Here’s the solution:

Caveat: This only works for web based cronjobs (which WPTB uses) and not all cronjobs. Anything that’s triggered through a url can use this script.

<?php
 
// WPTB Mass Cronjob Script
// http://wptweetbomb.com/strategy/fast-cron-job-setup
 
// How To Use This Script
//	Save this code as a PHP file. Something like "wptb_cron.php" will do.
//	Enter your WPTB cron urls below, one per line in the "$data" variable.
//	Upload it to your server. Any server, in any location.
//	Setup ONE cronjob to run this script on that same server.
 
 
$data = '
 
http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
http://otherdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
http://somedomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wptweetbomb/wtb_go.php
 
';
 
 
// Don't edit below here unless you feel like tweaking some code.
 
 
$urls = explode( "\n", trim($data) );
 
foreach( $urls as $url )
{
	get( $url );
}
 
function get( $url )
{
	$curl = curl_init();
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)" );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5", "Cache-Control: max-age=0", "Connection: keep-alive", "Keep-Alive: 300", "Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7", "Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5", "Pragma: ") );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "gzip,deflate" );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, 1 );
	curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1 );
	$html = curl_exec( $curl );
	curl_close( $curl );
	return $html;
}
 
?>

How To Use The Script

1. Save the code as a PHP file. Something like “wptb_cron.php” will do.
2. Enter your WPTB cron urls, one per line in the “$data” variable.
3. Upload it to your server. Any server, in any location.
4. Setup ONE cronjob to run this script on that same server.

You’re done. You now only have to change 1 cronjob and have it apply to all your blogs.
Each time the script runs it will trigger all the urls you’ve entered as part of the “$data” variable. Also this script will take one second per url to run. If you need more speed then make sure you’ve got cURL v.7.15.5+ and PHP v.5.2.3+ then change “CURLOPT_TIMEOUT” for “CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS” and it will go much faster.

I may bring something like this into the plugin in the future as well to help with bulk blog management.

“I would like to reach a goal of $100 a day, what do I need to do?”

- asked on the support forum by Rayche

I started writing a reply in the support forum but it got pretty long and I’m sure others would benefit from reading this, so it became a blog post. Here’s some pointers that should help you Rayche, as well as everyone else…

What’s This Guide?

Much of what this guide covers is beyond the scope of WPTB but after Rayche’s question I thought a few would find this helpful. The main purpose of the following is to point you in the right direction and get your cogs turning. It’s not the only way you can do things – it’s simply 1 outline in a sea of possible methods. You don’t have to follow it to the letter.

The one most important aspect is:  keep trying and you’ll get there. Get a clear picture of what you’re trying to do and keep it at the front of your mind. Every action you take should support this picture.

No One Cares

It may sound harsh, but the bottom line is that you’ve got to do everything yourself. No one else really cares about you, except you. This means you shouldn’t expect anyone to give away their whole strategy that makes them money for 2 main reasons. Firstly if they did more people would use it and reduce the effectiveness.

Secondly they have spent time, money and effort working out something that works – why would they share it for free? This isn’t directed at you Rayche, but more at others who expect the world for a few dollars. Treat this like a real business, which by the way you should be. How you expect to run this like a business, if you’re not a business?

What WPTB Does

It’s important to know this. It won’t make you breakfast, tuck you in at night or tell you the secrets of the universe. WPTB also isn’t designed to achieve SERPs for specific keywords. That’s simply not what it does. In essence, what WPTB does is “get niche traffic”. You point the blog’s theme in the right direction with more general keywords, and WPTB will use these to find specific content.

Of course, as with anything you need use use it correctly. If you buy a rifle to hunt deer and shoot yourself in the foot, is it your fault of the rifle’s? The point is: learn to use the rifle and you can drop an elephant.

First Step: 1 Domain

Pick 1 blog. Just one, on a unique domain. Ideally it will be on it’s own IP, but it’s not essential. If possible you should make sure the other residents of this IP aren’t too noisy so you get a clean slate to start with, but on shared hosting you can’t always do this. So the message here is to use a VPS if possible.

The reason you’re picking just one domain is so you can put all your energy into it. When you’re trying to nail down a core strategy you don’t want the admin hassles of trying to constantly make changes to lots of blogs. Pick 1 and stick with it until you reach your goal…

Define A Goal

You mentioned $100 daily, but you didn’t say (and I imagine you’re not too bothered) how many domains it takes to achieve this. You can do this with 1 domain or 1 thousand. Pick a figure you want before you start. It’s not really important as almost anything is achievable.

For this example lets say we have the goal of $100 daily across 10 sites – so $10 per site, per day. The advice given below is therefore tailored to this goal. The strategies and specific tactics you employ would be different for different goals. If you use common sense you can adapt these points for almost any other goal however.

Set A Starting Point

It’s going to take testing and tweaking to hit any given goal but you’ve got to start somewhere. The 2 fixed variables here are that you’re running WP and using WPTB. Everything else is variable and needs to be tweaked to align with your goal. So to begin with you need to take best guesses at the variable stuff. It’s not important what you choose for other stuff like the WP theme, monetization options, tweet settings etc.

The important thing is to keep it simple. If something like a plugin or theme doesn’t directly support your goal then don’t use it. Keep it brain-numbingly simple, as you can always add bells and whistles later once you’ve got the core strategy working.

What Niche?

Eventually you’ll want to sink your teeth into a large, competitive niche as that’s where the money is. I don’t necessarily mean a super niche (Casino, Porn, Pills etc) but one where there’s enough pie to go around. The more competition you’ve got, the more money there usually is.

Before that though you should always start with a very small niche. “Purple Lizard Farming” is the level you want to start at. By doing this you’ve got a much more flexible platform on which to experiment, make mistakes and tweak results. Plus it’s easier to rank. For the purposes of this first blog it doesn’t mater too much what niche you pick, but follow these guidelines:

1. Pick a small niche. “Small” is relative and subjective, but use your judgement.
2. Make sure there’s competition. Competitors mean there’s money.
3. Make sure there are affiliate programs in the niche. Check the SERPs, ClickBank, CJ etc.

Keywords & Content Blocks

With WPTB blogs I usually base a blog around a keyword. The homepage is optimized for the main niche keyword (like “Purple Lizard Farming”) then the content blocks will be other related or narrower keywords. The content blocks don’t all have to be stuff like “Purple Lizard Farming in TX”, “Online Purple Lizard Framing” etc. They can simply be related keywords if you like, for example “Blue Lizard Farming”, “How To Farm Lizards”.

I use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords. You may have other favourite tools but here’s what I do, from keywords to content blocks…

1. Set the region to “All countries and Territories”
2. Enter the main niche keyword
3. Make sure “Use Synonyms” is checked
4. Sort the results by advertiser competition
5. Pick 10-50 money keywords. (i.e. keywords that are product related). I usually start with 10 and add more later. Also I manage this in 1 excel sheet with a separate tab for each blog.
6. All keywords need to be short. “Best Lizard Farm” is good, while “Best Lizard Farm in TX” would not be good. Remember you’re only directing the blog’s theme, not specifying the keywords you want to rank for. More general keywords have more content available.
7. Add them to the mass cat & content block creator. I sometimes use just 1 keyword (the exact same one) as the category name. Sometimes I add a few closely related ones. For example, if the content block is “Funky Lizard Farming” then I would enter the line like this:
   funky lizard farming # funky lizard farming
   Or sometimes like this…
   funky lizard farming # funky lizard farms, funky lizards farm, very funky lizard farm
   The reason I’ve recommended using tons of keywords in the past is that most people haven’t got the hang of using the keywords with WPTB. The aim isn’t to get ranked for these keywords – they are simply used to find content and ads. So keep them as general as you can whilst still maintaining the theme you want.

Monetization

Very important. There’s no point in burning through bandwidth, time & traffic without making sure you can squeeze some money from the visitors. This also means that you should have ways to monetize your traffic from day 1. Don’t get the site built up then do monetization – do it immediately.

Monetization is also very open ended. There’s so many ways to get cash from an autoblog with more arriving every day. I’ll mention a few here…

• Contextual Affiliate
  There’s an implementation of this included in the plugin as “Ad Blocks”. The benefit of using this is that you can have relevant ads next to content – when you can’t predict the exact keywords used in the content – or you don’t want to pre choose lots of ads. The CTR’s you get will be largely based on visual appearance. The images used and formatting of them is what will get clicks, assuming the images are at least semi-relevant to the content. WPTB comes with a selection of ad block formats built in (see the “premade template” link) but you can make your own if you know some basic html and css. The current WPTB version as of writing this is v1.5.9.1, and in future versions I’ll be adding more premade templates for you. I prefer this monetization option over AdSense, but you can always use AdSense as well.
  .
• AdSense
  It’s easy to use and provides relevant ads for almost any content… but it pays peanuts. It’s a valid option to generate revenue from your blogs but you will undoubtedly make more from a well placed affiliate ad. If you plan on using AdSense with an autoblog know that you’re treading on shaky ground. Best case scenario is that you get fat pay-checks and no problems. Worst case scenario is that someone discovers your autoblog, recognises it’s an autoblog and whines to Google, which may risk your account. The amount you can make here is in part dependant on your keywords. Big, competitive niche’s tend to have higher CPC’s so AdSense might not be a good match for your first blog.  I read a good quote recently (think it was Eli @ Blue Hat Seo)… “The day Google starts giving a damn about my business is the day I start caring about theirs”. That pretty much sums up my attitude when it comes to AdSense.
  .
• Link Selling
  You’ve probably overlooked this option, but it’s a valid one. I’ve found that when you use WPTB right some nice PR builds up. Now, normally I don’t bother with PR as it’s another one of Google’s magic veils to obscure what’s really going on. Really the only time to pay attention to PR is when you’re selling links. If you build a nice PR 3/4 blog then by selling sponsored posts and blogroll links you could pretty easy hit $10 per day per blog. Also because of the lag with PR updates (usually every quarter) you’ve got time to build more and sell more. The downside with this method is that it’s tough to sell links on a new blog, so you may want to use another method until the blogs accumulates some PR. You’ll get more money selling direct to end users, but it’s more automated going through a link broker/network. You should probably test both to see which fits with you.
  .
• Flipping
  What a blog sells for depends on many factors, but if it’s generating income through whatever means in an automated fashion then flipping is an option. You can even pretty easily flip blogs that don’t make anything – ones that just have a bunch of niche traffic for example. When flipping a blog like this making it look pretty helps a lot. That means smoothing off any rough edges on the blog, making sure you’re using a nice theme, a custom logo etc. To give you an idea of potential, if you’ve got a nice site that’s doing somewhere near the $10 a day goal then flipping it for $1-5k isn’t out of the question. If you pick an achievable mid point of around $3k then liquidating one of these blogs would produce the same income you would otherwise get in around a year. If you can build up these in 3-6 months then keep flipping them you’ve got a reasonable model right there.
  .
• Single Affiliate
  Pick 1 affiliate product. Make sure it’s a good product with a nice sales page, high payout etc. Where you choose the product from will depend on the niche. Clickbank doesn’t do much other than “make money”, ebooks, software and membership sites. The payouts can be pretty high, but so can the refunds. Amazon and CJ are good for commercial, physical product based blogs but the payout is lower than other options. You should pick 1 product/merchant and put a big ass banner on your blog. Ideally have it in the header so it’s on every page of your site. You can put similar banners to the same merchant in the sidebar, post content etc as well. The whole point of every page will be to get a click on this banner. To refine this strategy you can try getting your own banners made for the merchant to improve CTR’s. Using this method CTR’s of 10% may be average. Conversions will of course depend on the specific product.
  .
• Self Promotion
  Got a something to sell? Use autoblogs to syphon traffic to your main site, similar to the “Single Affiliate” option. As you’re both the merchant and publisher in this case it does give you extra flexibility as to how you promote our stuff. You can get traffic, but you can also grow autoblogs for links. Personally I don’t bother with this as the admin hassles of managing IP’s, domain registrations, link patterns and everything else is a pain.
  .
• Opt Ins
  You can put custom html in an adblock with WPTB, so you could simply use  an Aweber optin form. When you combine this with WPTB’s popup box option to display the form it can work nicely. If you’ve got a list for your own product or an auto responder packed with affiliate links then a bunch of autoblogs designed to build your list can pay off big time. Don’t overlook this option as you can kill it with this If you decide to run with this make sure to have 1 list per niche, then build a bunch of blogs each based around a relevant keyword for the niche. With 10 blogs each getting 10 optins daily you’re growing a list by 100 people daily. This is worth more than $100 a day to you as good email marketing works great. You can promote stuff many times to each person and the whole thing’s cumulative. Once you get a big list in a niche you’re set. A 20 part AR sequence, 1 every 3 days with good content and recommended affiliate links throughout will probably knock it out of the ball park for you. You can outsource the AR copy if you like, but make sure it’s good stuff. Another benefit of this method is you only really have 1 focal point – your list.

Tracking

You need to do this. Don’t ever skip this step as it’s one of the most important things you can do. This guide isn’t about tracking systems so you’ll need to do your own research – there’s lots of info out there. Without tracking you’ll never know what’s working and what’s not. You’ll just be wondering blindly through the darkness like so many others. The key metrics you want to be tracking (daily, per blog) are…

• Overall unique visitors
• Breakdown of most popular pages by unique visits
• Search keywords used to find your site, broken down by page
• Impressions, Clicks & CTR for each item that makes you money
• Search keywords that visitors who clicked on your banners/ads used
• Conversion rate of the offer/product
• Keyword the converting visitor originally used to find your site

The above should give you a good starting point but there may be other things you need/want to track as well. You basically need to know exactly what’s working so you can improve on it, and probably more importantly – you need to be able to cut the dead wood.

WP Template

The template you use depends on your monetization strategy. If you’re aiming for click-throughs choose a very plain theme. Lots of white, lots of space, simple black text. When doing this you want your banner/offer to be the most visible and colourful thing on the page. It should also be the only interesting element on the page.

If you’re flipping a site you want it pretty. Pick a theme that’s well designed, with strong colours and get a custom logo done. Use some sexy widgets and flashy plugins. Make it look like something worth owning. Woo Themes do some great ones – I’m using one on this site in fact.

The comments about a “pretty” site also apply to vanilla autoblogging using AdSense or contextual affiliate stuff. You want it to look like a “real” blog so it doesn’t attract negative attention. You may have to balance the plain style (for click throughs) and the sexyness of the theme.

On-Site SEO

Most people should already know this, but I’ll mention it briefly. Kind of linked to the WP template you choose as well. Make sure keyword rich titles are H1 tags, that HTML titles are enticing and contain keywords etc. Use H2 and H3’s for bonus points. Get around 500 words of relevant text on each page and use the DeDuper to help posts stick in the index.

Don’t concern yourself with nofollow or JS links for most purposes. We want Google to crawl and index your site in this case.

Plugins

See here for plugins to use for autoblogging. You don’t have to use all of them (in fact you defiantly shouldn’t). Try and pick out ones that support your overall strategy. If something doesn’t add to your goal then don’t use it as more plugins = more bloat. If there’s just one I’d say is mandatory it’s WP Super Cache. Stuff to help automate SEO is always tasty as well.

Tweeting

The whole tweeting angle in WPTB serves 2 purposes. Firstly it gets you a small boost of Twitter traffic which is nice. These guys can be tough to convert so if you’re basing a strategy around Twitter traffic promote general offers/products or “get more follower” software.

The second reason to tweet posts with WPTB is more important. It’s to get links to your posts. Each post will have multiple external links pointing to it immediatly. This won’t really help you get ranked – it’s to get the spiders moving through your site. The search engine siders will come crawling, which is the first step towards getting indexed. Also the Twitter scrapers will come and steal your content – and some of them will link back, which is nice.

Links

There are 2 ways to play this. If you’re going for some specific rankings in conjunction with WPTB (even though this isn’t WPTB’s speciality) then you’ll want to do the usual – get focused anchor text from other sites. You’ll be pointing these links to separate (non WPTB), seo optimized pages. Don’t worry about nofollow by the way

The other way to do it, which is more in-line with WPTB is to simply create some link noise. By creating more entry points into your blog you’ll get indexed quicker and some of the mystical green pixels (aka PageRank) will appear as well. Good stuff to do here would be directory links, blog comments, RSS subs, the “Instant Links” feature in WPTB etc. If you include links to other blogs in your post content you’ll get some natural pingbacks as well. Also when you tweet each post the Twitter scrapes will help to promote your content through tweet search sites/aggregators. Stay away from Xrumer and similar power linking tools for new sites (or at least go very slow).

Whatever you do – make sure you get some type of external links to your site for best results.

Do More of What Works

I would have said “testing” but lots of people seem to be scared of that word, so simply “do more of what works”. If something doesn’t work try something else – but only after going deep and exploring the idea all you can. Once you find a particular tactic or strategy that works it’s important that you do 2 things. Firstly – don’t tell anyone. Don’t even speak it aloud as things that work have a habit of spreading quickly. You’re not safeguarding an occult secret, but you don’t want to take any chances either.  Secondly make sure you do more of it. Expand on the idea with your first site until the ROI has been raised as high as you can get it.

If you’ve tried various things and you’re still not hitting the goal of $10 a day then guess what you need to do? Right, more of the above

Setup Blog No.2

Do everything again for a second blog. At this stage you don’t want to scale to 100 blogs. You shouldn’t even try that yet as you don’t know if this strategy of yours will scale across niche’s. Don’t try to mass scale the idea until you’ve setup 5-10 sites yourself. This will help ensure that the idea is rock solid and will work in different niche’s. It will also give you a very good picture of all the processes involved so you’ll actually know what you need to automate/outsource. You don’t get this complete picture by just doing a couple of blogs.

The other way of looking at this is that 1 niche is all you need to know. By building lots of blogs in the same niche you start to build leverage which is key. What you can do is do your first site in a small niche, then try multiple larger ones. Find one that you like (and one you can generate revenue from) and start to cut a larger slice of the pie for yourself by building more blogs.

Then there’s 1 thing left to do…

Scale

This is last for a reason. Don’t run before you can walk. At this point you should have about 10 hand build blogs each making $10+ per day and you know the exact steps, plugins, themes etc that work for you. Now things get fun as you can do less and make more.

There’s only so much 1 person can handle and if you want to build a substantial asset you may have to hire people. If you’re in the West then outsource to the East. If you’re in the East then you have an advantage as the cost of living is usually lower and you’ll be generating dollars, so hire people in your location.

Before doing any of this make sure to write down the steps you go through to create a successful blog. Then give different tasks to different people. The last thing you want is an entrepreneurial employee duplicating your efforts

By the way, I’ll be making more posts like this on the blog soon. If you want something specific addressed let me know in the forum. Any comments use the form below…

1. Auto Unique Content
   There’s now an checkbox in your admin panel to “DeDupe” all content that’s posted. What this does is swap a random amount of stop words for their html unicode equivalents. For example, “of” would become “and”. This means that the page is now more relevant to it’s core keywords and some fluff has been removed and more importantly the code of the content is now unique compared with where it has been taken from. Google likes this.
2. Auto Follow Feature
   You can now choose to automatically add friends to each Twitter account after they tweet. This is really nice as it will boost the effectiveness of the whole site. It’s obvious that you will get more traffic and better CTR’s from people who are following your Twitter account than just from public search’s. By adding friends to each Twitter account they will naturally get followers back – getting you more traffic.

Any questions about the update email me or comment here.

I was just about finished putting together the first forum posts for the launch when I checked the bit.ly stats and it’s got 529 clicks already!

It will be interesting to see what the average daily number of uniques is once this has been running for a few days.