Halloween Sites Update #1

I thought I would provide a quick update to how my Great Halloween Experiment is going. I have ended up with 31 domains. About 12 of them I bought last November when I heard about Brian Johnson’s success (no, I did not pay for his coaching that is going on now…). The rest I picked up in June. All but two are laser focused on specific costumes. The other two are more of “authority” domains – along the lines of “fairy tale costumes” instead of “little bo peep costume” (just an example).

The two authority domains are being set up mainly as autoblogs using WPRobot. I bought the Commission Junction plugin that they recently released. It allows you to randomize how the auto content is generated. This is my spin on what Brian teaches. He doesn’t use autoblogging. I will also be adding a few new articles too.

The remaining 29 sites are being setup as Brian has described in his free materials. I paid to have the front page articles written as well as someone to research relevant links to go in the blogroll (so you don’t have all affiliate links). Once I see which sites are doing the best, I will add more unique content.

I am a little nervous about using Adsense on these sites. Brian sent a message that Google de-indexed a bunch of his sites that were running on a dedicated server (that is how they knew they were all his). He admittedly violated one part of their TOS and feels that being too open online (providing URLs of his sites) is what eventually got Google’s attention somehow. He thinks that it was an isolated case of Google cracking down on him, not his method. So, I am still debating on using Adsense. I’ll wait to see which sites do the best and maybe add it on later making sure I have a lot of unique content and value. Here is the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yms4j3Rws28

Results So Far

• All 31 sites are indexed
• About 5 are “done” as far as the building the site – I haven’t done much promotion yet.
• I posted the front page articles on all the sites except the last 8 that I am waiting on right now from Burn Your To Do List. I will go back later to add the images and links.
• I am keeping a giant spreadsheet to keep track of which tasks have been completed. Must have!
• 3 sites are ranking on the front page and 3 on the second page as of 7/23 (I am going to record rankings in my spreadsheet every Friday) 8 more are ranking on lower pages. Many of the sites don’t have anything but the Hello World post or just the one article posted. Only a couple have any backlinks right now.
• 2 costume sales this month so far! (BuyCostumes.com has an awesome affiliate program – you can keep commissions even if someone returns their purchase!)

On Promotion

I’m thinking of picking up a couple of automated backlinking programs I’ve read about recently. Haven’t had a chance to look in depth at them yet but I will keep you posted. With this many sites, I will not have time to mess around doing things manually.

I’ll do another Halloween update in a few weeks.