Tech and Trends:- There are three main components you will need for your own blog network:
1) Expired High PR Domains: If you have several older domains with page rank that you already own but aren’t using, great! But otherwise, I would advise you to consider picking up some expired domains that had some page rank and age to them already. I generally don’t bother with PR 0 or n/a sites, and instead focus on using PR 1 and higher sites in my own networks (and mainly PR2’s and PR3’s). In general, the higher the page rank, the more powerful the links will be in your network.
2) Diverse “Class-C” Hosting. For your blogging network, you are going to want unique class-c IP addresses, preferably one per site. However, in some cases you can host two or more sites on the same IP address (if the host allows) – especially if you will be using these to like to different money sites that you own.
3) A Blog Posting Mechanism. If you want to be able to post well spun content automatically to your blogs, you will need some software that allows you to do this. For the purposes of this report, I show how to do this using Article Marketing Robot. This is a software that many internet marketers (including myself) already own, and it is also quite easy to use. If you don’t own or use AMR, there are probably other options as well out there that you can research.
Calculating The Costs
Before you start building your blog network (or networks), you should have a clear idea of what the costs will be. Having your own blog network means you must make an investment both in the domain purchases (and renewals) and in the hosting.
This can get expensive, although when compared to the costs of a paid subscription, or continually using other types of backlinking services, they often turn out to be a much more worthwhile investment.
For example, I currently maintain two separate networks. One network is my “blog posting network” consisting mainly of PR1 and PR2 sites (a few PR3 are thrown in the mix as well). I use this network to post original and spun articles to (although my spun articles are over 100% unique and would not appear to be spun to anyone reading it – you can read more about my spinning recommendations later in the report). This network currently has about 30 blogs in it.
My second network is my static “satellite site” network – sites with static pages and a higher page rank in general. With my satellite site network, I have mainly PR3 and PR4 blogs in the network – and I hope to add some even higher PR blogs to the network in the near future. Currently I have about 10 blogs in this network.
My main cost for continually running these two networks is the hosting fees – I currently pay around $55 a month to host the 40 or so blogs for this network across three separate hosting accounts (I will get more into the details of hosting later in the report).
I also try to add new domains to this network every month. What I buy really depends on my finances for that month, but minimally I try to pick up two or three PR1 or PR2 domains each month – and these usually average around $10-15 a piece.
So right now, it’s costing me a little over $1000 a year just to run my two blog networks (consisting of around 40 blogs). With BMR, I paid $708 a year just for the privilege of posting to their blog network (with the five site plan) – but now all that money has now been thrown down the drain.
Ultimately, how much your blog network will cost you will depend on how much you have to invest starting out and how quickly you build out your network.
There is no fixed price, although I think aiming for a blog network of about 30 blogs is a good number for your first year.
C-Class IP’s generally costs in the $2 range per IP address each month (you can get 5 class IP’s for around $10 a month from several providers). So for someone just starting their blog network adding five blogs a month, you can expect minimally $10 hosting a month plus domain fees – and then add $10 a month to your hosting fees as you increase your blog network size.
In terms of domain purchasing, the sky is the limit, but if you stick to the cheaper PR1-3 domains, your domain purchasing costs for five domains a month will likely run between $50-$100 a month. I usually pay generally between $15-20 for PR1 and PR2 domains; and around $30-40 for a PR 3 domain.
This may sound like a large investment to some, but when compared to paying monthly fees plus additional fees for outsourcing content to a paid network like BMR, the costs may actually be less than what you were paying before. And you will likely see much better results from your own blog network as well in terms of rankings . In the end, it can be a much more profitable investment than paying money every month to a subscription based blog network that may/will likely eventually disappear at some point in time – along with all your posts.
