website ventures, part 1

I decided to start blogging about my new "baby" website. I want to document how I'm doing it, and figured since I'm already a regular blogger, this might be a good way to do that - plus it just might help someone else with ideas for their own websites!

My website is still in its infancy, but has certainly progressed past the newborn stage. Here's what I've done so far.

It all started when I got a hold of a tutorial called the Affiliate Masters Program (or the .zip version here). The tutorial takes you through, step by step, how to set up a website to provide tons of valuable information (for FREE), and how to make money through selling other people's products, google adsense, and various other methods of monetizing. The key point, though, is to create tons of value for your visitors!

This was along the lines of what I'd been wanting to do - an online site that once it was set up would practically run itself and make me money while I was sleeping, or vacationing, or whatever the case may be. And the beautiful thing with this is that you can pick a topic that interests you, something you can get excited about and enjoy doing.

So the first thing I did was to brainstorm some topics, ideas that would interest me, things I know something about that I could write about, and so on. I wrote out a whole long list, and then went through that list and picked out 3-5 niche topics to research. You want to narrow it down, drill down if you will, until you have a very precise, specific topic. If it's too broad and general, then it will be hard to do the research and get specific keywords, and it will be hard to rank well for that topic in the search engines. You can always add on more later once your initial niche website is established!

The research is not my favorite part, although some people just love it. The research for a project like this, involves picking some keywords for that topic and checking to see how much demand there is for those keywords (how many people are searching for that keyword) as well as how much supply there already is (how many websites come up when you search for that keyword). Ideally, you want to find keywords for your niche topic that are being searched by a lot of people, but don't have too many suppliers already. You want to be able to rank well in the search engines, so that you can get free targeted traffic!

I narrowed my topic down to one niche topic: romantic couples games. I then went on to do some more thorough research on just that one topic.

As I was researching keywords, I would type my keyword into Google.com and then go and visit at least the first 10 websites that came up, to see if 1) they were relevant to my topic (a competitor), 2) I could glean any ideas from them, 3) to see if they were quality websites (or if I could easily surpass them as far as quality goes) and 4) to see if they might be possible partners (with products I could sell on my own site, a site that I could request to trade links, etc). I learned a fair bit during this research, got some good ideas from sites that I found, and learned things that I wanted to avoid from other sites that I found. I kept track of all of this info and stats in an excel spreadsheet. (More info on the research in a later post - complete with copies of my spreadsheets.)

From my research I was able to determine a handful of good keywords related to my topic to use. I chose ones like the obvious romantic couples games, foreplay games, sexy games for couples, fantasy and roleplay games, and other such similar keywords. From my research, they seemed to have enough demand, and the supply definitely left room for a new and better website on the topic.

From there I went on to choose my domain name - I actually registered several. I was able to get romantic-couples-games.com (my main domain), as well as some other variations of the words. You definitely want to have your main site keyword in your domain name, so I was very pleased to find that one available!

The next step was to start creating the actual content, and designing the website. I started designing the website in DreamWeaver, but eventually moved it to a Joomla site, which is much easier to manage, even for someone who doesn't know html! I started with a very basic design - after all, the focus is on content not on design. Sure, you want it to look nice, but it's even more important that you deliver value to your visitors!

I started with the home page, and wrote up a few paragraphs about romantic couples games and how they can help make things more interesting, exciting and intimate in a relationship. I made sure to use my main keyword, romantic couples games, several times throughout the paragraphs, heading, and the title in the browser as well. My website still has pretty much the same original content on the homepage, so you can see basically how I structured the content, with the keywords, etc.

I moved on from there to create other pages about foreplay, sex positions, sexy food games, roleplay and fantasy, and homemade sex games. These were the original 5 internal pages that I started with. I went on to add the rest, like shower sex games, sexy oral games, talking dirty, and even more recently, sexy christmas ideas, love letters and sexy lingerie.

Since the original creation, I have been regularly adding new content, new products, new freebies, etc. The more value you create, the more awesome free stuff you give away, the more your visitors will want to come back, refer their friends, and buy the products that you recommend!

I also started a Sexy Tips Ezine, that I send out once a week (Mondays) with a sexy game of the week and a sexy tip of the week. I keep it short and sweet, but again, provide value! All of my ezines are also then added to my site after they go out, which also adds more content and value to the website itself.

I started out doing a separate blog as well, and linking it to my site, but I found that to be rather time consuming, and decided I would be better off adding the content I was putting on my blog to my actual site and having it all in one place. I do love blogs though, and it's good to have a "feed" for people to follow, so I found out how to do a feed of my website - my Sexy Tips Blog Feed - which is set up through feedburner.com. This feed simply displays the content of my site in a blog format. Every time I add a new article or page to my site, it updates in my feed.

Since the time I started the website, I have grown my newsletter list to 28 subscribers, I have grown my daily visitors to an average of 40 or so per day, and I have had a total of 3 sales with my affiliate programs, as well as 1 sale directly from a PPC campaign.

There's an overview of the project. In my next few posts I will go into more detail on things like the research, getting newsletter subscribers, the freebies I offer, how I get content, article marketing, and some of the other techniques I have used.