A Private Invite Only Network

Posted by Grizzly on Aug 12th, 2008 | 61 comments

Alright folks this has been a while in the making but the time has come to seperate the serious bloggers from the water testers. By now you should all know two things. Backlinks are the single most important ingredient to making money online and they are a bugger to get – especially good ones.

The single best source for backlinks are your friends. Get involved in a community of like minded individuals and help each other out. This is the best way for beginners to get involved, learn and grow online. I have added a page to this blog entitled Friendz of Griz and on it is a list of bloggers I have got to know and trust. You should get to know them as well. Help them and they will help you. The list is far from complete and there are many others I would like to add but I thought I would wait to hear from them first – if you want on the list please let me know.

Now let’s talk about what you can do if you have reached the stage where growth is necessary to increase your earnings. I’m talking about those of you who have niches that have proven to be profitable but you just can’t get to the top of the serp’s. If you are on page 2 of the serp’s and making $5 – $10 a day with adsense then you know your profits will increase if only you can break into the top ten.  You make the odd affiliate sale but know the potential is there if you could only move up the ranks. If you are not at this level then this post is not for you.

A friend who many of you know but I will be keeping quiet about is in the process of finalizing a private blog network. This network currently consists of 250 blogs, mostly PR3′s and he is adding more blogs daily. Let me make this point right up front. This is not my network and I am not financially involved in it nor will I be earning commissions from promoting it. In fact there will be no affiliate program. This network was devised originally for private use for a few trusted people and it will more or less remain as such except that he will allow others in on an invite only basis. I have agreed to help him in this respect for the same reason I have helped others – because I can.

I pondered contacting many of you by email but that smacks of spam to me and I have never sent out a mailing to my list in all my time online and don’t wish to start now. Instead I thought I would put the word out and let you contact me.

Before you do though let me give you some details.

This network is not for beginners or people with spam sites.

We are only looking for people with experience and who know the value of original content. You must have legitimate quality blogs in order to use the network.

This will not be free. The owner has invested a lot of money and time developing this and it will be a full time job running the program. He is entitled to make a decent living from it. He will offer an introductory price for the first month for users to try it out.

There will be a monthly fee in the neighborhood of $127.  If you are not in a position to earn back this fee with your sites then this isn’t for you.

This network is not like Backlink Solutions or Linkvana.

The blogs are not spammy looking and include all the bells and whistles found on legit sites.

The blogs will not be over posted and each post will remain on the high PR index page long enough to obtain the credit from G.

The Network is graduated. All newcomers will be limited to first tier blogs. At this stage you will be monitored and if you post to undesirable blogs you will be removed from the system as well as your posts.

Your posts will be controlled by the system. You don’t pick which blogs or the timing of the posting. This will be automated. There will be no blog list.

The blogs will have many non-linking posts on them as well. This will keep the blogs legit and avoid link de-valuation which both BS and LV were susceptible too.

These blogs will not lose PR as they will be gaining their own backlinks over time. The owner is also looking at a system for deep linking the sites so that there will be PR on the back pages as well as the index page.

There will be general blogs and niche specific blogs.

The number of users will be limited and monitored. Those with quality sites will move up to level two and eventually level three over the course of a few months. The top level will consist of premium PR4 and PR5 sites and users will have access to the entire network as well. It is hoped that by this stage all the spammers and inexperienced users will have been weeded out.

It is not in my nature to exclude people but in this case I agree with the owner. This program will be extremely powerful for those who know how to use it. Neither of us wish to see it sunk like BS. I believe that there are a few dozen of my readers who are at the stage where they can benefit from this greatly. A lot of you still need to develop your blogs and would be wasting both your time and money with this. Please don’t be offended if I feel you are not ready for this yet. We will be accepting more users as time goes on so keep plugging away and look for future invites.

As I said the program is still a few weeks away from launch but I thought I would do a little advance scouting and see who is interested. If I feel you are ready I will email you the URL when it is up and running.

This part sucks but I have to be honest – I already know who I think should join us. If you aren’t one of them I will be saying no for now but please don’t be offended. The fact is that this will only work with experienced users – especially until the bugs are worked out – and there will be bugs. We will open it up to a select group and then close the doors until we see the results. Later there will be room for others to join.

Nuff’ said – without naming names I’ll wait to hear from the people I hope will give this a go. I think you all know who I mean.

One last note – if I don’t know you well please forgo asking. Spend some time in the community and let me get to know you first.

You can contact me here: Grizzly

Flipping Pre-Made Domains

Posted by Grizzly on Aug 11th, 2008 | 44 comments

Most of you are familiar with Domain flipping. The practice has become quite popular over the past year and for good reason – there is money being made buying and selling used domains. The idea is a simple one. Buy an aged used domain and build up its PR, Traffic and yes RSS subscribers and then sell the domain for a decent profit. In my opinion the buyer in most cases pays far too much and in many cases really far too much. I have talked about  what I think a blog or website’s real worth is elsewhere (What is a Blog Really Worth) but to put it simply – it’s worth should be based on what it earns and not on it’s popularity. Many a buyer has learned this the hardway and yet the market continues to pay for style over substance.

In most cases the buyers believe that they can find a monetization package that will work for the purchased domain. This rarely happens though. Popular sites garner large buyouts because they seem to promise traffic and everyone knows that getting traffic is the hardest thing to get online. Get the traffic first and figure out how to make money from it second. Lots of people are losing a lot of money following this mantra.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the principle behind this thinking but I have always maintained that all traffic isn’t equal. Search traffic can be monetized. Social traffic is very hard to make money from. If you are buying a site and it doesn’t have steady search traffic then beware or you will pay too much.

There are lots of social sites for sale – what I don’t see are keyword SEO’d domains for sale. What I would really like is to be able to start a campaign on competitive niche and find 5 or 6 keyword relevant solid PR domains for sale. Oh and a consistent stream of search traffic even if small. This type of domain lends itself to Adsense income and has PR to pass which makes it far more useful than buying a popular social site.

And this brings me to this blog.

I want to see just what is necessary to produce a keyword optimized blog with solid PR in as few steps as possible. If a formula exists I want to find it and then duplicate it over and over in order to produce ready to use – income producing domains right out of the box. And then sell them.

I have not posted much on this new blog for a reason. I want to know what the trick is in avoiding the sandbox. Is it frequent posting? I’m thinking posting has little to do with it. Is it quality backlinks? This I’m thinking has a lot to do with it. So far this blog has not been sandboxed by G and the only factor that can account for this is the fact that I have accumulated a number of quality links from my friends. This is entirely white hat – all the links are legit and come from a variety of trusted sites. I was given a PR0 during the last update which could be seen as low but I see it from a different angle. The blog was less than a few weeks old with 2 posts on it in a highly spammed niche and yet G still ranked it – low yes but ranked none the less. I suspect that by next update all the high PR backlinks will be accounted for and credited to this blog resulting in a PR increase.

Now I don’t plan on selling this blog. I plan on using it to test my theories and once I have worked out the steps I intend to start producing ready made niche blogs for others to buy. In most cases I hope to find aged domains with the right keywords in the URL and then tweak the blogs and build links. Aged domains are preferrable as they don’t generally get sandboxed. In most cases however aged domains are not available and I will have to start the blogs from scratch without being sandboxed. This is not something I am doing alone. Terry from The Honest Way and I are working on this together. In time I expect that we will need the assistance of a number of other friends in our little network and of course everyone will share in the profits.

What would you pay for a site that pulls in $10.00 a day from Adsense? What would you pay for a site with 3000 RSS subscribers but only makes a few hundred dollars a month?

I believe there is a business model here that can work and should be relatively easy to accomplish given the fact that we have built up a community of quality bloggers. You can make money online going it alone but the real money is in the networks. Just how many pre-made domains do you think a small group of us could churn out using our existing blogs as the anchors?

If you have some quality sites with PR3 or better and are interested in pursuing this model please contact me and we can discuss this further. Any ideas you have are more than welcome.