If you read Progress Report 1, you’ll know that the blog I set up for this case study is Cheap Electricity Options.

To recap, Week 1 of the blog development involved keyword research and identifying if the niche wasn’t too competitive and that there were enough products for it to advertise. Week 1 closed with the installation of the blog, selecting a theme and adding a home page and article. The blog is set up to use a static home page. So now to week 2:

Week 2:

If you’ve taken a look at Cheap Electricity Options, you probably noticed that there are no ads on the site and no affiliate links. That’s because I’m seasoning the site for the first month. By that I mean that new content will be posted to the blog every 2-3 days so that the search engines will see that it’s an active site and, when they spider it, they’ll see it’s a content-driven site providing real information for visitors and not an affiliate or ad-driven site trying to get money out of visitors.
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At the end of my review of the Autoblog Blueprint course earlier this month, I mentioned that I might do a case study on one of the blogs I build using the techniques and methodologies laid out in the course. So that’s what I’m beginning here.

[Save $70 (47%) on the Auto Blog Blueprint with this coupon code: 72FC4A8B84]

Here’s what I did in the first week of setting up a new blog:

Week 1:

1. Pick a niche: I have some interest in the Green Energy / Alternative Energy / Renewable Energy niche so I did some keyword research using Market Samurai to see how competitive the niche is and if it would be worth devoting some time to.

2. Keyword Research Part: I don’t just build a single large list of all the keywords I find for a niche. I use Market Samurai to check the competition for different keywords. That competition is measured by the PageRank of a site, how many backlinks it has, where those backlinks come from and how good a job the site’s webmaster has done with SEO. While the niche is somewhat competitive, using Market Samurai’s keyword competition tools showed that I could probably shoehorn a domain into the Google page 1 results for several keywords given a bit of time. If a large enough list of keywords comes out of this selection process, then I proceed to Step 2 of keyword research. With the green energy niche, there were enough keywords.
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[Update: August 17th: Greg Jacobs' "The Assassination target" launched today. Copies were expected to sell out in about 5 days. However, demand has apparently far outstripped what was anticipated and the doors are expected to close within 24 hours. That's quite phenomenal for a $1997 product! So the question is: am I buying this product? No. That's not because I think badly of the product, think it's over-priced or any such reason. I simply don't have the time available to follow another course as I'm already invested in Alex Jeffreys marketing course and Mike Johnson's Autoblog Blueprint course. The Assassination might be the course for you, so check out the video on the sales page.]

I just received word from Greg Jacobs that he’s launching a new training course called The Assassination on August 17th. It teaches how to create a product and launch it, starting from nothing and ending up with a viable product.

Beyond that, the only info I have is this short blurb on the course:

The Assassination is an 8 week webinar coaching program that will take participants through the course materials to ensure success.

By the end of these 8 weeks they will have created and launched their own product.

This takes students from the beginning, starting with nothing, to creating a complete product, sales letter, website, running a launch and creating a sustainable long term income.

We also provide them with the tools they need; members receive lifetime access to The Assassins Guild (an online networking platform to build their team). They also receive lifetime access to FusionHQ – revolutionary software allowing people to build their online business from a centralized platform – no coding required, even a non-techie can do it.

The Run-Up to Auto Blog Blueprint

I first came across the concept of autoblogging back in November 2009. Basically, all it means is that your blog runs on autopilot, pulling content from different sources and publishing it on a schedule you set up. Most such systems run on WordPress, utilizing a range of different commercial plugins. Some of these plugins pull and publish content on a schedule; others create a number of future-dated posts, based on keyword lists, that WordPress publishes when that post’s future date becomes “today”.

The system I came across late last year was WordPress Mage. This is a full autoblogging system based on WordPress. It also comes as a set of WordPress plugins for those who prefer to install their own WordPress blogs. Training is provided on how to build and market blogs using the system. Blogs can be monetized in a number of ways (Adsense, Clickbank, eBay, Overstock, Amazon and LinkShare) and you can always add other affiliate image ads and links to blogs as well.

I built a few blogs with it and decided to buy a couple of plugins to better display eBay listings (phpBay Pro and Auction2Post) and a plugin to turn Amazon product listings (along with customer reviews) into blog posts (ReviewAZON). Becoming more familiar with the software, I was able to make my sites look better. The WordPress Mage ethos is to build sites quickly, keep building and hope that some of them “stick” and take off. The training also advocates putting 50+ eBay listings on a page above any content.

What I didn’t know at the time is that WordPress Mage is very resource intensive and having more than a couple of such blogs on a standard webhosting account (e.g. on Hostgator), results in more than your fair share of server resources being used. In my case, Hostgator suspended my account for overuse of resources, which meant I had to find another webhost who could meets the blogs’ needs.  I kept two blogs on Hostgator and moved the rest to Webhost4SEO. It was then that another problem raised its ugly head – the WordPress Missed Schedule Posts problem.

I wasn’t heavily promoting the blogs and the upshot was that they weren’t making money. Indeed, they were costing money due to the amount of time being put into them. I also  had a lot of hosting issues that have meant that the blogs were offline for periods at a time. So that’s where the Autoblog Blueprint comes in…

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After almost a week of being offline due to webhosting problems, WebBiz KnowledgeBase is finally back online. So why did it take a week? Surely it should just have been a matter of changing nameservers and migrating the blog from one webhost to another. Easy, right? Nope! It should be a relatively simple thing to do but things are never as easy as you expect…

Why The Blog Needed To Be Moved

Ok, the first question I hear you ask is “Why did you need to move the blog at all?”. Well, it wasn’t something I decided to do on a whim, just to see if I could do it. Originally, this blog was on a Webhost4SEO shared hosting account. I had other blogs on that account too, but those were blogs built using WordPress Mage. As I’ve come to realise, that particular set of plugins is a resource hog but more on that later.

Anyway, webbizkb.com is my prime blog and it’s the one I worry most about and the one I always want to have up and running. The other blogs on the shared hosting account were chewing up the server resources and every so often the server had a heart attack and keeled over. All sites offline as a result. At the time, neither I nor the webhosting company knew what the cause was but an errant WordPress plugin looked to be the likely culprit. As the blogs grew in size, the server keeled over more often. And webbizkb.com was down for hours, sometimes a day, at a time. And at other times, the site was very slow to load. Not good. And that prompted me to look around for alternative hosting…

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