Well, that one bombed. I got one bid for $5. Can’t say I’m surprised though. I wouldn’t have bought it myself but that doesn’t matter, I just wanted to test and see if it was a viable entry point. After all, some folks can’t set up a blog and $37 may be worth it to them - guess not

So, onwards and upwards. I’ve been a little distracted this week with those shiny little objects you read about. Man I’m pissed (off). Whenever I take my eye off the ball it ends up costing me a lot of hours. I’m back on track now so down to business.

I sat back a few days ago and started drafting the essential elements for a blog that I would buy from someone else, i.e. what I’d like to see included. It’s been a long time since I believed in blogs based on Adsense or direct links to Clickbank products. Continuous testing has shown me that you need a lot of traffic to make those work.

My aim is to create a blog that has an opt-in mailing list with a free report plus some follow-up emails recommending relevant products on Clickbank. From everything I’ve been taught this seems the way to go and should give the blog a decent enough value to to make it profitable enough to set up and then sell.

We’ll see

Now I’ve got my domain on my webhost and set up a new Wordpress blog via the cpanel it’s time to start customising the theme.

There’s a ton of free themes out there but some of my favourites can be found at ThemeLab.

For the PLR blogs I’ve chosen a theme that has a ’sponsors’ box on the sidebar and inserted some Adsense ads. If there’s any relevant Clickbank products with a suitable sized banner graphic I’ll use them too.

I like to make the theme look a little unique so I’ve sourced some freelance graphic designers over at Get A Freelancer where I’ve found a decent header graphic costs anything between $15-$35.

There are also some plugins that I always use no matter what type of blog I’m putting together. These are invaluable for SEO and helping with general administration of my blogs;

All in One SEO Pack - this is a vital plugin for any wordpress blog

HTML Sitemap Generator - the fastest way for new pages to be indexed and listed

Google XML sitemaps - this plugin makes sure Google revisits your blog often

KB Robots.txt - ensures that pages indexed correctly without duplicate content issues

MBP Ping Optimizer - essential plugin to ensure your site is not banned from valuable ping services

Unique Article Wizard - regularly receive relevant and unique content for your blog

That’s it. There are tons of different ways to configure Wordpress and everyone seems to find their own particular way of doing it. Since I’m creating PLR blogs that are optimized to work with Adsense and Clickbank ads I keep the posts down to just one per page so there’s not much scrolling to be done - this means the ads are usually visible on the page.

The blog I created for this test is over at http://www.juicediets.info and the auction for the site has now ended. I’ll post the result and what I’ve learned from it tomorrow.

A quick post today about finding a good domain name to use for my blogs. I usually buy .com’s or .net’s but for the purpose of my selling my first few blogs I’m going with .info’s - I’ve found no evidence that Google views them as any lesser of a name than the other TLDs and they’re a heck of a lot cheaper for the first year.

The site I use to find the majority of my domains is Make Words. This site has a fantastic User Interface and all you have to do is put in your main ‘keyword’, select a domain extension and it goes to work checking all of the available variations to see if they are available.

There’s 40 different themes available to check with and each theme has between 50-100 words. The site adds the words from these themes to your keyword to check if the domain is available to register - and it does it pretty quickly too.

I’ve built up my own custom theme over time (free registration is required for this feature) which I find a massive time saver - it usually takes no more than 3 or 4 minutes to find a suitable domain name and I can then go register it over at Name Cheap, my favorite registrar.

Ok - this is ‘basic’. I’ve dug out some old PLR articles I have from the PLR Pro membership site that do have transfer rights (which most PLR articles don’t have). All’s that  means is that I can pass the ownership of the articles onto the buyers of my websites without infringing any copyright laws.

To give my sites some value I’ve done quite a bit of keyword research for each niche so I can match up the right articles. I cranked up Keyword Research Pro and got stuck in. For each main keyword I gathered around 1000 long tail (3 words or more) phrases and then checked their competition in Google.

Out of the 1000 keywords for each niche I ended up with about 20 or so phrases that had a high enough volume of traffic with low competition to warrant building a site.

I spent some time time matching the right articles to the right keywords, changing the titles and editing them to remove spelling mistakes etc. The results are that I’ve got 10 articles for each niche that are highly targeted and easy to get traffic for. Duplicate content may be an issue and this is one of the things I want to test myself in the future - more on that in a later post.

The niches I’m working on for now are;

Juice Diets

Life Insurance

Digital Photography

I couldn’t find enough high volume, low competition keywords for the ‘Life Insurance’ niche without spending some more time on it so I’ve decided to sell that site with all 40 PLR articles included and will change the salesletter to match.

The sites themselves are nearly ready, I’m waiting on some header graphics before I can tie it all together. My hope is that today I can concentrate on the sales letter and get that ready for putting the sites up for sale over the weekend.

Tomorrow I’ll make a quick post showing how I do research for domain names - there’s an absolute killer tool that I use to make the whole process of brainstorming a piece of cake

After a lot of reading at the Warrior Forum I’ve decided to test out one of the Internet marketing models that’s gaining a foothold over there. Namely, ’site flipping’.

So for the next month or so I’m going to make regular posts here documenting my journey with building websites and selling them over at Sitepoint. It’s not a model that is touted that much throughout the IM industry. Instead, most of the plans and blueprints I’ve purchased have always encouraged the recurring revenue model.

And I wholeheartedly agree with them that multiple income streams is the way to go (especially when they’re set up to run on autopilot) but they often take too long to implement and see a decent return.

Site flipping is a little different. Build it, sell it and move on.

I’ve no idea yet what my results are going to be like but I’m going to start with the most basic site I can think of that’s easy to make and takes very little time to set up. Once I’ve made a profit from that and learned a thing or two, I’ll move up to the next level.