Web Development

One fairly simple development strategy that I am beginning to use involves building a website template and using that for all minisites. Instead of building a brand new web template for every site, save some time and money and use a very similar template. It doesn’t have to be fancy or flashy, but as long as there is room for content that can be viewed on a variety of browsers and screen sizes, room for Google Adsense banners, and room for other advertising banners from direct-to-advertiser sales (or affiliate relationships), you should be okay.
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend this for sites with a considerable amount of content or for high value domain names, as you probably want those to be more customized, but for your mini-sites that will have 5-10 pages each, I think one template should be sufficient. For those debating whether to use HTML, WordPress, or another type of tool, I am not the best person to make a recommendation. I think WordPress is easy, and I use Dreamweaver for HTML, which I learned on my own. Both are fairly straightforward and self explanatory – especially with a bit of background in HTML coding.
When it comes to the technical aspect of web development, my skill level started off at somewhere near a 1 on a scale of 10.   I am now probably around a 2.5, but I am still able to add pages to my WordPress and HTML sites easily. I’ve been told that I should use php to create my header, navigation and footer – which I probably should, but I’ve been too busy to learn. In the long run, I probably would save a ton of time by committing to a few hours now, but it’s hard to do that with so many things going on at the moment.
From experience, I can tell you that building a mini-site using strong SEO techniques will help increase traffic to a domain name/website. The more traffic that visits the site, usually the more revenue the site earns. I think if you put some time into development – but keep the time/financial commitment in line with your expectations for the site, you probably can’t go wrong. As I’ve always said, feel free to drop me a note with questions, and if I can’t answer them, I will try to put you in touch with someone who is more knowledgeable.

On the mini sites I’ve either created, am currently creating, or plan to create, Adsense is the most visible revenue generating tactic. People find my “mini” websites through various means (mostly search engines), and they click on the Google advertisements to find more information, generating revenue for me. While this is great, it will certainly take quite some time to make a decent amount of money this way.
As most developers would agree, the real revenue generation from a developed website comes from direct to advertiser ad sales. Selling advertising space takes a bit more time than just putting up your Adsense code, but that’s where the money is. When building a website, you might consider tailoring parts of it to meet the needs of potential advertisers and give more opportunity for advertising.
A quick example would be with TropicalBirds.com. I created a page to advertise bird breeders from around the country. Since the site was just launched and traffic is minimal, I decided to offer free listings by state in exchange for a reciprocal link to TropicalBirds.com on their sites. This should help boost the ranking of my site and also provide a service to visitors looking for bird breeders. I sent the following email that was individually to bird breeders I found online:

“I recently launched TropicalBirds.com, a website with information about many species of tropical birds, including parrots, macaws, conures, cuckoos, cockatiels, and many other types of birds – both domesticated and wild. In addition to discussing the proper care of pet birds featured on the site, I am also going to build a small directory of breeders. I would like to include you on the site in exchange for a link to TropicalBirds.com on your site.
If you would like a free listing and will link back to TropicalBirds.com, please send me the following information:
1) Business Name
2) Business Location (city, state)
3) Website Address
4) Types of Tropical Birds Bred
5) One sentence about your company
6) Location of link to TropicalBirds.com on your site
If you are interested, please send me the requested information as soon as you have a chance. We are still building TropicalBirds.com, and not all of our links are working yet. We anticipate a full launch by the end of this month. This is the main directory page: http://www.tropicalbirds.com/tropical-bird-breeders.html”

In addition to receiving several positive responses, I also received a request for a featured listing, which the breeder will pay $xx annually for each category. She breeds several types of birds, and she would like a breeder list by breed in addition to a list by state. I didn’t even have to solicit upgrades, yet I can make $xxx/year from this one person if I create a breed by breed listing. The cost of building this is very minimal, as it will probably take just an hour of my time to do. Once done, I can also seek out other advertisers who may wish for the same type of listing, potentially netting me $x,xxx/year, making break-even less than a few years away including acquisition and development expenses.
Point of this is to let you know that you shouldn’t have to be reliant on Adsense or affiliate advertising to make money. There are plenty of old-school businesses out there who would just as soon have a relationship with a small business than one with a big search company. If you give someone a reason to pay to upgrade, chances are good that someone will take it.

I wanted to write a more in-depth post on the development of my mini-site, TropicalBirds.com due to the amount of comments that were left and emails that were sent to me. First, thank you to everyone who sent their compliments to me. Domain investing and development can be isolating things, and I appreciate the support from my friends and colleagues.
Development can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. If you have a vision for a website but lack the development expertise, this post is probably for you. I came into the domain industry with absolutely no development skills or even development knowledge. I was barely able to put my development thoughts in an email, and 99% of the vocabularly I used was in layman’s terms. However, heeding the advice of a couple of friends, I taught myself how to use Dreamweaver.
For those of you who don’t know, Dreamweaver is an Adobe program used to build webpages. I probably only use about 1% of its capabilities, but that was really all I needed. Much of what I’ve done is cutting and pasting within the parameters created by my developer. I learned a bit of code (from my Ebay and blogging days), and using code, I was able to make simple changes.   I think there are books about code, but I am talking very rudimentary code.   Well… maybe I am getting ahead of myself.   Let’s start from square 1.
My first step in the process was buying TropicalBirds.com for several thousand dollars.   I saw the name and thought it would be a great foundation for an informational website about tropical birds. With hundreds of species of tropical birds, I knew I could jampack it with information that will get spidered (spread out) throughout Google. Since the name only receives a couple of visitors per day, I knew I would have to develop it to increase traffic and generate revenue. Spending several thousand dollars on a domain name is always a risk, but it was a calculated risk, and I believe I got a fair price.
As I was buying the name, I was thinking about a theme for the site – not difficult when it’s a category generic domain name. I thought about tropical colors, and I decided that orange, green, and red would be perfect.   I contacted LogoJeez.com, and verbalized my vision for the logo. A few days later, they presented a few logos from which to choose, and I have to admit, I barely changed anything. I’ve worked with them in the past, and it usually takes a few rounds to perfect, but this one was almost spot on the first time.
With my logo in hand, I was in contact with my friend Kevin who created the layout for me.   I told him what I wanted to accomplish with the site, I told him that I wanted an easy navigation scheme, and I gave him my logo. Within a couple of days, he provided the layout to me – it was almost perfect with a few minor personal changes. He sent me the base page and the stylesheet, which is used to dictate how the website will look – it’s basically where the architecture plans for the website are kept, and all the pages of the site read the stylesheet to know how to look.
The tricky part with development is building the pages. With a bit of coding knowledge (VERY basic), I am able to replicate pages to build new ones. I basically copy and paste text from Microsoft Word into Dreamweaver, and save it as a different page name. Kevin created the layout for me, complete with pictures, so I basically change the name of the image, copy the image into the image folder, copy and paste the text, and add other pictures using copy/paste. Since the meta placeholders are where they should be (keywords, page title, page description), I just change those out, too.   I do a “save as” and it’s easy.
When it comes to the technical aspect of things, I am a rookie. I wouldn’t say learning Dreamweaver is easy, but if you can learn a little bit about code (what is bold, what is italic, how to create bulletpoints…etc), you can easily make new pages for a website. I wouldn’t have been able to create the foundation and stylesheet from scratch, but with Kevin’s help, I got a great start. He was also willing to create a couple of the more difficult forms for me and has always been willing to give advice. Dreamweaver isn’t easy, and I know I am not using all of the features, but the best way to learn is by playing around with it.   Lot’s of doing and then undoing when I did something wrong!
I am not a great writer, and with Burbank.com being developed by yours truly at the same time, I don’t have much time to research dozens of tropical birds. I hired a copywriter based on a recommendation from someone else. Not only does she do good work, but she has had some great ideas for expanding the site. I get between 4-6 articles per day from her, and I am formatting and uploading the pages as they come. Once my copywriter has finished working on this project, I will recommend her personally, but I don’t want her inundated with requests before she finishes. I would happily use her skills again in the future.
For pictures on the site, I used copyright-free images from Wikipedia. These images are free to use as long as they are cited. All citations are on a single page of the site, which is linked from each page with an image. Additionally, I embedded some YouTube videos throughout the site, which was very simple and only involved resizing.
To generate revenue on the site, I have 3 Adsense advertisements on each page. While they are somewhat strategically placed, my plan is to test the placement at a point down the road to see how that impacts revenue. Additionally, I have Amazon affiliate links on some parts of the site. If people are looking for a bird cage for their macaw, I am happy to refer them to a place that can give them what they want. Once the site is finished, I will look for another affiliate who can offer   more related bird products, but for now Amazon will suffice.
Developing TropicalBirds.com isn’t/wasn’t easy, but I know my personal limitations, and where I didn’t have expertise, I hired someone who is an expert. Yes, development does take quite a bit of time, but I think it will pay off.   Instead of listing TropicalBirds.com as a domain name for $10,000, I will hopefully have a revenue producing website that isn’t for sale. All in all, the site cost under $1,000 to build and it probably took a solid 30 hours on my part for research, revisions, page building…etc.
I could have done the same type of website with CoolTropicalBirds.com or TropicallyBirds.com and saved several thousand dollars on a less expensive domain name. While that might have worked in the long run, if the site failed, I would have spent several hundred dollars on a website with a poor domain name. At least if TropicalBirds.com would fail, I would have a strong domain name to try and recoup my investment.
As I’ve said in the past, I really think development is where domain investors should begin to focus. Although I am still going to be relying on Google for revenue, I am able to increase the traffic to the site, something I couldn’t have done if I parked it. Also, I can sell links on the site to other bird websites, and eventually I can sell advertising, which will make the site non-reliant on Google for revenue. There are many more options with a developed website than a parked domain name.
This project has reaffirmed my belief that it is important to own a strong domain name.

One of the things I’ve learned about search engine optimization is that search engines such as Yahoo and Google really like unique content. The more unique content you write, the more the search engines will reward you with better placement in their rankings, obviously driving more traffic to your site. Sometimes when unique content is written, others steal it, either trying to pass it off as their own or because they are lazy and want to put up information but don’t feel like writing their own content.
Lately, I’ve noticed an increase in the later. There are people stealing (or borrowing) from various domain blogs and posting either full posts or posting partial posts without adding their own commentary and without seeking permission. While I don’t mind if someone quotes me for the sake of writing an informative blog post, I do mind when people just take my content without even asking.
When I notice this, I do my best to contact the domain owner via Whois lookup to let them know I have an issue. I don’t want them to gain rankings in Google at my blog’s peril. More often than not, the offending person apologizes and takes down my content. However, there are times when the offender has Whois privacy on their domain name and doesn’t have their contact information readily available. This is annoying, and through a hosting company, I found out a way to stop it.
If a website steals content and you either can’t get in touch with the owner or the owner refuses to take down the material, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint with the host, and the host legally has to take action within 24 hours of receiving the complaint. The one caveat is that you need to file an official complaint. It’s not difficult though, and you don’t need an attorney to do it for you, as there are several DMCA complaint templates available online at no cost. Simply find out the web host and email them your complaint.   The issue should be resolved fairly quickly.