Setting the Foundation of Your Portal

This guide is both an introduction and an advanced tutorial in portal building. At the end of this guide you will know exactly what it takes to build a network of profitable portal sites. This works whether you want to make $10, $100 or $1000.00 per day. You can repeat this process over and over again to continue to add income to your bottom line.

First of all, this manual is written with the assumption that you want to increase your AdSense earnings by $100 per day. I am assuming that you are currently earning $0.

Taking your AdSense income from $0 to $100/day quickly is going to take some investment up front. This means investing in the right tools, domains and hosting accounts. If you don’t have some of the tools listed below, that’s OK. But collectively they are going to make your life a whole lot easer. Here’s the list of tools we’re going to use in building our AdSense income:

•    RSSGM Wizard
•    DreamWeaver or any WYSIWYG editor
•    CuteFTP – cuteftp.com
•    Microsoft Excel – office.microsoft.com
•    AsRep (adsense tracking tool) – asrep.com
•    A Keyword list cleaning application
•    WordTracker
•    WordPressSuperInstaller
•    Linktator
•    Swift Blogger
•    Rss Submit Seo Version
•    Subscription to KeywordCountry.com

If you don’t have some of these tools, don’t rush out and get them just yet. Read through this manual first so that you understand what portal building is all about before making any purchasing decisions.

We’re going to build 100 “money” domains and we’re going to use the remaining 24 domains strictly for blog networks. If you’re not sure what a blog network (aka blog farm) is, don’t worry. We’ll get into it in more detail further into this document.

As far as choosing domain names, I recommend that you choose theme-specific domains. So, an example would be financedomain.org. This would be on the theme of “finance.” Another example is healthdomain.org. This would be on the theme of “health.”

With portal building, you don’t need to be that careful regarding which themes you choose. We are going to be building a lot of websites, so you don’t want to get caught up on this step. The fact is that some pages are going to earn you money and some won’t. The whole point of portal building is throwing up as many pages as possible. Some will stick and some won’t. But just keep building. That is the mindset for portal building success.

So, for your 100 “money” domains. I would suggest registering 25 Finance domains, 25 Health Domains, 25 Auto Domains, and 25 Technology domains.

Here are samples of each:

Financedomain1.org
Healthdomain1.org
Autodomain1.org
Technologydomain1.org

Obviously, you want to get a little more creative with your domain name. The trick is not getting too specific, while still sticking to a theme. You’ll see why we’re doing this later on, but here’s a brief explanation:

Your Finance domains might contain keyword lists relating to banking, mortgages, car loans, and taxes. All of those topics fall under the “Finance” theme. This is why you want the word “finance” in your domain name. If your domain was called “financetaxes.org” then it would be too specific. A better choice would be “financeresource.org,” or “financenewsforyou.org,” etc.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Terminology Check: when I say “site” I am referring to either a subdirectory or a subdomain on a domain. So, a domain can contain multiple “sites.” This is what subdirectories look like:

http://www.domain1.org/dogs
http://www.domain1.org/cats

This is what subdomains look like:
 http://dogs.domain1.org
 http://cats.domain1.org

If you don’t fully understand subdirectories or subdomains yet, don’t worry. We’ll be getting into them in a lot more detail. The remaining 24 domains are going to be used for your blog farms.

I’ll explain how to go about registering those in a minute. First, make sure that as soon as you’ve registered your 100 money domains, you copy and paste them into an excel file for tracking. We’ll use this document later. Name the document “First-100.xls.” At this point, your money domains should be registered and you should have the names loaded into column A of your spreadsheet.

It doesn’t matter how they’re formatted. Just load them in like this:

Domain1.org
Domain2.org
Domain3.org, Etc.

Registering Your Blog Farm Domain Names

You’re going to be building 4 blog farms (explained later) with your extra 24 domains. You’re going to use 6 domains per blog farm. This means you should choose 4 themes to build your blog farms on – one theme per blog farm. Your 4 themes should match the 4 themes of your money domains. In this case, we’ve chosen finance, health, auto, and technology.

Now, go ahead and register your blog farm domains around those themes. So, you would register:

6 Finance Domains
6 Health Domains
6 Automotive Domains
6 Technology Domains

These domains are going to consist strictly of blogs. Blogs talk about news, so a good domain name for finance might be:

Myfinancenewsblog.com, or something similar.
Again, you want to choose general themes here as I’ve described above.
Again, I’ll be talking much more about blog farms in a later section and it will become clearer why we’re choosing themed domain names for our blog farms.

At this point, you should have 100 themed money domains and 24 themed blog farm domain names. Your blog farm domains should be broken into 4 themed categories of 6 domains each.

Here’s a question I anticipate getting: “Is it really necessary to buy 100 domains?” My answer is: it’s hard to say. I want you to have the best possible chance of earning $100/day as quickly as possible, which is why I’m recommending 100 domains. If we buy 100 “money” domains then we need to make $1 per domain per day to reach our goal. This is realistic.

Now that you have your domains, it’s time to get hosting.

If you’re serious enough about this business to purchase 124 domains, then I assume you’re serious enough to get a VPS and/or dedicated server. In this tutorial, I’m going to recommend sticking your 100 domains on a dedicated box. You’re then going to need to signup for several shared accounts for building your blog farms.

Your Dedicated Server:



Liquid Web (www.liquidweb.com) is the only company I’ve ever purchased dedicated servers from and I’ve been more than happy with the service and the product they provide. Currently, I pay $208/per month per managed dedicated server.

If you want to follow this tutorial exactly, then save yourself the time and energy of hunting down the perfect deal on a server. Simply go signup with Liquid Web. Everything else you do from here on out will go smoothly because you’ll be using the same hosting service I use. However, if you do go hunting and find a better deal on a managed server, then please let me know ☺.

I use Webmaster Plan I found at this link:  http://www.liquidweb.com/dedicated/configure/webmaster/

When you click “Customize,” you’ll be able to add whatever options you want. I’m no server expert. The only option I select is cPanel.

You should get cPanel as your control panel. It will save a lot of hassle in the future.

Shared Hosting

For your blog farms, I recommend signing up for 4 shared hosting accounts. If you want to save yourself time, go to  ResellerZoom.com and signup for 2 different BudgetOne reseller plans. Before ordering, call up Reseller Zoom and ask that each of your 2 to 3 accounts be placed on different IP’s.

Then, go over to HostGator.com and signup for 2 different “Baby” plans. For all 4 accounts, you’ll probably be paying a total of $25/per month. This will give you two accounts on different IP’s (although possibly on the same class-c block) and two other accounts on a different class-c block.

There are LOTS of good shared hosting account deals out there. Do not spend a ton of time trying to find the perfect account. For the most part you’re just going to be putting WordPress blogs on these accounts and posting to them from an auto-blogger, which will be installed on your dedicated server.

Based on what I’ve described above, your total hosting cost will be around $230 per month. So, provided that you own the tools listed above (in the ‘Supplies’ section), your total cost for setting up the foundation of your business will be close to: Domains: $308 Hosting: $230 Total: $538 and $230 of that will be recurring each month. Of course, if you’re making $100/day, then $230/month won’t seem like much.

Once you’ve registered your domains and hosting accounts, you need to set the proper DNS settings in the ResellerClub control panel.

So, first, put your domains into categories. There’s info on how to do this in your ResellerClub account. Place your 100 domains into a folder named after your host. I might call this folder “Liquid Web First 100.”

Then, divide up the domains you want to use for each blog farm. In this tutorial, we’re going to build 4 blog farms, so divide your remaining 24 domains into 4 folders, perhaps:

1.    ResellerZoom Farm 1 - Health
2.    ResellerZoom Farm2 – Automative
3.    HG Baby Farm1 - Finance
4.    HG Baby Farm2 - Technology

Now, go setup your 100 money domain accounts in WHM on your dedicated server. Yes, this takes some time and it’s a pretty manual process. However, I know that there are scripts available that will do this for you automatically. I’ve seen a few of these mentioned in the PGInsider.com forum. One of them is Domain Dashboard (domain-dashboard.com). It’s a bit expensive, but it will save you the time and hassle of creating your domain accounts manually in WHM. Finally, load all of your domains and their FTP info into an FTP program such as Cute FTP ( cuteftp.com).

I have members of my family working with me now and they usually handle the manual process of setting up new accounts on WHM and loading them into CuteFTP. If you’re just getting started, then you may not have the luxury of outsourcing this task, but that could change quickly as you build your business.

Don’t worry about setting up your blog farm domains now. We’ll get into setting those up later.

Now, go login to  Google AdSense and setup a Channel for every one of the 100 money-domains you now own.

If you don’t have an AdSense account,  sign up for one here.
You can setup a channel for each of your blog farms too if you wish, although I have so many now that I don’t bother tracking. There are instructions provided in the Google AdSense membership area that explain how to setup channels.

Basically, a channel is a way to track the income of a single domain or groups of domains. You setup a channel, then assign your domain(s) to that channel.

As you earn more and more money in this business and continue to acquire domains, you’re going to run out of Channels. Google doesn’t provide infinite channels, unfortunately.

This is where a program like asrep.com comes in handy (Adlogger.com is another good one, and the one I currently use). It provides more sophisticated tracking than Google does and you can install it on each of your money domains.

Don’t worry about asrep or Adlogger for now. We’ll get more into this later, but I wanted to mention it here.

For now, just setup your channels in AdSense (and your AdSense account if don’t have one already).