Day 6: DNS, Addon Domains, and Plug-ins – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


Today, I decided to tackle the rest of the supplemental video stuff.

So first, I pointed all my domains at the Host Gator DNS servers. In the video, Court uses Proud Domains as his registrar, but their site seems to function almost exactly like GoDaddy, so I just pretty much followed his steps. One slight variation: his video shows how to change the DNS servers for a single domain, but I was doing 20. However, all you have to do is put a check mark beside all the domains you want to make the change for, and it will change them all at once, instead of having to change them one at a time. This part was cake.

Now, I needed to add all of my domains to my Host Gator account. I looked through the supplemental videos, but I didn’t see anything about how to do that. So, I turned to the Keyword Academy forums. A quick search for “addon domains” (that’s what Host Gator calls them) revealed a thread with a guy named Stede, asking the same question I had. The solution is pretty simple. In the Host Gator control panel there is a link called “addon domains” which takes you to a tool that you can use to add extra domains. (A word to the wise on this part, when you fill in the domain name you want to add, the tool auto populates the next 2 fields, just leave those alone. The auto populated defaults work fine. I cost myself some time messing around with these because I thought they did something other than they really do, lol).

It was at this point that I was very glad I had decided to spend the extra 4 bucks a month for the Premium plan. Probably would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out, without the benefit of those forums.

The next supplemental video shows you how to install WordPress to your site. WordPress is a tool that helps you build your wesite (more like builds it for you). I thought this part was going to be kind of time consuming, but boy was I wrong. Court shows you how to install WordPress using a tool that Host Gator has called “Fantastico De Luxe” (I think). I just followed the steps and had WordPress installed to my first domain in less than 5 minutes! I had it installed to all 20 domains in no time flat.

The next video shows you how to find and upload a WordPress theme to your site. I did this on one of my sites, just to get the hang of it, but I decided to wait and choose themes for all my sites later. This step is, once again, really easy especially if you’ve ever used Filezilla (or any other FTP client) before.

The last supplemental video shows you how to install a particular Search Engine Optimization plug-in to your site. The steps are almost the exact same ones you used to upload a WordPress theme in the last video.

However, I ran into another little speed bump here. My terrible ISP, Clearwire, is once again to blame. This step involves uploading files to your website through FTP, but because of my slow upload speed, the connection was timing out and failing on about every other domain. This means I would have to re-queue the files and try again. This was really frustrating. But then I thought to myself, “Since each site uses the same plug-in files, I really only need to upload the files to the server one time. After that I just need to find a way to copy them to each site’s ‘wp-content’ folder.” I couldn’t find a way to do this using Filezilla (but if there is one, please feel free to leave a comment explaining how). I remembered though, seeing a file manager in the Host Gator control panel. I opened it, and sure enough, it has a copy function, so I just used that to copy the set of plug-in files I had already uploaded to the “wp-content” folder of each of my sites. Tada!

That last video also talks a little about how to configure the SEO plug-in, but I decided to leave that for later, since it is covered more thoroughly in lesson 3 (I peeked).

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 4 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 20 hours @ $8.40 = $168.00
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
- ($360.76)


Day 2: Eliminating Keywords – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


After a good nights rest, me and my wife were both feeling ready to go again. Unfortunately, we both had to work all day which completely drained us of our eagerness. So, I had to tempt my wife with the thought of being able to quit her job and do this instead if the system works out. She begrudgingly agreed to help me again.

So, the next lesson (which I had pre-downloaded) is about eliminating keywords from your list that either:
1. Don’t have enough earning potential, or
2. Are going to be too competitive in the search engine results
The keywords that get eliminated we called “red” keywords (because you color them red in your spreadsheet to show they are eliminated) and the ones that don’t get eliminated, we called “green” keywords (because you color them green in your spreadsheet).

This is actually kind of fun. Me and my wife had a little competition going to see who had found the highest paying green keyword, the most green keywords, etc.

We were also both pretty impressed with the system of determining the potential income and competitiveness of each keyword. The system used is quite logical and straight forward; it just makes sense. But, we were both in awe of the time and money that someone (I assume Mark and Court, the owners of The Keyword Academy) must have spent figuring this out. Honestly, I feel like the dollar I’ve paid for the system and all the time we’ve spent up to this point are nothing compared to the time and cost it would have taken me to figure out something like that on my own. I am feeling very reassured about my purchase at this point.

Being the computer nerd that I am, I found a way to use macros and formulas in my spreadsheet program to make this process go a little faster. I plan on writing a post in the Keyword Academy forums on what I did, so it can hopefully help some other people.

By the way, I am using OpenOffice Calc as my spreadsheet program. It’s free and works every bit as good as Excel, so if you don’t have Excel, don’t worry. You can download OpenOffice here:
http://www.openoffice.org/

So after about two and a half hours (each), we had worked through all 500 potential keywords. I decided that if I was really going to make a go of this system that I had to give it my all. So, me and my wife each picked out 10 of our green keywords and tomorrow I am going to register domains for all 20. I am a little nervous. This is the first big amount of money (big to me anyway) I’ll be investing in the system…

Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 6 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $1.00
Time costs – 13 hours @ $8.40 = $109.20
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
- ($110.20)


Day 1: Getting Started – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment


Well, today is the big day. I have been lurking around the Keyword Academy’s site for a while, leeching all the free info off their blog, e-book, etc. Now, it’s time to take the big plunge and spend… $1. Yep, they aren’t kidding about that, it’s really just a dollar to get started. At first, I was really worried that this meant there had to be a hidden fee for canceling or something. However, paying with PayPal is an option, which dispelled my notions of hidden fees. See, in PayPal, if you want to cancel a subscription, you deal with PayPal and PayPal only. You don’t even have to tell the place you subscribe to you’re leaving. You just log in to PayPal and say “Quit paying these guys” and they do it. Nice…

So, they have two plans when you sign up: Regular and Premium. Word on the street is that they are planing on having a third plan called “Diesel” soon (yes, that was a gasoline joke. Sorry, couldn’t help myself). Anyway, the only 2 differences in features are that with Premium:
1.you can download all they’re past “webinars” (in either audio or video format) and,
2.you get access to the forums.
As far as cost goes, the monthly cost for the Premium is $4 more: $33 instead of $29. The first month is only $1, regardless of which plan you choose.

Honestly, the webinars didn’t really sound that appealing to me, but I am a big believer in forums. I use them all the time to find answers to computer questions for my job. So I decided to spend the 4 extra bucks a month to go with the Premium plan, and logged in immediately.

The member’s area is very no-nonsense (which I like). There is some info on the page about how to get the most out of the system, there’s an event calendar in the top right corner, some links (forums, affiliates, etc.) across the top, and then (the important part) the links to the videos down the right side of the page. I decided to hop into the first lesson immediately.

Uh oh, speed bump. Clearwire happens to be the only ISP in my area that services my address, and they are SLOW! I tried to start playing the first video but it was just too choppy. So I did a quick Google search and found a tool that can download flash videos. It’s called Orbit and you can download it free here:
http://www.orbitdownloader.com/
I used this tool to download the video to my computer, then used VLC media player to play it. VLC is also free and you can download it here:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Ahh, much better.

The first lesson is all about how to brainstorm a list of potential keywords. I enlisted the help of my wife for this part (and I’m glad I did! She thought of some great keywords that never would have occurred to me). It took about 3 hours with both of us working on it, but we came up with a list of about 500 potential keywords. I know that sounds like a lot, but once you get started it goes pretty quick.

After that, we were both feeling pretty drained mentally so we decided to call it a day.

Money spent: $1.00
Time spent: 7 hours

The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $1.00
Time costs – 7 hours @ $8.40 = $58.80
Revenue:
Google  Adsense – $0.00

GRAND TOTAL:
- ($59.80)