Heads up Sites, creating clean, functional, affordable websites.

In the end I made a profit of 126.40.  This is the first affiliate sales site I’ve made and i learned two very important lessons.

• Amazon’s 1 day cookie sucks.

It is a thankless task sending visitors to a site when there is no remuneration.

• Google’s ad words was a surprising source of revenue on something that was supposed to be a straight affiliate storefront.

You get paid an inordinate amount per click, basically amounts to the same as selling an inexpensive item and much easier  to attain.

• I spent way to much on advertising

Key is return visitors, not ’1 hitters’.  I stopped advertising after 3 weeks after my search engine rank shot up but by then I had spent way to much to turn an overall profit for the holiday season.

Currently working on an online shopping site for late holiday shoppers.

Plan is:

Get a basic first version out.

• Challenge is to put (way) aside pursuit of visual perfection and functionality
• Focus instead on the main goal of testing this particular business model for viability

Complete some basic marketing.

• Generate some traffic while spending as little money and time as possible.

Study the analytics.

• Knowing the site isn’t going to be perfect, answer the question, “Can I get some sales with a functional base model given a certain level of traffic?”

Evaluate business model.

• If the ROI does not look good move on to another project
• If ROI looks promissing spend a couple of days making a “clean and functional” site.

All websites have a purpose.  Most are created and driven by the desire to make money.  Your website, or lack thereof has  an effect on your business, if you have a website that does not make you money, than it is better to have no website.  However, obviously the best case scenario is having a website that makes you an optimal amount of money, that is to say a website that gives you the greatest return on your investment.  This is a broad yet simple statement that is often forgotten in the beginning when creating a site.   The first question when designing a site is “What site can I build that will fulfill the optimal level of return on investment for the client?”.  Through experience I have found there are two questions that, if answered correctly will create a site that allows for the greatest return on investment:

1. The Clean Question:  What are the requirements of the client?

• The site should be built that fulfills these requirements only.  Adding in metaphorical bells and whistles only diminishes the return on investment.   The site should be built to specifications that fulfill the needs of the client.

2. The Functional Question:  How can the site be built so that it has “Room to grow”?

• Renovating an existing bad site is a waste of time.  There is an old saying, you simply cannot make a silk purse out of a sows ear.  To me, the definition of a bad site is not necessarily one that looks poorly visually, (although this is also bad) a bad site is a site that is inflexible.
• Immediate needs are most important, but a well engineered site is one that can be built to incorporate expansion to fulfill future requirements.

If these two questions are answered correctly, then a website that is clean and functional will be built, and the greatest return on investment will be achieved.

Since I the first day I dabbled in programming HTML nearly ten years ago, I’ve programmed and launched an absurd amount of websites, ranging from small business brochure sites, to personal blogs, data base driven e stores, online social networks and forums and publishing for profit sites.  The launch of headsupsites.com represents a new era of discovery for me personally with regard to how I look at my business.  The driving force of my design work  has been the curiosity behind the how the internet works and the different ways it can be utilized.  My focus has now shifted to the focused development in creating useful and monetized sites.