Which Website Should be Worked on First?
After almost 5 hours of work, I have a largely complete spreadsheet organizing all of my domain details, folders and email rules set up in Outlook… and now I have to actually pick one domain and make something happen.
The challenge is, which domain should I complete first? Establishing criteria, goals and desired outcomes is something that needs to be done.
Loosely Defined Criteria for Site Development
- It has to be useful.
- Efficient: user-generated content or content that is fairly static, but can be referred to again and again.
- There are people who would actually visit the site.
Usefulness
For most of the domain names I’ve registered, I can recall the original intent and most of them I find useful, so I am assuming there may be a few other people in the world who would find it useful as well. While not the most scientific approach, it’s a starting point.
Action Step: Assign a usefulness ranking from 1 to 5 – one being the highest, 5 being the lowest.
Efficient User-Generated or Static Content
There is absolutely no way I will be able to provide daily/weekly updates on 52 sites; I don’t have the desire or the time. Having sites where the users generate the site content is the ideal first choice. Years ago I set up thescrapbookstore.com, a scrapbook store locator and I haven’t really touched it or done anything with it since. Scrapbook stores enter their store locations, scrapbooking grannies search for those stores, and it all operates without taking any of my time. While it sorely needs something of a makeover update, it generates about $30 to $40 a month in Adsense revenue. Do that 52 times, and it’s a tidy sum for a few days upfront investment that goes into creating the site.
Content for sites like hollyjollychristmas.org or theavrowarrow.com would be pretty static. While there is always something new on the Christmas front, the reality is the lyrics for Jingle Bells are what they are. Much of the content wouldn’t change, but would be useful to someone year after year. The Avro Arrow is really a niche site of historical information, targetted to Avro enthusiasts; not much new to share there, but it would be nice to have all of the information in one place.
Action Step: Establish a content ranking of (1) User generated; (2) Static; or (3) everything else, like a blog requiring updates.
Will People Visit the Site?
If I build it, will they come? Truthfully, I have no idea. I’m going to leave that in the hands of Google.
Wondering how many people just type in the domain, I wanted to install Google Analytics on each one, but they all need to have a site established for that, which isn’t the case yet.
Instead, I’m turning to Google AdSense for domains. I can park the domain with Google AdSense, and while the information won’t show up in the Google Analytics account, the Adsense setup will tell me how many people just stumbled upon the domain itself. The logic being, the more hits a domain name gets without a site, the more hits it will get with a fully developed site.
Action Step: Set up every undeveloped domain with Google AdSense for Domains.
The only thing left to ponder, is how to assign this a numerical point value or weighting, so I can factor it in with the above two steps. The end result will be a fairly logical order to develop the domains, step by step.