Create and Sell a website for profit in one month

CroneZone

Apr 25, 2008

Internet

We've all thought of it. Turning a little cash into something more with little effort. Well the semi-good news is that it can be done. But it will require a little work on your behalf.

In this article I will explain and help you profit nicely from a mere $10 by creating and selling a website!

Lets get started!

What you need

$10 in paypal

An hour or so a day

One month

Choosing a niche

First thing you need to choose is a niche. What is your site going to be about? Is it going to be a content driven site or will it offer a service? Try and thing of something unique. If you decide you want a video site, think of a specific video genre.

If you go with a content site there's plenty of free cms out there that you can use to set it up: Drupal, wordpress and the list goes on.

If you want to offer a service, there's plenty of free php scripts out there. Try and think of something that the market hasn't been saturated with already.

Choosing a domain

Once you have a niche it's time to choose a domain. Your domain is very important and a big factor on how profitable your site is. A nice short name will help visitors remember your site and keeping it related to your site niche is key. Finding a great name these days can be hard if you are not experienced. If you can't find a domain that you want, grab a thesaurus and look up similar words. Chances are you will find something better.

Tips for a good domain:

No hyphens or special characters

4-8 characters is best but under 12 is good

Keep it to 1-2 words

Dot com is the best extension with dot net being second. If either of these are taken generally try and think of a new name

In the end though it's your choice and if you find a domain that you think is exceptional, register it.

You can purchase your domain at www.namecheap.com. Where you can also search for available domains.

Hosting

Now you will need somewhere to host this site. I recommend hostgator because you can get the first month for only $0.01. www.hostgator.com and choose shared plans. Select order now for the baby plan. Go through the set up and when you get to the page to pay with enter the coupon code "404page". Continue with payment and you will be charged $0.01.

You will be emailed with your site details. Once you have that you can either use cpanel to upload files to your site or you can use an ftp program such as filezilla.

Now that you have your dns server address you will need to go back to namecheap and transfer the domain to your new name servers.

You now have pretty much everything set up. Upload your cms or script that you chose and set up the site following the instructions provided with the script.

Monetizing your site!

Here's where it starts to get good. You will be needing to make some money from the site to make a profit right? How can you do that without selling ad places? Simple, you will use an ad publisher called Google Adsense. You will have to be accepted by Google but this is pretty easy. Once you have been accepted add some of the adsense code to your site in positions that look good.

Optimizing your ad code is the most crucial part of adsense. Make it blend to your page by having the border and the background the exact same color as your sites.

You can sign up for adsense at Adsense.com

Advertising your site and working on it

If you have opted for a service site then you shouldn't have to do much work on your site. If you have used a content site then you will need to keep it updated each day. Half an hour or so a day will suffice.

Advertising your site is now the biggest thing you need to do. This can be done in many various ways for free. I recommend never paying for advertising as this will eat into your profits and is not needed.

I won't go into advertising too much as it's something that you can usually think of by yourself. However here's some general tips

Link swaps with other webmasters

Social sites like myspace and facebook

Digg your site and add a digg button to your site and hope you make it to the front page

Be creative, I'm sure something will come to mind.

Selling your site

Here's the part you have been looking forward too. Selling your site and making a profit. Of course this is optional, if you are enjoying the site and want to keep it then by all means keep it.

You can sell your site at a forum called Digital Point. You will need a minimum of 25 posts before you can list your site for sale so I recommend signing up here at the start of the month and making quality post during the month. You can ask for appraisals of your site there and also ask for advise with adsense.

Listing your site for sale is done in the Buy, Sell and Trade section. Here you will need to list as much info as possible. This will include adsense revenue, traffic stats, and anything else you can think of. There's a good sticky thread there that will help you list. Include the price you want for the site. This is called a BIN (buy it now) This is can be up too you what you want. Be reasonable though and just remember that it cost you $10 to set up and a bit of your time.

Well that's about all I can say.

Good luck.

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