Last updated - 27th March 2017

Would you like to own your own private blog network?

You should understand already how your very own blog network could be the most powerful and reliable tool at your disposal, so why I wonder, don’t you already have one?

Are you worried that it will cost you thousands of dollars and be a complete pain to manage? Do you lack the geek skills required to actually set one up from scratch?

Well fear not. With a little forethought, outsourcing and clever thinking – it can be done fairly simply and for less than five hundred bucks – and if you follow this step by step guide, then you could soon be easily ranking for low and medium competition keywords with the added bonus that you no longer have to worry about any Google updates.

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Exclusive Bonus: Download my 29 point step-by-step checklist that will show you the exact steps I follow every time I build out my PBN sites. Print and keep, or use it to train your VA.

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An effective private blog network is the ultimate aim of this guide, and if you follow it step by step you’ll end up with a powerful weapon in your arsenal.

We’re not creating a whole bunch of crap sites and just going for some short term gain; we actually want our network to last a long time - which is why we bother investing time, effort and money into building it properly.

Be careful setting this up because we don’t want it to get wiped out one night because we were careless and raised a big red flag. Before we begin, a question.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time... Click to Tweet

We are going to apply this same lesson when building our blog network.

It might seem a daunting task now, but if we break it down site by site, and then a bunch of steps for each site it becomes a very manageable task. You’ll want to complete one site at a time, I promise you it is far easier to manage this way. There is nothing more demoralizing than 15 unfinished sites waiting for you. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img alt="Building a private blog network is like eating an elephant..." class="tve_image" src="http://cdn.texfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/fiverr_image2_elephant1.jpg" style="width: 256px;"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Private Blog Network - Quality Control

To make our network of sites look real, we’re gonna do something unusual – we’re actually going to make real sites…

Each site that we build for our network will have an aged domain with good domain authority, a unique logo, unique and useful articles, a different theme and some core plugins installed to make the site usable.

Free Idea: Got some friends or family who want to learn about making and maintaining websites? Give them each a site so they can learn about being a webmaster. Publishing articles, updating plugins, changing themes and moderating comments.

Here is the checklist of steps that we are going to do for each site. You’ll want to complete each step in order to build each site on our blog network.

Planning is KEY - Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail. Click to Tweet

I’m not going to go into too much detail for each step, but if you get stuck or have any questions then feel free to get in touch by leaving me a comment below in the comments section. I will personally reply to every single comment left.

Choosing a Domain Name​

We will be utilizing expired domain names for our network, domains that have existing back-links and domain authority. Remember we are creating a high quality network of sites, so the domain names themselves should also be decent.

We don’t want to be buying domains that are obviously junk, or ones that have porn or pharma type words in them. We don’t want anything that will make the domain name stand out negatively, and I personally only ever consider .com, .net or .org extensions, as well as country specific ones if they come up and you can register them.​

Where to Find Expired Domains?

Visit Expired Domains and sign up for an account. These guys publish daily lists of domains that have just expired, and you can use their filters to find a good domain.

Do a search for all the .com domains that have dropped in the past 24 hours with 100 links minimum. Here is a snapshot of the settings I use.

On the second tab of the search form, make sure you select “only available Domains” as there is no point spending time researching a domain if it is unavailable.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img alt="" class="tve_image" src="http://d3lpgubp9jfrj6.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/expired-domains-settings.png" style="width: 1060px;"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

I generally then order the results by the DA (Domain Authority) column, which show how authoritative Moz thinks the site is. You’ll want to look out for domains that have a DA of above 20 and more than 10 linking root domains.

The higher the DA of your blog network’s sites, the better for ranking your money sites!

Have a scan down the list and pick out a few that take your fancy. No need to spend too much time worrying about the actual text of the domain name, it’s the domain authority that we are after, not a catchy URL. Once you have picked a few head on over to Open Site Explorer to check the DA of the domains you are looking at.

Remember to check both the domain.com and www.domain.com versions of the domain you are interested in.

The higher the DA the better (forget about PageRank, it's been years since it was updated).

You’ll ideally be looking for domains with a DA of 15 or higher. Once you find a good strong domain, you need to check out the back-link profile. Checking the existing back-links can be done easily at Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer.

This is a very important step, and you’ll want to make sure that the back-link profile is genuine and not a load of crap, as a crap back-link profile could cause the domain to be penalized, and we don’t want that.

Because PBNs have become very popular in the last year or so, this method might not give you the best domains anymore. If you have a budget, then I recommend you join PBN HQ Domains where we scrape the internet for expired domains with backlinks, show them in a table and provide all the metrics so you can easily choose the best.

&lt;img class="tve_image" alt="" src="http://cdn.texfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pbnhq.jpg" style="width: 680px"&gt;

Please be wary about buying domains from Godaddy Auctions, not only are the auctions very well subscribed (pushing the price higher) but it has recently come to my attention that Blackhat guys are sending extortion emails to people asking for money to keep their domains private or they will be forwarded to various members at Google.



From what I have heard the scammer watches Godaddy Auctions, waits for a domain to be won and for a new site to be placed on that domain, and then they email the owner.

Don’t forget though no matter where you buy your domains from, you have to exercise caution, and perform your due diligence checks, otherwise you are just wasting your time and money.

When you purchase the domain name, you’ll want to enable whois privacy. This is an extra step required to ensure the anonymity of your blog network.

If you are purchasing an available domain, then I can whole-heartedly recommend Namecheap. The domain itself will be about $8 and they include free domain whois privacy for the first year, which is a great deal.

If you want to buy through them, clicking my affiliate link (here) will earn me a few pennies for every domain you register. I’d be very grateful and might even print and laminate a small photo of you in your honor for every domain you buy…​

Facebook Groups

I'm not usually a fan of Facebook, but I am a fan of the PBN domain selling groups that have started emerging on Facebook.

In a nutshell, people are crawling, spam checking, categorizing and then selling unregistered domains for between $10 to $20 depending on the metrics.

Usually they have a shared Google spreadsheet where you can look at (without seeing the actual URL) the metrics and information before making a decision.

If a domain you buy from them doesn't get ​indexed - then 9 out of 10 times you'll get an appropriate replacement.

I've set up a group today, for discussion of anything PBN related so feel free to jump on board and take a look.

Click the image below to request permission to join the PBN HQ.​

​Some other good FB groups specifically targeting PBN domain sales only are:

Just remember to do your due diligence when dealing with someone for the first time - many people out there are looking to make a quick buck off an unsuspecting buyer.

Step 2 (Easy) – Hosting the Sites

TL;DR - Simplify this whole process​ by using the awesome service provided by Easy Blog Networks.

The process of hosting sites on different providers is complicated and burdensome. Luckily, there is Easy Blog Networks, a PBN hosting service that installs blogs with 1-click on random servers hosted by big brand hosting providers like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, Softlayer and others. The system automatically updates WordPress, plugins and themes while maintaining daily blog backups. EBN has a history of low deindexation rate, on par with premium cPanel hosts, proved by independent case studies.



Easy Blog Networks is currently the best, easiest and safest way to host your PBNs. Join them here »



Below is my guide on what to do if you want to do it manually.

First thing I'd like to make clear - do not use SEO hosting. Google is well aware of the hosts who provide SEO hosting services and will deal with your links accordingly.

Even if SEO hosting offers 'unique C class IP' addresses, they will be recognized as bad IP addresses and your sites will likely not get indexed at best, at worst they will trigger a manual review and penalty.​

You can read into it a bit more by Googling - and well worth quickly reading through this guys experience.​

Here is a little trick that I learned a while back, and it will save you a great deal of time and effort.

Nowadays Bluehost is my go to host of choice. They offer unlimited domains, unlimited email addresses, unlimited space etc for a very reasonable $4.95 a month. If you are going to be hosting a bunch of sites, it makes sense to use a shared hosting account like this – I’ve been testing out quite a few hosts from budget to premium and these guys are my standout favorites at the moment.​

After getting ripped off by Bluehost at renewal time, and after the huge performance issues they have been having recently, I now have changed my recommended host of choice to A Small Orange.

Support is excellent, sub 1 minute response times, FAST sites that I have had NO issues with in the time that I have been using them.​

The one click installations of WordPress save a tonne of time, meaning I can build and roll out sites much quicker than before.

Now, I hear you crying out – it’s obvious that all the sites are owned by the same person, they all have the same IP address…

This is the neat little twist. By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as CloudFlare, you can easily mask your server IP address (as well as some fringe benefits such as speeding up your site, protecting your site from DDOS attack etc).

It’s free to set up, and without going into too much detail, they own a global network of servers that you can use to deliver your sites content, from a geographically similar location to your websites’ visitors.

This means that your actual server IP address (which would be the same for all your sites) is masked for all visitors (and that works for Google’s spiders too).

Yes, we are leaving a footprint here, which is we use CloudFlare CDN for all sites on our blog network, but these guys host over 1.5 million websites, it’s not a pattern that is going to expose our network or raise any red flags.

Step 2 (Better) – Hosting the Sites

​Now, the above method has been (and still is) working for me, but it’s kind of a cheats short cut and may open our network up to being discovered.

A far better way (although more expensive and more time consuming) is to build each site on a new host.

Head over to Web Hosting Talk forums and look in the Shared Hosting Offers section where you will find a bunch of hosts offering hosting for under a dollar a month. If you are building 10 sites, and have 10 different hosts you should be able to get it all sorted for $5-$10 a month.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img alt="" class="tve_image" src="http://d3lpgubp9jfrj6.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wht-offer.png" style="width: 714px"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Granted the hosting isn't going to be the best in the world (although it's very unusual to be bad), but it should be on different C class IP addresses so, will suffice for our network sites.

It is ESSENTIAL that when you are setting these sites up you make a note of the following information:

Hosting Username and Password

WordPress Username and Password

Domain Registrar Username and Password

I’d advise a spreadsheet for all the information (and because I’m paranoid, I would use a local copy of Excel and NOT Google Spreadsheets) so you can easily access it when you need to deal with any maintenance on your sites.

I wanted to learn a little more about this type of hosting, so I jumped on Skype with Or Paz who runs Paz Hosting and asked him a few questions.

​What footprints does SEO hosting leave behind and how does the distributed hosting model avoid them?

There could be many potential footprints when it comes to SEO hosting.

The more IP addresses a company has, the harder it is to manage them, and of course the cost increases. Most SEO hosting companies use some kind of automation to save time and money - and it's this automation that can tend to leave a lot of footprints, leaving your PBN open for discovery.

The most common footprints I see are as follows:

IP Addresses

​Having several IPs (or all of them) on the same physical server is a big footprint.

For example, if you have these 2 IPs

- 192.65.241.91

- 192.65.242.89

The first section is the A class (192), the second is the B class (65), and so on...

If 2 IPs have the same A class, and they are located at the same location i.e. they are located in the same server.

The location (Datacenter) is publicly available, and you can check it with tools like IP Location.

It is very unnatural for a bunch of sites, that all link to the same money site, to be hosted on the same server.

This is very easy for google to track, so C-class 'SEO hosting' is a very good way to get your PBN deindexed.

Just a quick aside - if 2 IPs are located in different data-centers it doesn't matter if they have the same A/B class. that can happen by chance, but it doesn't mean anything.

When you buy SEO hosting, make sure it offers A/B class and not C-class, and also make sure their IPs are not all located in the same location.

With the services listed above, they all host each IP on a different a server, from many different data-centers around the world.

SOA Email

​Most hosting companies use your account email as your SOA email. This email is publicly available so Google or other marketers can easily trace all of your PBN sites back to the same owner.

With a distributed service you should always ensure that default cpanel settings are changed and that each IP is identified with a unique email address so your real email is protected.

Nameservers

​If your hosting company uses their own Nameservers, or their own IP address instead of a nameserver, then it's not too much of a task to work out that many PBN style sites are using the IP addresses or nameservers - that's a big footprint that you need to hide.

Again with these distributed hosting accounts, or when you manually sign up to 25 different hosting companies, you'll get 25 different nameservers to use. This helps keep your PBN hidden.

Bad neighbourhoods

If a large percentage of PBN style sites all live on the same IP address, or same class C IP address, then they are left wide open for automated penalties and demotions from Google. All sites will be considered toxic, and links from these toxic sites will harm your money site rankings.

The same issue can also occur when using $1 hosting companies, which tend to host a lot of lower quality PBN sites.

With distributed hosting, you are getting shared IPs from genuine hosting companies which means your sites are hosted with other regular sites.

For example - if you buy a hosting on crocweb/jaguarPC/hostgator (Real companies we buy space from) for $3-$5/month you will get the exact same IP and Nameservers as on Pazhosting.

A good provider will also check their IPs every couple of months to make sure they are still in good condition, and if not, they should be migrated to a different server.

So there you have it, some common footprints to look out for - and some considerations to bear in mind when choosing either cloudflare, separate shared hosting or managed shared hosting!

I'll continue with the PBN guide now - with the next small section about protecting your sites from other marketers!​

Blocking Bots to Protect your Sites

There are many back link discovery services out there that can reveal your money site back-links to your competitors. You can edit .htaccess or you can use a plugin.

If you would prefer to use a plugin, I have found a very good one called Spider Blocker which is completely free and is working for me very well at the moment. I’d suggest this is the best solution to protect your backlinks.

If you prefer to use the .htaccess method, the code is below.

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*rogerbot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*exabot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*mj12bot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*dotbot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*gigabot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*ahrefsbot.* bad_bot

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent .*sitebot.* bad_bot

<Limit GET POST HEAD>

Order Allow,Deny

Allow from all

Deny from env=bad_bot

</Limit>​

This will stop the back link checkers like Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO from spidering and indexing your PBN sites in their index.

Step 3 - Building Content, Relevant Niches and on Target

Because we are looking to actually build real sites, you’re going to want real content. The content should be unique and relevant to your niche. If your money site is all about red apples, then your blog network should all be related to red apples in some way. &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img alt="" class="tve_image" src="http://cdn.texfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/fiverr_image4_alt-e1385250164594.jpg" style="width: 348px;"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

You should try and keep the sites that you build for your network as generic as possible, so that they remain relevant, but not too niche that you can only ever use them once.

The content doesn't need to be stunning quality but it needs to be decent and provide some value to the visitors, so we definitely don’t want to be publishing spun crap on our sites.

For content, I use a variety of sources including iWriter (where a decent writer creating a 500-700 word article will cost you about $3-$5), oDesk, or from someone offering content generation in the BHW marketplace.

Recently I have been using HireWriter to very good effect, I always pick an article length of 300-500 words and tell the writer to make sure that they write the full 500 words – this means you can get an article written for about $2.75 (the quality has been excellent by the way, much better than the writers on iWriter) – and if you utilize the introductory offer of 25% extra for your first deposit, it brings the price down to about $2.20 for 5-600 words.

If you do choose to sign up with them (even if you don’t deposit any money) – I’ll get a small referral fee, so if you find this guide helpful I’d really appreciate the small tip you can give me for 30 seconds of your time!

I got a LOT of good feedback from you guys on Hire Writers and content creation was something that everybody was interested in. I published a huge, in-depth comparison of the two leading content creation services, which you can read by clicking here.

A slight note of caution when using an independent writer, get samples written before you pay for a bunch of articles and work in small batches (5 articles at a time) with the same writer.

I've noticed a growing tendency for content creation to be OK at first, then as they get backed up you either get rubbish articles delivered or nothing at all.

One top tip to getting more interesting articles written is to provide a title for the writer, as well as some standard guidelines that each article should adhere to.

For my headlines, I like using magnetic headlines. If you are unsure what they are, then you can find a couple of very good articles here and here.

If my niche is Red Apples, then I would suggest using headlines like this as a great starting point for your writers.​

Get Rid of Rotten Red Apples Once and For All

What Everybody Ought to Know About Red Apples

15 Killer Tips to Save Money when Buying Red Apples

The Secret to Growing Bigger Redder Apples

For my article guidelines that I provide to the writers along with my suggested headlines, I suggest you use something like the following, when requesting articles.

Use of headlines and sub-headings desirable. Use of bulleted lists desirable. No rehashed, overly verbose language.

It makes the articles much more readable, and isn’t too much of a burden on the person writing the article.

I will also then find a relevant image or video to embed into the blog post along with the text, this extra step only takes a few minutes and makes a lot of difference.

Once you find a good writer that you like, and one that delivers on time, I tend to keep using them – as it is easier than dealing with multiple vendors. I re-iterate though, keep your orders fairly small in order to minimize the chance of getting burnt.

Linking To Your Money Sites

Each PBN site should only link to your money site ONCE in an appropriate article (one that is both relevant to your PBN site and to your money site.

Ideally you structure your PBN site with sticky posts on the homepage (full text) so you get the benefit of an in content, in context link.​

Make It Look Real

Normal sites don’t just have five 500 word articles, they have a mix of stuff, so try and replicate this by not only varying the length of article that you are ordering, but buy publishing shorter posts yourself. Ask your writer for a 200 word article as well as an 800 word one.

While you are waiting for your articles to be written, create some of those inspirational quote images, and publish a couple of them – along with a short summary. It would also help to blog about a couple of YouTube videos that are relevant to your niche just to keep everything looking natural.

Of course, to save money you can completely write all your own articles if you so desire, but this method of outsourcing will definitely save you time.

Step 4 – Customizing Each Site

A few steps to go through for this stage, but all are relatively simple and shouldn't take long to complete.

Install the latest version of WordPress – use the one click installers within your hosting environment, or upload via FTP, whichever is easiest for you.

Don’t use the username ‘Admin’ for every site, change it each time to something original.

Once installed it’s time to get it set up and looking pretty.

What Theme To Use?

I know from building sites in the past I have access to a bunch of premium themes and frameworks like Thesis, Marketers Delight, Thrive Themes and some Theme Forest themes as well as, of course all the free themes (some of which are perfectly decent) available through your WordPress dashboard itself.

Also consider My Theme Shop, Elegant Themes etc - they all have various membership options for unlimited theme downloads. If you are working with a buddy, sharing the cost is a very good way to get excellent premium themes for very little outlay.

Bonus: 35% Off all My Theme Shop themes by using the coupon TEXFLY35 at the checkout.

Your site doesn't need to look pixel perfect stunning but it needs to be be a site that you would be happy for someone to look at in more detail without arousing any suspicion.

I’d be very wary of using some of the less legit sources to obtain my theme files, because a lot of the time the people who provide these files enter malicious code into the theme which may compromise your site.

It’s just not worth the hassle in my experience, either pay up for a legitimate theme, or use one of the freebie ones that WordPress suggests.

If you want more detailed steps on setting up a WordPress site from scratch, then you're in luck. I've recently published my longest guide to date, over 6 thousand words teaching you step by step how to build your WordPress site from scratch. Click here to read it in a new window.

Getting Social - The Sneaky Way...

Remember we said these sites are going to be genuine, real sites? A real site has real followers on Twitter, Pinterest etc and if you are building a bunch of sites out then this can be particularly time consuming.

A quick hack that I discovered recently is always check if your PBN domain already has an existing Twitter account.

You can easily reset the password, and take over the dead twitter feed for your own needs.

If you're interested in the full tutorial, it's posted here - but remember to come back and finish off the PBN building article!

Building Out the Site

DIY OR PASS OFF TO A PROFESSIONAL?

Building PBN sites can be time consuming. If you don't want to do it yourself you can consider outsourcing it to a third party.

Many of you know Jon Haver. He runs a great PBN build out service - Lightening Rank done for you PBN setup.​ If you have more money than time, then this is an excellent idea to use a highly recommended service like his.

What Pages Should you Create?

Each site should have a few standard type pages to make it seem legit, but make sure to chop and change how you refer to each page, and what URL slug you give it. I usually have:

Contact Us (/get-in-touch, /contact, /contact-us, /say-hello, etc)

Privacy Policy (/privacy, /pp, /privacy-policy, /legal-pages, etc)

Terms of Use (/terms, /tandc, /terms-and-conditions, etc)

To get the content for these pages you can install one of those ‘instant legal pages’ plugins if you have access to it, or you can find multiple resources available on the internet that provide template files for free.

Try to find a few resources so that the actual copy you use varies from site to site. Maybe don’t use some pages for some sites, and other pages for other sites – it’s entirely up to you, but making it different between your sites is key.

Plugins - The Fewer The Better

With each plugin you run the risk that you expose your site to hackers through insecure code, so use as few as possible. I personally use the following:

Askimet – Blocks spam comments on my posts ( Use new API key or leave a footprint! )

) CloudFlare Plugin – Integrates a free CDN

Clicky Analytics* – Analytics to see my traffic

Contact Form 7 – You’ll want a contact us page on the site

W3 Total Cache – Caching plugin, will make your site nice and fast

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Plugin to show related posts

Yoast WordPress SEO – SEO tweaks &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img alt="" class="tve_image" src="http://cdn.texfly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/fiverr_image3_alt-e1385253716766.jpg" style="width: 277px;"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Note: Unlike Google Analytics, Clicky Analytics provides non-contiguous unique identifiers for each site, that can’t be tied back into your main account. They actually have a great simple interface, and are much easier to use than GA, so my advice would be to sign up and start using them instead of giving Google your data.

You'll want to mix and match your plugins for each site you build out. For example use W3TC, Super Cache, Hyper Cache on different sites to keep the footprints to a minimum.

I will also systematically remove any plugins that are installed but don’t server a purpose, such as Hello Dolly and Jetpack.

Update - I've just published a much more complete guide to what plugins I use and consider using on all my sites, it’s a comprehensive guide in it’s own right, so you should definitely grab a coffee and spend 15 minutes reading it.​

Permalink Settings

If you are feeling particularly paranoid, you can change these between sites, but to be honest I wouldn't stress about this level of details. Maybe consider using a random one of the following structure types for each site if you remember while you are setting it up:

Default: http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

Post name: http://www.yourdomain.com/sample-post/

Custom: http://www.yourdomain.com/article/%post-name%/

Custom: http://www.yourdomain.com/%category%/%postname%/ ​

Designing a Logo

There are a few ways that you can do this. The method I prefer (because I’m inherently lazy) is to pay someone a few bucks to do it. Get onto fiverr and type ‘logo’ in the search box – You’ll have a bunch to choose from, but look at the past examples and pick someone who has a good reputation.

Get them to either make a graphical logo that matches your theme, or a graphical stylized version of your domain name. You can then upload this and use it on your site to give it a nice professional look.

If you’re a whiz at Photoshop, then you should be able to knock something up easily. It’s important to remember though, the chances of getting any kind of manual review on your site is very tiny – so don’t stress about the details.

Another resource for creating decent logos is the Square Space Logo creator.

Monetizing the Site (Optional)

We are building real sites. On the internet, real sites have the facility to generate income. We should at least consider monetizing these blogs to

a) help pay the monthly hosting cost,

b) create a genuine site.

I would strongly advise against using Google Adsense for obvious reasons, but there is nothing stopping you looking at one of these alternatives:

Chitika

Kontera

AddClickMedia

BuySellAds

Clickbank

I personally wouldn't actually initially install advertising, I’d keep an eye on any traffic the sites were generating, and pick the top two sites to have a test with, see if it’s worth the effort. Generally speaking you’d not expect these sites to get a huge amount of traffic.

Publishing Content

Before publishing content, give your site a few days to sit and marinade. You're waiting to ensure it gets indexed in Google before we start putting content on it.

Getting indexed can take anywhere between 10 minutes and 7 days, but I really advise waiting until you get results with a site:yourdomain.com in Google.​

OK so we now have our site up and running, and the content written and waiting in our inbox, the next step is to publish this content.

I don’t do anything special at this stage, simply create the blog posts as normal, make sure they look decent and publish them. I try to avoid using the date on my blog template, so that it’s not obvious that all 5-10 posts on the site were made within a couple of days – that’s just personal preference, I wouldn't have thought it would raise any flags though if you didn't do this.​

I like to naturally link out to authority sites in your niche, where appropriate; to make your site look more natural.

I also like to add rich media, i.e. embed videos, images, quotes etc into the posts themselves - make them appealing.

Treat your Private Blog Network sites with the UTMOST respect and it will love you for ever. Click to Tweet

For linking to your money site, you’ll want to find a relevant snippet of text on your homepage. If you show the latest 5 blog posts on your homepage, with a snippet of 200 characters, then you should find an in-context place within one of these blog posts where you can drop your link. You don’t need to do this a tonne of times, it is pointless. Once will be enough.

You should treat these sites with respect and never spam them with links to your money sites.

Look after them now, and they will keep returning the favor by helping you rank your sites time and time again.

Important Point: NEVER interlink your blog network sites.

The most important thing I want you to take away from this post is that you have to begin your journey.

Taking the first step is often the hardest, but I assure you actually sitting down for a couple of days and planning and starting to build your own PBN will teach you far more than any guide ever will.

Taking the first step is the hardest. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Click to Tweet

If you get stuck with any of the steps, or don’t know how to do something, then feel free to drop a comment below and I’ll try my best to help you out.

​Extra Awesome Sauce Tips

One thing that I have noticed is that social signals can help increase a sites domain authority. A simple way to do this is to set up a twitter account, and set up a years worth of automated tweets so that you publish a couple of tweets a day that are relevant to your niche.

I like using Tweet Adder 4 for stuff like this, it’s a pretty solid tool and now complies with Twitter’s TOS, so you shouldn't get into any trouble using it.

I’d also find people who were in the same niche as me and follow a few each day to start building a small set of followers, but this isn't really necessary.

If you want extra social (black belt ninja type tricks here), then you can set up a Facebook page for your site, and publish your tweets via IFTTT to keep the page up to date.

Further Training and One on One Support

Do you need further information and guidance for setting up your PBN?

It’s a big step, and can get expensive very quickly so you have to ensure you get it right the first time.

You don't want to waste time and money building an ineffective PBN, and believe me it's easy to mess up if you don't know what you are doing.

Having built hundreds of PBN sites across many different niches, I've learnt the hard way. Leverage my expertise and experience to shortcut your way to success by signing up for my Private 10 part email course, called the PBN Blueprint.

When you are ready, I will send you an email which contains instructions and information on exactly what you need to do today. They are strictly ordered so you can efficiently build your own powerful blog network to rank your sites on the first page of Google.

This private training is literally like having me sitting with you, showing you exactly what you need to do.

Email One - Planning Your PBN

Email Two - Keyword Difficulty

Email Three - Finding Great Domains

Email Four - Registrars and Hosts

Email Five - Building Out Your Base Site

Email Six - Site Security and Stealth

Email Seven - Content Matters

Email Eight - Powerful Links To Your Money Site

Email Nine - Maintaining Your PBN and FAQ

Email Ten - Rinse and Repeat

Why an email course? Why Not I say...

I really hate signing up for different sites, just to access courses and information, I'd rather they just emailed me the details. I can never remember the URLs, the passwords - so have to search in my inbox for the information. Isn't there an easier way? YES - an email course, where all the steps are broken down and sent via email.

Accessible - I've always got my email on my, it's on my phone, my tablet, my desktop and my laptop.​

Self Paced - Each email has a link to request the next lesson. You can go as fast or as slow as you wish - If you do start slacking off though, I will be getting in touch to make sure everything makes sense.

Easy Support - No one likes filling in forms, and signing up to Zen Help Desk for support. With an email course, you need help? Just hit reply and I will personally help you out.​

One on One Support - I personally will deal with questions and guide you through the process of building out a PBN.

Interested in gaining some page 1 rankings?? Of course you are…

Boom! Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end of a pretty long blog post, I think the longest one I’ve ever written (weighing in at over 5,000 words) – I hope you can use this guide to help build your first blog network, that skillfully flies quietly under everyone’s radar!

If you have any questions or comments then feel free to add them below, I’ll read and reply to every single comment personally.