How do maintain your site(s)?

[bernard]

One of the reasons I will skip PBN's this time around is the massive time spent on maintaining 100+ sites.

This forum preaches one big site, or at most a few, I am going to have more than a few sites due to smaller niches in my country. That still means a lot of maintenance, most important, making sure affiliate links are working, products are not 404 etc.

How do you structure this practically?

I used to spend my Sunday going through everything, but could it be a job for outsourcing? Give someone a list of all money pages and click through the links for example. Do other stuff?

 

[CCarter]

@ragnar I've been reading every one of your posts and what you talk about - I just don't get it. I recall in a thread a while back you were having a hard time making ends meet, and then couple that with this strategy of maintaining 100+ sites (which clearly doesn't work since you aren't making enough money), why continue this strategy even scaled down?

Why not do what all the people that are successful do and concentrate on a single site until you grow it to a point you can diversify. At a certain point you have to look at your past results and ask yourself whether you should continue going down the same or similar roads that end up leading you with barely enough to make ends meet.

I've been warning people against PBNs since Wickedfire was active. The people that listened concentrated on single projects that are now generating $10,000 - $20,000+ a month in revenue. The people that wasted their time trying to maintain 100+ PBNs for months at a time to barely make $500 (that's a generous number cause the majority of PBN users are making far less than that) - if they are lucky... they have nothing to show for all that waste time and effort. They don't have a real business they are just playing at one.

Yeah grant it there is the magical 1% that purport to be making a lot of money with PBNs, but watch carefully what they offer you, they turn around and offer you guides, courses, and charge you lots of money for their knowledge - basically Guru-ing the process. If those Gurus are making so much money off of PBNs and these strategies why are they wasting their time charging you guys a ton of money for those same strategies - why not just make bank and not give away "secrets"? Come on guys lettuce be cereal for a moment, they are making the majority of their money off of selling their course and guides to you - Period.

If you notice there are certain types of IM courses going around - local SEO and PBNs - why those specifically? Cause BuSo's digital crash course is completely free and destroyed the market for the rest of the IM courses, but the two topics we do not touch on are local SEO and PBNs.

So before you guys dedicate your time, huge chunks of your days/nights/weekends, your life, and your energy towards something make sure it's actually going to get you to your goals and not based off of a Guru or someone else's purported claims.

 

[Future State]

@CCarter nailed why PBNs and Spam are crap. They don't last, they don't work, and everyone who claims it does is lying to sell you something. It might have worked in 2010. Not 2018. PBNs might work for a little while until you get busted, and you will get busted. It's not a question of "if," but "when."

But to answer your question, use a spidering software. Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog, Integrity. There's a bunch of them that will crawl your site. You can tell it to only report back on external links like affiliate links and tell you if they return an HTTP status code of anything other than a 200.

 

[bernard]

I'm not using PBN at all this time.

I'm talking about money sites.

 

[Sisu]

I maintain them by owning as few as possible. I have 4 sites, and frankly, even that's too many. A few years ago, I was making 8k a month primarily from 1 of them.

 

[bernard]

Even with one site, you can have hundreds of outgoing links though right.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I spider mine monthly and replace any broken links or broken Youtube embeds.

The only issue is if you're using certain programs like Amazon, they don't always give off a 404 error if a product is out of stock. A lot of times it's just "we expect more stock in X days" or "this product is no longer available." I don't mind the first one because there's always other sellers they link to above the fold, but the second one sucks. I don't check them all manually to see if this is the case. I should do it every few months or so, but any more frequent is impossible.

I recommend knowing which posts generate the majority of your revenue and keeping an eye on them manually, and checking the rest much more infrequently.

I generated a system where all of my affiliate links are tucked away in text files on the server. So if I have a product I want to sell across 10 posts, they all pull the link from one of the text files. That way if the product goes down and I need an alternative, I can replace the URL in the text file and it automatically propagates across the site. This also gives me a nice clean list to manually check and replace.

There's no good way of doing it. I suppose, for something like Amazon, you could identify parts of the page that only appear if the product is unavailable, and write a bot to detect that. It just depends on how many networks you use, how responsible they are on their own backend, what HTTP responses they send, etc.

If you haven't, I'd suggest gathering all of your affiliate links into one spreadsheet if needed, mapped to the pages their on (or not if you use a system like mine) so you can check and replace as fast as possible. I'm not sure there's any good way to get around having to do it the hard way though.

 

[bernard]

Thanks Ryu, this is exactly my problem.

As I wrote in another post, we don't have Amazon here, so I have a lot of independent affiliate programs. It really sucks when you find out you're linking to a dead 404 page or out of stock.

What you describe, would that be a good task to outsource?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Sure. It's the definition of things we should be outsourcing. But at the same time it's a pretty sensitive task. I've outsourced things of this nature (boring data entry, image collecting and resizing, etc.) and you can tell the person gets sick of it and they know you won't be double checking their work.

Why would you? You'd have to be insane to manually do everything you just paid them to do manually. Some people will take advantage of you if you don't pay the right amount. And these kind of mistakes can be costly, since having live affiliate links is how you're making any money at all.

So you might put in some redundancy here, where you pay 2 or 3 people to type either Yes or No into the column next to your affiliate URLs, doing it separately, then do a comparison where anywhere there's a mismatch, you check to see which was right or wrong. You could even pay one more person to double check the end result.

Technically the work is so simple a child could do it. But that's the problem too.

 

[turbin3]

My first question would be, do you already have a separate list maintained of all the affiliate links?

My second question is, considering the links are from many different sources/networks, is there anything consistent and identifiable about them (URL parameter strings, ID numbers, etc.)?

As far as crawling, Xenu is probably going to be the quickest, easiest option. Just make sure to be clear with the crawl config up front, and enter which domains are considered "internal" (your site). Then check the box to "Check external links". It'll make quick work of a 2,000 page site, like in seconds or maybe a minute or two. From there, you can export the tab separated page map and copy it to Excel or whatever spreadsheet program you prefer. So this would be a low barrier to entry solution, and it's fast.

If we're talking Wordpress, which is usually the case, WP Multisite could be one efficient option. Makes the backend management a bit easier and more controlled.

 

[yawei]

Thanks Ryu, this is exactly my problem.

As I wrote in another post, we don't have Amazon here, so I have a lot of independent affiliate programs. It really sucks when you find out you're linking to a dead 404 page or out of stock.

What you describe, would that be a good task to outsource?

I agree with @Ryuzaki - in both that this surely is a thing to outsource but also that it is a sensitive task that could directly cost you money.

So I suggest to look into the outsourcing alternative which is having a software do it for you. Sure, you'd have to check the result, but you'd have to / would want to do this when outsourcing too.

I've been using Genius Link (not an affiliate nor posting any links) for a good while and they monitor all my links for out-of-stock products and broken links.