What Would You Expect To Pay?
 

No Spam here please - just want actual answers - not your specific companies outsourced BS :)

How much would you expect to pay someone to set up a simple blog based on keywords and using all affiliate feeds - including graphics(very simple) and making sure of continuing (automatic- no human intervention) updates - on a per blog basis - especially if someone were say looking for 50 blogs to be set up? |jester|

"Luke, you must not underestimate the power of the dark side...". ;-}

"strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will"

|bananna|

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you."

"I fucked your mother, Luke."

DAD?

Changing SciFi/SpecFic references for a minute:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain. "

OK - so now that we've played out all the star wars and Dune references - any help here as far as what to expect to pay?

How long would it take you to do this? Are you considering offering this as a service or outsourcing?? Reason I ask is because if your outsourcing payment might be more attractive with some advertising thrown in rather than money. If your looking for someone to do this for you then how long would it take you yourself to do it and what do you consider is an average hourly wage for yourself.

If it would take you 10 hours and you feel that you can make $10 an hour doing other things then I guess anything under the $100 is a good price to pay.

Very interesting project Linkster, I’m especially looking forward to see what linking strategy you use.

The hardest part will be choosing the feeds and keywords for each domain.

I assume your setting up Wordpress blogs, the install is really only ten minutes, tweaking the install, uploading the plugins you will need, adding the keywords and links is another twenty minutes.

Hope that helps

Pat - I figure I can come up with the keywords ahead of time - the linking of course will be my part as well - but if I were to use something like that script that you are familiar with for managing many blogs - it sounds like around 30 min per blog for the html part (I would also supply the graphics- header etc stuff)
What do you think that type of project would run assuming it were to be a total of 50 blogs but doing say 10 at a time (300 mins per group)?

Anyone who has ever worked with me knows that I'm really bad establishing prices, but let me walk you (or anyone who is considering do this for you) through this.

The installation of a WordPress blog is a 5 minute task, and that's if you are smoking and/or sipping coffee while doing it. Unhindered, you could probably knock it down to 3 or 4 minutes. The actual uploading of the files to the server requires the majority of those minutes - that's how simple a WordPress installation is. You login to your control panel. Create a database. Edit your database connection info on the wp-config file. Then upload. Go to the install page and follow the 3 seconds of instructions. Done.

It's the customizing that slows you down. You have to configure the permalinks, kill comments, and install the plugins. (Once who ever does this has done 2 or 3 of them, this whole process will go quite quickly as well.) Modifying each of the templates visually is going to take the most time, especially if you are using different themes and renaming any graphics with keywords/phrases.

Obviously, automatic updates will require an aggregation plugin that utilizes WP's fake cron job or an actual cron job handled through your control panel.

Lastly, you add the sponsor feeds. A cautionary note: many sponsor feeds have been tossed together so quickly [so the sponsor can yell 'we have feeds!'] that many links within the posts quite obviously don't carry the affiliate code. Nice. The state of blog RSS feeds in this industry is horrific. The quality control simply isn't there. I gave up on using sponsor feeds a while back, but Walrus and a couple of others may know of some quality feeds that are more than lists of galleries.

Keep in mind, updating feeds everyday, especially on 50 separate blogs, will bog your server down.

Depending on the amount of customization to be done on the template, it takes me between 4-6 hours to get a WP blog up and running with feeds. Now I'm not terribly organized so someone who was could probably cut that down by an hour or so.

I use blog organizer but not for this type of project. Probably the biggest reason is that I like to customize the WP-Autoblog plugin a little bit but also there are plugins that I'm convinced help me that just aren't available with a program like blog organizer.

Thanks for the replies - UW - Ive got to ask - how much bogging down really occurs updating feeds - seems it would be less than updating and rotating thumbs on a tgp maybe? Id be real interested in what kind of server loads we would be talking about?

I use FeedWordPress on a couple of sites for feed syndication and it - the script - moves very slowly. How much of that is due to server performance - I really don't know. When I see a script crawling like that, I assume it's impacting the server itself, but I may be very wrong. A lot is going on though, while a blog is being updated. The syndication script is polling the various feeds' servers for updates, adding new posts to the blog's datatbase, and WP is pinging an array of other sites to tell them that your blog has just updated. I may be very wrong about a server impact since it could be the communication between your server and all those other servers which causes the delay. Honestly, this is the first time I have ever given the entire process this much thought. Any other time I just sit here thinking, "fuck, this is slow". ;)

FeedWordPress would require a cronjob in order to perform the updates automatically. There is another syndication plugin called WP-Autoblog that uses WP's fake cron (I think) and will auto update on it's own. I didn't have any luck with that one, but that's probably because I didn't apply the correct settings to it. I think that's the one Walrus uses quite successfully though.

Originally I used FeedWordPress but was having a problem with it duplicating posts from some of the sponsor feeds I was using. Couldn't figure out what was causing it since the same sponsor feeds were working on other blogs. I haven't had that problem with WP-Autoblog.

But thats neither here nor there since you eluded to using a different program for actually aggregating your feeds into blogs.

Just hire Useless & throw him $20/hour - that's what I'd do if I was going to do this project.

First of all I installed wordpress twice to see how long it takes first install 7min 51sec second install 8min 25sec, Useless must have a faster ISP than I have.

If you went BO with a basic template something like this http://www.retrobro.com I would think 5 to 10 minutes each.
Like Walrus said there are a couple plugins that would help a lot that aren't available for BO
I also don't like the linking structure http://www.retrobro.com/Retro-Porn_76.html would get a lot more SE bang if it were http://www.retrobro.com/Retro-Porn_S...cCullough.html

Not sure if this is related, but ...
It ususally takes me less than 1 hour to create a blog for a sponsor/website, as long as the sponsor has free-hosted galleries and descriptions or episode summaries with them. The majority of the time is pent customizing the blog; the rss feed itself is created in less than 10 minutes, with tags (I have a script for generating these). See an example here: http://nudesexmodels.info/

Guess I'm the slow one but I really do spend a lot of time customizing the layout of the template I chose and I try to not reuse a template very often.