In response to "don't use free hosts, blogs,..." and other myths of business.
 

There is always discussion about whether free hosts and free hosted blogs are worth ones time, and there always has been such discussion. I understand why people say they are not worth it, but I think most of it comes from prior experience (or inexperience) with shitty ones. Without getting into the plusses of such places, I'd like to tell a little story.

Since most of the stuff I'm about to mention is past, and no longer works nor is given weight like it used to, I thought I would share a little story about how I made a small fortune off free blog services. By small fortune I dont mean enough to eat out nice a couple times, I mean enough to buy a house or two.

It all started about 4 years ago when I had discovered a cool backdoor into yahoo via myyahoo and rss feeds (which I found the day they started allowing them) and that backdoor lead me into a job or internship with what I thought of then, and still today, the Adult Industries Best Seo. During my 6-8 months of mindblowing revelations, while surfing yahoo, and dmoz, for more information on blogs and rss and how it could all work with real, old school webmastery and search engine manipulation, I stumbled upon a 404, that eventually meant more to me then any live webpage.

Here's what happened. I clicked a link in dmoz directory that lead me to a blogspot site, that had been deleted. It was a pr5 with about 2300 backlinks, and well basically, a total fucking shock to see it there empty. So I logged into my blogger, and almost shaking, created the same blog. Blog created successfully.

By the end of the night, actually 6 am the next morning, I had a list of about 40-50 pr 5 blogs, maybe 100-200 pr4s and so many page rank 3 that I stopped looking. When I told the man I was working for that day he said "you've just found a gold mine John".

Within weeks I was approaching the 3000-3200 area of total pagerank. I didnt spam porn pictures or movies on any of the blogs but instead used their link power to brute force links up to first page in google,such as my referal links for big terms. There is a post on this very board about if there is a "trick" to ranking TCG Hosted galleries with blogspot, cause someone stumbled upon my links. Anyone in the squirting niche will remember in google, my referal link as number one for 2 years, until any url with wm_refer=jdoughs in it was banned from google. (sigh)

Blogger changed their entire 404 system the first time, and while it never effected how I found them, the second time they edited the system effected how which were deleted and such. In the early days nobody in the world was picking these blogs up, and nobody thought anything about it, there was so many sites with backlinks that it literally was sickening. I was nearing about 600 sales a month (new joins not counting recurs) from "free blogs" that everyone and their brother advised to stay away from, and nobody else seemed to realise they were even there. Of course that didnt take long to change, and you will be hard pressed to find any with PR at any of the sites. There is people reading this thread who have spidering bots they search with, good luck :)

I still hold many of the links from them blogs, most are deleted now, caught in the eventual doom of deletion by mods once found. It has taken about 4 years for the traffic and sales from the links to completely die. But to this day I get new joins from those old links.

Long story short here I guess is that there is value in everything, you just need the right wisdom, timing and experience to take advantage of that value. While it may seem silly or trivial to one, it is almost certainly someones moneytrain. You just may not see it.

I still to this day use free blog services to incorporate extra link power into my network, that yes, was built by a whole lot of free blogs. While some of the other blog networks have turned the focus to mainstream they can still be used to pursue those avenues, and adult free hosts like thumblogger are certainly viable replacements as hardcore "superdomains" that allow you to actually link to yourself. Lots to be said for that. A couple housefull's worth of reasons I can think of. :2 cents:

Interesting.

Wow, you read it faster then I re-read it :)

It was a good read, and good advice.

That was some smart thinking outsde of the box.
Inspiring.

This is a good post...

clever man

you did well :)

and I know for a fact that what he's saying is actually real. I wasn't part of what he was doing, but he was showing me a little here and there.

There Is No Money In Free Blog Services

That's the kind of thinking that makes money. I never ceased to be amazed at how many ways there are to make money. As long as I've been doing this I still find new ways to basically pluck money out of thin air. Good job bro.

Great story!
There used to be a similar "feature" in wordpress.com hosted blogs.
Last year I managed to find around 50 unclaimed blogs after I read a post about it in a SEO blog, but minimal pagerank and they got deleted quickly.

Great read.

So what are you up to these days ;)

the guy from bluehatseo wrote a tutorial on how to do exactly that about a year ago.

Yeah it was basically over by then. This was 04-05,there was nobody doing it but myself when I first caught on, which made it way to easy, I still have lists of thousands of deleted blogs none of which are worth much for anything (or they would have been used).

Not good for much now, well...., Except 40-50 mb of unique text content that was cached on them originally.. lol

i dont think it worked a year ago.

i was doing the same thing until it stopped working and it made me a fortune. it was great while it lasted. thanks for the house blogspot!

This text is too long men!

So you were able to log into these blogs and insert content?

Created, added templates/html, added unique text work and links to my own network and several target url's from sponsors. I ranked several hosted galleries for big generic terms as well as their site specific search and relevant niches.

Most of these blogs had hundreds of unique links to them, so allthough they came from the same IP/Domain, they had the backing of unique content and unique sets of backlinks (was far from a network or single effort). So when I set up 70-80 PageRank of root pages everyday (allready existing, and instantly spidered) and only added 3-4 outbounds, it really bottled the link power up and passed it along at its full capacity.

The link power was funneled from ALL OVER THE WEB, it would be impossible for one guy or one network to cover so much ground, that was the true beauty of them. And also, this was befor any subdomain spam protection work from google, and even blogger/blogspot was basically still a completely trusted domain.

These werent exactly "dead sites", in the boom of blogs many people set them up then later moved to their own .com's, and just logged in, changed the server principles, and reposted to the new .com, and deleted their old one. Most the old links never changed, they were buried in posts or in comments on other blogs, in directories (often years old links) or other places never to be changed.

Hmmm 10 short paragraphs about how someone made 6 digits of revenue off of free blogs (literal $0 investment) and its too long to read? Good luck :Oh crap

can you be my affiliate? :)

really, email me at [email protected]

how much did you make total?

I love it when people actually post real info :)

I think I gave enough clues above as to what it was, I'm certainly not going to claim any said number, but again, read the post and do the math.

I wasn't joking before when I told you there were people who get more sales in a day then you make posts. And I wasnt being demeaning when I said it. 30 sales a day is not that much for someone whose on their game with their ducks in a row.

I've never seen the problem with using free blogs

Bump cause this is still good advice, and a good story.

nothing wrong with mixing but i wouldnt depend 100% on free services. remember smuthost/servers . you have no control and they can ban / delete/change your site anytime

old hat like you said. don't work no more. :( :1orglaugh

Actually no you can still make money from this but you need to follow it through a lot more deeper than ever to get the results!

Yes, its certainly doable, its just not as broad of a doorway now. But the same theories still apply and work. Using services like smut.com and thumblogger.com to build feeder network sites or trade sites is a completely viable way of expanding the outlook for your money sites.

Wow, that's one of the most interresting story I've heard! :thumbsup

exactly!

Interesting story, thanks for sharing

Apologies in advance for bumping ancient thread, but is there a way to
find and re-register deleted/removed blogs of thumblogger, smut, sensualwriter, blogbugs etc. ?

My only criticism is for those who only use freehosts, and depend of them as their sole source of income. And even worse, use a single site so if that site changes their business model or shuts down, they have lost every thing.

dude i was doing this while ago to ...forgot all about the 80 blogs i had till right now LOL

guess what still around and kicking with PR just loged in and now changing links over on them to what im pushing now days ....cheers :)

True dat top notch.
:thumbsup

Good stuff, John.

Freehosts are great for linkwheels.

http://www.highrevenue.com/seo/sites...wheel-building

And a word of caution here: http://www.highrevenue.com/linkbuild...kwheel-flowers

Thats amazing story

This post is interesting, but it confirms hosted third party scripts are no good. They are fine for a year or two and then they become useless. Now all that work was for nothing, just a couple of hundred grand, and that's it?

Yea well a couple 100 grand is pretty good money. I doubt he worked 12 hours a day for 4 years on those blogs.

i can just say WOW...

Bumpin'...

nice read, thumbs up!

Nice used to do this with wikipedia references, that fun is gone 2.

Awesome post Jdoughs. Great stuff. Let's talk. Shoot me an icq sometime if you get a chance. :)

So if you were on your way to the bank to take out $250,000 and you saw $150,000 on the ground, you wouldn't pick up that $150,000 because the time you spent picking it up wasn't worth it?

Think about it, it's absurd. All the work I did on them was minimal, and the returns were maxed. This got me my 'real' start in the business and sent me from making a couple hundred dollars a month, to a few thousands A DAY. I have a very hard time even pretending that it wasn't worth it.

Old post, true story, thanks for the bump.