This is the first part of our three-part series on Advanced Private Blog Network Building. The other two parts cover buying domains your PBN deserves and hosting that leaves no footprint. If you have never built a PBN, start with the beginner's PBN guide.
A private blog network costs real money and real hours, and most of the ones that fail were never planned. So before you buy anything, take a step back and decide what you are building and why.
Remember: failing to plan is planning to fail. Here are the five things to settle first.
- How many PBN links you need to rank
- What the network will cost you
- How you will structure it
- When and how fast you will link to your money sites
- How you will run it without it eating your week
1. How many links you need
There is no fixed answer. It depends on how competitive the niche is, whether your on-page SEO is sound and how much authority the money site already has. As a rule of thumb, ten good PBN links move a medium-competition keyword. Plan for at least ten sites, and expect to add more as you start earning.
2. What it costs
A PBN has three costs: the domain, the hosting and the content. The value of a link comes almost entirely from the domain's backlinks, so that is where the money should go. A solid domain from a broker or an auction runs from about $100 to $500; the really good ones go for far more. For a first network, stay around $100 to $150 a domain and move up as you learn to judge backlinks.
Hosting should cost you $15 to $30 a year per site. Content is the cost people underestimate: five decent articles to launch a site and a fresh one every couple of months, at $10 to $25 an article.
- One site, one-off (domain + 5 articles): about $200
- One site, per year (hosting + 6 articles): about $100
- Ten-site network: about $2,000 up front and $1,000 a year
As the network starts paying for itself, add stronger, costlier domains. They are what make it hard to beat.
3. How to structure it
The structure depends on whether you promote one money site, several in the same niche, or several across niches.
If you are an entrepreneur with one site, or a few in the same niche, keep it simple: every PBN site links to the money site and the PBN sites never link to each other.
If you are an agency with clients in different niches, build one master network per top-level niche: a Health and Fitness network, a Technology network, and so on. Each client gets links from the network that matches their niche; a generic client can draw on more than one.
Two reasons this works: a manual review that finds one master network does not take the others down with it, and you can still share links between networks where a client sits in more than one niche.
4. When to start linking
The question we hear most: "When do I link from my new PBN to my money site?" Only when it looks natural. A brand-new money site with no links from outreach, guest posts or citations should not be receiving PBN links yet.
PBN links are the best links your site will ever get, because you control the anchor text and the equity they pass. Use them like the scarce thing they are. Once the money site has a varied link profile, drip-feed the PBN links with your target anchors, a few at a time, and watch the anchor-text percentages.
If "buy bitcoin" is already 17% of your anchors, adding more of it will hurt, not help. Wait, add other links, let the percentage fall, then add the PBN links. Blend them in so the site passes every manual review it will ever face.
Too many owners skip this, add the links and pray. When the penalty lands, they swear off PBNs for good.
5. Running it without losing your week
Building and running a network is repetitive work, and repetitive work belongs with a virtual assistant. But do not hire one until you have built the first two sites yourself. The first time you will make mistakes; the second time you can write the whole process down as a checklist, with the footprints to avoid, and hand that to the assistant. A checklist you wrote yourself is one you can audit.
Yes, it is a lot of work. Nobody said dominating the results would be easy.
Carry on to the next chapter in this guide on buying domains your PBN deserves.
Looking for domains for the network? The PBN domains search on DomCop lists spam-checked expired domains with Open PageRank 3+, DA 30+ and Citation Flow 10+ under $300, updated through the day.
