Content Almost done.

Not that your content is ever done but although I haven't quite got to the end of my list it is time to start getting some inbound links. So in the next day or two I'll post about how to go about that and start to do it for my site. In the mean time a few stragglers have found my site and google has indexed most of my pages. And yes, there has been a few clicks, enough to bring me to just under 10% of my goal of being profitable already, much better than I would have expected. 18 days in of 90 days. I think we should be alright.

posted by john at 5:37 PM 0 Comments

  Content Still Going

About 3/4 of the way through the first lot of content. For some reason we have already had two clicks and google has picked us up so we are listed now. It's against googles TOS to disclose how much you are getting but with the two small clicks we are 2.5% of our way to a profitable website.

posted by john at 4:06 PM 0 Comments

  Step 5 to a profitale website: Starting Content

Before put effort into publicising the site it's a good idea to get some starting content. 25 pages of 500+ words is a good starting point. Over the long run you are going to fill in all the gaps but it's best to start with the pages that are going to be the most popular. To find this out there are a few keyword tools out there on the web that can help you find what terms are most search for and thise are normally the best pages to start with:

Keyword Tools:
So for lighting, for the first 25 pages I'm going to cover:
  1. dj lighting
  2. led lighting
  3. outdoor lighting
  4. light bulb
  5. lighting fixtures
  6. track lighting
  7. bathroom lighting
  8. solar lighting
  9. kitchen lighting
  10. aquarium lighting
  11. recessed lighting
  12. chandelier lighting
  13. emergency lighting
  14. low voltage lighting
  15. bathroom lighting
  16. designer lighting
  17. bedroom lighting
  18. light switches
  19. Garage Lighting
and I'll leave some room to cover off some basics to
  1. Main page
  2. Forum
  3. Contact Us
  4. resources
  5. basic lighting principles
  6. a project in the making your own section
Yes, that's a long list and I would to see if I can get through it in a week. I have in the past hire people to do this from elance. For 25 pages you can expect to pay $250+ and they can normally knock them out quite quickly and of a good quality. But that's going to take 9months to a year to recover, so if it's your first site, try and do it yourself.

As your writing try and remember our designing the content checklist.

posted by john at 1:18 AM 0 Comments

  Step 4 to a proftable website: Domain and Hosting

The domain name
If you hadn't picked one up earlier from step 2, the now is a good time to get to buy a new domain name. This is another one you shouldn't over think. Search for one that is as short as you can with your topic in the title. There are a few little hints that can help. If you are using multiple words the put a dash (-) between them and I tend to favor .com's if I can get them but I do like .info's too and they are both $10 a year so that's not to hard to recover.

After a bit of work in the thesaurus and lots of already taken options, I came across www.lighting-bible.com and registered it.

Hosting
Choose what hosting you like but we have been around a while and godaddy's seems to be the best option for a low cost starting out option with some room to grow. They have a deluxe plan for $7 a month and you can have unlimited domains, which if you are repeating this is a great option. get what you want, but I would use that as a bit of a benchmark. They also have the added benefit of if you sign up you get your hosting for two bucks. So for our little experiment that's what we'll use.


Yuck... we've spent some money
I case you hadn't read the previous post ( and I suggest you do) , if you do want to make a profit the easiest way to do it is spend as little as possible, so if you see us spending money you'll know it's the bare minimum you can spend to be successful. So we have forked out 79.68 for the hosting for a year + 1.99 for the domain which is 81.67 for the year which works out at about $20 for our 90 day experiment. Doesn't seem so hard now does it, but thats the trick. If you spend some time now and $20 make a profit you can almost forget the website and your costs will stay the same and your income will slowly creep up and you can repeat it over and over. That should be all we need to spend so lets see if we can recover our money.

There's nothing there yet but you can check it out - lighting-bible.com

posted by john at 3:07 AM 0 Comments

  Step 3 to a proftable website: Site Design

The Layout
Now this is an easy one. The trick here is to keep it simple. Users are not going to come to your site because it looks good, they re coming to get some information from it. And they are not going to wait for the information so keep it small to make sure it loads quickly. I think a logo its great, but don't fill your page with pictures, you want it to load quickly. You also want to keep it easy. If the navigation etc is too complete people will give up, so make it easy to read. Browse through some CSS Templates and pick one quickly, don't waste to much time on this. Your readers don't care if its blue or green just that its has what they are looking for and it's simple, loads quickly and they can find what they want when they are there.

Now I tend to favour a certain layout to get the most of the sites:


Lets see if we can find one: After about a half hour or so I found one called fastforwardthink that should do nicely.

Navigation Design
Ok, now is when you need to start thinking about content and which categories your topic can be divided into, yo get a navigation menu. Now there are some common items you should have on there 1) Home - A link that takes them back to the main page and 2)Links or Resources - A page for links to other sites. Some people also like to add forums and contact pages. But for lighting I'm going to go with
  1. Home
  2. Basic Lighting Principles
  3. Lighting Design
    1. Lighting Atmosphere
    2. Stylish Lighting
    3. Dramatic Lighting
    4. Lighting Tricks
    5. Lighting for Occasions
  4. Lighting by Area
    1. Entrance
    2. Hall
    3. Stairs
    4. Living Room
    5. Dining Room
    6. Kitchen
    7. Bedroom
    8. Bathroom
    9. Kids Room
    10. Garage
    11. Workrooms
  5. Doing it Yourself
    1. lighting Safety
    2. Hardware and electrics
    3. Bulbs
    4. Switches
    5. Accessories
  6. Making your own
  7. Forum
  8. Contact Us
  9. Resources
I'm sure you can come up with a good list for your topic pretty quickly.

Designing the Content
To make this successful you need to plan out what you need to cover on each page. Where not quite up to writing it yet but planning these before hand is a good idea.

Make Sure -
  1. each page has 1-5 keywords that you are targeting
  2. each page has a unique title using some or all of the keywords
  3. your keywords are used in the headings
  4. you use your keywords in bold at least once
  5. you have internal links on your site to the page using the keywords.
  6. your keywords are used 5 - 10 times each in of your content.

posted by john at 11:50 PM 0 Comments

  Step 2 to a profitable website: Used Domain Name

Step two is optional but it can help a lot if you do manage to do it, but it can take a little time so it's a good idea to start it early.

Grabbing a used domain name
A reputable domain with inbound links takes a while to build and has an inherent value that you can make use of. Thousands of domains name expire every day and some of these still have a good page rank, inbound links and are indexed in the search engines. Th hard part is trying to find on of these on your topic and getting it at a good price. Remember any money you spend you have to earn.

Where to find one
The best source we have found is the domain name aftermarket (tdnam). It's not free but I don't think the $5 is a bad deal to sign up. The other good thing is you can browse round before you sign up, so don't sign up until you see a domain you want to buy. First of I jumped into tdnam and did a search for all domains with out topic in the title - "lighting". Now that has returned 800ish results.

Wheat from the chaff
So you have 800 possible domain names from this tool, how do you know which ones are good. We tend to do a pass through each of these to see what the page ranks of each are (pagerank is googles 0-10 rating of the quality of sites). Now we grab these 100 at a time and run them through this tool - PageRank Lookup. That give us a pagerank for each one and we pick out the ones with a higher ranking. Now amongst the 800 possible domains only 4 had a rating above 0
  • PR1 - http://aaalightingfx.com/
  • PR1 - http://neworleanslighting.com/
  • PR1 - http://incandescentlighting.com/
  • PR3 - http://lightinglandscape.com/
Now page ranks can be faked and you do also want addition information so I also run these through this tool http://www.domainpagerank.com/ and it give you if they are valid or not and a few extra bits of information Alexa Traffic Rank (the lower the better) and the number of backlinks in the major search engines (the higher the better). Now these are all valid and obviously lightinglandscape is the best and aaalightingfx looks alright. Looking aback at what we
are trying to achieve - a profit - the cost of these is important. Lightinglandscape is going for $441 - probably a fair price but for our goals not good. aaalightingfx is going for $10 which pretty much the same cost as getting a new domain so thats good. It is however not the best name and it has no alexa traffic rank and only 60 inbound links and none in google. So let's have a look at another tool - the wayback machine. This tool show you the history of websites, you can even have a look at the content. From this tool we can see it started in 2000, the longer a site is around the better and 2000 is good, so good it makes one a little curious why it is only PR1. Looking through it's original content you can see it was a lighting sales site, perfect, later on and for the last few years it does look like a site full of spam though, not a reputation I want to inherit.

So, unfortunately, in this case, it doesn't look like I can nab an old expiring. Oh well, if I can do it the hard long way, you can spend a few more days or weeks looking for the right topic or waiting for the right domain name.

posted by john at 6:15 AM 0 Comments

  Step 1 to a profitale website: The Topic

Well it's day 1 and if we are to cover this in 90 days we don't have a second to lose. Now, yes I do have a day job and writing this blog is not it, as I am sure most first timers do. Now you can do this and a day job, no problem, but the first week or so is a lot of work so be prepare for some after hours work or take a weekend and lock yourself in your study to get through the first steps as quickly as you can.

The common answer not always the best
Now we are here to make a profitable website so you need have a bit of flexibility on the topic. It is true what people say that the hobbies you are interested in are the easiest to write about. Easiest does not always equate to profitable, but it does equate to you being more interested into follow through on the project. so take it into account when following the rest of this.

Other than that people always tell you to find a niche. This one I agree on. Don't try to take cover every bit of information that ever existed. Find on small section of it and get good at it.

What are we searching for?
We are looking for the magic combination of
Return
Dollars people pay to advertise on that topic
(higher the better)

Competition
How much competition is there
(lower the better)

Market
Number of people that are looking for these websites
(more the better)

It makes sense when it's put in front of you but we have to be clinical about this.

First, a list of possibilities (30 mins +)
Now we are going to be running these lists through some tools, so don't skimp on the list. I started this one buy grabing a few web pages:
You can do this forever find topics, we have grabbed only the first two for our example. Open Excel or something similar and save your list, one topic per line.

Our list so far - List-of-Topics.csv

Return - How to find it out? (15 mins)
Now you don't want to rely on only one source of income but Google advertising has always made me more money than any other source so I tend to look here to find out how much a topic is worth. In case you didn't know, people pay to put their adds up via adwords and people are paid to put others advertisements on their site via adsense. Now we are going to get paid by adsense. But adsense doesn't give you any hints on how much you would get for topics. You can, however, find out how much you would pay to advertise on that topic and that gives you an idea of what topic would earn you more. So sign up to google adwords and get your list from above and run it through AdWords.
this should get you a dollar range for all your potential topics listed in the tool as estimated avg CPC. Add these price ranges next to each topic in excel for the next steps.

Market - How to find it out? (10 mins)
The added benefit of checking the return in AdWords is it also gives you a field called Estimated Clicks/Day which is basically a easy view of how many people search for that topic per day. No how many people search for a topic per day isn't a perfect measure of how much traffic you'll get but it is about as good as you get for comparison purposes.

List with AdWords Data - List-of-Topics-02.csv

Competition - How to find it out? (30 mins)
Now this one tends to be a pain it you do it properly. Basically you want to search for each term in say google and record how many sites your competing against to get to number one. You'll see it in the top right eg "Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 3,090,000 for ...", you need to be better than 3,090,000 other pages to get to number 1. Now in AdWords you can do upto 2000 at once so it's pretty fast. This one takes longer so to start with it's good to do a little culling at this point. Sort the list by the CCP and Clicks/Day and remove any without any data and if you want to those with lowest values too. Removing the ones without values dropped the list from about 3500 to about 1500. Now the from this and for some speed I also dropped off anything with a CCP of less than a dollar and less than 2000 searches per day. That left me with 91 to look up how competitive they were.


Playing With the Data (10 mins +)
Now that you have the data you need to manipulate it decide on the best site topics. Basically you want to decide what is more important, the return, the market or the competition. I like to rank each one from the lowest at 0 and the highest at 1 (middle at 0.5) etc and add them up so they rank equally. This is the top 20 results from this:
  1. Furniture Stores
  2. Party Supplies
  3. Iron
  4. Paintball
  5. Sunglasses
  6. Bars
  7. Airports
  8. Sporting Goods
  9. Fishing
  10. Rock
  11. Manufacturers
  12. Organizations
  13. forms
  14. Police
  15. Posters
  16. Sudoku
  17. Collectibles
  18. Ultimate
  19. Pizza
  20. Automobiles
The full list is here - List-of-Topics-3.csv

Picking one? (1 min +)
Now most of these are ok to use. I would browse down the list from the top until you see one you want to write about. I like a few on the list looking down but I'll leave some for you guys and I'm going to pick lighting, about half way down the list at position 48. So create your own list or nick a few off mine. This is what your website is going to be about.

The next step will come along very shortly.

posted by john at 11:49 PM 0 Comments

  90 Days and 9 steps to a Profitable Website.

We have had this little formula, well... a method, that has worked really well to develop a profitable website in around 90 days and since developing rather than owning profitable websites are not our core business we thought we'd share our method with you.

We were discussing how best to do this and we though the best way to write about this was for us to do it right here in our blog, spacing it out over the 90 days and that way if you, our readers, are adventurous you can follow along and ask questions and have your own site done in that time, and if your not adventurous you can see how it goes before you use it.

Profitable, thats a big term
Now not to mislead you, this isn't a get rich or even a get rich quick scheme, it's about how to get more money out than you put in. So a lot of our little tips are about cheap sources of the items out can't do without and doing the work yourself rather than hire others. If your doing this to make money, any cent you spend is a cent you have to earn to be profitable. Now as you get a few of these you might be able to splash out and spend money to get a higher return, but we are strong believers in getting a profit first and then using those profits to get more.

Your first web site?
Along these lines, if this is your first web site, do not spend a single cent more than hosting and registering a domain. If your tempted to buy traffic, web development, web templates, content, SEO services etc, then web sites are not for you, I guarantee you that you will spend more money on them than you will earn. Once you've got the first one up feel free to spend the profit on then next site or improving the first but this way you are alway profitable and won't regret doing it.

So what are the 9 Steps?
You'll just have to follow along in the next 90 days to see them. We'll have the first few steps up quickly so watch out.

posted by john at 11:22 PM 0 Comments

  CSS Templates

Design of a site can be one of the trickiest things to get right. How easy a site is to read, understand and its technical usability are one of the more critical elements to a sites success with a user. If they can find the info they want quickly and easily they will be a happy customer and are much more likely to return to the site. When we started out this was one of the trickiest bits and we would spend a long time doing mock ups of different designs. These designs started in HTML and as technology grew and people wanted a design language that they can reuse and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) emerged. Now we still do a lot of mock ups and design, but now it goes into CSS files and we can reuse it easily.

Why do you care, if we can reuse our designs easily, so can other people, and that means people start trading in designs and even giving away free ones. So you can easily pick up free designs from round the web and use them saving you a lot of time. Here's a few which offer free designs:
They normally come with one page of HTML so you can see how to use them but in case they don't - You normally get a file with a .css suffix. Save that file in the same directory as your html files and in your head section add
<link href="/filename.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
and you should be fine to use the styles within it.




Enjoy.

posted by john at 10:10 PM 1 Comments

  Expired Domains

For the average Joe/Janet it takes a good six months to build up the stability and respect of a site. It doesn't matter how much content you have and what it's quality is like, when a search engine finds a brand new site it takes a while for it to creep up the search results. It costs a little more but you can get a head start by purchasing a domain that is already in use, already in the search engines and in some case already has inbound links to it. There are lots of places that offer these services,

If you know what domain name you want try these:
Snapnames.com,
Enom.com, and
Pool.com

If you want to search through for domain names then this is by far the best of them:
Domain Name AfterMarket

Once you have the domain there are a few tips and tricks to get it going faster:
  1. Search for the pages that are already indexed (in google "site:www.name.com") and start of with pages of the same name.
  2. Have a look at the wayback machine to see what the content of their site was. Start off with similar content and over a month or so move it to focus on what content you want.
  3. Have a look at any inbound links (in google "link:www.name.com") and make sure you have pages with those names.

posted by john at 9:57 PM 1 Comments

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