Honestly, I'm not big on new years. I always have the massive desire to slap anyone in November or December who starts a sentence with "In the new year I'll...". But I started my Splogging journey a few months ago and a bunch has changed since then. And since the journey is expanding I might as well update the title to 2018 as well.
In December I made a little under $2000 profit with 100% automated content. Kind of cool but not the interesting part.
I started my original journal mostly to work on a more scalable version and test the fuck out of things to see what was working. I've got a bunch of different tests up at the moment, more variations in development and I've reverse engineered a lot of splog networks which seem to be having varying success. I've finished a lot of the original code, scaled my backend development hardware and (far more importantly) started to see some traffic and longtail rankings already.
In fact today I noticed a page 1 ranking for a longtail with the content design which I think is the highest quality and has the most potential. If you didn't know what you were looking at you might mistake it for a real site.
Still, loads of testing to be done but I'm starting to narrow down what works. Ideally, I want to be able to focus on scaling the system and adding more to it. But my big time bottlenecks at the moment are:
Keyword research/content sources.
Setting up and customising sites.
Setting up accounts and landing pages for the parasite splogs.
I've automated huge chunks of all three so I do a lot less of it than you might imagine. But there are some things a human can do better and the quality just wouldn't be the same when automated.
I had/have a JV partner. The deal is anything they do the initial setup for earns them 50% of all revenue. They make a lot less from this project than I do because they haven't really set much up. I'm trying to incentivize that and I'll see if that works in the next week or so.
I'm also looking at hiring a VA who can handle at least some of the basic stuff. I've had... mixed results with this in the past. I'm not relishing the idea of having to deal with the interviewing and training but if I can find someone half decent to handle the setup I have a huge to-do list of things I want to implement.
In the short term, the focus at the moment is to launch more sites and finish a new parasite system I've been working on. I think it's almost there maybe another day or two if I can make the time to properly work on it.
I prefer the idea of splogging on my own domains so this is the bulk of my testing at the moment. But I won't turn down free traffic from other sources and my theory is they'll rank faster so it's a good way to test content concepts rather than my own domains which will likely take months.
So that's pretty much it. Scale the stuff which works. Test the fuck out of everything I come across to see if it works better. Stop wasting my time with mundane tasks and either sort out my JV or hire someone.