If it doesn't look "natural", it's not going to help you. Sometimes, it might even hurt you. If you make these 20 blogs and they're all on the same server, google is going to see that it's all coming from 1 IP. There's a lot of steps you need to take to make things look natural, and on top of all that, you still need to promote and link all these sites as well so that each of them gets some authority and reputation. A link from a "nobody" is still a next-to-worthless link from a nobody.

I don't remember the exact stat, but I remember seeing somewhere that 1 link from PR5 page is worth about 2000 links from a PR1/PR0 page. And 1 link from a PR6 is worth 10,000 links from PR1/0 pages. Anyway... the exact numbers don't matter but they're huge. If your website is crap, then you obviously have to get 10,000 crappy links because no one with a good reputation will link to you. But if your website has something interesting to offer, you might be better off trying to get a handful of high quality links from higher quality sites.

thank you dc - very helpful.


much appreciated!

I am thinking of hiring someone to write something that would break Google's ToS. It's proof of concept project to fulfill my curiosity more than anything, but I don't really want it tied to my name. As such, I don't really want to post this on freelancer sites I use. Any suggestions on where to post it? I had a look at BHW and it looks like no-skill kids there and they require $100 membership to post a classified ad. Any suggestions?

Something like http://bittask.com/ perhaps?

Anyone have a favorite shopping cart plugin recommendation?

I'm looking for free, easy to use, and will probably never have more than 20-30 physical products w/ shipping.

It'd also be nice to do multiple sizes and quantities of each item. Example: be able to choose from a 10, 25, 50 or 100 pack of widgets in s, m, l or xl.

I plan to just accept paypal.

Would accept bitcoin for the novelty of it if there were an easy to integrate option? I can't imagine I'd have many people wanting to pay with bitcoin but it would be a nice easy way to accumulate a few.

I use Cart66 Lite for WP. The paid upgrades can handle what you want I think. I have mine setup with PP.

Hi Guys,

I'm in the process of starting my own business and building my own website for it. Essentially I'm going to be coaching endurance sports athletes (runners, triathletes etc.) remotely. I am also going to be starting a local triathlon club. The website itself will mostly consist of my blog, recent sports news, and a weekly podcast that will be hosted from blogtalkradio.

For starters I'm using WIX. I've seen a lot of people prefer wordpress. What are some of the pros and cons of each?

If its Wix, I'm looking at the 8.25/month plan. Basically this will remove Wix ads to make it look a bit more legit. Any reason I would need more than 3GB of storage and 2GB of bandwith? What if I start blogging videos? would this affect the storage space a great deal?

A more important question is payment. I'm thinking of using Paypal standard which doesn't have any monthly fees or start up costs. I don't see my revenue reaching more than 4K/month. Any major benefit of upgrading to the $5/month plan?

Heres some websites of other coaching services to get an idea at what I'm trying to do.

http://www.qt2systems.com/
http://www.fifthgeartri.com/Customiz...w_York_NY.html
http://www.pbmcoaching.com/aboutus.htm

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You would hit the storage cap quite easily if you started to post videos but you're much better off creating a youtube channel and posting your videos there.

Now you use no video bandwidth/storage and you have your videos on the most popular video network in the world.

Great job. Thanks for sharing.

tl;dr: Anyone have any tips regarding starting an online sex (toy) shop?

I have a friend who haven't seen in a long time, and I talked to him about my latest venture with SEO, and he said he knew a friend who had struck gold with an online sex shop where he bought stuff for cheap (from here: http://www.aliexpress.com/) and sold it for high profit margins. He asked me if I could make him a site, and I said sure, thinking it was the beer who was talking.

Two days later I get an email where he asks if I am still on board. He would provide the capital for the goods, I will do the website building/marketing and we have a third (mutual) friend onboard (a lawyer, if that helps) who also will help about/provide capital.

Now, I see this as a great opportunity as I've always wanted to try to sell physical products/create an e-commerce site (so far I have only been in the affiliate side of things).

Anyone have any tips or resources for me to read up on? Both regarding creating and running a e-commerce site and experiences with the sex toy niche?

Sex toys don't cost $1,000/piece and require 1000 minimum quantity order. How much "capital" do you actually need from these 2 people? Because otherwise, it sounds like they are bringing almost nothing to the table.

Start your website and slowly scale up your inventory. If it's as easy to sell at high profit margins, you will scale up very fast.

Do you think you can do better than http://www.edenfantasys.com/ ?

Sounds like a classic dropship industry imo. You are going to be going after super slim margins against people spending 90% of their budget on marketing/ advertising and squeezing out any edge they can find.

Def research the industry well and see if you think you can realistically compete before wasting your time.

Seems like it would be a very saturated market no? Kinda missed the bus on that one I think, could be wrong though.

Thanks for the replies guys. And yeah, you all are probably right in that the market is probably saturated and kinda tough to break into. I have already had some success in the gambling affiliate market, which many would say is pretty saturated. Now this can off course be attributed to luck, which it probably is, but it's not impossible to make it happen I guess.

Now that you say it, it seems very obvious :P This will all be done online, and I hold all the expertise there, they will simply bring the capital, which thinking about it isn't all that much. Now, if they are eager to learn the business and help out, that could be a possible scenario.

Well, not necessarily, but there is still room for more than one online shop right? I understand what you mean in that the competition will be pretty tough in this market, so maybe I should focus on a set niche of items?

Maybe we could start out making the site an affiliate site for other stuff, just to check if we actually know what we are doing?

My belief as well, but I will have to see how set the other guys are.

We are meeting tomorrow, and I will try persuade them not to try to this, to see if they really have set their mind. Also, would love to talk to the guy who had this success to try to gain some insight as to why and how.

Check out eldorado for supplier information...

The whole industry is dropship dominated, very tough to break in to. I was gearing more towards the womens ****erware parties than I was online sales. I figured I might as well look in to the online portion (still own my domain name). The markup is awesome if you can create a niche (see: Pure Romance), but if you're just a run of the mill adult toy vendor online, you might as well just be lighting money on fire.

A few people have PMed me regarding building iPhone apps a while back. If you're looking to build a good app, PM me.

I have 24 bitcoin related domain names. I'm unsure how I want to proceed. Potentially sell them, potentially run legit businesses, or potentially have 'blog' type sites with ads.

Right now I'm leaning towards the third option because it requires the least amount of day-to-day maintenance. Just need to get them up and running and hope there is some profit coming in. I don't think right now is the ideal time to sell a domain, although bitcoinwallet.com just sold for $250k. My domains aren't nearly that good.

I guess I should read this whole thread over the weekend to see about the best way to get some basic sites set up to start running ads.

^^ ppl like you are what I hate about trying to be a web dev, holding meaningless domains in the scope of things you can possible do with it in hopes of extorting people for insane prices when they want to have a relevant domain name for their (insert awesome business idea). Makes the barrier of entry to be competitive so much higher for the average joe/new guy trying to start a web biz and doesn't have 250k to drop on a domain name and is just so absurdly douchy. You sir should be ashamed of yourself

I disagree. As I said, ideally I'd like to run my own businesses out of them. At this point I don't have the technical know-how, nor any capital to do so. I have free weekends to learn and put in time. I have a couple ideas, it will just take some time to get them going. Domain sitting was not the goal behind purchasing them. Ideally I'd like to run a combination of: a) product-based sites, b) crappy ad-based sites, c) not-for-profit sites.

If however someone makes a reasonable offer for one of the domains I would sell it.

Yea so douchy. I mean its almost as bad as promoting an online poker site that is scamming people for your own gain. You sir should be ashamed of yourself. Ducwidt?? Gtfo

If anything, the third option requires the most effort. Traffic doesn't just magically appear because you have 'bitcoin' in your domain and some ****ty articles from elance. Those days are over. If you want traffic, you need good backlinks and if you want recurring visitors you need quality content.

Very few people can grind out quality content, day-in and day-out. And you're not going to get quality backlinks if you don't have quality content.

My guess is that you're overestimating the value of your domains. If you want to get a feel for value, list them on Flippa. For $20 (or whatever their listing fee is for domains) you will see how many people are watching your auction and whether you get any bids at all. Bitcoin domains are hot right now so it is a pretty good time to try to sell.

Hot right now yes, but I can only imagine they'll be much hotter in the future.

I don't even know what backlinks or so i'll definitely need to read this thread and probably did overestimate the ease and profitability of a crappy ad site.

You know I left a while ago and didn't take a dime for 6 months+ right? Thx for opinion tho


That's fine I but domains I think I might use as well and sometimes don't get around to building them, I do think in a general sense domain squatting is the equiv. of patent trolling and is super bad for the web in general, let alone the people who would benefit most from having reasonable domains be normally priced/not held out for a huge rape

Buying domains is like buying plots of land. Just because you have 25K for a plot of land doesn't mean you have 500K to improve it and make money. Nor does it mean you have the operational howto, even if you did have 500K to spare.