Podcast 21: How to Make Money with Your Own Private Blog Network; Interview with Hayden Miaymoto
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Well, Hayden Miyamoto is at it again! I decided to bring Hayden back onto my podcast for the 3rd time because he continues to build his business in unique ways that I think we can all learn from.
In my interview with Hayden today, we discuss how his niche site business has fared over the past year, and what he is doing differently now. In particular, Hayden has been able to build a huge business using expired domains and his own private blog network.
You may recall my previous 2 podcast interviews with Hayden of NoHatSEO.com. They were very in-depth and groundbreaking for many people.
- In my first interview, Hayden shared how he was making 30,000 dollars a month with niche sites, post penguin.
- In my second interview, Hayden shared how to find valuable expired domains for just $9.
I HIGHLY recommend that you listen to those podcasts if you haven't already.
Hayden's Update
In the interview today, Hayden reveals that his niche site portfolio took a serious hit after the EMD update. I wanted to know why, and also what he is doing differently in his business now.
As it turns out, he is still in the business of building sites, but many of these sites are now in foreign markets (like Mexico). He has some interesting ideas for building very large content websites using the same basic principles that I always talk about around here (solid keyword research, quality content, and link building).
Although, I have to admit that his link building tactics are much more advanced than mine.
It will come as no surprise to you (based on his previous interviews with me), that Hayden is actively using his private blog networks (from expired domains) to rank his own websites. However, he is doing so much more now with those networks.
He is actively selling packages to SEO agencies to help them rank their clients websites as well. As we discuss on the interview, this is huge business. SEO agencies are spending vast sums of money each month to get the links for their clients all the time. Hayden has now built a very profitable business out of this venture.
What I really wanted to know on the interview was this: Is it possible for someone just starting out to build a business out of selling links? I'll let you be the judge of that based on the interview; but the answer to me is clearly a yes.
Is it a Shady Business?
I want to address the question of whether or not this is an ethical business head on. We discussed this on the podcast as well. However, I know others will bring it up, as they have in previous podcasts with Hayden.
The truth is that Google does indeed make it against their policies to buy and sell links. So, yes, if you get involved in private blog networks and sell links, you are going against Google's guidelines.
But the reality is that this is very common practice among SEO agencies and is the way business is done for their clients. Could it get your website banned from Google? Yes. Is it unethical or illegal? No; there is demand for the product and you are providing this product and service. I'll let you be the judge for yourself, but just because Google doesn't want you to do something doesn't make it that is illegal or bad per se.
I'm not here to convince you one way or another what business to go into; but if you do go into this business, just go in with your eyes wide open. Be aware that this is indeed something that Google frowns upon.
What's Covered in the Interview
During the course of the interview, we cover a number of different topics, tips, and resources. Here's what was discussed:
- An update on Hayden's Niche Site business
- How the EMD update hit up to 70% of his sites
- What Hayden is doing differently now
- Using expired domains to link to his own sites
- Building large content sites in foreign markets
- Selling links and private blog networks to SEO agencies
- How one intern has built a $15k/month business after just a few months by selling links
- The big business of private networks
- How to develop out a private blog network
- How an individual can get involved in this business. Is it realistic?
- What happened to TextLinkAds and other link brokers
- What a “guest post” network is
- How to find valuable expired domains
- and much more
You can stay in touch with what Hayden is up to on his blog at: NoHatSEO.com.
Where to Buy Valuable Domains – Coming Soon!
Hayden has developed a process to find valuable expired domains very quickly. As a result, he finds more than he can use right away.
After Hayden and I discussed the fact that he is finding so many domains, we decided to partner up and offer for sale some of these valuable domains that he has found. So, early next week I will be adding a list of domains for sale, right here on my blog. These will all be domains that Hayden has gone through and spam checked; so they are clean domains.
You can certainly use the steps that Hayden has discussed in previous podcasts to find your own domains. But for those that don't have the time or are not comfortable with the process yet, you can pick up some great domains very easily.
I'll let everyone know with a blog post and email early next week when these domains are ready.
Listen to the Podcast Here
You can listen to this interview on iTunes as well right here. As always, if you have a minute to leave a review on iTunes, that would be great!
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76 Comments
Conversation
I’m currently at work, but I’ll definitely be catching this podcast during my lunch hour 🙂 But readying through your show notes I can say that I definitely got hit really hard during that EMD update. I think 90% of my sites went down as opposed to Haydens 70%, haha.
I’ve been planning on building a private blog network for a long time, but just haven’t gotten it off the ground. It’s has quite the out of pocket expense. Anyway, can’t wait to listen to this one!
Jon Haver has spoken highly of Hayden for learning about blog networks, looking forward to giving this episode a listen.
hey Spencer
I’ve heard about Hayden before, I think it was because of a “expired domains” link/podcast you’ve shared on your blog…
Cannot wait what this time he has to share with us.
My worry is this: for beginners it may sounds scary to build their own network/invest in expired domains, and the associated costs could make them turn for an alternative like buying access to established networks
What do you think?
I agree with you John, it will be a challenging task for the beginners in terms of investing in buying a quality expired domain and as we all know getting a super quality domains stats from $200.
Hayden should explain more on this?
Following the techniques on the blog you can still find freely available domains for registration. Just know that it has a steep learning curve and will take hours to figure out. Alternatively you can quite easily buy quality domains for under $100. At this cost owning the domain is a no-brainer for me, as you have complete control of it.
Hayden, you are ridiculously awesome. I’ve been following you for quite some time. I have one question and I beg of you to answer it.
Will you link to one specific domain multiple times on the same “expired domain”?? or do you only link to a site ONCE?
I see it as natural for a site to maybe link to a different site multiple times if they have a relationship going..
**When you sell these links to Agencies, are you throwing links in OLD articles or only posting new articles with the links. Are your sites devoted as mainly posts or pages??
Just ones that have been vetted. Easy. Job done
Awesome, I can’t wait to hear this. Over the last few weeks, I have listened to the other 2 podcast with Hayden about 5 times each and last weekend picked up a few domains after what he said. also what Tung and Jon have been doing with them.
Keep the great podcast coming Spencer!
Hey Spencer,
It seems expired Domains and private networks are the way to go 2013. I thought about doing this for some time, but the tech part still scares me way!
I’m a big fan of blog networks. I’ve built a small one myself lately, and it is doing very well so far.
Please we need transcript! Can you help us get it as internet connection round the world is not the same
Thanks for your continued assistance and help
And here comes the controversial subject of private blog networks again. I can doubtlessly testify to the fact that private blog networks work, and they work really well. The fact that you can make money via your blog network makes it even more worthwhile. I’m not ready to build a blog network now, so I’m renting links from others. If I ever decide to build one in the future, I’d come back to listen to this podcast again to grab some tips on how to monetize blog networks.
Great podcast with lot of potentials. I have few questions for you Hayden:
A. Do you charge a recurring fee from your customers? If yes how does it work? Or do you set up a nework exclusively for each client and then sell it for a flat price?
B. the main problem of PBN subscriptions is, the links drop off of PR page very quickly as they add new content. Does it really matter in terms of ranking?
C. What’s your minimum set level of PA, DA while purchaing domains? Do you care about majestic seo metrices too ?
Eagerly looking forward to your answers !
A – Yes, generally it’s xx number of new permanent posts per month gives them a heavy discount. But they have to use them each month, and their billed on the 1st of the month.
B – It matters, but not much. Most of the time the links stay front page for a month or more, and since they’re always getting new links it’s a steady progression.
C – I don’t care about SEO metrics. PA30+ DA20+ is sort of my minimum, but I search hard for higher 🙂
Love Hayden’s podcasts. Always full of so many actionable ideas.
It’s interesting that helping others rank in Google has become more profitable for him than ranking himself in Google.
I love the approach of going after big money clients who want to rank. Seems much more profitable then a Google AdSense account!
Great interview. Having your own Private network work very well but now a days it is not easy to find expire domains. Some are cheap and some are very expensive. I did buy a video course on how to use expire domain to your advantage. Making sure you add privacy, having different IP address and so on. Great course but I am not sure if you want me to share it here. So far I own a few and it has helped me ranked for a niche site(about 6 months ago).
I would tread carefully with this kind of activity. Google is not oblivious to these tactics and eventually the hammer will come smashing down. Like selling drugs, the business is great…until you get caught.
As with everything it’s about risk and reward. Decide how much risk you are willing to take before embarking on new strategies.
I agree. I did my best to add a warning in the post under the “Is it a Shady Business?” heading. Everyone need to weigh the risks and rewards for themselves.
Love it when Hayden’s on. I’m a little fuzzy on the specifics though.
He finds good expired domains. He vets them, he buys them.
I’m assuming that he hosts each expired domain on a different IP than his money sites. I imagine that can get pretty pricey. A typical GoMommy/RedHost/Hostreptile account will be 100 bucks up front. 10 bucks for the domain.
So if he’s building a network of 5 feeder blogs – that’s look like 550 bucks.
He builds the expired domain out.
1) Does he grab the old content from the Way Back Machine? Or are they 5 new articles that relate to the backlinks.
After the expired domains are built out, he then builds links to his money sites.
2) Links Expired domain to Money site
– how many (I imagine more to a) go higher up the page, and b) for higher competition keywords)
– do I need 30 of these really good sites to rank for #1 for keywords with a KC of 30 or less? (3300 bucks)
– or better yet, against e-commerce sites where the KC can be in the low 20’s, but still “unbeatable”.
– how fast does he build these links
– what’s the anchor text?
– is he linking to the home page, or to a deep inner page?
– does he keep adding content to the PBN?
– average article and # of articles on each site (I think I heard 10 articles of 500 words or more)
3) And did his niche sites fail *because* of his Private Blog Network, or *despite* his private blog network? He says something about non-diverse anchor text, but he didn’t elaborate. And I don’t recall him talking about that on the 1st podcast.
I’m sure most of the readers are looking for a basic architecture here of how to get rolling on this.
If the nitty gritty details is in the 1st 2 podcasts, I know I must have missed it
Thanks, great podcast as usual Spencer.
There are lots of clever ways to get multiple C-blocks for next to nothing. I have a few options posted on my blog. Hosting my entire network costs very little.
1 – I write unique content and don’t grab from WayBack. I never pretend to be the previous owner of the site.
2- You likely will only need about 10. It depends on the quality of the domains though.
I make sure link velocity is no more than 1 or 2 a day, and then continue to add links even when ranked so the velocity doesn’t drop completely.
Anchor text is 90% generic, 10% partial match.
Usually 50/50 between homepage and innerpages. My money sites generally target inner pages.
I try to make sure I add content to the PBN to not oversaturate the site with link-based articles.
I start with 10 articles 500 words each as the filler cornerstone content. No links in these.
3 – It failed despite my network. It was how I link built using over-optimized partial match anchors. The PBN itself never got hit, or flagged.
Thanks Hayden, much appreciated.
Hi Hayden,
I really appreciate your honesty and business knowledge. My first online business was along these lines.
Just a few Qs regarding blog networks..
1. How do you maintain DA + PA after purchase?
2. Do you linkbuild to the domains outside of your own network?
3. You mentioned advertisers do not bother with PR. I will say from my own experience, some still do. I have been asked for Alexa 800,000 or less.. Your thoughts?
Much respect, you’ve got a new follower..
Adam
Wow, I just listened to the podcast and I ended up taking 2 pages of notes. I’ll have to look into some foreign markets if they’re as open as Hayden suggests.
Also I’ll likely add a PBN to my arsenal in the future, I just don’t have the time to learn it at the moment because my plate is already so full. *sigh*
I heard the pagerank algorithm is not being updated anymore due to patent issues, is this true?
Furthermore a lot of corporate websites are now implementing nofollow in their links which will be a backlash to PR as well as link velocity.
How do you monetize your foreign sites btw? Adsense still?
Hey Gary. You make money the same way as you would with a .com, .net, .org… I’ve been through Hayden’s internship and highly recommend everyone does the same. You learn all the answers to all the questions people are asking on here and obviously then get a chance to build relationships for ongoing projects with other interns and Hayden and his team (Phil, Scott and Han).
I am very new to this expired domain thing and I am reluctant to using it because recently Google showed that they are actively working on removing these “shady” link building strategies. However, I don’t really know how could they do this if the blog networks are done right (aka multiple IPs). It’s always nice to see opinions on this matter as this makes me more and more inclined to give it a try.
The worst that can happen is that I will end up with a bunch of high or at least decent PR domains to sell for a profit.
Thanks for posting this interview Spencer and Hayden.
I have a million questions for how you manage your network of sites but here are the three main ones:
(a) Does every article you post on your blog network have links (either to you of clients) or do you post articles without links to make it look more natural? If so what kind of percentage?
(b) When you buy a site for your network, do you start backlinking form it immediately or add content first?
(c) When you buy expired domains are they just domains or websites as well? Do you keep the old content or always assign new content?
If you assign new content, do you redirect to old internal url’s to your new ones?
A – The first 10 have no links, and then I just have a QC check when posting links to make sure the sites are still looking good.
B – Add content first (as above).
C – Just domains. I do use 404 redirects, and occasionally recreate the page if it has a lot of LRDs and still makes sense to do so.
Great Podcast! Hayden’s insights into the power of using expired domains is excellent. There is definitely money to be made in this area as long as you take your time and buy the right domain/s. It’s great to hear more and more people talking about expired domains and there uses!
Thanks again Spencer for the great podcast!
Hayden – thanks a lot for the postcast.
1. Do you put dates on your posts? And if so, do you try to put past dates (in accordance with the domain age) or fresh dates?
2. Putting at least 10 articles as an initial filler for a PBN site is quite a time/money consuming task.
In your experience would it be less effective for each PBN site to have about 3 articles (500 words each), with one outgoing link per article for example? Granted you can link to less money sites, but let’s assume I only have just a few money sites.
Thanks!
Alan
1) I vary it up. When I post dates it’s the actual date of the post.
2) Yes it is quite a task. It’s so the sites have lengevity however. These sites are real sites, and links are posted only when relevant in a way that looks exactly like link bait. Everything is done with “plausible deniability” kept in mind. With a 3 page site you are definitely just creating a link farm site with no value.
Understood, thanks 🙂
Great episode guys! I have only one burning unanswered question.
When you build likes from the PBN sites to your money sites or client sites – where do you place the links? Are they in the author bio of the guest post? Or inside the actual content? Is there any advice you can provide on what works best for this?
I personally place them within the content, and only if the link is relevant to the article, and the article is relevant to the site.
Hayden, is it important to host your money sites on different C class IP’s? Because I heard it’s important to host the blog network sites this way. But what about the money sites themselves?
No, not on your money sites. I’d vary it up a bit, but certainly not every money site on a separate IP.
Thanks!
Im not liking this business model at all.
I strongly feel that Hayden will be looking for the next blackhat business model that he can ‘game’ whenever Google shuts this one down in a year or two…
But we all can learn valuable lessons from all situations, good or bad. The lesson I have learned from this podcast is that building links and paying for links is indeed still one of the deciding factors for ranking well, regardless of what Matt Cutts or any other SEO guru says.
They claim that they want you to build links naturally by ‘earning’ them, but it’s all hogwash. Manual link building is still key as you have shown us with your niche sites.
But…I do agree 100% that Google does not like link farms. So Im sure Hayden’s time will be cut short once Google catches onto him, which I know they will.
Yep, there is indeed risk in this business – as in all businesses. People should all make their own decisions as you have based on their analysis of the business.
Spencer, Hayden,
Great podcast, really enjoyed it and took a lot away from it.
I’d appreciate if you could answer a couple of questions:
1) Is there a limit to the number of links you would post to each site in the network?
2) How would you price exclusive use of a site? I assume monthly, but how much would you charge, say for a PA35 or PA40 site?
3) Would it be easier when starting out with 5 sites to try and get SEO agencies for exclusive access? I’m just thinking that SEO agencies probably don’t want all their links going to 5 or 10 sites.
4) If an agency regularly requests new links to the same URL and anchor text, do you need to spread them out over lots of sites?
Thanks,
Chris
1) Limit per links per post and ratio of posts with links, but not total number of posts with links.
2) The equivalent of 4 links on that site.
3) Possibly. Usually that’s an upsell for me. And if you’re just starting out you should just tell them that they are your first client so the sites are fresh and clean.
4) Yes.
Hayden, you are ridiculously awesome. I’ve been following you for quite some time. I have one question and I beg of you to answer it.
Will you link to one specific domain multiple times on the same “expired domain”?? or do you only link to a site ONCE?
I see it as natural for a site to maybe link to a different site multiple times if they have a relationship going..
**When you sell these links to Agencies, are you throwing links in OLD articles or only posting new articles with the links. Are your sites devoted as mainly posts or pages??
I link to one specific root domains only once per linking root domain. There’s diminishing returns for each link after the first.
99% posting new articles and links are posts.
Hayden I got a few questions.
1)When you offer the seo agency a trial, do you spread links over all 20 websites.
2) Do you add NEW links every month for the seo agency or are they only renting the SAME 50 links on those websites.
1) I spread links over 10 sites (10 sites each with 1 link to the target url).
2) I add NEW links every month.
Hayden –
Assuming all goes well, do your interns walk away after 30 days with enough of an understanding of the process to source their own expired domains? And to build their own blog networks?
And do they get to keep the tools you’ve created? Are the tools mac compatible?
thanks
They learn how to build their own blog networks, and have options to get domains through my crawler (as well as posts from my network). Everything involving finding the actual domains is covered on the blog though, not in the internship.
And yes they get ongoing access to the tools, which are mac compatible (browser based)
Hi Hayden –
When an SEO agency decides to use your service for links – do you usually have to check whether or not you have PBN sites that are relevant to their clients sites?
e.g. an SEO agency’s main client sells shoes and they want 20 links from 20 sites – do you only use your PBN sites that are relevant to shoes? And what if you don’t have any?
I would use sites relevant to fashion, shopping, design – not specifically shoes. Then write a quality article that makes it perfectly relevant to my fashion/shopping/design site.
Hayden, Spencer great podcast. Hayden is doing some awesome stuff and its rare to find someone so open about everything.
Interesting to hear the emphasis you put on OpenSiteExplorer metrics and in the comments above not on MajesticSEO metrics. I find the PA and DA so easily manipulated by spammy links its easier to sort using Majestic. How do you take an automated approach to filtering out the spammy domains or is it manual review of the links/archive content?
Looking forward to the 4th Hayden/Spencer podcast
I have a few automatic first filters based on a few things:
1) Are their links to both the www and non www versions of the site (is fmrp >1 on both versions)
2) I compare the domain names to a machine-learning spam checker (blacklist + rules, too many hyphens, numbers, etc.)(
3) I compare the anchors to the same spam checker. This step will be worked on a bit to also identify patterns in linking.
Oh and if there’s just way too many linking root domains that’s an obvious one.
Hayden, is identical registrant information (whois) for all your PBN domains a concern?
Do you buy privacy for all your PBN domains (which is a lot of extra cost)?
Or do you vary the registrant information, and if so to what extent?
Thanks again
Alan
It is a concern, I vary it, a lot. And I never buy privacy.
Thanks 🙂
Could you elaborate a little bit on this – the extent you vary your registrations? You vary the names? Addresses? Credit cards? Do you have multiple domain registry accounts with different addresses and credit cards?
Thank you Hayden and Spencer, for being so forthcoming with information.
Timely post and loved the detailed covered in the call.
Will def be looking out for the sell off these domains.
Keep the podcasts coming…
Excited to start my day listening to this podcast. I think this will going to be a great day for me.
Sorry to hear this happened, the process was managed by a VA and this is the first time I’ve tried selling the domains. Let me know your paypal address and I’ll gladly refund.
Hi Hayden,
What should be the quality of the article we write when creating links? Does it matter much?
e.g. Do you expect anyone to read them? Or should they be only good enough to pass a manual review?
Thanks!
Again this is up to you. I’ve gone the quality route and always make sure that if someone were to read them it could pass traffic. Obviously this means no Filipino/Indian writers, which makes it a costly process.
Go to free websites and find the expired domains yourself. It will save you a lot of money and once you know what you are doing it is easy. Don’t depend on others.
Hayden, how do you feel about “editing old posts”??
For instance, if you gave your SEO Agency a free trial period but then they never pay you.. that dilutes your page authority and you have boosted their rank for free.
Would you edit those posts and remove those links??
I’m in this dilemma
I would remove the links yes. Occasionally even remove the posts.
Hey Hayden, thanks for your insights.
1. Do you diversify CMS’s on your blog network, or do you use only WordPress? Is it of importance? Almost the whole web uses WP anyway..
2. Do you diversify name servers? Some hosts give different C class IP’s but still the nameservers are totally identical (e.g. ns324.host.com) for all these IP’s. How important is that?
Thanks for your time!
1) I use WP.
2) I create separate nameservers for each site (NS1.sitename.com)
Thanks. Most shared accounts don’t allow to set your own branded nameserver, it’s normally only possible with a reseller plan which makes things really expensive..
Hayden and Spencer you 2 are steering me in a hole new direction. I’ve been following Spencer for about a year now orso Build a few niche sites and like so many others,..having trouble ranking them in the serps. I’ve tried layered links and allthough the results we’re ok i was still stuck at the second page in google. Went one step further and bought 20 high PR links from a PBN and boom number 2… It def works
I fully intend to take the expired domains route now and build my own PBN. I am bidding on some of the domains in the auction here, so hopefully i can aquire my first one or 2 here today, however, I’m eager to learn the process of finding them myself, either by searching for them in lists or by using scrapebox and xenu sleuth,etc etc.
So first of all i’d like to thank you 2 for being so open/honest and helpful so far and now i’ve got 2 questions for Hayden which are very basic but are puzzling me at the momentl
1) Hayden, in your 1th video (the manual method) you set xenu’s preferences- depth to 2. As i understand it this means track the links on the given url AND the links on the page that that link links to. Why would you want to know if that page has broken links? You have no idea of knowing if that particular page has any value( PR,PA/DA etc etc) So it might link out to expired domains, but the domains are less likely to be of any value?
2) In the podcast you mention that 99.9 procent of the domains listed on expireddomains and other sites like it are no good? So we basically have no other option then to go through the scrapebox,Xenu and sorting method if we want to find any decent ones?
thanks in advance and good luck with the auction, think it can be very lucrative.
A especial way to make money by selling links to SEO companies. However, not everyone will use this business model, as I find Google will target these companies sooner or later.
But interesting to know there are tons of ways to make money online! Good interview, but bad mic.
Great podcast, I’ve loved every one that Hayden has been on. I find that expired domains is sometimes the only reliable way to get quality links into certain niches…yeah we can all submit links to a general directory or whatever, but the fact is, many niches don’t lend themselves well to linkbuilding. This is an excellent way to get some high quality do-follow links into a site’s niche that would otherwise be an uphill battle to linkbuild.
Thanks for the new insight!
Another great article Spencer & Hayden!
Following your initial podcast I have gone out and purchased 5 (not many I know!) expired domains and all are hostied on their own separate shared hosting account.
Some (3-4) of my money sites are hosted with the same shared hosting provider (same IP). My question is: can I link back from ALL 5 expired doms to the 3-4 money sites? My thought is that this may look unnatural if Google was to compare backlink profiles across the same (money site) IP…..thinking about it, I think I am over-analysing too much! Would Google even consider this??
Would still value your opinion though. Problem is if I have a “matrix” of separate IP exp. doms AND separate IP money sites….hosting costs are going to add up!
Thanks!
I have a question regarding PA vs DA.
I get that DA is important – over 30 is good.
But where does PA come into it if you are analysing the root of a domain? The root being the home “page”.
E.g. if you looked at http://www.domain.com and the PA was 40 but the DA was 10 would that be a good domain / page or not?
Hi,
What happens if you put contents totally not related to the previous niche of the expired domain? Will all the DA,PR,PA be gone? Will it be useless?
Hayden – Thanks for the great info!
If you find a domain that has someone’s full name in the domain (example: johndoekarate.com or just john-doe.com) do you still use the expired domain?
If you do use the domain, do you give it back to the original owner if they complain or email your host?
Thanks!
Well, whatever you say guys. You can make use of private blog networks for a long time only if you use it for your sites exclusively. I mean you don’t want to sell links on such a network because it won’t work for a long time otherwise.
Is hard for me to understand why Google keeps vouching for expired domains. If one domain expires is logical to assume that all the valuable content that got the links in the first place is gone.
For me it is very clear that Google can crack all this BPN scheme by simply restarting from zero the SEO value of an expired domain.
I suppose they know the exact date a link first appear, they know if a domain was expired for some time, this should not be a complicated thing to add to their algo.
I am not saying that PBN are not working. I just wander for how long they will.