Entries from January 2008 ↓

I’ve been looking for a way to simplify the process of setting up new websites. Wordpress does a great job in that the install process is quite simple and I can get one up and running in about 10 minutes. The trouble is whenever there is an update, I have to go to all my sites and manually upgrade them all (Fantastico does a great job of this but my web host is a bit slow in updating their wordpress versions in fantastico.)

Enter Wordpress MU (multi user). This is basically the version user on Wordpress.com where millions of people have their blogs hosted. It is absolutely amazing that these guys have released it open source for general public use. The best thing about this is that everything is on one database, and one code set - ie. I will only need to update it once when there is a new version.

However, by the default, wordpress mu only works on subdirectories (ie. domain.com/blog1) or subdomains (ie. blog1.domain.com) so a little tweaking needs to be done in order to get it to host different domains (eg. blog1.com, blog2.com, blog3.com, etc.). As is customary for wordpress, everything has a plugin already developed. In this case, you need to down the multi-site plugin for wordpress mu. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no documentation that comes with this - they don’t even tell you were to upload the plugin! Hopefully, the rest of this post will help other people out so they didn’t have to go through all the trial and errors that I went through.

Installing Wordpress MU:

1. Download the latest version from mu.wordpress.org
2. Upload it to the root of your public_html or www domain directory. I’m guess you should also be able to put this in a subdirectory (eg. domain.com/wpmu) but since it’s going to host a ton of other domains, lets put it in the root so we don’t over complicate things.
3. Create a new database (eg. wpmu). Most people have cpanel so this is done via the MySQL databases link in the cpanel admin page. You will most likely be on a shared hosting account so your db will be called something like username_wpmu.
4. Create a database user for wordpress to use. Most people will call it the same as the db name so it is easy to match them up. Remember to add the user to the db and grant all permissions.
5. Try to access your domain in the web browser. The wordpress mu install page will come up and tell you what is missing. This will be stuff like changing the permissions of some files, giving it the access rights to the database, etc. It’s pretty self explanatory and I didn’t have any problems at all.

Installing Multisite Manager

1. Download the latest plugin from http://wpmudev.org/project/Multi-Site-Manager
2. Uncompress the file and upload it to the wp-content/mu-plugins directory
3. That’s it. You should now be able to log into your wp-admin and see a ’sites’ page in your site admin screen.

Adding a new site

1. Firstly, you need to add the domain to your hosting account. Log into your cpanel and add a parked domain.

   

   ( Obviously, you need to also make sure your domain is using your hosts nameservers at your domain registrar. )

2. Now here’s where the money is. Instead of adding a new blog, you go to the site admin and add a new site (ie. your new domain)
3. Apart from the new domain name (use domain.com, instead of www.domain.com!) , I’ve circled all the bits you need to fill in.

   

4. Path: You can’t leave this blank. Put in a slash
5. Clone Site. You MUST select your main domain to clone. This is so that every site can have it’s own site admin and be able to manage the themes and plugins.
6. Leave everything ticked (selected) but also check the site name and illegal names boxes. ( It doesn’t seem to work properly without these cloned. )
7. You should now be able to log into the wp-admin of your new domain. (ie. newdomain.com/wp-admin)
8. Once logged in, go to the Options menu and update your Site Name and tag line
9. Also go to the Presentation menu and pick the theme that you want the new site to use. If the theme isn’t there you will need to go to the Site Admin menu and enable to theme.
10. That’s it. You’re ready to go. All the other menus are the same as the ordinary wordpress.

Once you have Wordpress mu setup, you basically have your own domain ‘parking’. I have a theme fully loaded with adsense and every time I have register a new domain, I just ‘park’ it and it’s ready to go. This is sooo much better than those traditional parking companies. It’s almost like parking on steroids because I can put whatever I want on the site, I can build as many backlinks as I want, and it will almost definitely get indexed by google.

Parking domains with wordpress mu is what I do now for all my domains until I find the time to build them into a proper site. It’s working really well because now I’m not missing out on any money by having domains sitting empty. Check out SEOpinions and Media Leaks as examples. They’re both running off FreeServing.com but they are functioning as completely separate installations! Thank you Wordpress!!

Popularity: 38%

Happy New Year guys! It’s been a great break and unfortunately, I haven’t made my millions yet so I’ve had to come back to work. December was an awesome month. The jostling for christmas shoppers meant that every click was worth that much more. I’m now up to 51 domain names and my adsense income for December came up to a grand total of… $263.66. It will be hard to beat this figure in January as I’m already noticing that the returns per click are substantially lower than they were in December. Some people have rumoured that maybe it’s because I’m using the old adsense formats instead of the new ones. Sounds a bit far fetched and I doubt Google has become that evil.

With the growing number of websites that I now own, it’s probably doesn’t add any value for me to keep listing them all and breaking down their profits per site. Suffice to say, I’ve managed to secure some ripper domains, so much so that I’ve started to auction some of these off at my new domainholics blog :) Currently the auction is underway for StumbleMe.com which has a highest bid of $80. I’m finding more and more killer domain names than I can handle so whilst I do have intentions to build a site for each, sometimes it makes more financial sense for me to let some go to give me some immediate returns and cover my hosting and domain rego costs. Next up on the auction list, I’m thinking about putting MediaLeaks.com and SEOpinions.com on the market. Both, I think are high quality dot coms that would be worth $x,xxx for the right end user so it might just be too early for me to give these up…

With all these domains, I’ve also been experimenting with domain parking. From some of the guys over at NamePros, it seems to be making them a lot of easy money. However, after a month of trail, the returns for my type of domains are too low. Mind you, I’ve only used Sedo as my application for Parked.com was rejected. I suspect with domain parking, you really only make money if you have some super type-in domains (like iambored.com or whatever.com) or if you are into adult xxx related domains and poker / gambling where the cpc’s are supposedly much higher. For me, I prefer to ‘park’ my own sites with adsense as this way, I am free to do whatever I want with site design and it has a chance of being on top of Google’s search results for a variety of key terms.

Popularity: 5%

Source: Freelance Freedom

Popularity: 5%