- Joined
- May 11, 2020
- Messages
- 252
- Reaction score
- 21
- Points
- 52
Introduction
Earlier this year, I bought an expired domain that used to focus on news about politics and economics. I put up a simple page saying the domain was for sale, but no one reached out.
Scrapy
I turned the domain into a WordPress blog. To keep it active, I built a Scrapy bot that uses a rotating proxy to visit about 24 other WordPress blogs with a similar audience. The bot grabs posts, rewrites them using AI to keep the same meaning but fresh wording (it took me a day to fine-tune the prompts), and publishes them on my blog. The bot runs every hour, ensuring there’s always something new.
Here’s a breakdown of how my Scrapy works:
After a few days, I started getting around 1,000 visits daily from Google Search. On average, there are about 850 clicks per day with 7,900 impressions (CTR is a little over 10%) and an average position of 9.5 across 290 keywords. The most recent data I have is from the 29th because Google Search Console has a bug that hasn’t updated since then.
Here’s a screenshot from Search Console Insights showing the blog hitting 125,000 clicks in one month back in 2021 december:
Goal:
Figure out how to make money from this.
Expenses so far:
Earlier this year, I bought an expired domain that used to focus on news about politics and economics. I put up a simple page saying the domain was for sale, but no one reached out.
Scrapy
I turned the domain into a WordPress blog. To keep it active, I built a Scrapy bot that uses a rotating proxy to visit about 24 other WordPress blogs with a similar audience. The bot grabs posts, rewrites them using AI to keep the same meaning but fresh wording (it took me a day to fine-tune the prompts), and publishes them on my blog. The bot runs every hour, ensuring there’s always something new.
Here’s a breakdown of how my Scrapy works:
After a few days, I started getting around 1,000 visits daily from Google Search. On average, there are about 850 clicks per day with 7,900 impressions (CTR is a little over 10%) and an average position of 9.5 across 290 keywords. The most recent data I have is from the 29th because Google Search Console has a bug that hasn’t updated since then.
Here’s a screenshot from Search Console Insights showing the blog hitting 125,000 clicks in one month back in 2021 december:
Goal:
Figure out how to make money from this.
Expenses so far:
- DigitalOcean Droplet -> $6 (for Scrapy)
- 5GB Proxy -> ~$14
- .com Domain -> ~$11
- My time -> an entire weekend
