You can find it here:-
http://www.frankhaywood.com/go/wpapns/
The sale will last until Sunday 5th July at 7.00pm GMT – that’s 74 hours from the time of this post
UPDATE #1: I fixed the link to the videos – REFRESH your download page. Sorry.
UPDATE #2: I’ve now added 12 brand new Wordpress themes to the download page.
-Frank Haywood
Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now is to be able to create a Wordpress page that looks completely different to the rest of the blog.
So the page when clicked on from the home page of the site looks like a regular sales page.
It’s been in my product ideas document for nearly 2 years now, and for one reason or another I’ve not done anything about it.
I decided that enough was enough and I’d started looking for a decent Wordpress developer as I thought it might need a plugin developed and/or a special page template created.
I’m sure there are lots of other people out there that have wanted this too. I mean really sure.
My thought was that all we really need was something that threw away all the Wordpress stuff on the page itself so that we could just paste in HTML from a sales page design we already had. Maybe a product we have master resale rights to, or some edited PLR sales page, that kind of thing.
I still wanted all the SEO goodness of Wordpress for the rest of the site, but the sales page itself had to be standalone. The other proviso was that it didn’t use CSS or any complicated PHP.
It had to be plain and simple good old table based HTML or nothing at all.
Having decided to do it, I started my research. I bought a couple of existing products to see what approach the product developers had taken, and I was gobsmacked at how complicated it all was.
It seems I could only buy a whole THEME with that kind of functionality in it, and in one case it was all or nothing, ie the whole site had to look like the sales page itself, which isn’t what we want at all is it?
And then a thought occurred to me.
As we all should know by now, developers aren’t marketers. They don’t know what it is that we want exactly unless we pin them down and tell them, and even then it doesn’t always go in.
The people who were putting together these methods of displaying Wordpress pages with a unique look were going about it from a developers point of view. They were making it more complicated than it actually is.
I thought to myself that there must be an easier way of doing it, so I started looking at the Wordpress documentation. Here’s a heads up on that. It’s written by developers for developers. 
So after spending a couple of hours going round in circles yesterday, I suddenly found the exact piece of information that I was looking for.
A quick test and…
You know what? It’s so easy to do I could have just screamed when I realised.
What the flaming heck are these other product owners on exactly? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
And you know what else?
I’m now going to create a low-cost how-to video list-building product out of this as it’s so easy to do and so understandable that anyone with a bit of basic HTML and FTP knowledge can do it.
Perfect.
I’ll make it freely available to anyone that’s signed up to the free tuition so it won’t cost a penny.
For everybody else, let’s say $7. 
Watch this space.
-Frank Haywood
And by this I mean which control panel?
Experience tells me that most small businesses use a Linux or Unix platform of some kind (collectively called *nix), but I know that many people also use a Windows server because they have some app they want to run that needs Windows.
So if you’re on a *nix platform, which hosting control panel do you use?
My personal choice is cPanel.
#1 – It’s probably the most feature full hosting panel there is.
#2 – It’s the easiest to use.
#3 – If you’re not happy with your host, it’s a piece of cake to move to another cPanel host.
But even though the cPanel software is cheap at only about $100 per year per server (to the web host, not you), some hosts insist on writing their own server software. Maybe if you have at least 500 servers at $100 giving a total of $50,000 / year, then it’s tempting to spend the money having your own platform written, or at least find a cheaper one.
But I strongly believe that this policy damages their business. There are tens of thousands of people in the know who wouldn’t touch a non-cPanel server purely because of the reasons above. Especially people who need a dedicated server.
The problem I think for many users of these hosts is that they don’t know any better.
Think about this one for a moment. When you first looked for a web host for your very first web site, you didn’t have a clue what to do did you? No, nor me.
So you first have to do some research. For many people this consists of nothing more than going into their favourite forum and saying “anybody know a good web host?” – and this is where the problem lies.
People who have an opinion without a rounded experience are usually the most vocal.
The people who know that a cPanel host is the way to go may just about be bothered to say “any cPanel host” which doesn’t help the guy or gal looking for the information.
But the “newbie” users will jump forward and say “I use 1and1″, or “I use Yahoo”, or “I use GoDaddy”. For the majority, that’s all they’ve ever used, and they’re not offering good advice either, all they’re doing is saying what they use.
In marketing this is called “social proof”, and so the poor new guy goes and buys the appropriate hosting depending on what’s been said. Usually, social proof is a good short cut to the right answer, but quite often (1 in 5) it’s not the best method on which to base a decision.
So then the new guy uses the host and thinks that’s what web hosting should be like, and that it’s supposed to be really difficult.
With a cPanel host it’s much much easier to do most things, and often there are things you can only do on the cPanel hosting platform because of #1 above.
And of course once you’re using a host that has their own control panel, they make it very difficult for you to move. Many of them will even offer a free domain for 12 months, knowing that it will be even more difficult to get rid of them once you have both your domain name and your web hosting with them.
In fact, I made the same mistakes when I set up my very first web sites, and I’m pretty much stuck with domain hosting by a company who charge $25 just to look at allowing you to transfer your domain away from them.
I’m not kidding.
(UK2.net will take online sign ups and take your credit card details without a problem. They charge TWICE the domain registration fee per year that NameCheap.com do and their admin panel is dire.
If you want to transfer to another domain host, they require you to send a FAX to their billing and accounts, and also a cheque (check) for £12.99 (approx $25) to them in the post. They only guarantee to look at your transfer, not to actually do it. If it’s disapproved, then you have to start all over again.
You can’t find the pages on their site that explain this, you have to contact them first before they’ll give you the link to the page. That’s what I found out when I tried to move a while back.)
I think that’s sharp practice don’t you?
And I wonder how many other companies do this?
Anyway, we all live and learn.
Hosts that YOU would have to pay ME money (about $1,000 per month per domain is worth the pain) to use are:-
UK2, 1and1, FastHosts, Yahoo, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, and any Helm based host.
(I believe, but don’t know for sure, that UK2, 1and1 and FastHosts are run by the same parent company. I think this may be the case because I used NetStat to look at the connection when I’ve used live support and found I was connected to a 1and1 domain. Maybe they were just buying support services from 1and1, but I think not.)
If you want to know where I now register all my domains, it’s with NameCheap, and my recommended web site hosting is Hostgator, purely because they fully load their servers with just about everything you need to get any script to work.
-Frank Haywood
Just a little update to let you know what I’ve been doing since I contacted you last.
I’ve been busy.
I’ve been brain dumping out all the bits that go into a product launch, with a very useful tool called Free Mind. The map is looking a little crowded and messy at the moment and I’ve really only scratched the surface, so we’ll see how that goes.
My curiousity has been rising about what the people that won’t be doing the Product Launch stuff want to learn about instead. My thoughts are that if I’m going to spend some time putting things together for you, I need to know what to target first.
If you don’t get on the free product launch tuition, then I want you to get something else instead. In fact even if you do become a part of the product launch group, there’s nothing to stop you from looking at the other stuff too, it will all be good.
So I have to ask a few questions first.
What I’m going to do is give you TWO sign up forms. I don’t want to keep bothering people who don’t want to learn for free with emails about learning stuff, it just doesn’t make sense.
You can sign up to either or both. To begin with I’ll probably send out the same emails to both lists, but after a while they’ll branch off in different directions.
I’ll be asking you simple questions like “what’s the number one thing you want to learn about?” – stuff like that. Your answers will help me shape the learning material and also help me to decide in which order I should do things.
If you sign up to the product launch list I’ll also immediately ask you for some information about yourself, what you’ve done, what you’re doing, what you know, and why you think you’re a good candidate.
I know some people have already given me some detail about themselves in their blog comments and I have to say that what I’ve seen looks very promising, thank you.
So.
I hope you can see I’ve been putting a lot of thought into all this, as I want the final creation to be something that anyone can go through without it costing them anything, and come out at the other end clued up.
Which brings me on to…
A couple of people have asked me what I’m getting out of this financially, ie why should I do this?
I’ll be dead straight with you.
If I get this right, and you appreciate what I’ve done, then you’ll tell other people about it. They’ll come sign up to do the courses, and in the process will see the paid for tools I’ve created. I’ll make more sales than I’m doing now, your karma will be good, and everything will be right in the world.
Publicity.
It’s as simple as that.
Well almost.
After you’ve gone through the learning material as part of the first wave, I’m going to put in place an “invitation only” process.
What that means is that only someone you invite using your personal link will be able to join.
This will help keep the whole learning process clean, as you’re only going to invite someone who you know will work their way through all the learning and won’t disappear part way through.
I don’t think you’d want to waste your single invitation on someone who isn’t going to stick it out.
Okay?
Right, here are the two sign up forms below. You can sign up to either or both.
I’ll remove them in a few days time to stop anyone else from joining, and then we’ll see where we go from there.
Time’s up! If you signed up there’s a chance of you being in, and if you didn’t, it’s too late this time round.
Time’s up! If you signed up you’re in, and if you didn’t, you’ll have to wait until it all goes public.
-Frank Haywood
As I write this, there have been 178 comments in reply to the email and blog post I did a couple of days ago, with my offer of taking a few people and teaching them about product launch for free.
That’s both surprising, and then again not surprising when you stop to think about it.
I want to do this for you for free, but I feel you’ll learn better and the information will stick harder if you don’t get the next part unless you really want it and are prepared to work to get it.
Make sense?
From the comments that have been made, a lot of people (this may include you) actually want to know more about the whole selling online thing, and maybe you don’t trust what you’ve been sold and told in the past.
(Some people have even questioned my right to teach because they don’t know me yet – it’s a fact that I don’t blow my own trumpet as hard as some do in their attempt to be heard. You can look at me as being quietly confident in what I do.)
So. I can see that many want to know more than just product launch.
I can also see that some didn’t read what I’d written properly, or maybe just got caught up in the moment.
Just to repeat myself… My offer is to teach a few people about product launch (and associated areas) in return for doing a few tasks for me. It won’t cost you anything other than your time.
I expected maybe 30 people to come forward, and that seems a reasonable number to me given that I have to hand out tasks and check that they’ve been completed, as well as create the learning material – a task I haven’t even started yet.
Seeing nearly 6 times that amount has made me stop and think.
Here’s my dilemma.
#1 – I’d like to take on board everyone that wants to do it.
#2 – I don’t have the time to handle everyone through the learning and tasks. Yet.
#3 – I don’t think that everyone that wants to do it is ready for it. You may or may not agree.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
#1 – I don’t like to disappoint people and I bet you don’t either. I’d really like to be in a position where I can put you through this and see you come out at the other end in a much better place.
#2 – I’m currently not geared to deal with more than a few people. I see this as a learning process that will evolve over time into a sausage machine. Eventually anyone will be able to sign up, and get their first bit of learning followed by their first task. If that task is completed successfully then the next section of learning will be made available and so on.
#3 – Reading some of the comments, many people aren’t ready to take on board information about doing a product launch. Here’s a simple reality check. Ask yourself these two questions and exclude yourself if you answer no to either of them.
o Do I have a product ready (or nearly ready) to be released?
o Do I understand how to write good sales copy?
In addition, ask yourself this.
o Do I have a mailing list in my target niche?
o Do I have a good number of potential JV partners in my niche?
These last two aren’t absolutely vital as it’s possible to build buzz and do a launch without them. But if you want to do a big launch then it really does help if you have a mailing list and JV partners.
I hope you now understand where I’m coming from and that you won’t be mad at me if I don’t pick you for the first wave.
Yes, I’ve decided I’ll do this again, and probably the second time around will be better than the first. So don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get first dibs.
And to make you feel a bit better about it all, in the meantime I’ll release some free videos and reports that cover other topics that I know you’ll want to learn about.
So what I’ve done yesterday is I’ve asked Paul to install CMS Anywhere (our upcoming Content Management System still in development) on two sites.
The first site will be free tutorials for everyone and aimed at newbies and intermediate marketers. Tell your friends if you have any.
The second site will be more advanced stuff and will also be free, although you’ll get tasks to complete. You’ll be invited there after joining the first site, but please don’t tell anyone about it if you are.
Neither site yet exists other than domains I registered a while back which have since sat there doing nothing. Yeah I used to do that too.
Okay?
The next step is the selection process for the first wave, a task I’m not looking forward to.
What I’ll first do though is ask you to sign up to a separate mailing list to keep things clean and give me an easy way of contacting just those people who are interested, so that I don’t keep bothering those who aren’t.
Then you can tell me some more about yourself and why you want to learn about product launch or if you think you might want to start on something a little less challenging.
I’ll let you know about this in the next couple of days or so.
Thanks for your patience, and I hope you’re as excited about this as I am. Make no mistake, this is going to be an exhilarating ride for all of us, and it doesn’t matter whether you do product launch or something else, you’re still going to get a lot out of it.
-Frank Haywood
I’ve just made a snap decision.
Sort of.
It’s been building up for a while now, and something I’ve just read has made me say “Right, time to blow the lid on this.”
So here’s the deal. I’m going to teach a SMALL group of people to recognise when a product will do what it says it does and to understand when they’re being manipulated and how.
In the process, you’ll also learn how to do a product launch yourself. And you’ll learn how to sell your own products with the right actions and words.
This is SCARY stuff, and it cost me thousands of dollars and countless hours to learn.
I’m not going to charge you anything.
But, I AM going to ask you to do a few tasks for me as we go along.
They’re not difficult, and everything I ask you to do will also be a good learning experience in itself. You’ll be able to perform these same tasks for yourself and apply them to your own business.
Okay?
There’s also a proviso or two. I need to know that you have the right skill set to begin with.
I need to know you:-
o Are proficient in the English language.
o Can write. Both harder and easier than it sounds.
o Are independent and have a “can do” attitude. If I give you a task, you will get a good description of the task, but you will get NO help from me and I WON’T answer your questions – I don’t have the time to hand hold. You have to do this on your own.
In addition and ideally, but not necessary:-
o You would know basic HTML. No CSS required, just an understanding of basic formatting of web pages. This would include the use of FTP.
o Be able to do simple graphics editing using either Photoshop or GIMP.
o Know how to install Wordpress, and add plugins and themes.
That’s it.
You can treat this as a “Super Internship” where the payoff is you learn various vital new skills and also how to do a product launch.
In summary, you’ll learn stuff and you’ll be given tasks to do by both written instruction and video.
What this isn’t in any way, is coaching. If you want me to coach you then you’ll have to pay me, and I’m not taking coaching students at the moment.
This is free, and some of the stuff you’ll learn from me no one else will tell you let alone discuss. It’s a bit shady, and it’s a bit on the dark side.
But it works.
There can only be a limited number of spaces. Let’s say 30. That’s all I’m going to take.
I’ll give you more details in a few days when I’ve thought it out some more.
In the meantime if you want to show your interest and get a “foot in the door” or ask any questions (while you can) then you can do so by leaving a comment.
-Frank Haywood
About three weeks or so ago – since my last blog post really I suppose – my brain decided to turn off for a bit.
I couldn’t concentrate, think straight, or even start a sentence. My memory, poor as it is, stopped being any real use to me too.
I’m not kidding.
At the same time, I was constantly tired and didn’t need any excuse to close my eyes for a nap. In fact, I was getting up in the morning, doing the school run with my wife and then that was it. I needed to go back to sleep.
Yes, I was a bit worried about it, but not to the point where I felt I had to see a doctor…
But it turns out it must have been a virus. Eventually it broke into a sore throat, sniffles and a headache. About the same time my mind started to clear up.
Also, my wife now has the same symptoms, which makes me feel better in a perverse sort of way as I know that my problem wasn’t something more serious.
And because we were both in the same frame of mind for a while, some conversations have been a little strange.
The following joke is a good example of what it’s been like in our house.
There’s an old couple at breakfast time, and the lady says “I’d like something a bit special for breakfast this morning.”
“Oh yes dear, what’s that then?”
“I’d like some ambrosia rice pudding please. I know there’s a tin in the cupboard, I saw it there yesterday.”
“Okay, I’ll do that then.”
“I haven’t finished yet. Write this down, you know you’ll only forget it.”
“No, I’m okay, I won’t forget. What else do you want?”
“I also want some whipped cream on top.”
“Okay. Ambrosia rice pudding with whipped cream on top.”
“Write it down, I know you’ll forget what I’ve said.”
“No dear, it’s okay, I won’t forget. Is that all?”
“I bought some strawberries yesterday. I’d like two strawberries on top please.”
“Right! Ambrosia rice pudding with whipped cream on, and two strawberries to top it off. Is that it?”
“Yes. But please write it down, you know you’ll only get it all wrong.”
“No, no, dear. I’ll remember it perfectly well. Rice pudding, whipped cream, two strawberries.”
“Ooh, okay then, if you’re sure.”
So off the old gent goes into the kitchen, and for the next twenty minutes comes the sound of banging and clattering, cupboards opening and closing and so on.
He finally returns with a plate, and on that plate are two rashers of bacon, two fried eggs, and a sausage.
His wife looks at it incredulously, one eyebrow raised, and with a look of total exasperation on her face. Finally she says “See! I knew you’d forget if you didn’t write it down!”
“Wha… wha… what’s the matter dear? What have I done wrong?”
She looks at him and says…
“You’ve forgotten the toast!”
-Frank Haywood
While doing research for a report on autoblogging, and looking for a tool that would allow you to post to Wordpress remotely, I (eventually) came across this blog by 5ubliminal.
It’s well worth signing up to as the owner has released some pretty cool plugins and you’ll only get them if you sign up due to his very nice pp:Morpheus plugin which I’ve just purchased.
If he had an affiliate scheme I’d join it. And if it was a Wordpress plugin I’d buy it.
And after purchasing the pp:Morpheus plugin I DEFINITELY want to buy his Wordpress store plugin when he releases it, it’s just what I’ve been looking for to use on this site, although I guess I’d want a slight tweak to it. From my recent shopping experience there it allows you access to additional content by adding an access token to your subscriber account on a blog.
The tweak I’d want doing to it is to optionally (on a per-post basis) make some content available to all existing subscribers, but make new subscribers pay for it. Tie that in with an affiliate scheme and it would be bloody awesome. I don’t swear often so I think you can tell what I think about that idea.
If you decide not to look at 5ubliminal’s blog or even subscribe, then at least take 2 minutes of your time to read this and have a chuckle. 5ubliminal is my hero just for creating this page alone.
-Frank Haywood
5ubliminal message: I would very much also like a Wordpress plugin that allows me to gather subscribers and email them from within Wordpress. It would need SMTP support so I could use a service that I like called AuthSMTP.com to ensure email deliverability. Actually I think a lot of people would like that. Thank you. 
Yes I am still here.
Thank you to all the people who’ve asked if everything is okay, and where I am. Your concern is appreciated, I’ve just been lying low.
Well, actually I’ve taken a little time out to take stock and decide which direction I’m going in this next financial year. I’ve now decided what to do and hopefully you’ll come with me for the journey.
This last few months I’ve deviated from what I know works, and I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation.
First of all, what do I know works? The answer to that is right at the top of this blog, “Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation.”
You create a product, you get some traffic to take a look at your offer, you build your list, and then you automate the whole process.
Cool. I’ll carry on doing that this year.
In fact I’ll be concentrating more on list building than anything else this year, and I’ll be implementing it in everything I do. I’ve decided to make list building my “hedgehog” concept from now onwards. ie no project is pursued unless it builds a list.
Secondly, what have I been experimenting with?
At the beginning of November I was introduced to IPK. I immediately saw the untapped potential and so off I went full steam ahead and created the Price Comparison service together with a method of quickly building sites thrown in for free.
This also captured my wife’s imagination and attention and she started building mini sites to take advantage of the huge empty market that was out there. She also focussed on creating some hub sites, and two of those have just begun to pay off, with two of the sites making her a total of around £65.00 ($97.50) in the first 10 days of this month.
When the children go back to school next week she’ll be concentrating on adding more content to those hub sites to get them onto page 1 of Google.
Which raises another interesting point.
She’s made that £65.00 ($97.50) from just a few visitors a day – around 30-35 average – mostly from Yahoo, MSN and some ISPs own search pages. Google so far has hardly been in the running at all, sending only 1 or 2 visitors a day.
When she gets her sites off page 5-ish of Google and onto page 1, traffic will kick in big time and her earnings will soar.
She’s never done anything like this before, and I’ve been really pleased that 1) she really got to grips with the whole site building thing (the Site Builder makes it easy) and 2) she’s making money from it and can see that her income will grow in time as long as she sticks at it.
As a result of what’s been going on with the mini-sites I’ve also been experimenting with autoblogging, with some very pleasing and exciting results.
It’s funny. You know how some things just bubble around and are there in the background but nothing happens? And then suddenly they “come of age” and everyone’s paying attention to them?
Well, it’s autoblogging’s turn to stand in the spotlight.
I mentioned automation above, and autoblogging is a perfect example of this.
You set up a niche blog, you set up a pile of relevant articles from a free article site to be posted, and push the button. From that point on you forget the blog and move onto the next one.
Here’s a great and recent example. I set up an autoblog 5 weeks ago about petrol lawnmowers. I grabbed a load of articles and queued them up for gradual release over 6 weeks to see how it would do.
There’s no advertising on that site yet, and I’m due to revisit it in the next week to put on a huge pile of articles and also some monetisation. (No, I WON’T be using AdSense.)
So far there are 84 posts and with no links from anywhere I’m now getting 4 or 5 visitors a day for the exact search terms I want people to find the site by. Google has indexed 75 pages but the site isn’t yet in the first 10 pages.
Not a lot of visitors yet, but my plans are to shortly apply a linking strategy which will boost the number of back links and traffic to the site.
The next steps for that site are:-
#1 – Queue a whole load more articles which will appear over the next 12 months.
#2 – Apply a good linking strategy.
#3 – Monetise the site with a few “lawnmower reviews” and Price Comparisons, and also a few ads using AdSpurt and Amazon (and maybe eBay) widgets.
#4 – Link to my REAL petrol lawnmower site.
#5 – Forget about it.
Okay I won’t completely forget about it, as I’ll probably make changes to it as I like to experiment. Experimentation and a bit of thought and applied logic is what will make the site really pay off.
At the end of the day, this autoblogging site is disposable. Notice I said that I’ll be using it to link to my real site. Google likes it when related sites link to other sites. Not reciprocal links mind, just one way.
So if I apply a good solid linking strategy to both sites, and then link the autoblog to my real site, then the real site should do quite well. Especially if I create a couple of other related sites via autoblogging.
Finally, I’ll be automating the creation of my mini-sites by farming the work out to staff in the Philippines and Manila where the employment costs are much lower.
(I’m reliably told that there’s a technical college in Manila where the undergrads speak good English, are well-educated and like to make a bit of cash doing web work.)
So there we have it. My strategy for the next 12 months.
#1 – Continue to create new and useful products for my own business and sell them. Make list building my “hedgehog” concept.
#2 – Create niche mini-sites (monetised with Price Comparisons) using a combination of Wordpress and my Site Builder service. (Build niche lists.)
#3 – Create niche autoblogs where I both monetise them and also use them to link to my real niche mini-sites in #2. (Build niche lists.)
#4 – Pay other people to do #2 and #3 for me.
I hope you can see that having a good strategy and knowing just what you’re going to be doing and how, is well worth taking some time out to decide.
Maybe you’ll decide that my strategy or at least parts of it are good ones and will work for you too.
I’ll share more with you as it happens, IF I get feedback that’s what you want me to do.
-Frank Haywood
I’ve known about autoblogging for quite a while now, about 2-3 years I guess, but I’ve never done anything about it while spending a considerable amount of time learning a lot about it. Learning new stuff is great, but it’s not a good use of your time unless you put the learning into action.
That’s changing now as I started the first run of an “experiment” yesterday.
I took out a brand new .info domain in the baby niche for a term that suddenly seems to be getting a lot of search. My wife has earlier this week taken out a .co.uk domain for the same term, and is building a site similar to the one she built a couple of weeks ago that resulted in a payout from Amazon yesterday.
So she’s building a regular “hand made” site using Price Comparisons, and I’m building an automated site using autoblogging techniques. We’re going to directly compare to see if there are any SEO or monetary benefits to doing it by hand over having a site built automatically.
In case you’ve never heard of the term autoblogging, it refers to a method of where a blog site is built automatically or semi-automatically over time. It’s populated with freely available material you can get from article directories, and is (usually) 100% white hat.
If you think about it, by gathering together a series of articles and other material on one particular topic from multiple sources, you’re creating a useful resource for anyone interested in that subject.
In the bricks and mortar world you might think of it as a specialist store such as (for instance) scuba diving. There the store owner has pulled together lots of different products all about scuba diving and it’s a one-stop-shop in that niche.
Autoblogs are no different from manually created blogs, but take a lot less effort. And they come in different guises and are used for different purposes, but the ultimate goal is to use them to make money with.
So in my case, I’m using a self-hosted Wordpress blog and building it with a set of (as I’ve said) freely available articles from an article directory. I’m monetising it using the Amazon self-optimising widget (like Google AdSense, but pays a lot more), and also eventually with an eBay feed, and of course AdSpurt.
Rather than monetise it directly as above, I could have just set the blog up to grow and rank well in the search engines with no direct monetisation. I could then either monetise it by persuading people to sign up to a mailing list and then having an autoresponder send them a series of offers every week, or I could use it to send traffic to my wife’s site.
Also, instead of using a self-hosted blog, I could have used for instance a free blogger blog, and again monetise it indirectly.
And there are umpteen other methods of building and monetising autoblogs.
Now I know that any non-marketer who is more of a techy geek would likely get very agitated at this and start making false accusations like “spammer” and “splogger”, and “ruining the blogging community”. I’ve seen that talk in various places, but this is total nonsense and in most cases the same people are running AdSense on their sites.
There’s nothing wrong with monetising a blog, and if you decide to do it the easy way via autoblogging, there’s also nothing wrong with doing that either. But some people just don’t seem to get it, and I get the distinct impression that they think that’s it’s somehow cheating to do things more effectively.
After all, what’s the difference between running a generalised article directory full of other people’s articles, and running a niche blog full of other people’s articles? It’s a different platform, but the net effect is the same.
So, just to be clear, there’s a distinct difference between a splog (spam blog) and and an autoblog.
Splogs are by their nature typically black hat, and sploggers are responsible for all the junk sites out there that are filled with AdSense and non-sensical scraped and gibberised wrangled content from other blogs, where all references to the original author of the material has been removed.
Splogs will just appear on the web fully formed often with several hundred pages of junk, thrown together in a couple of hours max and are never touched again. The life expectancy of a splog is about 2-3 months (often less) before de-indexing happens, so the creator isn’t going to spend much time on them and knows beforehand they’ll only get a limited life out of them.
Autoblogs are typically white hat and centre on a niche using a range of legitimately obtained material that gives credit to the original author and the all-important backlink to their site. It’s the back link which is what spurred them to write and publically make available the original material in the first place. The material itself is often genuinely useful and well written articles, but of course not always.
Autoblogs will start small and grow slowly and naturally like a regular site would, with new material being published every day or so. Anyone that finds them would be inclined to believe that they’re maintained by hand, whereas in fact the posts are automated. Your visitors benefit by finding their one-stop-shop on the topic they’re interested in, and you benefit by not having to have done any real work while also being able to monetise your site.
It’s a win-win, and that’s always important to me in anything I do. I provide value, and I take my cut.
Here’s the learning point.
If you provide genuinely useful material on a topic, and the site conforms to what Google expects to see on any quality site – privacy policy, terms, etc – and it stands up to human inspection, then you have nothing to worry about. Over time it will become a force to be reckoned with.
I’ve seen countless what I would call black hatters make comments in forums and on blogs that go something like:-
“I make my splogs so ugly that people want to immediately click on something to get away from them. So I put a big fat AdSense block in their way. Muhahaha!”
*sigh*
There’s just no need to do that. Comply with what real people want and what Google want and everything will be fine. You’ll have a long term useful resource that will bring you in a nice little extra income.
-Frank Haywood
