Launching a New WordPress Website
Well – The day has finally come that I am ready to launch the Do it Yourself Reviews website! The site is roughly 80-90% complete, and I am far enough along to get the indexing started with search engines. Throughout the rest of this week, I will continue to get the content positioned and listed the exact way I want it… but that is all on the technical side. Overall, I still have several hours of work in front of me, but getting the indexing started is my main goal.
Many of you will immediately notice I have not installed BANS on the site yet and to this point, its really just an info site. That is actually by design… so don’t go crazy on me yet! :-) There are some features that will not come into play until I have 30+ posts.
The Custom WordPress Theme
The theme I used on the site is 100% inhouse! Its really a pretty basic theme, which is truly what I wanted for this type of website. I coded the theme over the past few weeks and have it completed for WP, BANS, and the several custom pages inside the site. As you can see… this is not a straight up affiliate site, it is a website for the DIY visitor that also has room for affiliate ads! My original intent was to develop a theme that could easily be distributed to all of you, but it takes me 6-8 hours to set this up… and I am afraid the technical side of it may be too overwhelming on most. If anyone is interested in the theme, the only way I will offer it is as an installed package, which as you can imagine, makes the cost go through the roof! (+$400)
At this point, I have only integrated one PopShops page with Books on it, and a few ad banners. I have BANS installed, but it is not linked on the site at this point. My goal is to give this site 30 days to get fully off the ground, then explore the different ways I am going to direct the monetization. I am using the basic version of aWeber to manage the email subscription feed for the site, and was reading over at the Problogger site about finding free ebooks to give away, and located a great creative commons Home Improvement Guide from the Scribd website with distribution rights, to encourage people to signup on the mailing list! Hint: The mailing list is where the gold is at! If you dont use aWeber, sign up now!
Along with the free ebook offer, I have also incorporated my own custom script for the Top 100 DIY Websites list. I did this two main reasons. First, to make the site more sticky for inbound linking and second, to support the “theme” of the site being in the DIY niche.
My Goals for this Site
If you recall, when I talked about setting goals, I mentioned that the primary goals for this site are:
-
Total Quarterly Earnings: $30!
- 5 Unique and Compelling content posts per week!
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1 Unique Top 10 list every week!
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1 unique “How-To” 5 page (+/-) pdf every quarter!
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25 New RSS/Email Subscribers Every Month!
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25 Inbound referral links per month!
The only goal not listed, is that I am also going to list this site for sale IMMEDIATELY! That’s right… I am going to put it for sale at a ridiculous high price, and see if there are any bites! During this time, I am going to continue working toward every other goal on my list, so when the right person does see it, they will find it is not just an affiliate site, but a fully developed website, ready for a new owner to move right in!
How Will I Reach My Goals?
Starting tomorrow, I am going to have a new category on this site named The First 30 Days. I will be posting a detailed chronological journal of everything I am doing on that specific day to reach my goals in the first 30 days of the sites existence. The post will be updated at 8AM eastern time every day, so make sure you are subscibed to the rss feed to get your daily blast, as the emails do not get sent until 6PM.
Throughout the remainder of this week, as I continue posting to the site and working on driving some traffic to it, I am also going to continue developing 2 hidden pages that are not yet published to the public. One is a page that shows all posts in the specfic categories (There are 40, even though only 6 show publicly) and the others are actual shopping pages. (Popshops & BANS)
Is your new site ready to go yet?
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- 3 Full Weeks into my New WordPress Website!
- Days 13 & 14 of my New WordPress Website
- Build a Review Website with WordPress!
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I’m very much looking forward to reading this series. My new launch will be mid November and I’d like to see how you go about this launch and see what I can learn. Thanks for sharing.
GOOD LUCK!
If you have a relavant site to Mark’s Do IT Yourself Reviews link to it. I did. Let’s give him a head start.
Is my new site ready to go? Yes, New domain Sept 1st. Launched Blog Sept 16.
It is getting daily hits by the google, yahoo. MSN, alexa and Ask every two days.
16 daily posts so far and 25 drafts waiting to publish. Popshops and BANS. BANS needs some keyword tuning yet.
AWstats showed 2 visitors Sept 16, now getting about 250 visitors a day.
Looks good Mark! I will be interested in the next 30 days. Keep up the good work.
Best of luck Mark, the site looks great. Excellent job on the theme!
Mark,
We’ll all be interested to follow how you go about doing this.
For instance, are you writing the articles yourself or do you have a trusted outsourcing partner?
How would a guy as busy as you find the time to write 5 articles a week let alone the rest of that stuff. You don’t sleep much as it is.
Jeff
Hi Mark,
I will be following you on this, just curious what will you be offering your email subscribers? Are you going to send out special offers occasionally? Articles on diy? How often do you plan to email them?
It’s a good idea you have!
@ Jeff –
I had one of my sons write the initial 10 posts… $5/post. I got what I paid for! LOL
In all, it takes about 30 minutes to write a unique post, so its not that bad of a thing.
@ Christine –
The emails will be sent whenever I post to the site, which is really… daily. Over time, I will begin to introduce offers to subscribers, which are through aff programs.
For now… content, content, content… the building process for the first 30 days.
Mark
Mark,
Very impressive! Looks like you are off to a fast start. Nice eye catching theme.
Gerry
Good luck with the new site!
Did you design the header yourself? Man I need to learn how to make headers Mark lol….
Desmond
@ Desmond –
Yes… the whole theme was really grown inhouse. I did use some features from other themes I liked, but coded it all here.
The header image itself is only about 100 pixels wide… its just a layer over the background.
Mark
Mark that’s an excellent looking site. I am still stumbling around when it comes to writing code that would produce a site like that so I end up usually buying them.
This is also a great series of posts to follow and I have directed a few friends to it so they can follow along.
I follow a lot of blogs but yours is the only one i have bookmarked. :)
You have been doing a great, errr, excellent job, keep it up, please.
Just curious about the ‘for sale’ aspect of this site. Where do you have it listed for sale? I expected to see something about this on the site itself but couldn’t find anything.
Rochelle
P.S. It looks great, btw!
@ James –
Glad you are liking the posts man!! I don’t know how this post slipped past my email… but email has been funky lately!! I saw another from you in regard to guest posting as well, I will answer this morning!!
@ Rochelle –
I decided NOT to list it yet and instead build up the user base and popularity first.
I do however have several listed on my eBay store… which is the same place I was going to list this one. I am trying to list 1 site per week, just to see if anyone wants them more than I do!! :-)
When I list sites for sale, I do not make it a public on the site or even on ebay, by listing links. I do not want spiders to find the site based on the “for sale” aspect and I don’t want visitors to think they are visiting a soon to be sold site.
Mark
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