sitepoint

another day at the office…

When i woke up yesterday urldwarf.com didn’t exist - the name, the logo, the script, the design… nothing.

Less than 12 hours later i’m receiving a $110 BIN bid for it

It took 180 minutes to complete, cost $16 in promotion and domain expenses, so all in all it means i earned $34.67 for each of those 3 hours i spent working on it

The sale comes off the back of a $100 imagehostme.com sale and a $140 sawurl.com sale both last week.

This thing started out as a ‘challenge‘ but it’s in danger of turning in to a war. Me -v- Me. How much can i make? how quickly can i make it? Can i beat last weeks income? can i set a new monthly record income?

I’m now at a stage where i can quite obviously make money creating websites if i try… that’s very comforting for me, especially at a time where i’m at my most stretched financially (with all my cash tied up in online projects - the vast majority in BeerChief).

Re-investment is key and as you seen last week with my .me buys - i’m ALWAYS looking to the future. So despite all these sales, i don’t really think of the money - i try to get rid of it ASAP before i spend it offline on stupid things. By ‘get rid’ of it of course i mean invest it wisely

It’s taken 2 years and a lot of work and learning, but i can finally say that i can now easily create a site from scratch sell it for a price that’s well worth my while.

Not only that, but i can do it in style - although nothing sensational, my logos and site designs recently have been very web 2.0 and very stylish and it’s really noticeable when my sites go head to head with similar sites up for auction.

I know for a fact these sales of mine are gonna spur some of you readers on a bit and make you say, “well if he can do it…” - but it’s not as easy as that. First of all it DOES take money despite what people will tell you. For example, i had to spend $16 on urldwarf.com before i got anything - no guaranteed i’d EVER get that $16 back - i had to be prepared to lose it.

Although it’s small money, you also have to be prepared to lose your time and morale if it doesn’t sell. So despite the easy picture i might be painting, it’s not all fun and games and you need patience, confidence and skill, plus *some* money

Anyway, bigger and better site to come and i’ll roll another one out today - don’t know what it will yet

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SawUrl up for sale

Another day, another site up for sale.

This time it’s sawurl.com and it’s on sitepoint

I’ve set a BIN of $140 on this one. Mainly due to the fact i’m actually pretty reluctant to sell it. I toyed with the idea of hanging on to it. The domain name, i feel, is excellent. The script is also pretty smooth and AJAXy and the whole site is just so simple and clean…

So if this one doesn’t sell i won’t be too disappointed. If it sells for the BIN, i will of course be delighted as it’ll be more cash in the bank and will beef up my 3 sites a week / minimum wage project.

But domains like this are getting harder and harder to come by. 6 characters dot com, relevant, easy to remember… 10 years down the line i may regret selling these hot domain!

imagehostme up for sale

Fresh from the baker’s oven, imagehostme.com has been put in the shop window.

I’ve decided to sell it ASAP rather than twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to gain traffic or pagerank or something that would make it more valuable. Sell, sell, sell - that’s the way it has to be if i want to earn some cash and invest more in BeerChief.

So imagehostme has gone up for sale on sitepoint - it costs $10 to list a site there, so if it DOESN’T sell, i’m gonna be be -$10

I’ve set a minimum bid of $30, a reserve of slightly more, and a BIN of $100. I’m hoping it’ll fetch $70+. It’s a long shot, but someone might fall in love with the design and hit the BIN at $100

As with everything i sell, it’ll all be reinvested back in to other stuff. I now have 15 more domain names that i need to buy. They’ll cost ~$90, but assuming i sell all 15 sites for an average of $50, it’s a $750 return, or $660 pure profit. That’s very do-able over 2/3 weeks.

If imagehostme.com sells for anywhere near the BIN i’ll probably continue with image host designs for my next 2/3 sites, then move on to other ‘webmaster tool’ related sites, then i’ll chuck in the odd custom wordpress theme or two. Either way, i’ll continue to work hard and churn out some sort of semi-respectable design/content.

Whilst the money is nice, the REAL value is of course in experience… buying/selling, design, content creation, databases, transferring files/folders, learning about scripts and needing to edit bits of php, meeting new people, gaining some extra links etc.. that’s all invaluable experience.