
Think that's pretty much it. Still testing a crap ton of shit to see what's working. Mixed results so far but enough to keep me interested. I'm trying to incentivize my JV to get in on this properly. Looking at hiring someone to do the grunt work as well to take a bit of a punt on this.
