Mage Monster by Greg Jacobs

Wow! it definitely sounds impressive!

By the way, if we buy the Monster... do we also get the old MAGE (the core program)?

I wonder if Greg can make this a monthly subscription so that those who don't want to fork out $1497 can try it out first on monthly basis. Test out the Monster for a few months and then decide whether to continue or not after testing... just a suggestion

You do only need one hosting account, Marion. But if you've ever had lots of sites up, generating lots of traffic, you would know that it's the size of the server your on, that matters. In the beginning, when you only have 40-50 Mage sites up, you can get by with a simple shared hosting plan. By the time you have 250-500, you will have outgrown that shared server's memory & resource capabilities and need to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated server...your monthly hosting fees will increase from as little as $15/mo., to $50, $100 or more a month. For all my traffic, I had to upgrade to a Dedicated server for over $200/mo. at Servint, but then, I'm making much more income, so it works out

Steve, these are all great questions that are all answered very fully in Mage's tutorials, Greg gives a full training course. If you're gonna get Mage you'll see throrough answers for all this in the course. If you're passing on it, no need to give a long Mage training here in this review thread.

I will say that Expired Domains can give your new Mage sites an initial boost, based on the backlinks still active from the previous site built on that domain...sometimes you get a big boost, sometimes almost no boost at all, depending on the quality of the previous site and the backlinks that were there. There is an expired domain finder built into Mage.

I subscribe to another expired domain list called Register Compass. The domains I find there are fully expired, meaning they're available just like any other domain at normal price. I find the ones I want on Register Compass, hop over to GoDaddy and buy them just like any new domain, no extra $.

I buy about 1/2 expired, half new ones. And yes, of course, your final yearly income will be your gross minus all your domain & hosting expenses...for me it's still plenty worth it.

#3 I don't know all of why some pages get de-ranked or de-juicified by Google, while others stay at the top. Some of it's pure luck and Google's capriciousness. It's NOT always because of the "spammy" nature of autoblog pages, as many would think. Some Magers have seen some of their top traffic pages suddenly get their traffic cut in half, others with similarly autoblog-looking pages never see a drop.

#4 I do drip feed a percentage of my pages into the future, supposedly it gives the SERPS the impression that there's still plenty of "new activity" happening on the blog. But I've seen some of my site go up in traffic after the drip-feeding was over and nothing new was happening...other Mager have corroborated this.

#5 Best explained in Greg's training in the course your now gonna rush to buy

#6 Mage comes with a keyword-finding program called Keyword Mage. I have tried all the other highly-touted keyword-finding programs, including OneLung's eBay Keyword Scraper (terrible!) and nothing rivals the keywords Keyword Mage pulls. IMHO, this one tool is worth the whole $1500.

Well Michael, the obvious question would be, how much money are you making from those 10 niche micro sites with clickbank? What percentage of those work? I've had success with these too, which is why I said you should do both...so you can make more money! But I've also put up many micro niche sites, highly-targeted to a good keyword, beautifully laid-out, with a fine backlinking campaign, a lot of time and hard work, and they made zilch, nada. Which again, is why I ask, what percentage of your micro-niche sites succeed. Probably not much better than how many of these Mage sites do.

Plus, when you say "all that work putting up 500 sites" it's obvious you haven't tried Mage. Each site takes 5-10 minutes to fully erect, and there's really no work at all, just a few choices and a few buttons. If you had a program that made putting up blogs feel like opening your refrigerator and picking your evening meal, and it could make you an extra $5K a month, why wouldn't you??

I see your point, but the thing about the mage system, for me anyway, was the ease in getting the sites up, WITHOUT having to write content (which i hated) and WITHOUT having to do backlinking to your sites (which i hated).

And to your comment of "throw a thousand and some will sure stick......." that would happen in any niche site that you make, correct? Some work and some don't. But the thing with the mage is that you are putting maybe, what, ten minutes tops on each site, whereas with a niche site that has original content and backlinking and such, that takes ALOT of time and work with the chance of it getting no results. With Mage, if it doesn't work, it's not lke you spent hours upon hours making it.

Also, you can't really scale the original niche sites unless you are outsourcing it, which takes money that some people might not have.

I've done those activities in the past, and i did make a little money from it (emphasis on little), but the work involved was just a complete drag, i didn't enjoy it, and all that hard work didn't translate into enough money to make it worth my wild. Certainly not enough for me to continue on that path.

When the mage came out, it seemed like a system that i could wrap my head around and i could concentrate on just putting up sites in good niches with low competition and decent demand. That's all i had to worry about. NOT content writing and NOT backlinking, which was a huge plus for me.

In terms of the content, two things: the data feeds from Ebay themselves come up with the unique content. That's what makes the content unique. Also, spinning the content from third party sites (to which i do a little of, maybe one or two other content sources OTHER than Ebay on each page). So that takes care of the content.

The backlinking is taken care of by the expired domains that i buy. Now mind you, some will not be able to do this because it gets VERY expensive when you start to buy a lot of expireds, as i have. If that's the case, then you just buy regular domains, but just be aware, at least in my experience anyway, that they do not perform as well as expireds.

You can also buy .info's, as i have for like 2 bucks, but they have NEVER worked for me. Some in the mage forum say it works for them, but they are in the minority. I bought like 19 of them, and they all bombed. So just be aware of that.

And hosting. Someone above said you could put like 40-50 mage sites on a shared hosting account. I think that is WAAAYYY too many. I have 20-25 each on 9 shared hosting accounts, and still get emails from time to time saying that i am using up too many resources. I think if i would have had as many as 40-50, i would've been kicked out by now.

I know i should transfer to a dedicated (some people are saying to go to a VPS, but if it's more power and resources that you want, you need a dedicated, as a VPS isn't really built for that. Atleast that is what other people tell me, anyway.). So that will cost you money. I'm just lazy i guess and haven't done it yet.

Anyway, back to my point. With these sites, they are set and, not so much forget, but do very very very little work in the future. Work like:

- update plugins

- update wordpress

- add keywords to your sites when they run out (amount of pages in your mage sites is equal to the amount of keywords you have. So if you have 100, for example, and drip one page a day starting today, you will have 100 pages of content going out to 100 days in the future. So when the content runs out, you add keywords to add more pages)

And that's essentially it. (and by the way, the monster takes care of ALL of the above, and more, from one central location. but more on the monster in a minute).

Whereas if you are gong the 10 niche route, with original content and backlinking, you always have to do that in the future PLUS what i mentioned above. Now you can of course outsource all of that, but it takes money coupled with managing outsourcers and so on and so forth, and i might do that, but i want to build a nest egg before i dip in to that.

So i did the Mage to build Niche sites that i could scale without killing myself in content and backlinking and that could get a good (actually great) ROI on my money.

Now, Monster Mage. As i mentioned, it is a complete time saver in terms of building Mage sites. So it was a definite no brainer for me to purchase, which i did.

BUT (and this is a big but) at the moment, it doesn't work for me. Crashes all the time. Been doing that since the 7th of July. Some people say it crashes on them like 90% of the time. For me, I have YET to be able to put up a site with it.

Disheartening as i wanted to get back in to building these sites (took a break from them about 6 months ago). They said that they are working on it, but i have a 1 month window before the refund period ends, and if this doesn't work after 1 month of them working on it, then i have my doubts that it ever will.

But i will be patent, given that i have done well with Mage. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and be patient and wait for at least 1 month (until the refund period comes upon me). If it doesn't work by then, then i guess I'll have to refund and just do it the manual way. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that point so that i can actually use it. Hopefully Greg will extend the refund period until they can get it fixed....

So anyway, to each his own. It works for me and i do well with it, which is all that really matters to me. Will this get slapped out of existence some time in the future? Probably, but who cares? I'll ride this pony until it is no longer feasible (monetarily). I'll admit that I still have another project that i work on that is original in content and backlinking and such, but i do this one slowly over time and it's just 1 site that i concentrate on. I plan on having that site for the rest of my life so there is no rush on that money-wise. That's a LOOONG term project where i don't expect to make money on in the short term.

But i needed something now that i didn't have to spend so much time on, that i could scale, and would work pretty quickly and that could get a good ROI on. Mage fit the bill. Quick, residual income without too much upkeep that will last at least to the foreseeable future.