So, you want your own website, and make some money from it?

Sit back and enjoy reading about my recent experience of creating a new website, with the intention of making some money from it.

First the logic behind ‘the plan’ :

Those of you that know me, know I am no stranger to creating websites, some of which are successful, others are dismal failures – but hey, you gotta try the idea out to see if its a flyer or not. Anyway, because much of what I do is centered around eBay, I have often been asked “why not create an auction website” and my reply has generally been “nope,  enough of them out there as it is” besides the fact that most eBay sellers want everything for free or almost free, how could I make money from it?

But, the concept of ecommerce where you make money from adverts, which is basically what an auction website is, is very often on the back of my mind, so I decided to do something about it, at least test the water – nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So, instead of looking at creating an eBay type auction  website, I looked at Gumtree (owned by eBay) which is a very popular classified ads website, it costs nothing to list an item, and costs nothing to sell an item (unless you want to pay for a promoted advert) , so free sounds good, just what eBay sellers and almost everybody else is looking for – right?

Then my ‘financial thoughts’ kicked in – thousands of free ads listed, and some of those will want a top slot (promoted advert) then there are services who will want promoted ads etc etc, and if I charge a nominal fee, it will soon mount up, £3/month for a promoted ad is very cheap, 100 such ads will give me £300/month, each and every month, 1000 such ads will give me £3000/month, each and every month, this excited me, so I started to put my logic into action.

 

Next, the action behind the logic.

Firstly, I needed a domain name, have you ever tried to think of then register a domain name, if yes you will know the difficulties – most of the good ones are taken. Anyway LocalClassifiedAds (.co.uk) was not registered so I grabbed it, as it looked like a good name to describe what the website will do.

Secondly, website design and functionality. All of my other websites are custom built, this time I went for  a customizable off the shelf script, and found a script that performed almost the same as Gumtree, that’ll do for me I thought!

So I bought the script, asked the script writers to modify it for me, which they did, infact some of the mods I requested they liked so much, they are becoming default in the next roll out of their script. I  installed it, customized it even further, and then made it live :

http://localclassifiedads.co.uk

Thats it you would think, my logic has been turned into a plan, and that plan actioned, now is the time to sit back and wait for those fees to start rolling in, but Ohhhhhh Noooooooooooo, it doesn’t end there, far from it!

You are most probably familiar with the expression ‘location, location, location’ in respect to property, well for websites its ‘traffic, traffic, traffic’ – you need traffic, you can have the best, smartest most innovative website on the whole of the internet, but what use is it  if nobody visits it?

That’s where the problems start, good traffic costs money. OK yes you can SEO your site to death, post about it in forums etc, include links to it in emails or anywhere else you can – but people have to follow those links, then do something, something like list a free advert in my case, its not as though I am asking people to spend money on a purchase or something!

I want traffic, and I want it NOW, I want people to use the site, I want people to list free classified adverts for items for sale, items wanted, promote their services etc, I have got to go out there and let people know the website exists, so apart from the possible  link placements I mentioned earlier, I thought of Adwords – where you pay Google for a sponsored link, and as it happens, Google sent me a £50 voucher to use for Adwords, I set up my Adwords account  and to date have spent £16.27 of my initial £50, which has generated 7,497 ad impressions, with only 50 clicks to the website – and NO free ads placed as yet!

 Still, its early days, very early days yet as the website has only been live for 1 week (call me impatient OK) but I will persevere with it and let you know how (if) it progresses.

In case you forget, here is the link to it again :