I decided I am either going to sell TrickOrTreating.com in the next few days or I am going to develop it. First, here’s a brief sales pitch. The keyword “trick or treating” appears to be highly searched, according to Google’s Keyword Tool. As one can imagine, most of the searches are done from September through the end of October, as people are looking for trick or treating costumes and seeing when their city permits trick or treating. The BIN price is just $7,250 for this great top Halloween domain name.
If it doesn’t sell at this price, I am going to develop it. I figure I might as well layout my ideas for a site here, and the buyer can use this as a reference, or I can email this to my developer and tell him to follow the plan laid out here. Either I am generating some revenue to offset tax costs, or I am saving myself an email to my developer!
Now for the development pitch. I think most of the searches are for people looking for information about trick or treating in their community. Most of this information can usually be found on the city website, and there generally isn’t much to discuss aside from the permissible times. Sometimes, like in the case of Burbank Trick or Treating, there is a special event to coincide with trick or treating, which is great because it usually means more people are searching for this info.
For the template, I want a very cute Halloween themed logo and header. On the side or top menu of the template, I want spaces for 2-4 banners of various horizontal sizes (maybe of cute shapes), each connected to affiliates that sell Halloween costumes and Halloween candy. Below this, I would like a link of resources, some external, but many internally created pages, such as “Trick or Treating Safety,” “Popular Halloween Costumes for 2009,” “Trick or Treating History”…etc.
Now for the meat of the project… On the home page (in the middle), I want text that says, “Trick or Treating Times for:” and below this, 2 drop down menus – one for state and one for city. When a person chooses a state, the city list populates and they can then choose the city and hit the “Go” button. It will take them to a page that has the time for trick or treating for that city, a link to the city website where it mentions trick or treating, and any additional special information.
Most people will find the site through search engines, when they are searching for something like “Lowell Trick or Treating Times.” Because the site will launch 7 months prior to Halloween, it will gain trust in Google and continue to rise in the rankings. Additionally, because the site will look very professional and have good information, I presume there will be links to the site from bloggers and other websites who post trick or treating times.
I won’t add Adsense to the site until July or August because there probably won’t be a lot of traffic, and Google might think it’s “spammy” if a large site is launched with Adsense. I will launch each state/city separately – slowly, so Google doesn’t see a 500 page site go up over night, and because it’s going to take a bit of time to get all the data. If I can figure out a database option, I will use it to make the data load easier.
The site will be built on WordPress, and the actual site skin and logo should be fairly inexpensive, depending on the style customization. The difficult part will be finding all of the trick or treating times, but I did some checking and the information is readily available. If the project is started ASAP and built over the next few months, I think it will lead to big rewards every Halloween.
