Lately I have been actively looking at websites for sale around the $100USD mark. I have been looking for those diamonds in the rough as cheap investments for websites that just need a little elbow grease and TLC. I have worked on several websites in the past (primarily as a developer) and want to focus solely on promoting websites and my SEO skills by buying cheaper websites that I can work on increasing traffic with little to no budget. I figure $100 is worth not having to spend the time and effort to create a website before I can even start working on promotion because the grunt work is already done.
I came across the sale of ffvii.org domain and website with a $250USD BIN on Digital Point Forums and pondered buying the website but decided not to spend that much and keep to my $100 or less budget. I went back the next day to see that they had lowered the BIN to $75 and BIN’ed it 11 minutes before someone else did! For those of you who don’t know what FFVII is, it’s short for Final Fantasy 7 which is an RPG game that was created for the Playstation. Not to mention one of my favourite games of all time! I felt given the domain name it was a fair price although I would have obviously preferred the .com domain.
I have one goal in mind with these websites I’m potentially throwing $100USD away on: learning. I want to see how others are developing their websites while working on my SEO skills and how to increase traffic to a website with little to no budget.
Today I was in contact with two people from COPEAC in an effort to start sinking my teeth into affiliate marketing. I want to see what/if I can make any money with their offers on the website I plan on flipping. I also sent them a complete list of all my domains asking for their recommendation on what offers I could use to monetize my websites. They will be sending an seperate offer sheet for each of the domains. What I’m supposed to do with that, I don’t even know yet and have emailed her back asking for clarification. I think there is some information missing from the email but will have to await the reply back as to what to do with it.
The other thing I did today was start to throw numbers into a spreadsheet to see what affects the tweaks I have made to the domain I bought to flip. At first I was quite disappointed looking at the numbers which seemed to be declining. Thankfully I realized it was the wrong account in Google Analytics I was looking at. Doh! I’ll comment on those numbers after the weekend when the last few days that I want to report on have past.
What did you do today to make money online?
In an earlier post on Domain Flipping, I mentioned some tweaks I was doing to help increase it’s accessibility and subsequent search engine rankings for a domain I purchased to flip for profit. Here is a summary of what changes I have made:
- CSS-based layout (needs fixing up, few tables to remove)
- XHTML Transitional validated on all pages
- CSS has been validated
- 301 redirects from .htaccess (will replace at server level)
- Template-based (few tweaks such as including page titles)
- Added titles/alt texts where they were missing
- Changed titles to H1 and H2’s
I released these changes on Sunday, May 27th and almost immediately started seeing results of those efforts which makes me feel it was worth the hours it took me to complete. Prior to these changes, I was averaging 0-5 unique visitors per day. Since the changeover, that has increased by 2-3x to 5-15+ uniques per day. Peanuts I know compared to most websites out there but the important part is that the websites traffic is increasing!
Upcoming tweaks to increase accessiblity and search engine rankings:
- keyword/phrase research and implementation
- add robots.txt
- move 301 redirect to server level (from .htaccess)
- add a sitemap
- update meta keywords, description, etc.
- add titles for pages
- keyword links in footer
You might wonder why I didn’t do this all in one swoop. The first push was getting it from the wretchedly written source code to templates and changing the non-descriptive filenames to get them into the search engines sooner then later. Now that the canvas is somewhat clean, I can start to paint!
Considering I have no idea what if any value my blog provides to anyone, until I start seeing comments on my blog, I won’t release more details about the niche of the projects I’m working on. If you enjoy my blog, please considering signing up and commenting on my posts.
