I just read Brand Development Case Study: From Expired Domain To Real Online Brand by Morgan Linton. He is going to take us through a case study step by step to learn his development process; what a great guy. I have been planning to also do a series like this, albeit, mostly in my head. I decided that today would be a good day to do the first post.
I don’t have a bunch of hard set rules that I follow, though, I probable should. I hope that this series will help me and you develop some patterns for developing sites and lead us to models that we can scale into successful brands. To date I only make a few hundred dollars a month on my sites, but I have already begun to identify certain patterns that I am good at and can scale.
I want to back track for a moment and give you a little history of my web experience. You will notice that I focus on scale. I believe this is good, but can also be detriemental as well. My first experience with scalable processes was with magazine production. I worked on a team of nine that produced three 144 page magazines per week. Next, I worked for a printing mail house during the peak of election season. Our throughput was over 400,000 pieces per day printed, sorted and labeled, and delivered to the post office during the height of the season. Then, in 2005, after toying with Ebay for a few years, I set my business on a course for success through leveraging keyword research, closed auctions, and tools for managing auctions. I was on my way to $10,000 in sales per month with about a %50 profit margin when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, my home town. My niche was handbags, which are highly seasonal. When I finally regained my footing, I had lost too much money and my hold on the market.
I work as a software developer, which I have been doing for 12 years. Finding patterns that can be reused is the name of the game. Scalability is one of my main focuses. This is where the detrimental part comes into play when dealing with scaling.
For a long time, I thought that if I could scale a site with loads of content, then it would be successful. I chose to focus on restaurant menus. It is not a bad industry, but there are a lot of players fighting for the audience. I was kind of ignorant to this when I started my menu site. The other problem I had was that content management software was not as easy to use as it is today, or at least they didn’t seem to have the features that I wanted, which meant I would have to program them myself. Since I was already a programmer, and knew how to build large sites, I decided to program it from scratch.
There is nothing unique about restaurant menus themselves; month after month I would put up menus by hand, hoping for a significant jump in traffic. It never seemed to come. I then decided to scrape some sites to scale my site quickly. This brought more traffic to my site, but was short lived when the search engines pulled the plug on me.
Somewhere in the process of all of this is where I learned that just throwing a bunch of content out there, especially if it is not unique, is not going to get me where I want to be. In one of my attempts to monetize my menu site, I contacted hundreds of restaurants that did not have a website with a pitch to put their menu online for $15 per month. I only had one sale. It was this sale that really made me understand the importance of external links to my site. I had read hundreds of times that this was important, but every time I thought about it, I would talk myself out of seeking links because it seemed hard and I didn’t know where to start. I figured I could just keep throwing content at the problem and that would make up for my lack of link building.
I wanted to promote this one menu because the lady was paying me for it. I went to some of the major sites like yelp.com and submitted the link as the restaurants site. Most of them accepted the submission and gave a link back to the menu on my site. This led to instant traffic from the sites and in a short period of time placed the page first in the search engine results.
Well, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I wanted more links on these sites. I started submitting links to these sites for restaurants that did not have a site listed on their profile page. I figured I was doing them a favor by advertising for them and I would get something out of it as well. The big sites got privy to my strategy quick and cut me off even quicker. I had learned two lessons, links count, but you have to play by the rules.
In this series I will take you through finding a niche, researching it, building out a site, monetizing it, and scaling it. I will use an actual, live example. I look forward to sharing with you. Please check back soon for my next post in this series.