its normally better for seo reasons to have domain.com/blog rather than blog.domain.com. with blog.domain.com you spread the links coming in *slightly* so for the main site (which is where you make money so obviously you wanna help the main site) it is better to have links going to the exact same domain, not subdomain. but ive not really noticed a huge difference tbh
yeah, use wordpress. loads of themes for it both free and not free. just find somrething you like. or order a custom one. as you have a paysite personally i would have a custom one that matches the sort of style as your main site but imo its not crucial
'3. Next... I guess I need to put various sponsors on the BLOG, relevent to the name of the domain and niche we're targeting... '
don't do that if it is a blog on the same domain as a paysite. affiliates won't want to send you traffic incase the surfers end up clicking your affiliate links
'4. I need to update the domain... what's good, I know someone said the more the better... but people are talking about networks of domains that run into hundreads... how in hell do they get updated regually... ? '
Hire writers. Or sit there for a few hours and schedule lots of posts. its a fun life
. I use marsedit (on osx) to manage my blogs, its soooo much faster than manually logging into /wp-admin/. I've heard on windows MS do something called live writer (i think) that is meant to be good as well
'5. And finally traffic ? How do you drive traffic, link exchanges ? '
seo seo seo
'6. Oh and anything I have missed lol ? '
just get building them. you'll find out what works and what doesn't. make sure you set up wp correctly... which tbh just basically means have permalinks to something decent (%category%/%postname%/ or %postname%). i never bother with seo plugins but some people swear by them.
btw if running lots of blogs on one server its easier to put several blogs on one installation location/config. i wouldn't put 100s on one config but a few on each. in wp-config.php you should have this line:
Code:
$table_prefix = 'wp_'
do something so it does something like
Code:
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
$host = str_replace('www.','',$host);
$host = str_replace('.',$host);
$allowed = array('mydomain1.com','mydomain2.org');
if (in_array($host,$allowed)) {
$table_prefix = 'wp_' . $host; // should equal wp_mydomaincom
}
else {
die('Invalid');
}
(untested code... i actually do it slightly different but that is the general gist of it)