Scope of Work
First of all, in order to run an e-commerce site, you've got to have, well, a site... with e-commerce built in. Now, that may sound really obvious, but it it's not a simple problem to solve for minisites. While there are minisite solutions from using SmartNames.com's "e-commerce" templates, to using DevHub to quickly build up affiliate and PPC links to products in your niche, these are not really e-commerce solutions. Building an Amazon A-store is about as close as one can get to a free store front, but even Amazon A-stores have limitations.
But there are tons of e-commerce solutions out there, they just are not practical for minisites. Often they cost $30 or more a month to operate. Yahoo's Store, Shopify, etc. all have monthly costs associated with them, and when you consider running even a handful of stores, this cost structure just doesn't scale.
There are open source alternatives such as the shopping cart built in to Drupal. While I really like Drupal (or WordPress, or other CMS), there is a large overhead associated with running a full CMS site, and when dealing with minisites, there's usually little that is gained from that complexity. Also, in regards to scaling up the solution, there are caveats and issues with operating multiple sites that can cause quite a bit administraton for upgrades, security issues, etc.
In short, I think the only solution I'm going to be happy with is one of my own making. My work load has now significantly increased, but by freeing myself to design the system for exactly my own purposes, I'll have a much more narrowly focused, but easier to maintain system. I've sacrificed startup speed in order to minimize maintenance costs and I'll hopefully realize future productivity gains when I reuse the system for future minisites. In the end I think it's the right choice. I'm calling my handy little content management system MiniSiteMS.
Selling Widgets vs Selling Information
But what about the content of the site? While the MiniSiteMS system will have product pages and affiliate links, my revenue model for most of my sites is not going to rely solely on selling hardware. Part of the reason for that is hardware has such slim margins. For example I found a wholesaler who would Blind Dropship Wireless Routers, but while I could mark up the price as much as needed, I was really only getting about 3-5% off the cost. By the time you take out my expenses of operating the site, handling customer service and not to mention credit card transaction fees, there's no profit motive there. While my sales (and the percentage made for each sale) through a channel like Ebay or Amazon may not be nearly as high, they scale well for minisite development. And while owning an exact match domain helps with SEO work, driving traffic to the site through Adwords or similar marketing efforts would eat up any money I would make through my affiliate sales. So... what to do??
Sell information, that's what. While article marketing and keyword optimized content, link backs and various SEO techniques can drive relatively cheap traffic to the site, it's really a rat's race that you'll never win. What I'm looking for is a product that I can create once and sell a thousand times. While AdSense clicks make a few pennies, I want to have a product that I can promote for a few pennies via AdWords, and when it sells, I walk away with 90+ percent of the sale price in profit. I want to have a product that others can sell via affiliate links. And so if you haven't guessed yet, one of the main products that will be at WirelessRouters.us will be information products. I already have ideas for at least 3 ebooks and the topic is broad enough to scale to even more.
In terms of scaling up information products across dozens or even hundreds of minisites, there are hundreds and thousands of information products already ready already via affiliate offers at places like ClickBank. Alternatively, you can outsource the creation of the ebook by hiring a ghost writer using sources like Elance.
With a goal of $1250 in profit in 3 months (now about 10 weeks for me), and with that schedule compressed even further with the upfront development time of building my own MiniSiteMS, I'll likely have to resort to paid advertising for the site, but that'll be a subject of another post!
Sorry plan A didn't work out for you. I have a similar domain and was wondering what happened with your sale. Did you get any offers?
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that you've come up with to make use of the site. Do you have examples of other similar quality domains that are generating revenue?
Thanks for sharing your plan to develop with us!
Rob L.
Nameswing.com
No, this is my first trip into information marketing really. I have a few minisites using various platforms but they are revenue shares or strictly PPC and not generating as much as I'd like to see. I have several names I'd like to develop in a similar manner to the plan for WirelessRouters including names like YeastInfection.info (there actually are information products in this category!). I'm also working with my father on his site which will be promoting information products related to marriage advice. That site is still in it's infancy but you can check it out at MarriageHelp.com
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