How To Create Infinite Content Pages

By: John Elder posted in Adsense


Hello good people!

What do you know, mid 40 degree weather in the middle of December here in Chicago! Trust me, I’m not complaining, but I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a herald of the end of the world or something! We should be knee deep in snow by now! I can’t complain though…

Earnings are chugging along nicely. Yesterday brought in $108 in Adsense revenue and $27 in amazon commissions (off 5 items purchased for $383). That’s a daily total of $135, and I’m pretty happy with the continued pre-panda earnings I’ve been seeing.

Yesterday I talked about the basics of How to spin content. Today I want to talk about the next step, using wordpress to generate unlimited pages of content.

I’m just going to talk about this concept in general today, and tomorrow I’ll talk about the actual code modifications you need to make in wordpress to get this to work.

Let’s break it down

Before I get started, I want to talk about the general strategy we’re talking about here. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you probably already have a good idea of my strategy, but for all you newbies who may have just started reading, my strategy is pretty simple:

  • Create one article
  • Spin the heck out of that article
  • Use that one spun article to create thousands of pages on each website automatically, with each page focusing on long tail keywords
  • Churn out thousands of these sites using the same templates

I use php and simple html templates that I created myself (for a number of very good reasons), but most people want to just use wordpress.

Fortunately there’s a way to modify wordpress to do most of the stuff we need it to do, and it’s actually pretty easy.

The thing we’re most interested in is creating an infinite number of webpages, with each of those pages targeting a specific long tail keyword. Here’s how you do it (generally speaking, I’ll get into the nitty gritty details and talk code tomorrow).

Basic wordpress installations

Whenever you install wordpress, several default files are created. You can log into your webhosting account via cpanel or ftp (I suggest you learn how to use ftp, it’s really useful).

Navigate to this folder on your account, it’s usually called the same thing on most webhosts; /www/wp-content/themes/twentyten

Twenty Ten is the default theme that comes with wordpress. If you use another theme, then you’ll need to look in that directory. For instance, if you install a theme called marketingfoolrocks, then you would probably look in the directory /www/wp-content/themes/marketingfoolrocks, you get the idea here.

Inside that directory you’ll find several default files. The one we’re interested in is called search.php

What is search.php? It’s a file that runs wordpress’s search page function. Most themes come with a search bar that allows people on your webpage to search for things on your blog. If you look at the bottom of this page, you’ll see my own search bar (it says “Search My Site”).

Go ahead and search for something…I’ll wait. Try “tacos” go ahead and type in tacos into my search bar and see what happens (be sure to hit enter!).

What happened? WordPress searched my website and took you to a page that said: “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.”

What just happened here?

What did wordpress do? In effect, it just created a webpage about tacos on marketingfool.com! Completely on the fly. Think about it!

On that page it said “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” but what if we modified the search.php file and added our spin text article. Then told search.php to display that spun text instead of an error message?

Then, doing almost nothing else, you’d potentially have an unlimited number of pages on an unlimited number of items.

It’s hard to wrap your brain around this concept, and I’m not explaining it very well, but that’s the entire idea in a nutshell. Use wordpress’s search function to autmatically create an infinite number of pages. The URL’s for those pages will look like this:

http://www.marketingfool.com/?s=Tacos
http://www.marketingfool.com/?s=Burritos
http://www.marketingfool.com/?s=Nachos
http://www.marketingfool.com/?s=Fajitas

See the pattern?

?s=KEYWORD

just replace KEYWORD with whatever keyword’s your site is about, and whamo instant pages about those keywords.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the actual modifications you need to make to search.php in order to get your spun articles in there so that you actually have some content to show google. In the mean time…

Keep on building!

-John
The Marketing Fool!

PS..if you liked this, or any of my articles, please share them on facebook, twitter, digg, or whatever social networks you like. Spread the word!!

John Elder is an Entrepreneur, Web Developer, and Writer with over 27 years experience creating & running some of the most interesting websites on the Internet. Contact him here.



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3 Responses to “How To Create Infinite Content Pages”

  1. Emanuel

    13. Dec, 2011

    Hi John, nice trick. I understand the concept and is very clever!
    I have some questions. Does the search query creates a file on the server related to the keyword it finds? Does Google finds those results naturally or we have to build some links to them?
    I suppose that in Google results the page that will rank and be showed is http://www.marketingfool.com/s=tacos is that right? I mean with the “s=”.
    Sorry for my bad english!

    Reply to this comment
    • The Marketing Fool

      13. Dec, 2011

      Hey Emanuel,

      No, the search query does NOT create a file on the server…that’s part of the beauty. It will reference that search.php file, throw up our spun article sprinkled with the searched for keyword as well as your adsense ads etc. But it is not creating that page per se. It’s done on the fly, virtually. It’s hard to visualize. For all intents and purposes, that page now exists…just not as a physical file on the server.

      No, Google will not find those pages naturally, you’ll have to create a sitemap page with links to all the keyword pages you want Google to find. I’ll talk about that in another article in a few days.

      Yes, you’re right, the Google results page will show those sites as s=keyword which some people don’t like. Don’t worry, I have a way around that too. A simple .htaccess trick you can use to trick your server and make it change all urls on your site from this: http://www.yoursite.com/?s=keyword

      To this: http://www.yoursite.com/keyword.html

      All on the fly, virtually, automatically…stay tuned!

      Reply to this comment
  2. Emanuel

    13. Dec, 2011

    Nice John, of course I will stay tuned!
    BTW I think you should change your blog name to marketingwizard lol.

    Reply to this comment

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