Unfortunately, most of these projects require lots of unique and well-written content. I don’t have the time or motivation to sit down and write all of this content on my own so I’ve been going with third-party service providers to lend me a hand. I think I’ve finally found a service I can rely on for all of my writing and content needs called Textbroker.

At Textbroker, you create an account and then build orders for pieces of content you’d like written. Your orders contain the individual topics you want written about, the expected word count and the quality of the writing you’re looking for. The pricing is based on price per word so higher quality content will be more expensive but have better style and grammar.

When you’re done entering in your specifics, the order is then submitted to the site moderators to be verified and added to the system. Once verified, your order is presented to all of the site’s registered writers who can then pick and choose what pieces of content they would like to write. When a writer is finished with one of your articles, Textbroker’s system emails you and then asks you to login to either approve the content or ask for revisions. It’s that simple.

In the interest of full disclosure, here’s a site I recently had built using content from Textbroker’s members: Vegas Casinos Direct

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A Decent Content Creation Service

Luckily, I found a guy in the UK who was wiling to write the player biographies for each of the clubs for a more than reasonable price. It was simply a matter of copying and pasting his content into my mashup CMS and the sites were live.

I normally don’t talk dollar amounts on this blog but a lot of people are curious what various projects cost so this time I’ll reveal that information. The biographies cost $30 per team. Add another $10 per team for the domains and the cost of each site was $40. I spent about an hour or two adding all of the content into my content management system to get the sites up and running.

So for $80 and a small amount of my own time, I expanded my sports network by two sites and also added an entire new sport to the coverage. I’d say that was an incredibly good deal.

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New Soccer Mashup Sites Launch

I’m a big fan of the mashup idea for two reasons: speed and simplicity.

Mashups Are Quick

I have a custom built content management system for my mashup sites but even if you don’t have that kind of programming knowledge making your own mashup site is relatively simple. There are so many widgets and free scripts to let you bring in fresh content that putting together your own mashup site should take no time at all.

Aside from the content from outside sources, my mashup sites also contain hand-written content that I have made unique for that site. Whether you write this content yourself or hire someone to write it for you is your decision to make. When I have the content in hand I simply copy and paste it into my CMS and the site is updated.

Mashups Are Simple

A mashup site isn’t a complicated e-commerce store, a frequently maintained blog or any other type of time consuming website. it’s really a simple content site that is augmented with automatically updating features to keep the site fresh with new content. How can it get much simpler than that?

It is that simplicity that makes it possible to produce, quite literally, dozens of these sites with little to no effort. For under $50 I can have all of the necessary content written for me and away I go. No fuss or hassle after I load up the site using the content management system.

The End Goal

The whole point of the mashup site, as with most things online these days, is to make some money. You can use something like phpBay Pro to add eBay listings to your sites like I do. I also include AdSense and sell private advertising on the sites when the time for that is right. It takes a bit of time but not a lot of effort to turn these sites into profit machines.

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Building Quick Web Sites With Mashups

Since the switch my stats are all over the place. One day I’ll have no clicks at all and then the next I’ll have 70+ on one site seemingly at random. The next day we’re back to no clicks.

I’ve read in a lot of other places that people are not happy with the numbers they’re seeing as well. They’ve reported this to eBay and have basically been told they’re wrong and that everything is going just fine. One of the big points of argument with affiliates seems to be the number of new signups they’re seeing. It just so happens new signups are one of the biggest money makers for affiliates but I’m sure this sudden drop is just a coincidence…

My eBay revenue was so small to begin with that I’m probably in no position to really argue but some of the bigger players in this field feel something is amiss. When enough people start to see smoke there probably is a fire.

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I Don’t Trust eBay’s New Affiliate Program

This site is actually built as a companion piece to all of the sports news sites that make up the Jack’s Sports Report network. Each one of the sports reports has team-based pages that previously contained a few links to related eBay auctions. Now with the Discount Sports Items I can cross-link the sites and offer visitors a wider variety of auctions to choose from almost seamlessly.

There wasn’t much effort involved in this new site since it runs on the same set of code that made Golfing Galaxy so quick and simple to setup. One of my big ideals whenever I do something is to build it in a manner that makes it easy to roll out similar sites quickly and efficiently if the idea behind the site proves to be successful. I’d already had a few conversions on the golf site and eBay listings on the sports report sites is proven to work so I’m optimistic for Discount Sports Items.

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One More eBay Site About Sports

Even though I gave up in January, I’ve still had my eyes open for any interesting golfing sites on the various auction forums since then. Finally, earlier this week, the waiting paid off.

The Key Is The Content

A golf blog at golfing-galaxy.com came up for sale at Digital Point. The site was running on WordPress and had 13 posts with unique content that added up to about 8,000 words. I ended up paying $65 for the site which averaged out to be just under one cent a word.

I already have a golf blog that’s doing quite well so the idea of starting another one wasn’t really that appealing to me. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to really get my hands dirty with the new eBay affiliate program.

phpBay Pro To The Rescue

My post on phpBay Pro as an alternative to BANS is probably one of the most popular on this blog. I thought buying and expanding Golfing Galaxy would be a great opportunity to really see what I could do with phpBay Pro and a really lightweight template/framework I’ve been developing for eBay affiliate sites.

You can see by visiting Golfing Galaxy what my template and framework does. The template is actually an open source one I discovered a commentator using on my original phpbayPro post. I took that template and built a site that is entirely powered by a simple menu file and some .htaccess tricks. Adding new manufacturers to the site is as trivial as adding one line of code.

Now The Fun Begins

With the site now updated and expanded it’s time to start building backlinks and getting some traffic. Hopefully this is where my current network of golf sites I’ve built from the ground up can really come into play. I’ll keep everyone posted in the future as to how things are going.

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Launching A New eBay Affiliate Site On Golf

Some of you might remember that I put my auction aggregator up for sale back on the 15th of February. I decided to list the site on the SitePoint Marketplace to see what kind of reaction it would get. I promised I’d give a recap when the site was sold and even though the sale only ran for seven days the site wasn’t officially sold and transferred completely to the new owner until March 31st.

It took me nearly six weeks to sell my site.

The Auction

The act of listing my site at SitePoint cost $20 and was a pretty painless process. I should note that I did all of this before their recent updates to the Marketplace so I can’t say one way or the other if the experience is any better.

Within about 15 minutes of posting my auction bids started to come in. In about two hours my (apparently very low) reserve was met and things just continued to escalate. At the end of the seven days it had basically boiled down to a three-man race for the site with the eventual auction winner taking it for a last minute bid of $900.

Sealing The Deal

Now that the site was “sold” the fun really began. The initial winner of the auction was pretty clearly in over his head. I suspected as much from his questions he asked during the seven day listing but he wasn’t in the running late so I didn’t think much of it. Until he made an 11th hour bid that won the site.

We went back and forth via private messaging at SitePoint about transferring the site. Then one day all communication just stopped completely. The winner had gone AWOL on me so now I was left with a finished auction and no buyer.

Reserve Champion

In the show cattle industry the second place winner is called Reserve Champion. Well, I decided that after my first buyer vanished I should contact the second place bidder and see if they were interested. Luckily for me they still were and even at the first winner’s final bid of $900.

And then this “winner” disappeared from the face of the earth as well. Once again I was back to where I started about three weeks after I listed my site for sale.

Finally, We Have A Winner

I was on SitePoint trying to contact the third place bidder (whom I would eventually find out no longer was interested) when I received a message from someone interested in buying the site if it was still available.

This buyer was not only interested in the site but he was committed to actually seeing the transaction through. What a pleasant change of pace for once.

I won’t disclose what the buyer paid but I will say it was less than what the site went for at SitePoint. After a week or so of sorting out some technical issues the site is now running smoothly for its new owner. And that’s the end of my experience with the SitePoint Marketplace.

If anyone reading has had a similar experience I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a comment about it.

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My Experience With The SitePoint Marketplace

• I finally found a newsletter winner for the Single-Use License of Adii’s Premium News Theme for WordPress. I had a really great response to that contest so I definitely plan on running another one soon.
• Along with client work I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new side project that, unfortunately, I don’t plan on discussing here in any great detail. It’s basically a brand new type of content management system I’ll be using internally to manage a network of sites my friend and I will be launching. Again, I’m dying to talk more about this but in the best interest of the project I’m going to remain silent.
• Thanks to this intense workload I’ve started to dip my feet into the outsourcing pool for some help. This is a topic I’ll definitely be writing about more in the future but probably in a more general sense. It’s been a really interesting experience so far and I’m looking forward to using outsourcing again very soon.

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Quick Hits From Jack’s Empire

So how do you use this as inspiration for your next web project?

The Secret

The sites that are doing well online are not being sold at Digital Point. Most people are selling their site on Digital Point because it’s an absolute failure and they want to get rid of it.

Look at what people are selling and if you’re considering doing something similar trash that idea immediately.

The seller will use excuses like he doesn’t have the time or doesn’t know how to promote it. Those are key phrases for “this web site is a failure.”

Examples of Bad Sites

The following types of sites are pretty commonly on sale right now. Avoid starting sites in these niches like the plague. They just don’t work.

• Image Hosting
• URL Shortening
• Sites with “Four Unique Sources of Income! Amazon, eBay, ClickBank and AdSense!”
• YouTube Video Aggregators
• WordPress Blogs Powered by Auto-Updating RSS Scripts

Those kinds of sites have been the main offenders for months now.

Examples of Good Sites

So those are the sites that aren’t apparently doing too well online these days. I’ll wrap this post up with a list of the types of sites you rarely see for sale. I take that as an indication sites of the following nature are reasonably successful for their owners:

• Established Blogs with Hundreds of Indexed Pages, Thousands of Backlinks and some PageRank
• Unique Content Sites in Niche Topics (again, with Indexed Pages)
• Membership Sites with Recurring Monthly Subscriptions

There are more, of course, but you’re going to need to do your own research. Again, use forums like the ones at Digital Point to find out what is and what isn’t working online. Most of the sites selling online just aren’t working which is why they’re being sold in the first place.

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Using Web Site Sales As Inspiration

The Stats

There are some good and some bad things to report about this blog’s statistics. For starters, the Alexa Rank has dropped to 135,680. Getting that score below 150,000 was one of my goals when I began a concerted effort to post more regularly here back in December. Mission accomplished.

I’m seeing around 150+ unique visitors come to this blog each day and the majority of those are from search engines. I think that has a lot to do with writing keyword rich posts and content on long tail topics. This site sees a lot of traffic to my posts on tech support problems and my programming examples. I have no opinion one way or the other if this is a good or bad thing in the long run so I’ll take a wait and see approach.

One disappointment here would have to be my stagnant RSS subscriber count. I won’t bother giving you the exact figures because they’re pathetically small and, quite frankly, I just don’t put a lot of stock in RSS counts to begin with. The actual number itself doesn’t bother me. What does bum me out a bit is how there doesn’t seem to be much growth from week to week.

Upcoming Changes: Subtractions

I’m going to be dropping my regular features on interesting links and the WordPress plugin of the week. This actually started this week as some of you may have noticed. My original intention with those posts was to make writing here easier but they ended up being more of a mental burden than I had planned.

Also getting the axe here is the Entrecard widget. In the last few weeks I’m seeing traffic from the Entrecard site dwindle into nothing as I’ve stopped actively dropping cards and buying my own advertising. I’ve also been noticing a pretty big difference between the Entrecard-related numbers I see on Google Analytics and the numbers Entrecard is reporting. It’s enough of a problem to cause me to decide to take the widget down.

Upcoming Changes: Additions

I’m going to definitely be posting more interviews with other web developers and freelancers who are doing interesting work. The interviews are personally some of the favorite posts that I do.

I’m going to write longer but less frequent posts as well. I like to ramble on (subscribers to Jack’s Newsletter should be painfully aware of that by now) about whatever topic is obsessively on my mind at the time and the traditional short-post format just isn’t well suited to that kind of writing.

I’m also tossing around the idea of adding some advertising options. I have the 125×125 banners on the sidebar but they currently go to sites I recommend or own myself. I might be offering those to the public sometime soon. The idea of doing paid reviews has crossed my mind as well but I’m not totally sold on that idea just yet.

Tighter Integration

The last thing I want to try to do applies to more than just the blog. I really want to make more of an attempt at unifying this blog, my newsletter and my WordPress themes site. I think the closer together I can tie all three of those sites the better chances of success they’ll all have.

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A State Of The Blog Address