Hi everyone,

I don't know if this is actually allowed but I thought I'd start a kind of diary going through the steps I've taken to start up my own little pet niche sites.

I think it might be useful for new guys like me who didn't (and still don't) really know where to start and talk about any problems that turn up. Hopefully the more experienced marketers amongst you will give some tips as to what to do next and what to avoid.

Anyway if the mods think this shouldn't be here just delete it

Content is King

I really like the content of the articles I've looked at so far, they are very well written.

I'm a great believer in unique content and the first thing I did after I downloaded the articles was to cut and paste some of the text from one of the ferret articles into Google in between " and ". I was a bit dismayed to see that it returned one site and then 72 others (by clicking on the "similar content" link). I imagine that some of these may be due to the article being submitted to the various directories etc. But surely some attempt should be made to "spin" the articles a bit before publishing them? Well that's my understanding of how it works.

So I'll be doing a lot of rewriting before I actually start publishing. Would I be wasting my time doing it?

Day 2: Setting up my "Empire"

I've bought a "Baby croc" account at Hostgator as it allows me to set up an unlimited number of domains (more about setting them up later).

I registered a total of six domains, for cats, sugar-gliders, ferrets, hamsters, Chihuahuas and gerbils. I already have a pet hedgehog site. I registered most of these with namecheap.com, mainly because they offer free whois privacy for a year with new registrations. Their sign up page is also far less cluttered than the Godaddy one. One of the domains is a co.uk which I got at fasthosts.com for £6.78 for two years which seems pretty cheap. The fasthost sign up procedure involved them telephoning me for a code etc which went painlessly.

Unfortunately I couldn't get .com extensions for all my new sites so I went with .org. I'm led to believe that search engines don't "punish" you for .orgs although .infos are to be avoided. Someone might know more about this.

Setting up the new domains on hostgator took a while as it was the first time I'd ever done it. A quick search of their forums provided the information I needed and I set them up in folders of the main root directory so the structure looks like this:

/home/username/domain.com/public_html/

If you don't do it like this the system sticks them all in the public_html of your main site as sub-folders.

All the sites are going to be Wordpress blogs and setting them up with Hostagtor's Cpanel was a breeze.

That's as far as I've got. My next step is to "spin" the articles a bit which will probably take quite a few days as unfortunately my day job is going to get in the way.

If people think this diary thing isn't useful let me know and I'll stop

Sorry for the wall of text....

Unfortunately setting up my "Internet Empire" coincided with lots of day job stuff coming in (I do translations and they are always "urgent").

I have managed to set up my chihuahuas as pets site. I am using the Studiopress Lifestyle theme which I've modified a bit.

Anybody that is interested can see it here: http://chihuahuasaspets.com/

It is empty at the moment. I've been busy "rewriting" the blog articles, hoping to avoid google's "Similar content" trap. It's also a way of learning about the dog. I'm hoping to start uploading the articles later today or tomorrow.

The actual rewrites do not take long, about 10 to 20 minutes in most cases.

A question: Is it worth adding tags to each article? Do they help with SEO?