I’ve just had a look at the figures to the end of July 2010 and the site has so far made £1,156.00 for the year, which is already more than the whole of 2009 and still 5 months to go along with the Christmas trade

I know it’s not a fortune but I think it justified my asking price, if it keeps going as it is I’m hoping it will make over the £2k mark for the year and doubling 2009 income, this is all organic traffic, so apart from a portion of the ECU/hosting price it basically pays for a nice holiday or 2,000 items at the Pound Shop

Here’s an image of the traffic stats for 2010.

The site went live in Feb 09 and you can read here how it started, in my post I mention I couldn’t find many white TV’s but I just wasn’t looking properly and since added a lot more which is probably why the commissions increased in February.

In 2009 the site made £1135.29, So far in 2010 (jan-Feb) the site has generated £325 in commission, below are the stats for February, the site generates most of it’s income through Amazon.

The site is number 1 in Google for the terms:
“White TV”
“White TVs”
“White LCD TV”
“White LCD TVs”
“White Televisions”
“White LCD Televisions”

I am looking for £2000 for the site

Edit ** A few more stats/revenue figures

The site is White TV which as the name suggests is about white televisions, so a pretty niche niche if you like.

A bit of history about how the site was developed, in January 2009 I set up a design contest at Digitalpoint for the design of the site, I paid around £95 for the design and about £25 to have it coded. I would update the site with new TV’s and prices manually until Easy Content Units came along, which was like a godsend as I was getting fed up with researching and updating the site.

At this point the site wasn’t ranking very well in Google, the content wasn’t too good as I’d written it myself and I’m hopeless at writing content! A search of Google for ‘White TV’ brought up 325,000,000 results and 190,000,00 for ‘White Televisions’ so I thought I better do something about it.

Around the middle of June somebody posted on the A4u forum about content writing so I thought i’d give them a shot and I was pleased with the results so had them write content for the White TV site a few weeks later, I’m not sure exactly when it was or how much a part these changes made to the site ranking, but the site is number one in Google for most of the keywords you’d think of for this niche ‘White TV’, ‘White Televisions’, ‘White LCD TV’ etc.

So how did the site perform in 2009?
Commission for Feb – Dec 09 came in at £1135.29
Looking at where the sales went shows:
Amazon – £793.02 – 72 sales
Play.com – £119.20 – 99 sales

Play.com pay such an aweful commission rate, if those sales had gone through amazon or even anywhere else I’d have been looking at an extra £900 based on average commission figures, as frustrating as it is I always include Play.com in most sites as I think a sale is a sale and the customer may end up getting there from elsewhere anyway.

On the last update I did to the site I noticed fewer new White TV’s which is probably why i’m doing this post now, I’ve noticed a couple of other White TV sites popping up in Google now, they’ve certainly ranked page 1 quicker than I did though

Normally when I do these kind of sites I just submit the URL to Google, Yahoo and Bing and then link to it from an older site of mine and depending on the product place an ad on Gumtree, just from doing this I’ve seen quite a few sites sit at 1 or 2 in Google quite easily and other times take an age to index, but what else should I do, what do you do?

I don’t expect this to make any decent money to be honest, I’m not sure why I did it, I get bored sometimes working on bigger sites and create a small one that doesn’t take so long to set up, I need to learn to be more patient I think!!

I set the site up for PPC just for Cufflink Boxes and not cufflinks and have already made a sale, £1.16 from John Lewis, happy with that!

It didn’t make a fortune but it was some nice pocket money, the brand is in the domain name which was a bit risky but I didn’t realise about brand domains until earlier this year, now I avoid them like the plague!

The site in question is Philips Arcitec which is an electric shaver for men and I thought it would sell well being near to Christmas, girlfriends and wives buying these for their man and I was very pleased with the results from it.

I created the site in photoshop then chopped it up and saved as html, as you do, and added price comparison tables manually, which I was updating almost daily with the Amazon price changing constantly, very annoying! (Thank god for ECU!) I started promoting the site using Google adwords and then it started ranking ok and sat at number three in Google behind Philips and Amazon (I’ve just checked now at it’s currently number one, no wonder I sold one this week!) The site is now actually made using a css/xhtml template and using Easy Content Units for the price comparison, makes life a whole lot easier.

So as you can see, for the period of Sept – Dec 08 the site made £534.14 not amazing but nice for just one niche site.