Technology Reports

There is a thread on DP that I have been following almost since it was started on March 11th 07.

The whole $48 concept is that if you create an adsense ready-website and do nothing other than get it indexed by the Search engines that the site will on average earn $48 a year. You set up several sites with several long-tail keywords in the same niche. You get it indexed and sit back and wait for the clicks. Once set up you never need to touch the sites again and your only ongoing expenses are domain renewal and hosting. Use .info domains and only pay $1 to register them and then about $9/year to renew them, set up several sites on the same hosting account - so hosting is less than $5/yr.

So, per site, on average you earn $48 for a $15 Outlay (plus the $3 per site once-off for creation - which is totally offset by the $1 domain registraion in the first year.) So, with 1 site you would earn $30/yr profit. It is all about the numbers so, 100 sites should see a return of around $3K year, 1000 sites = $30K year.

The thread is someone offering to create the adsense websites for only a few $ per site when purchased in bulk. I took a look at it and by the time I decided I would go ahead and order 100 sites and have them set up.

As luck would (or would not) have it, I was too late to take up the offer and the smallest package on offer was for 300 sites. Now the initial cost of setting up 300 sites would have been $300 for domain names, $600 for the websites and For the hosting, I would have just dumped them onto one of my existing servers.

I didn’t quite have the money to gamble on setting up 300 sites but I did have the money and inclination to set up a single site on what I knew to be a reasonably high paying niche.

I purchased a script and a domain name and set it up on the 1st of May to dabble. I spent a couple of days setting up the site:

Expenses:

• $30 Script to run the site (and as many other sites As I want to setup)
• $10 for a good .net domain name in the niche I am targetting
• $0 for hosting - I just put it on my server
• $25 for a custom Blog theme and some Free-to publish Articles on the niche
• $10 for promotion - paid for a blog posting package to have a short article posted in several Blogs

Out of my Expenses, the $30 script is licenced so I can use it to create an unlimite number of sites, so the more sites I create the cheaper (per site) it becomes.

I actually did a little more than simply get the site Indexed as I wanted it to happen fast! I did a few link exchanges and paid for some blog posts. I am going to actually add a blog to the site next month, and set it up to publish a new article every 3-4 days. So with the 100+ articles I have, I will have new content on the site for over a year.

At the end of the 1st month I have already made a little from this site - $4.53 to be precise. This works out to be around $55/year. Yes, with the time I have put in it means that I have not made a single penny this year, but it was more about proving the concept to see how it would work. I proved to myself that the concept works just fine, and I am hoping that the addition of the Blog will further improve the traffic and returns in the coming Months.

Month 1 was positive, so next month I’ll create another couple of sites, using similar promotion techniques and see where it leads me. The Idea of course is to eventually produce a few hundred sites that take no time to maintain and give me a nice residual income.

I guess that the whole webmaster concept is about diversfication and creating these sites are only a small part of my overall strategy.

Every webmaster will want to use pictures,photos and other graphics to make their site look better and who could blame them! In almost every webmaster forum you see threads that xxx has sent me a bill for $x,xxx for a photo I have used on my site.

The usual story here is that a website is using a picture or photo that they have no rights to use and the Stock agency is simply sending them a bill for usage of the image. The threads on these forums usually end up with a lot of people who don’t have a clue saying things like “don’t pay” “ignore the notice” and things like that.

Well lets look at the truth of the matter. In every instance where someone gets such a notice they actually ARE using an image that they don’t have the rights to use on their site - and the person getting the bill for usage never denies the usage.

The whole reason people get these bills is that they are either ignorant of the licencing requirments for the image or they are a theif who has stolen someone else’s images. As ignorance is no defence there is no excuse for anyone ever using images for which they don’t have the rights to use.

Now the solution to this problem is fairly easy - but it does mean that a little bit of “due diligence” is required. Firstly, when creating a website and you need images you should find out where and how you can legally obtain them and if you are purchasing an established website that has images/graphics and photos on it you should also ensure that you protect yourself from possible future large bills.

There are several places where you can legally get images/photos from for use on your website and the most obvious one is to go out and take the photo’s yourself. While this is not possible for everyone in every situation there are of course a lot of other places to look.

The safest place to obtain images is from one of the several Stock photo sites. Read their terms of use, purchase the rights you need and get on with it. There are of course 2 type of stock sites - the Traditional and Micro’s. A traditional stock site may charge as much as $500 for usage of a single photo and this is out of the reach of the average webmaster. This is where the micro stock agencies come into play.

At the microstock websites you can purchase royalty free rights to use a photo for less than $5 - In some cases you can purchase the rights for as low as $1 per photo. These Microstock sites have anywhere upwards of 1 Million Photos that you can look thru to find what you need. In most cases you will find several photos that meet your requirements that cost less than your lunch!

When it comes to purchasing a website that has photos on it the easiest way to protect yourself is to ensure you have a statement that grants you rights to the images on the site. If the seller is not willing to give a statement to you then it is time to steer clear of the seller because the “bargain” you thought you were getting might just cost you a small fortune!

Resources:

Download Stock Photos from Shutterstock
Chosse from over 1,000,000 photos from Big Stock Photo
$1 Photos for high resolution Photos from Dreamstime