Blog Network Manager

If you're looking for the best blog network manager, you've found it.

xMarkPro is a comprehensive blog network management suite*. And you can save $50 by using the coupon code gary5050. Yes, that's my affiliate link because I bought xMarkPro and now I recommend it.

* UPDATE: No longer recommended, sorry. Since posting this page, which is based on material the vendor provides to affiliates, I have had many problems with this script and I now suggest you look for other solutions to your blog network management needs. Here is the Xmarkpro vendor's page at WarriorForum where you can see the ongoing discussion. If things improve, I will be pleased to remove this update.

These days I use and recommend this $29.95 tool. It doesnt do everything XMPro was supposed to but it's one tenth the cost and it works!

Let's talk about blog networks and see how beneficial a network management script like this can be...

Create Your Own Blog Network

Today I'm going to fill you in on all the nitty gritty details of blog networks, why it's important you learn about them, and how they can benefit you. If you don't currently know what a blog network is, you should, as they can be an invaluable resource to your online marketing efforts. A blog network is simply a collection of sites that work together to serve a single purpose. That purpose can be many things, including:

  • Easily market multiple products / niches / opportunities, and easily view the performance of each helping you gauge what is and isn't working.

  • Market one product / niche / opportunity using multiple web sites, each with different SEO and marketing strategies, allowing you to easily compare the various strategies to determine which are doing the best and worst.

  • Setup multiple feeder sites that promote / link into a single site. This can help with SEO, back links, and overall give you a better ranking in the search engines. For example, if six of your sites are on the first page of Google for a certain keyword, you're going to get that much more traffic, and ultimately, customers.

  • Manage a network of lead capture sites, with all processes centralized, and instantly gauge the performance of each.

  • Trade links, have more available advertising space for AdSense, and so on.

Needless to say, if you're serious about online marketing, learning about and starting a blog network can be extremely valuable to you. This article will explain how you can easily create and administer your own blog network, and how it will benefit your online marketing. For this tutorial, we'll be using an excellent system called xMarkPro, with which you can effortlessly create your own blog network, and keep on top of all necessary information such as traffic and sales statistics.

Getting Started

Before creating our new blog network, we first need to ensure we have the three things needed, which are:

  • Domain Name(s) - You'll need to register at least one or more domains. If you only have one domain name, that's perfectly fine. If you don't yet have any domains, head over any domain registrar such as Namecheap.com and pickup your very first domain!

  • Web Hosting - You will need a hosting account. If you don't currently have one, Hostgator's simple and cheap Baby Plan will work perfectly. Yes, that's my affiliate link. Again, I am a paid customer of theirs... "use and recommend" indeed.

  • xMarkPro - You will need xMarkPro which is the software system that is going to help us create and manage our entire blog network. It does cost a little bit, but is definitely worth the money. If you don't currently own xMarkPro, don't fret, there's a full online demo available on their website. And you can get $50 off xMarkPro by entering the coupon code 'gary5050' on the order form!

Now that we have the three required ingredients, let's get started! Once xMarkPro has been installed on your server, you'll receive access to your administration panel. The first menu you'll want to visit is Domains & Pages->Settings menu, which looks like:

Domain Settings

Most of you will be on a cPanel web host such as Hostgator, so you'll want to select "WHM/cPanel - Shared" as a server type, then enter your login information (your web host will provide this to you). And that's it! We're now ready to create our Wordpress library.

Gather Your Wordpress Themes & Plugins

This article assumes you already know what Wordpress is, and maybe even have some favorite Wordpress themes and plugins already. If you're not sure what themes and plugins are, once again, don't fret. Themes simply provide your website with the look and feel you want, while plugins give functionality to your site. There are virtually an unlimited number of free themes and plugins available in the Wordpress directories at:

Themes: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes
Plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

Got some favorite themes and plugins picked out? Great! If not, just download a few random ones from the links above for the next part of this tutorial. Now go to the Domains & Pages->Domain Manager, and view the WP Repository tab which will look something like:

Wordpress Repository

This tab lets us create a library of all our favorite Wordpress themes and plugins, which we can select from later on when creating our domains. So go ahead and upload all your themes and plugins by using the form located at the bottom of this tab. Once uploaded, you'll see they're now available for use.

Create Your Domains

Now we get to the good stuff, and can begin creating the domains for our new blog network. Go back to the Domains & Pages->Domain Manager menu, and at the bottom of the first tab you will see a form similar to:

Add New Domain

This form allows us to instantly create all domains within our blog network. We'll start by creating a new domain. To do this, enter the following values in the form:

Type:

'New Domain'

Domain Name:

This can be anything you wish. If you already have additional domains registered, go ahead and enter any domain name you own. If not, don't fret. You can simply create a sub-domain as shown in the image above. For example, if your domain name is mydomain.com, enter test.mydomain.com.

Please note, the domains you create can not already be live, or created within cPanel.

Online Status Text:

Leave this blank, and if wanted you can fill it in later. This simply allows you to define a small phrase that appears on your home page. Every 15 minutes, xMarkPro will automatically check to ensure that phrase is found on your site to ensure it's online.

Install Wordpress:

Leave this checked at Yes.

Wordpress Blog Title:

Anything you want, or if wanted, simply leave it blank.

Default Theme:

Optional, and will show all the Wordpress themes you previously uploaded. This lets you select the desired theme for your new blog.

Plugins:

Optional, and if desired, check off all the Wordpress plugins you'd like installed on your new blog.

That's it! Hit the Add New Domain button, and within a few seconds, a green message will appear on top of the form saying the domain was successfully created. You should now be able to view the domain in your web browser, and you'll see Wordpress installed, with the desired theme and plugins. This just reduced the time required to create a domain from 30 minutes down to 5 seconds. Continue using this exact process to create all the domains and/or sub-domains you want for your blog network.

Manage Your Domains

Once you have all your domains created, go back to the Domains & Pages->Domain Manager menu, and you'll be able to see all domains you've created within the tree view. It will look something like this:

Select Domain

Simply click on any domain within the tree view, and some details will automatically appear to the right, including a small Wordpress icon at the bottom. Clicking on this icon will automatically log you into the Wordpress dashboard for that domain, allowing you to create all your desired posts, pages, and so on. This provides you with excellent, centralized management for your entire blog network, and allows you to instantly manage any Wordpress blog within your network.

Setup Your Sponsors

Excellent! Now we have all our domains created, with Wordpress install and configured as we want. Next step is to get tracking in place, so we can see which domains and pages are bringing in the most traffic, sales, and conversions. To do this, we need to visit the Sponsors & Media->Manage Sponsors menu, where at the bottom of the page you'll see a form like:

Add New Sponsor

Using this form, you need to define all the different programs that you promote, such as Clickbank, CommissionJunction, and so on. Simply select the appropriate sponsors from the available list, and define any needed information that is asked. Every 60 minutes, xMarkPro is going to automatically login to each program, and retrieve any new sales data. This works beautifully, because instead of having to constantly login to each program you promote, all your sales can be easily viewed through xMarkPro. If a program you're promoting isn't currently available in the list, don't fret. Simply contact customer support at xMarkPro, and they'll ensure it gets integrated for you.

Link Codes

Next (and almost last), we need to create our link codes, so we can link from our newly created domains to the programs we promote. This is what will tie everything together for us, so we can view exceptional statistics regarding our entire blog network. Go to the Sponsors & Media->Link Tracker menu, and at the bottom of the page you'll see a form like:

Create Link Code

All the various programs you promote (ClickBank, Amazon, etc.) will provide you with URLs to promote, right? You then send people to your URLs, and if they signup / purchase, you'll receive commission. These are the URLs that we want to create link codes for, because it will allow xMarkPro to track all sales. Let's start with creating our first link code, by completing the form shown above:

Sponsor:

The program you'll be promoting with this link code.

Sponsor URL:

The URL you'll be promoting. These are provided to you by the programs you promote, and is where the user will end up when they click on your link.

Link Code:

Optional. In the above image you'll see I entered 'realestate', and the resulting URL has /realestate at the end. If wanted you can leave this blank, and xMarkPro will create a random 16 character link code.

Display Name:

Optional, but if defined, this is the name you'll see on all statistics throughout xMarkPro allowing you to easily tell which link it is.

Once done, hit the Create Link Code button, and you'll immediately see a new URL appear in the bottom box. This is the URL you'll want to promote, place in your blog posts, e-mail messages, and so on. When someone visits the link, they'll be automatically redirected to the Sponsor URL you defined, and xMarkPro will be able to track whether or not they purchased, plus other details such as the domain & page they clicked from, the country they're from, and so on. Please note, the domain name within the URL (eg. test.mydomain.com) can be any domain you previously created within xMarkPro.

Continue the process of creating all the link codes you need. Once done, you can go ahead and begin promoting your new links within your blog posts, pages, e-mails, forums, and so on.

Campaigns

One last important aspect is being able to track your various sources of traffic. Maybe you exchange links with other web sites, purchase banner or e-mail advertisements, advertise in forum signatures, and so on. You're going to want to see how much traffic is coming from each source, plus how well that traffic is converting into sales and commission for you. This can be easily accomplished by using the built-in campaign features of xMarkPro.

Simply place ?cid=XXX at the end of any URL, where XXX can be anything you'd like (maximum 30 characters). For example, if I created the domain mydomain.com, I can simply use http://mydomain.com/?cid=banner1, http://mydomain.com/?cid=forumsig, and http://mydomain.com/?cid=trade_john, or whatever else I want. xMarkPro will track each as a different campaign, and allow me to easily view full details on each traffic source, allowing me to see which are traffic sources are worth concentrating on, and which sources don't provide any real value.

Done! Sit back, and watch the statistics!

Congratulations! Your new blog network is fully setup, and ready to go! You can now begin promoting your new sites, sit back, and view detailed statistics regarding your blog network. For statistics, there's three main menus you should worry about:

  • Statistics->Piwik Login -- xMarkPro comes pre-installed with Piwik, a world leader in open-source traffic analytics software. All traffic to the domains you created is automatically tracked via Piwik, and you can instantly login to Piwik through the Statistics->Piwik Login menu.

  • Statistics->Traffic - Every 30 minutes, xMarkPro will automatically generate new traffic statistics from Piwik, which are available in this menu. This allows you to view the overall traffic for your entire network, plus broken down by domain, page, country, campaign, and more.

  • Statistics->Sales - Probably the most powerful report, and shows all sales statistics for your overall blog network, plus broken down by domain, page, sponsor, country, campaign, link code, and more. Every 60 minutes xMarkPro will automatically login to all programs you promote, and download any new sales data, which is then displayed in this report. This report includes views, clicks, joins, sales, refunds, commission earned, detailed conversion ratios, plus more.

These statistics allow you to easily see how much commission each aspect of your blog network is producing, where your traffic is coming from, which are the strong and weak aspects of your marketing efforts, plus more.

Conclusion

And there you have it. Your new blog network is now fully online, all link codes have been created, and all of your traffic and sales statistics are centralized in one place. You can now easily manage all aspects of your blog network, plus view detailed statistics on all traffic and sales, allowing you to easily pinpoint strong and problematic areas. This can become an absolutely invaluable resource, saving you loads of time from constantly logging into many places to check your statistics, plus provide you with a great amount of insight into your marketing efforts, ultimately making you an even better marketer.

Here's my link to the xMarkPro website again, where you can save $50 by using the coupon code 'gary5050' on the order form. Enjoy!