Click here to download Website Launch-Daily Action Plan Template v1.0 (Microsoft Excel format)

This launch checklist provides the core elements of a good website launch plan, including tabs dedicated to:

• Master Go-to-Market Plan: This plan gives you the primary building blocks leading up to your website launch, like market overview, site objectives, competitive analysis, financial forecasts, keyword lists, building your website and driving traffic.
• Monthly Goals: Add key measurable website metrics that show the “health” of your website. These metrics can often be found in your website analytics.
• Daily Task List: Here are a few categories of daily activities you can do to successfully grow traffic and regular visitors to your website, including creating new content, building social media connections, and participating in relevant communities.
• Weekly Task List: More valuable tasks, but these you just need to track weekly, like reviewing web analytics reports, identifying new offers, adding to your keyword list and general website maintenance.
• Site Tracker: Additional tabs, like a sitemap list, a changelog and a social media account list, that track major or one-time updates to your site. This history of changes is perfect if you want to switch back or remember key details. It’s easier to record something here than try to remember it on your own.

Make sure to customize the basic website launch template, checklist and daily task list to your specific needs. I am sure that this free version will help you get a great start to your project. Plus you can use it to cut down your planning time and focus your efforts on creating a fantastic website.

If you have additional tasks that you recommend, post them in the comments. I love the feedback and will be able to make updates.

Related posts:

1. Flipping Website Real Estate for Profit
2. Buying a blog is different than buying a website
3. 31 Royalty-Free Stock Photo and Image Sites

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business models, search engine marketing, SEO, social networks, traffic, web design, Wordpress

Since my fortunes are used for mundane things like a mortgage and not angel funding, I simply watched the demonstrations online. Here are some of the companies that I will be doing further research on or using this year:(...)
Read the rest of Prime Angus Filets: Links this Week 2-1-2008

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, business models, Links of the Week, social networks, web 2.0

Hot Topic

I have read three poignant posts this week that have led me to write this post.

Devlounge – The Dangers of Buying a Blog: David gets right to the point – expect to lose approximately 33% of the current traffic right away. Unique visitors are not eyeballs, they are readers. You have to value why those readers are visiting the site and if that readership can be maintained.

Portfolio.com – What’s Drudge Worth? – by way of ProBlogger.Net: Duff estimates that The Drudge Report should be valued between $10-20 million based on eyeballs, ad sales, and his mom’s opinion. However, he goes on to say that it is worth zilch if you cannot lock Matt Drudge into a long-term writing contract. I could not agree more.

Dosh Dosh – Building an Online Empire: Of the 16 website types Maki mentions that you can buy/sell, none of them were a pure blog. He lists a product review blog, but that type of site is more dependent on the product than the author.

There are many more helpful articles if you do a Google search. Or I also recommend reading related forum posts on WickedFire, Sitepoint or Digital Point.

The Metrics

Before buying a blog or any website, you need to know the following metrics:

• Unique visits per month
• Page views per month
• Feed subscriptions
• Posts per month
• Monthly Revenue
• Google PageRank
• Alexa rank
• Date established

Of course, you should ask for the trends and seasonality of these metrics. A snapshot in time or peaks can look great, but they can be pumped up and a single number does not tell the whole story.

Beside statistics, you should also have a clear understanding of the intellectual and technical property you are acquiring. You are not buying a domain. You are buying a website and everything that goes with it, including posts, comments, media, databases, customized themes, etc.

Recommendations

There is no cookie-cutter, rule of thumb for valuation, like $10 per post or 10x monthly revenues. Here is a swag bid estimate calculation that I use:

1. Your valuation calculation should start by defining a financial benchmark. Estimate the monthly profit (preferred) or revenue per thousand unique visits or subscriber that you are achieving for your current blog properties.
2. Then use that value and apply it to the same measure for the blog in question… less 50%. Remember David said 33%. I go more conservative when making financial estimations.
3. Finally, my bid would be approximately 12 months of that estimated profit or 6 months of the estimated revenue. That is my personal valuation rule based on my desire to be rolling full speed with a site within a year.

For example, let’s say your current blogs make $2 profit per thousand unique visits per month and the potential purchase has 20k uniques per month. Then I would expect to make $20 per month ($2 x 20 x 50%). My bid would be in the range of $200-250 (or $20 x 12).

In addition to making a good quantitative decision, you should also be prepared with an action plan to minimize readership erosion and to increase your ramp to profitability. Specifically, make sure you line up engaging writers and content to hit the ground running and get your promotional methods implemented.

Now I am off to see if there is anything on Sitepoint or Digital Point that catches my eye!

Related posts:

1. Flipping Website Real Estate for Profit
2. Claiming my blog on Technorati
3. Search Engine Journal – 2006 Search Blog Awards

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, business models, results, web real estate

One key element that MySpace got right in their developer program is allowing developers to monetize their apps by controlling their own advertising. Until now, the online marketing community has primarily focused on social media optimization and driving traffic to their websites. Now with the ability to create direct revenue streams that tap into the massive social networking population, I can see entrepreneurial developers creating applications that are similar to what has come out of affiliate marketing web services.

MySpace is not the first to venture into opening their platform. Facebook has had huge success in adding new and retaining members and attracting commercial dollars as direct result of their developer platform efforts. Of course, other social networks are joining the application bandwagon, namely Google. Google’s Orkut social network and iGoogle personal homepage service are announcing their APIs in early November. It will be very interesting to see how the big social networks continue to square off on this front.

Related posts:

1. Web Services Reviews – Week 1 Introduction
2. Web Services Review – eBay’s New Shopping APIs
3. I Built My Own Social Network in 1 Hour

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: API, business models, social networks, web 2.0, web services

Way back in August, Super Affiliate Marketing Blog had a great post on flipping web real estate. Jon details three key redesign elements to turning a low traffic dud into a website worth buying. First, the design…

Is it too crappy to look at? Do you need to change it around? Chances are pretty good that you will need to make some alterations. Whether you should redo the whole thing is again, up to your taste and budget. Remember, you already spent $500 on this, and your goal is $3k, so you don’t want to go overboard with unnecessary beautification operations.

Then, Jon drills down on steps #2 and #3 – usability and monetization. Mixed in with these steps, he gives invaluable guidance that can give you the edge to maximize your ROI. For example, focus on generating statistics like unique impressions, page rank on Google and Alexa, and some basic contextual advertising revenue. Then, provide a mini business plan with current site metrics and future projections in your “for sale” message. Help make it simple for a buyer to pay top dollar.

Also, it is vital that there is an active marketplace to buy and sell web real estate. Of course, the real differentiator that maximizes your overall profits is to understand the potential buyer and don’t burn bridges…

Remember, that even though you are selling a property that doesn’t really interest you much in holding onto, you are selling it to someone who finds it as a good deal or investment, so you must treat it with respect, because this property may be someone’s baby sometime soon…

… put some contextual ads onto it if you like, get the stats program working again, collect as much real data as possible on the current situation of the site, and then make projections of 3, 6, 10 and 12 months. Base those numbers ONLY on the current situation of the site. If you just go off and make numbers up, they won’t buy anything else from you ever again, and you may also sabotage your reputation on your first deal, which can suck.

Here is the link to the full post. The marketplace and profits are there for you. Check out Biz MP for developed websites or The Domain Name Aftermarket by GoDaddy for just domains.

Related posts:

1. Buying a blog is different than buying a website
2. Free Website Launch Checklist and Daily Tracker
3. Domain parking is SO easy

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business models, results, web design, web real estate

Domain Sponsor is by far the best service that I’ve found to help generate some very small revenue rather than posting an under construction page while I am in development mode. There are other good services like Google Adsense for domains. Or every web hosting provider has a partner that provides domain parking for free.

What is domain parking?

Domain parking is simply an advertising program to monetize type-in traffic visiting your site. Your traffic comes entirely by someone typing in your domain – no Google Adwords or search engine traffic allowed. Based on that, you are not going to see a whole lot of folks hitting your site, even if you have a really common domain name.

Visitors are redirected to a page containing relevant advertising listings and keyword links. These ads and links are pushed by the service and are targeted to the predicted interests of the visitor. Over time the domain parking service further optimizes the ads based on the number of clicks and the payout. The domain owner is then paid via a classic pay-per-click model.

How do I make real money?

“So domain parking is incredibly easy, but I can’t see how you can make any real money.” Well, you really can’t make significant “quit your day job” revenue on an individual site basis. Then again, you can at least cover the annual cost of owning your domain for absolutely zero effort.

For me, I’ve made a whole $3.50 over the past 6 months on ultimatebathroom.com and ultimatetoilets.com – not even close to covering my fees with Go Daddy. Then again, those are terrible domain names to get type-in traffic. I am even amazed that I’ve gotten the 15-20 visits a month (about 1/3 are international).

However, there are domain real estate businesses that are playing a numbers game. If you own thousands of domains, you only have to net $10-$20 per year for each domain to grow a pretty easy nest egg. Additionally, these high volume domain owners are typically using domain parking as an enabler. They make some easy money while trying to sell the domains on the aftermarket. Plus, they can identify sites with real potential for building out and launching, or at least sites that should have a higher resale value.

I will share more on how to optimize your results if you are venturing into the domain real estate business, why Domain Sponsor is the best provider, and how I’ve customized my landing pages in future posts.

Related posts:

1. 5 steps to maximize domain parking revenue
2. Would you use domain parking to monetize AtomicWarrior.com?
3. Discover Domain Name Deals using DMOZ

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: business models, domain parking, web real estate

More specifically, I love everything about web business models, the latest marketing programs and new web development technologies. But what I love the most is results. So I’ll be sharing the details of what’s really working well, what’s not driving results, and why.
I also want to here your feedback on what is working for you and what you think of the network of community sites. Go to the Network Directory and check out a site that interests you!

Related posts:

1. Updating bobangus.com
2. Launching a New Theme for BobAngus.com
3. Website Directory

© Bob Angus for bobangus.com, 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: angus, business models, results