Blossom

The domain name I’ve chosen is websamplesales.net, it was FTR and the idea came about based on a Flippa listing I saw a few months ago.

My aim is slightly different to pretty much everyone else in this contest I think. I want to try and prove that you don’t need to spend money to make a profit, and you don’t need an exact match domain name either. I’ve gone for a logical name (although it could definitely be better) but there you go.

I chose a .net extension because the US market for sample sales is much larger than the UK market and the .com wasn’t available. I try to extend the market as much as possible when creating an Adsense site, because it just makes sense to appeal to as many people I can. I don’t expect to have problems ranking it in the UK as the terms aren’t very competitive here (balanced by the fact that the searches are so much lower).

1st – 3rd September

I registered the domain name, which is the only money I intend to spend other than hosting costs. I installed WordPress, created an admin email account, and found a free theme to use. There aren’t many girly WordPress themes around, but I managed to find one I like, and luckily it’s pretty much discontinued now so I don’t think it will be too obvious as a premade theme.
A lot of people will probably consider the theme overkill for an Adsense site, but I’m thinking about the bigger picture of attracting guest posters, advertisers, return traffic and possibly even giveaways and contests with brands at some point, or selling. It all depends.

I did have a setback in that the only version of the theme I could find was screwed up to the point of being completely unusable. In the end I fused it with the default Twenty Eleven theme, it’s still a little messy code-wise, but it seems fine from a browsing perspective. Unfortunately it did cost me 3 or 4 extra hours to sort the code out. I then spent a few hours modifying the theme, including editing the header image and making it more SEO friendly. I added Adsense, Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, a variety of plugins and then wrote the key pages. After that I wrote and scheduled a few posts and did some research into what competitors are writing about.

It’s been indexed by Google as of last night. I’ve submitted the site manually to Bing because I know they’ll take forever to pick it up otherwise. I’m not doing any link building at all yet, it just has one link from my PR1 photography site to get it ranked a bit quicker without any damage.

My next step will be to schedule posts on a daily basis for the next couple of weeks, after which I’ll be slowly down gradually to about one a fortnight by the end of the year. I’ll also be doing some competitor analysis and building backlinks once the site is more established, and of course monitoring rankings and ad performance. I don’t expect to get a whole lot of money from it, it’s just another practice site to see what happens really.

Summary (or TL;DR)

Website is up with Adsense and indexed.
Work so far has probably taken around 16hrs.
Aim is to make money without spending any at all.
Site is aimed primarily at US market.

Thoughts?

accelerator

Good luck with it ... I haven't heard the term sample sales being used in the UK so as you say the site is likely to have a heavy US bias.

I'd like to see some pictures being added to the posts for greater interest.

Rgds

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