Setting up a niche blog network can be challenging and managing it after its launch can be an even more daunting task so I have put the following together as an example of what I believe to be “Best Practice” for the problems you will face, but also what the potential profits and benefits are.
Now the first thing you will be looking at is how to set up the individual blogs on your network and call me old fashioned but I do like the manual way of doing things.
I say get you’re hosting with Cpanel and click through to fantastico and press install on the wordpress button.
The funny thing is that most people don’t even realize there is an automated wordpress setup built into every Cpanel hosting account but before you even do that you need to look at the following few points before you dive in.
To make your blog network the puppy’s privates of blog networks and attract the most business you are going to have to look at a few things.
Firstly the blogs will need to be unique. This means not relying on someone else setting the blogs up for you and choosing the first rss feed that comes to mind for content.
Second. You need to have a wide range of niches so you can cater to everyone who may ask for a backlink or an article to be posted.
Third. You are going to need to put some work into getting pagerank for each of the blogs. This is an important factor for many internet marketers and will be a good example of your blog networks strength.
Fourth. SEO quality. The blogs will need to be hosted on different class c IP addresses. For those of you who don’t know what this means just do a Google search for explain class c ip’s. You also need to consider the actual content on the blogs. Having a regularly updated site is one of the best ways to ensure Google likes your site.
Fifth. Ensure that you promote your blog network as if it were your favorite site. This means submitting to directories and gaining backlinks. Write articles and post links back to the original etc. Your blog network needs to be active and actively promoted.
With these 5 main points in hand you can start to install your blogs and get the content rolling. How do I do that? I hear a few of you ask. Setting up wordpress is as easy as clicking the install button in fantastico and entering a few usernames and passwords. To create the content you will need a plugin called wp-o-matic and you will also need a nice looking theme to make your blog stand out a little.
When choosing the theme if possibly try to use one where you change the header and look of the site without changing the footer files at all. If you can succeed in doing this you open up another revenue possibility which we will discuss later.
When making your blogs you will probably find it easier to set them up in blocks of 10 – 15 at a time and get these functional and running before continuing. Do also keep a track of all of the details for each blog. As an example I set up a spreadsheet to keep track of the theme, rss feed, niche and footer style of each new blog.
“Quick Tip Don’t forget that many themes come with Google adsense already installed so be sure to include your adsense id. If you not in the Google adsense program already then sign up.
There is a piece of software I use to manage all of my Websites including my blog network and it will save you an enormous amount of time and energy in managing your blog network.
Domain Dashboard has a lot of features which will start helping you from here onwards. It has a bulk FTP feature which allows you to FTP a single file to a hundred or a thousand different sites. I don’t need to tell you how useful that can be when you’re trying to upload a new footer to 200 blogs.
Domain Dashboard also provides very useful management tools such as fetching statistics for every site and displaying
- Pages indexed
- Backlinks for every major search engine
- Pagerank for each site
- Traffic including unique visitors and bandwidth usage
- And robots/spiders visits.
To begin with I managed my blog network with another 2 people taking around 100 sites each. Now, using Domain Dashboard, I can see which sites need attention or more SEO work for link building etc without having to do 3-4 days research first. I don’t think I could manage my network without Domain Dashboard but if you want to keep it relatively small then you can probably manage it.
Anyway back to the blog network setup. Once you have installed wordpress, wp-o-matic plus your chosen theme you will need to decide where your RSS feed to auto post your content will come from. This was possibly one of the most difficult parts for me to complete as choosing a good relevant feed is a very important part. Unless you are going to hire a team of writers you will need to take this part seriously also. One of the benefits of WP-o-matic is that you can include more than 1 feed and this is another great time saving tip for your blog network.
Make 1 main master blog which you only post articles which you want to appear across all of your blogs. (this will usually be articles someone is paying you to promote) now signup every one of your blogs to the rss feed made by this blog aswell as the main rss content feed and you have a fully functioning blog network where you can post a single article to every site on the network in one move. Just by posting it to your main blog all of your other sites will pick it up.
You may want to take this a step further and have some of your blogs only pick up one category from your master blog so that you can post to say 50 or 100 blogs at a time.Now you can really take part in the opportunities owning a massive quality blog network provides.
I will be writing a follow up to this soon with details on how you can promote your blog and other ways of setting up your blog network
