Web Empire

When it comes to designing individual sites in your Web Empire, variety is of primary importance. Sites should use a variety of layouts, and use different colors, fonts, etc. Specific design considerations are different for the various types of sites we described earlier.

For your ‘factory’ site, think in terms of one or more databases. Put all of your content into database tables, and plug that information into the individual pages. So, for our site listing various dinosaur species, we might have a database table with these fields:

• Scientific Name
• Pronunciation
• Common Name
• Meaning of Name
• Earlier Name(s)
• Order
• Suborder
• Infraorder
• Family
• Time Period
• Location
• Type (e.g. Duck-billed, carnivore,  etc.)
• Length
• Height
• Weight
• Description
• Notes

Not all of these fields would have values for every species, but you would fill in as many as possible. Then parts of this same data could be used on other sites, especially the fields that contain simple data, rather than extensive text. You do not want to use the same description or notes on other sites, but you can include the alternate names and earlier names and size and such from the entry for Tyrannosaurus Rex in a side-bar on your site about Sue, one of the most complete T Rex fossils ever found.

If you can develop several different table with inter-related information, all the better. For each time period, such as the Jurassic, you might have a table listing environmental conditions on different continents at that time, or plant species found at various localities during that period. Then, whenever you mention a dinosaur is associated with a particular time period, you can include a side-bar about what that time period was like in the area that dinosaur was found.

Your simpler sites, like house sites, can use data from your database tables when appropriate, but otherwise tend to be simpler in design. Page content may be static, with the only use of include functions being for the repetitive header and footer information, and for optional ads and links that will appear or disappear as they are sold.

On your junkier sites, you can use your database information to increase the prevalence of  relevant keywords. For example, your site with text from an old book on dinosaurs could include a sidebar labeled ‘Interesting Dinosaur Facts’ that uses your database to display information on a random species on each page, using a variety of text constructs around the data fields, such as:

The {common name | scientific name} form the {time period} was {height feet tall | weight pounds in weight}.

or

{length} foot long {scientific name} a {type} of dinosaur, roamed {place} in the {time period} period.

Of course, you need to make sure that only records with all the required fields filled are used for your constructs, so they look right.

Of course all of your sites should follow basic good SEO practices such as are described on this, and many other sites. Build a dozen sites in this neighborhood, then move on to the next. If it takes a year per neighborhood, your dinosaur empire will be complete in five years, by which time you should dominate the field. It should only take a few weeks to get the start of your factory site up, though you will continue adding records to the database (and hence, automatically, pages to the site) for several months. You should begin earning a trickle of money by the second month, and by year’s end it should be substantial. If you pick a more profitable topic than dinosaurs, you should be earning a living from your websites by the end of the year, and ready for retirement when your Empire is complete in five years.

Since making money is the ultimate aim of our Web Empire, we need to know how we are going monetize our sites before we build them, as that can affect the layout and content of particular sites. For our Dinosaur example, as with any other topic, we have these general sources, and within each some specific examples of typical monetization sources:

Advertising Agencies

• PPC links like Google Adsense, or ads other advertising aggregators  like adbrite or fastclick
• Text links like TLA or backlinks and linkadage

Custom Advertising

• Ads from lodging providers at destinations like Dinosaur National Monument
• Ads for Eco-Tours that include dino excavation sites

Affiliate Sales

• Dinosaur books and videos from Amazon
• Dinosaur posters  from Allposters

Your own Products

• Dinosaur ebooks for children (i.e. how to catch a dinosaur; dino care and feeding; etc.)
• Educational dinosaur-related multi-media presentations

Other monetization options that may fit your topic, though they aren’t very easily applied to dinosaur-oriented sites, is to offer services (dinosaur sitting?), a subscription site, or selling tangible products (you could sell fossils, but it probably wouldn’t be profitable enough to be worth the effort).

These are just a few examples of the sorts of things you might consider under monetization. So, how does this affect site development? If you are selling advertising space, be sure not to make the factory site look junky by including too many ads — on other sites, experiment, and see what works best (i.e. is most profitable). For affiliate sales, provide a lot of information before sending people off to the affiliate site. You want to pre-qualify them, so that a high percentage of those who click through to the affiliate actually buy something. You don’t want to send away potentially profitable visitors down a non-profitable link. Luring them to click on something that won’t buy is self-defeating.

Put a lot of options in your site design for easily placing ads, both those you sell and ads for your own products. This is easily done using PHP and includes() within if(file_exists) conditional statements. Side-bars can be a series of such conditional statements, prioritized according to the importance of the content. Then it is easy to fill-in with ads and links.

In our last post in this series we will look at further considerations for designing the individual sites.

We begin by planning the general layout of our first neighborhood. Each website is like a building in the neighborhood, with links like streets (most of them one-way) and our databases forming an underground infrastructure that supplies one or more of the sites with services.

Since this is to be a self-supporting neighborhood, we need one main industry — a factory building, located at one edge of the neighborhood. The factory site will be our biggest and ‘best’ site. It will provide information on dinosaur species, so let us say one page for each species, plus pages on each genus, along with various support pages, indexes, sub-topics and such.

The factory site is our showcase — the kind of site people will want to link to, just for the valuable information it provides. This site will require the most work, but since we chose a topic we are interested in, even passionate about, it should not be too onerous a task to research and write about all those dinosaur species. Remember, our sites will be designed with modules, so they can be easily managed and expanded. So we will make a list of 100 or more species of dinosaurs, and so soon as we have the first dozen or so pages, we put the site on-line.

Our neighborhood will need its own gather-place, a town-hall site, but let’s put off building that until we begin to get some traffic. We know it is coming, however, so we will leave space in the factory site for a notice (ad) about that site. The meeting place will be a forum for dinosaur related discussions.

Of course the neighborhood needs several houses for the workers to live in. These are the sub-sub-topic specific sites. One might be about the Tyrannosaurus Rex called Sue that was found in the Dakota hills and was the subject of some controversy. Another will be about ‘pregnant’ dinosaurs (of which something like three have been identified so far) — and how the bones reveal their maternal state. Another about dinosaur eggs, and another about dinosaur tracks, several about specific dinosaur excavation sites, etc., etc.

House sites are relatively small, maybe a dozen pages each. They zero in on a topic though, and provide intense coverage of that specific subject. Since they are related to the general topic, they all provide valuable incoming links to the factory site. The factory does not link back to the houses, which are spread over as many different servers (and IP addresses) as possible. If, for example, a house site describes a location where a herd of pachyrhinosaurs died trying to cross a river, there would be links back to the pachyrhinosaur page on your factory site, as well more general links to the factory home-page.

We will need some garages and sheds, maybe a barn or two in the neighborhood, just to hold junk. These are sites made up of reprint articles, public domain material, etc. They are fast-build sites, with as much text as possible, spread out over lots of pages. Find an old book on dinosaurs and divide it up so each page has four to ten kilobytes of text related to a single subject. Copy reports off government sites that relate to Dinosaur National Monument or other locations with dino-related keywords in them. Several of these sites will blogs, you can even host some of them on free-hosting sites, just for the SEO benefit of links from a high-authority site.

Each of these junkier sites will link to the factory, and each may link to several house sites as well. People searching for outdated dinosaur terms will find them in your old-book site, and go from there to one of the other sites in your Empire. Or people searching for information on Dinosaur National Monument will find your governmental-reprint information, and likewise end up going to your other sites.

It is a good idea to have one more blog site, this one your personal public-relations site (personal branding), where you establish yourself as an expert in dinosaurs. Your interest may be an amateur one, but many amateurs have high levels of expertise in their areas of interest, even if they are not employed in the field or do not have academic credentials. Post frequently about current news items about dinosaurs, interesting facts you uncover during your research, etc.

As you research all these other sites, keep your eyes open for a subject that might make a good link-bait site. Two or three link-bait sites would do the neighborhood a lot of good, if you can come up with that many effective ploys. If you don’t know what link-bait is, see the Wiki article on linking, it has a few paragraphs describing this.

If you create your own dino-related product, you will need a sales site as well. You can use a sales-site for funneling affiliate traffic too. A typical sales site has no outgoing links other than the purchase link. You can have multiple sales-pages on one site, each in its own subdirectory or sub-domain, but don’t link between these, however tempting it might seem. Once on your sales page you want your customer to click on the purchase link — don’t distract them with any other options.

The local newspaper site is another optional, but useful site to have in the neighborhood. This site just posts RSS feeds relevant to dinosaurs. This would not be a very busy news-room, but there is a constant trickle of new findings about dinosaurs that your target audience is likely to be interested in. Alternatively, you might want to include this as a side-bar on your factory site (for a busier news subject you can make this a separate site).

Our next post will discuss our plan for making money from each of these sites, which will affect the layout specifics that will be the subject of our last post on this topic.

There are two ways to grow your Web Empire — make a plan and follow it, or just build it up a site at a time, without careful planning. I built mine the second way, because I didn’t know better. With hindsight, I’m sure my business would be much more profitable had I created a plan and followed it. But in the beginning I didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to make a reasonable plan.

Here, I am going to give you the benefit of my accumulated experience, and together we will lay out a plan for building a successful Internet Empire. In the end, success is measured in dollars, though for specific sites and specific goals we may have other measures along the way.

As we discussed a bit in the post First Websites, your first step will be to choose the topic your sites will be built around. First, choose a general topic that interests you, sports, automobiles, health, technology, etc. Be sure it is something people will pay money for — search for sites using your main subject as the keyword, and see how many of the sites have advertising, and how wide-ranging that advertising is.

If you chose dinosaurs, for example, you might find that most of the sites about dinosaurs have little advertising. Those that have ads are mostly for fossils, or educational material about dinosaurs, such as books and videos. This suggests that the field would be very difficult to earn money from — how much do people spend on learning about dinosaurs? If it is a passion you have to follow, then go for it — you can become the  leading vendor of dino-related material. But if your main goal is to make money, choose something people spend more money on.

For our sample plan, however, let’s take the difficult example, and see how we can build a plan around dinosaur sites. We will be building up our empire one neighborhood at a time, so we need to consider a more specific topic, within the broad subject of dinosaurs, that will be our first neighborhood. Lets look at some of the possibilities:

• dinosaur ecology — how they lived, what their environment was like
• dinosaur fossils — what we learn from fossils, how they formed, what they look like
• digging dinosaurs — paleontologists and how they work
• dinosaur evolution — how they developed and changed over time
• dinosaur species — characteristics of each species, when they lived, how they looked

That is enough to get us started, though a closer examination of the topic might yield more sub-topics. There is a point at which they begin to overlap too much, since they are all inter-related.

Let’s put those subjects in the order we want to cover them. Our plan will only cover the first topic, but once that neighborhood is built-up, we will have these other topics waiting in the wings. Thus, as we research our first subject, we can gather information for future reference on the other subjects.

1. dinosaur species — characteristics of each species, when they lived, how they looked
2. dinosaur fossils — what we learn from fossils, how they formed, what they look like
3. digging dinosaurs — paleontologists and how they work
4. dinosaur ecology — how they lived, what their environment was like
5. dinosaur evolution — how they developed and changed over time

This is a fairly logical progression, though you might have chosen another, it makes no difference in the long run. Our first decision is made, we will build a plan for websites exploring the different species of dinosaurs.

In our next post, we will begin designing The Plan.

In an earlier post I suggested that those who do not already have a website go immediately to Wordpress.com and open a free blog. I’d like to elaborate on that statement and talk a bit about getting started in general, for those who have not yet begun their Web Empires.

The important thing is to take action now, so you will have something to build on. There is no reason to wait. You don’t need to learn more before you start. You have no excuse. Start a blog, and begin posting daily. Choose any subject matter you have an interest in, don’t worry about making money or choosing a profitable subject or anything else — just start it.

Of course a free blog will never be your main site, or even a major part of your empire. But when you do start building the money sites you will have had some experience with making at least one type of site — your blog. Also, you will be able to link from your blog, which by then will certainly be getting frequent visits from the search engines because you post frequently, and have never stopped posting frequently. That link will ensure that the search engines find your money site right away, giving you a jump start.

When you have two or three money-making sites going you can decide if you want to continue adding new posts to your first blog. It depends on the following you have by then (how many people read the blog) and whether or not you can get money out of the subject. If it is something advertisers are willing to pay for (and we will cover how you figure that out in another post) then one or more of your money sites can be on the same subject as the blog, and you can use the blog to drive additional traffic to the money site.

Why do I recommend Wordpress.com, which does not currently allow advertising, rather than blogger.com, where you can place ads? Because blogs should be an important part of your Web Empire, and it is more important (and will generate more profit in the long run) to learn how to use Wordpress software. When you get your own web hosting and domain, you can install Wordpress and be up and running in no time, since all you have to learn is the basic installation and configuration — you are already familiar with the mechanics of adding and editing posts and pages from your experience on the free blog.  That will be worth more to you than you can expect to earn from a free blog on blogger.com.

When it comes to your first ‘real’ site, the first site that will not be on any free hosting service, you will want to get much of your content ready before starting the site, unless it too is to be a blog. I’d suggest a more static site for your first, and add more blogs later. As mentioned elsewhere, it is best if this static site be database driven and modularly designed — you don’t want it to look static — so your first one will take a little time to build. Don’t worry, with a bit a practice it will get easier and the work will go faster.

Before you can begin gathering data for your first site, however, you need to decide what your Web Empire is going to be about. You need to choose something that lots of people are interested in — cars, sports, travel, cooking, health — there are hundreds to choose from. Pick one that you are passionately interested in, and your odds of success will be much higher.

Next, decide what sub-topic within your general subject area will be the first ‘neighborhood’ you will build. Think of your Web Empire neighborhood as a country within this great empire you will rule. Sub-areas corresponding to the five examples we gave for general subject areas might be — race cars, baseball, National Parks, Mexican food, longevity — of course there are hundreds or thousands to choose from, depending on the main subject.

Finally, take a very specific area of specialization from within your sub-area to be the subject for your first website. Again, using the same sub-areas, we might choose — Formula One race cars, the Detroit Tigers baseball team, Yosemite National Park, Mexican Salsa Recipes, anti-oxidants — or any of the hundreds of other subjects you could choose.

In our next post, we will talk about gathering data for your first website. Generally you have two choices: spending money, or working hard.