I entered the world of website ownership in July of 2004. I did
a Google search for “websites for sale” and found that e-Bay was
a big seller. I had learned some web programming as the acting
webmaster for a non-profit organization. My training consisted
of reading, Learning Web Design: A Beginners Guide to HTML,
Graphics and Beyond by Jennifer Neiderst.
Many websites are for sale on e-Bay. After watching the ads for
a couple of weeks I decided to buy three sites: a diet site
(www.atkinsdiethelper.com), a travel site (www.epictravels.com),
and a web tools reseller site (www.webmastersprofitpak.net). My
choice was based on the domain names, the product being sold,
and the sense they were good products to sell. I had read an
article that said search engines were more likely to index and
rank a website where the product or topic was part of the domain
name. My total investment was less than $300. The diet site was
a drop-shipping business and required the most time. The travel
site was an affiliate so no web programming was needed, only
advertising. The web tools site required some web programing. I
decided that a few additional web tools to sell would be good,
so back to e-Bay I went to purchase more software to sell.
Next came submitting the sites to search engines. I found
www.addme.com where you can submit sites for free---this
definitely fit my budget. I also hand-submitted the sites to
Dmoz, Yahoo (free), AltaVista and any other directories I could
find. I found www.directoryarchives.com, a directory of
directories and submitted the sites to as many of the
directories as possible. I also began to do searches based on
the keywords of my websites and did add the url, or submit site,
or exchange links to those who offered it. I figured that people
searching for my product were likely to find the same sites I
found.
Within about 3 months, my sites were listed on Google, Ask
Jeeves, Excite and several others when the exact website name
was entered--- a big step forward. I still had made only a few
sales and noone had found my sites by using the search engines.
I decided to focus my attention on only one site,
www.webmastersprofitpak.net, because it was the only site that
had any sales and the profit margin was highest on that site.
I began to experiment with advertising. I opened Overture,
Google Adwords , Mamma, and Kanoodle accounts. I signed up for
Adsense. I bought ezine ads, and visitors from Traffic Taxi, did
a popunder ad and newsletter ad with bravenet.com. I signed up
with companies that pay people to visit your site, I tried an
adblast---all with little or no results. I found
site-reference.com and bought ads for the software site in the
newsletter. Finally, I began to make some sales..
But to stay in business long-term and to reduce advertising
costs, I needed to be able to make sales based on search engine
results. I bought some site submission software which I now sell
and began to submit my sites page by page. I also signed up with
Microsoft bcentral.com and began to optimize my website pages.
Now, after six months, one of my sites has a great Google page
rank. www.webmastersprofitpak.net ranks 3. Website traffic is
about a 2,000 hits/week. I have high hopes for 2005! I have
learned a lot in the past six months especially about search
engine submission, optimization, directories, and links. See
www.webmastersprofitpak..net for Reseller Tips.
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