The first step in creating your network of content sites is choosing a topic for the first one.

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who developed the concept of the "Hierarchy of Needs", shown in the drawing below.



Maslow stated that people's needs were arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs were those which directly affected their survival - air, food, water. Once those needs were met, safety needs became important - stability and security. After those needs were taken care of, psychological or social needs followed - the need for love, acceptance and belonging. At the top of the pyramid are "self-actualising" needs - the need for fulfilment, and to become all that one is capable of becoming.

If your needs on a lower level have not been met, your higher-level needs become unimportant. Your desire for acceptance is irrelevant if you're starving to death.

With the hierarchy of needs in mind, here are four major themes that most people are interested in:

Health and well-being
Love, romance and relationships
Money and material comforts
Career and progression

And here are three minor themes:

Travel
Education and the pursuit of knowledge
Ambitions, hopes and dreams

Within these broad themes are thousands of sub-categories.

Here are some which may be useful in choosing a topic for your first content site:

Arts & Entertainment
Business
Communications
Computers
Disease & Illness
Fashion
Finance
Food & Beverage
Health & Fitness
Home & Family
Internet Business
Politics
Product Reviews
Recreation & Sports
Reference & Education
Self Improvement
Society
Travel & Leisure
Vehicles
Writing & Speaking

Once you have decided on a theme for your content site, you'll need to choose a domain name. There are two approaches here.

One is to find a short generic name - something like 'Squidoo' or 'Yahoo' would be good. There are still 5-letter names available - but they are a little thin on the ground. Try MakeNames or download the free Domain Name Analyzer software to find short generic names.

The other option is to create a domain name which includes your keywords. The search engines used to love this, but it seems that they are less keen on the idea than they used to be.

The other point to consider is that we'll be using a hosting account which allows you to create multiple sub-accounts. There are two ways that hosting companies can do this. One is by allowing you to set up 'add-on domains'; the other is by giving you access to a full-blown reseller hosting account.

The reseller hosting account is preferable, simply because if you have a problem with one sub-account, the hosting company can shut that account down without affecting all the other sub-accounts. With add-on domains, it may not even be possible to determine which add-on domain is causing a problem, meaning that your entire account gets shut down.

There is also a serious security concern with add-on domain accounts. If the bad guys somehow get hold of the user name and password for the main account, they get access to every single one of your add-on domains as well. Since they can then log in as if they are you, they can do whatever they like with your sites.

My advice, then, is to go for a short, memorable master account name - like 'doozy.com" or "foobar.com". Your network of sites will then be either sub-domains (eg. "financearticles.foobar.com") or folders ("foobar.com/financearticles").

I recommend NameCheap for domain registration, for a number of reasons. Firstly, their back-end control panel system is an absolute joy to use when compared to any of the other registrars I've tried. Secondly, I've had no problems with them. Their support has been excellent on the rare occasions when I've needed to contact them.

It's important to choose your web hosting company carefully. There are thousands of hosting companies, and not all of them provide the same levels of service.

There are some important things to get right.

1. You will probably want the capability of hosting more than one web site. You can, of course, get a separate hosting account when you decide to build your second site - if so, I recommend that you sign up for hosting with a different hosting company. However, there are a number of hosting companies that allow you to build multiple sites with one hosting account.

2. Many hosting companies give you a discount if you pay up-front for a year or two years hosting. They'll also probably waive the 'set-up fee'. That's fine, but my recommendation is that you find a hosting company which:
a) doesn't charge a setup fee at all
b) charges on a month-to-month basis.

Why? Well, the set-up fee only exists to encourage you to sign up for a longer period of time. And while it's great saving a dollar a month by signing up for 12 months in advance, what happens if the hosting company's service is lousy, or they go out of business? Are you going to get a refund? It's better to assume you won't. Rather find a hosting company which lets you pay month-to-month, and if there's a problem you can cancel your account.

3. Never, never, ever sign up for hosting with the same company that registered your domain. Domain registrars are generally fairly stable (although Google RegisterFly.com to see what happens when a domain registrar goes bad). You're much more likely to have problems with your hosting service than with your domain registrar. And when you do have problems, the last thing you want is for your hosting company to block access to your account - and your domain name. When your domain name is registered elsewhere, you can change the DNS settings and point the domain name to a new host in a few minutes. If you have a proper backup, you can have your site up and running on a new host within hours.

4. Two is one, one is none. As your website empire grows, you'll want to split your services between at least 3 suppliers. Try not to get into a position where you are completely dependent on one supplier - for anything.

The only hosting company I can personally recommend at present is ResellerZoom. For $6.95 a month, you get a real reseller account (although they don't recommend that you actually resell sub-accounts to other people). You can create up to 20 sub-accounts, each with its own CPanel.

WordPress is very easy to install, particularly if your webhost offers CPanel and Fantastico.

CPanel is a common 'back-end' system which allows you to control many aspects of your hosting account. You can upload files, set up email accounts, check your traffic statistics and install scripts.

Fantastico is a system which simplifies the installation of a wide variety of scripts on a CPanel-based hosting account. One of the scripts it will install for you is WordPress.

Yaro Starak has set up a great resource called Become A Blogger which shows you how to set up a WordPress blog for free. There are 10 videos, which cover the following topics:

• Why You Should Use WordPress


• How To Get Your Own Domain Name


• How To Get A Web Host


• How To Install WordPress With One Click


• How To Upload Files To Your Webhost Using FTP


• Choosing A WordPress Theme For Your New Blog


• How to Install and Use WordPress Plugins


• How To Create Your First Blog Post And Blog Page


• What RSS Is And Why You Need It


• How To Use FeedBurner For Supercharging Your RSS Capabilities

There are a couple of steps you'll need to take to get WordPress working the way you need it to for the Content Site System.

Firstly, there are some settings you'll need to change.

Go to the Settings page and select "Permalinks".

Enter "/%postname%/" in the "Custom Structure" box.



You'll need to go to the "BlogRoll" section and delete the Blogroll.

Go to "Manage" and delete the "Hello World" post.

There are a couple of plugins you'll need to install to make your content site more search-engine friendly.

These are:

All In One SEO Pack
This plugin gives you easy control over a number of on-page SEO factors. For instance, you can set the TITLE tag the way you want it without having to mess around with the WordPress code.

Google XML Sitemaps
Some people believe that submitting a sitemap to Google makes no real difference to the ranking of your blog. However, I have seen a big difference in the speed at which Yahoo and MSN index my blogs since i started using this plugin.

Simple Tags
The Simple Tags pluging does everything you can think of doing with tags. It adds related posts after your articles, it allows you to edit all the tags used by your site, it automatically tags new posts. Don't leave home without it.

WP-Contact Form III
This plugin lets you place a contact form anywhere on your site by inserting a simple tag.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
This essential plugin lets you quickly and easily update your WordPress installation directly from the WordPress Dashboard. It takes care of backups, database upgrades and all that stuff.

Finally, you'll need a plugin to automatically post content to your site.

There are a couple of services that do this. iSnare, for example, has a free publisher service.

If you set up a free Article Dashboard article directory, you can get a free script which publishes iSnare's content.

If you want to do the same thing with WordPress, you can buy a script from EasyBlogsPro. In the package, you'll also get scripts for The Phantom Network and Article Marketer.

But there are two article submission services which provide excellent WordPress plug-ins for free.
I'm not going to tell you the names of the services here - to find out, you can go to my website at www.contentsitesystem.com. and sign up for my newsletter.

Once you have your content site set up, you'll need to start getting some traffic to it.

There are a variety of 'tried and tested' methods for generating free traffic. Here are some which have worked for me:

1. Build a "Power Network"
Sign up for free accounts at Squidoo, Blogger, WordPress.com, Zimbio, Multiply and HubPages. Build a simple one-page site at each of these, with a link back to your content site.

2. Drive traffic to your Power Network
The search engines are in love with the sites I mentioned above, so it's relatively easy to get those one-page sites ranked. By comparison, your brand-new content site will take a while to get anywhere, and the search engines don't like it when a new site 'suddenly' gets tons of page views.
So drive traffic to the sites in your Power Network by using web 2.0 tools like StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Digg, and Facebook. The more visitors you get to those pages, the more will click through to your content site.

3. Write articles to drive more traffic to your Power Network.
Write articles and submit them to high-powered article directories like GoArticles and EzineArticles.

Google Adsense is the ultimate 'passive income" system. Sign up for the program, download a snippet of code, paste it into your site and generate money. How simple is that?

There are alternatives to Adsense, of course.

But the best approach is to look at it as if you were a magazine publisher. Every square inch of space on your site could be generating revenue - from affiliate ads, Adsense, text link ads or whatever. How do you manage all this? Use an Ad Server. Go and take a look at my Ad Server lens