The History of ActionEmpowerment.com

Action Empowerment was an experiment. The goal was to create a fully automated website that would attract visitors for a specific niche. The niche being articles about empowerment.

I created the site on September 11 of 2016 and set up three different areas to focus on, "Personal Empowerment", "Guided Meditations" and "Personal Development". I chose these areas to cover so that I could leverage SEO backlinks and visitors toward my other websites which focused on life coaching, hypnotherapy and meditation. I also added Google Adsense to place ads on the site and generate some income.

The website used the plugin WP Automatic to scour the web for public domain and creative commons articles, blog posts, products from Amazon and videos from YouTube. Another piece of software called SpinRewriter would then automatically rewrite the articles so that Google would not think it was a duplicate. The software would then create a post automatically and feed it out to the social networks set up, Facebook and Twitter.

Over the period of the experiment, the website created 10,828 posts, received 47,500 views and 40,719 comments. The Facebook page generated 255 followers and the twitter page generated 333 followers and posted 66,500 tweets.

20,085 of the visitors came from Facebook, 16,215 from search engines of which 15,798 were from Google and only 994 visitors from Twitter. The rest of the visitors were from all over the place.

Some of the articles were great and SpinRewriter did an amazing job. Some were pretty average. I ran into trouble, however, when the automation picked up random porn pages. I didn't realise for a long time until I got an email from Google threatening to close my account if I kept putting their ads on porn pages. Although I was only making a few bucks from the site, my Adsense account was also linked to my YouTube page that generates a considerable income. The thought of losing that was not a good one.

Finding the offending pages amongst the several thousand was quite an undertaking but eventually, I got them and deleted them. After that scare, I figured it safest to just remove the Google ads from the site as there was no way I'd catch them in the future.

With no income being generated, I decided to let the website go when the domain name came up for renewal. It was an interesting experiment.