First website
Second post already, nice.
After reading so many articles, PDFs & forums, I decided I must start doing something.
Last week I thought to start with EPN (eBay Partner Network). I purchased PHPBay Pro got all excited, and then applied to EPN. It took them about 2 days to reject me and the nice part, they don’t even give a reason. That’s how they work, no reason. I was really bummed, but nothing to do there.
I then started to read another PDF who gave great detail plans on how to build a website for a niche with many competitors (a lot of competitors = a lot of buyers). Since I already have a user in ClickBank (with no earning so far), I decided to follow this plan.
I suck at copywriting, and I’m pretty lazy to do research (since I’m an expert programmer, I’m used to making scripts to automate everything), so I decided to cut some corners and just copy other websites from this niches that are clearly done according to this PDF.
I found one site, which I’m 99% sure belong to the writer of the PDF, so I decided to make it my number one choice to copy.
I paid a writer to rewrite few of this website articles, bought a domain with the keywords, got a template (took me hours, thats one of major weakness) and started to work on it. Since I’m a programmer, I decided not to go on some ready made platform (like wordpress), but to build my own.
I already had a very very basic framework I wrote a while ago, so I sat down to implement the template and insert all the articles I received from the writer.
It took me about 8 hours to finish it, all in one sitting.. found myself going to sleep at 06am after fighting for 30 minutes with the templates, which apparently, looked fine in Firefox but not on Internet Explorer (did I mention I hate IE??)
After putting the site up, I had to start promoting it a little so search engines will see it. I started by using some automatic search engine submission online tool I found, but today I decided I have to make some extra links from outside sources, so it’s time to find some services.
DigitalPoint is the forum I look for such services. Google sandbox is a scary thing, and I knew I can’t go with the “submit to 5000 directories” on the first week the domain is up, so I chose 2 simpler services:
1. links from article directories (including writing the article) for $10
2. yahoo answers links for $5, I think this might be more effective to get actual traffic and not for links juice.
I think thats enough for the first week, now I wait for google to crawl me. Already added my site sitemap to Google Webmaster, hopefully it will speed the crawling.
My expenses so far:
$20 – Domain for 2 years
$57 – Articles rewrite
$5 – Yahoo answers
$10 – Links from article directories
Total: $92
Spending about $100 for the first site sounds reasonable, I don’t pay for hosting, because I have Dreamhost account that I can host unlimited websites.
Now I wait. Let Google do it’s magic and hopefully will start to see traffic to the site in the next few days and maybe even make a sale 
I’m really proud that I finally made something, I just hope it will show some result.
When I researched the Niche, I found many websites from 2006, 2007 that looks like they weren’t touched since then. It’s amazing, they still get traffic, the affiliate links still work, but no one touches them. I wish I knew if they still make money or not, if they don’t why keep them online? and if they do, why not update them and increase traffic & profits?
That is some long 2nd post, but actually this is the reason why I opened this blog, I think it’s a good way to keep track on all my work.
Can’t wait to post the “First sale” post