Finding a SEO startup project
When your new to earning money online it can be a bit tough to discern exactly how and where you should start. One great option is a Spring Board business. However once you have mastered that, or if you don’t want to start there, SEO is a great place to start. Creating a project that you can successfully earn money with is no easy task. There is much work that has to be done before choosing a business niche. Some of which is learning SEO, keyword research, search volume research, and analyzing competition in your niche. Those are all after or part of just choosing what your project is. Then there is the actual building the project which will take longer, and the promoting the project which will take ever longer. This can be quite an overwhelming task to start with, plus you don’t even know if you will be able to make any money with your project.
I personally prefer to have someone else do all of the research and testing part for me for free. Then after I know it can be profitable and have a basic blueprint to follow, then I will proceed. How can you get someone to do all the testing and research for you without paying them anything? Simple, look at sites for sale. This idea is not orignial to me, but I wanted to share my experiences with it.
Given that I have only been in the SEO market for a little over a year I am relatively new myself. My first major SEO project came from Sitepoint.com. Sitepoint has an excellent marketplace that is known world wide for selling websites. When someone sells a website they have to provide a lot of information about that site in order to attract potential buyers. Information such as:
- How long the site has been up
- How much money the site earns each month
- What advertising platforms that money comes from
- What the cost of the site is each month, including advertising and other expenses
- How many visitors the site gets each month
- Where the traffic comes from
- What methods they have used to promote the site
That is just to name the most popular. You can often times see screen shots of some of the above info. You can visit the site to see what it is like, and you can look up in Yahoo how many backlinks the site has. Once you look at a few sites you kind of get the idea. Basically they disclose everything about their business.
I go about it like this. I head over to sitepoint, and I look at the Premium listings or the Established listings. I go through and look at lots of sites. I typically look for sites that I think I can reproduce. So a site that takes a lot of high end custom scripting or a site that sells physical goods won’t work. However a site like Icanhascheezburger.com is do-able. Mind you icanhascheezburger is way out of my league for startups, but you get the point of the type of site.
When I find a site that looks do-able I check all the stats, is it profitable? Is it worth the time? Is there lots of competition? How established is it, aka how many backlinks does it have. When I find a site that I think will work I start my project. I make a folder on my desktop, in there I stash all the info I can get from the auction ad at sitepoint. I save off the actual auction article, the website for sale, how much it makes, the screen shots, the sitepoint auction url, everything. At some point the sitepoint auction will end and the ad will be deleted, but I may want to reference some of the info down the road.
Then I choose a domain name, get it hosted and begin duplicating their idea. I do NOT copy their content. I am not saying go pirate their copyrighted material. In the case of Icanhascheezbuger I would go find other pictures of cats and give them captions. As I go along I try to find ways to improve or slightly alter the project to be more my own. In short I duplicate their idea not their content/site. Its the idea that I wanted to begin with, they tested the idea, proved it was profitable and then made that info public.
I have two sites right now that I did this with and they are both profitable already. One of them very new, and the other one a bit older. The established one is earning $200+ profit per month and I have plans that will probably double that in the next six months. This is not killer income, but I don’t spend killer amount of time on them either. They are both still growing too, plus I have been doing a lot of learning to get to this point. My goals are to get a good base of income down, and use that to branch out to bigger and better ideas of my own.
I certainly have plenty of ideas of my own that I think will be profitable, but I like to be able to start on solid ground. Beside that my sites are morphing into more and different things then they originally started. I feel they are better then the original idea that I duplicated. After all, its all about building a better mouse trap. 
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