Self Growing Websites Review
Written by ady on May 17, 2008 – 4:19 pm -
Self growing websites have long been the aim of the internet marketer. The search for a system usually starts after 6 or so months when it dawns that automation is needed if the portolio and profits are to continue to grow.
The ultimate self growing websites system would be Portal Feeder of which I’m lucky enough to be a member. However, after I had reviewed the WP Traffic Suite of plugins (read review here) and calling it a “poor man’s Portal Feeder” I decided to check out what other systems were available for those that either couldn’t get into Portal Feeder (doors are shut and very rarely open) or who weren’t yet at the stage where they could justify the $300 a month price tag.
I found Self Growing Websites available in 2 versions, light and pro and my first mistake was to buy the light version. As soon as you get it installed and start reading the instuctions you realize that you have something with huge potential but to fulfill that potential you need the full version. I promptly upgraded but it works out dearer than buying Pro from the off so be warned, if you like the look of the Self Growing Websites system go for Pro and save some money.
How It Works
Self Growing Websites is broken down into several modules, Light version includes 4 while the Pro includes all 9. The modules themselves fall into 4 categories, Input, Monetization, Output and SEO.
Each time you set up the system you can use 1 module from each category plus the 2 SEO modules but you can set up as many as you like per site. To better understand this here are the modules.
Input:
- Article module - upload your plr or self written articles and this module sorts them and does several tricks to them
- Content module - pulls articles from directories based on your keyword and performs various tricks on them
- RSS module - pulls rss feeds from as many sources as you want and again performs various tricks
Monetization:
- Adsense - Currently the only module in this category. Select which ad block, where you want it to appear etc. and it puts the ads within the files sent from from input.
Output:
- Static module - Files arrive from the input module and having been monetized via the Adsense module are published in your web site. A page is created with the content on as well as a monthly archive page which is updated every time a new page is created.
- WordPress module - Same as above but posts it to your blog rather than a website.
SEO:
- Sitemap module - Creates a sitemap and updates it as the output grows
- Pinger module - Pings your output to all the impotant places. Extremely useful if you are creating static pages.
As I said, you can use 1 from each plus the 2 SEO modules for each set up. So for instance I set the Article module up with a pack of PLR articles, monetized it with the Adsense module and had it create static pages to grow a website. I’ve set it to do this once a week. For the same site I also created a blog and set up a Content module to pull articles from several article directories, monetize with Adsense post them to the blog once a day. These will promote my once a week articles on the site. I also used the RSS module to create a latest news section on the website which updates every 6 hours.
If you are thinking this sounds pretty powerful stuff but what about duplicate content, Self Growing Websites does some pretty neat tricks to make sure you avoid the duplicate penalty trap. For instance, when it takes articles from the directories you can set up various tasks for it to perform on the articles before it moves it to the next module.
Swapping paragraphs is probably the most powerful of these. You can set it to swap paragraphs around within the actual article or if you are pulling more than 1 at a time you can set it to swap paragraphs between articles. In either case it always leaves the first and last paragraphs alone.
I experimented with swapping paragraphs within the article and its suprising how well it works. Most artices are written by marketers nowadays anyway so they are basically a collection of points or facts. They read perfectly well when changed and I couldn’t see a problem unless perhaps an article included a numbered list.
Changing paragraphs between different articles is a great little trick if you don’t mind using less than ethical methods. This would only work though on a tight niche so that you know each and every article are on exactly the same subject: “Heartburn” rather than “chest complaints” or “Atkins diet” rather than “lose weight” for instance.
You can also make your keywords bold or italic so they stand out for the spiders and you can make them links pointing to your sales page or affiliate program.
The RSS feeds will be mixed up so they create completely unique pages and if you are grabbing from more than 1 feed, they will be mixed even more. For example, if you are pulling from 3 feeds and each have 10 extracts showing and you have selected to create a page made up of 10 extracts each time then Self Growing Websites will pull 3 extracts from 2 feeds and 4 from 1 and then mix them all up. It will even mix up the order in which the titles, dates, source, link and actual snippet is shown to further the uniqueness of the page it creates.
Other little tricks include uploading a list of sentences such as “Did you know….” facts and it will pull 1 each time and place it at the beginning of articles before publishing. Adding a link at the bottom of a static page to the previous articles and complete control over total cross linking of your pages.
Downsides: Doesn’t work with latest versions of WordPress and I suspect will always be a few versions behind. Not a major problem if like me you are going to use Self Growing Websites to add life back to older blogs.
You need an understanding of cpanel, in particular creating a database and setting up a cron job. Full instructions are included but it helps if you have done it before. A nice touch is that it creates multiple cron commands for you in the order that hosting companies seem to favor. Just copy and paste the top one and set for 15 minutes and wait, if it doesn’t work try the next in the list and so on. I use 3 different hosts and the first 1 worked each time for me.
Summary: Self Growing Websites is packed with features and as such comes with a $249 price tag although if you consider that too expensive you probably aren’t yet experienced enough to be considering purchasing it. I set 3 sites up yesterday in around 2 hours and the next time I need to look at them is when they run out of disk space and I need to upgrade the hosting.
More modules are currently in the pipeline and where as Portal Feeder is about much more than simply drip feeding, I have found Self Growing Websites to be a better drip feeding system. Its quicker to set up and making the articles more unique is better automated.
I currently have around 100 sites that could do with a freshen up and I intend adding Self Growing Websites to all of them.
If you are building your virtual real estate by using a service such as PLRPro, using Self Growing Websites to drip feed your articles and supplement those by using the content or RSS module would be a great foundation for your online business.
You can visit the SGW sales page here.
Tags: portal feeder, self growing websites
Posted in Internet Marketing Products |
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Nice review PLR Man. I had tried tried to start an Adsense business some time ago with templates, and got frustrated b/c after about a year the most I had earned was $100 every 3 months. Now it’s even less. Could you update your results using this software? Monthly would be great. Thanks! Tony