content sells

23 Jul 2008

Tags: content, logo, new site, portfolio, sells
Posted in Work | 4 Comments

I’ve noticed most of the sites that sell on sitepoint, are sites full with content. I’m talking about huge databases with thousands of entries… the buyers also have a 4 or 5 page copied pasted sales pitch and set a price of about $297 or something spammy like that (yes – even a price can be spammy e.g. $47, $97 generally anything ending in a ’7′). Probably took 30 minutes to create – stock template, no web 2.0 effect, poor domains hyped up as ‘premium’ domains

Anyway, i thought i’d get in to the content buying a bit, so i’ve bought a database with over 3000 entries on ‘dreams’ I’ve *almost* got it working with wordpress, there’s a problem with the tags that i just can’t sort out… i had to manually edit tables to get the categories working, but the tags thing is a nuisance…

So that’s what i’ll spend my day doing. You can see how the site develops at truthdream.com – i’ll be selling that for over $200. By the time i’m finished with it, it will probably have over 3000 indexed pages in google

Bannedtvad.com is also looking VERY slick (not live yet)… hopefully i’ll be able to get that up by this evening too. It too will be running wordpress and will come with a hefty price tag over over $300 i’d imagine.

So i’ve ‘slowed down’ a bit, but that’s because i’m working on larger scale stuff now hoping to sell them for a bit more… selling a site for $100 is great, but really, i’d need to be doing that daily to make a living online.

That’s quite demanding and not quite the cushy life you’d expect from working online But 2 or 3 sites per week selling at $2/300 – that’s much easier to do as you’re not in a rush and you’ve some sort of flexibility.

I’m already seeing the benefits of blogging so openly about my new sites – i’ve had my first request to design a logo for someone my portfolio is here for all to see on this blog so it’s juts another advantage of blogging… i am planning on setting up a ‘portfolio’ page though or perhaps on a subdomain.

At this stage i’ve created dozens of logos and a few unique template designs. I’ve also sold several sites and know a thing or two about SEO so rather than let those facts get burried in this blog, i’ll have to make sure you all know about them

Not so much to get more business, but to help people ‘trust’ me when it comes to buying a site from me or wanting to find out past info on me…

http://www.preblogging.com Becky

i hope you didn’t pay too much for the dream DB, as it seems to be copyrighted work SEE HERE . bY Douglas Hensley in 2006
http://www.smemon.com smemon

interesting becky, i’ll look in to that… i knew the content wasn’t original as it’s on a few different sites… i was told though it was legit however…

unless there’s some sort of automated scraper thing that goes through ebooks – i pity the guy or girl who had to manually copy and paste all of that and organize it properly

edit: looks to be as clear as mud… with other sites claiming it’s work of the ‘Gustavus Hindman’ and open licensed…
http://www.giglovers.com Carl

Sites built on these databases will never fair well in google.

Example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22An+abyss+can+always+be+considered+an+obstacle%22&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLJ

Click ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’ to see the number of sites with that content.

Only a few sites shows up, due to the duplicate content.

There’s always the alternative, scrape and sell a database… £25 a time will probably make you more in the long run too. I wouldn’t do that myself, for ethical reasons!

My move would be to create a number of small sites with unique content… usually “rewritten/combined/improved upon” from content elsewhere. Stick some adsense on them, keep them for 3-6 months (until they get rankings and traffic) and flog them for a higher price.

Obviously in the meantime you’d need to gain some links to gain PR and an increase in rankings….

Not that I’d do that either, because I can’t be bothered – The refresh of Gig Lovers is coming soon but it’s taking a long time because I do every part of it and I don’t have any spare time! :/
http://www.smemon.com smemon

agreed carl, unique content written by yourself is always the way to go but that takes time

i think if you can establish the bones of a site, buyers will see that… by ‘bones’ i mean a good domain, a good design and some sort of content to match the niche/domain.

traffic, members, links etc… will all depend on how / if the site is promoted…

there’s always this debate about scraping RSS feeds – is it copyright infringement? is it unethical? etc… i don’t have a problem with it myself if it’s done tastefully….

the only time i’d have a problem with it is if someone basically cloned my site… if it’s something like scraping feeds from 10 bloggers – thats ok imo as that in itself is adding content to the net and value to the end under as it’s helping organize content…

But i know there’s people that disagree and strongly disagree with that it’s just one of many big grey areas online.