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 freethis 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 adblastall 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.
About the Author
Geraldine Jensen is the owner of several ecommerce websites. She is the publisher and editor of http;//www.familiesonlinemagazine.com,
which was chosen as Hotsite by USA Today in October 2004 due to it diverse opinions and good content. She was Webmaster for a nonprofit organization for 10 years. Her newest project is Today's Family Forum.