“Even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”
~ Robert Burns

As you may have noticed, my self challenge of Creating and Selling a Site in 30 Days has stalled out a bit. However, despite a trip to PubCon in Las Vegas and back surgery earlier this week, I have managed to knock out two more tasks on the project plan that I’d like to fill you in on, creating content and choosing a WordPress theme.

Creating Content

Making a living by creating and selling sites is simply a matter of scale. You can obviously succeed by selling a single site for 5, 6, or even 7 figures but that’s not the only option. Even if you only make a hundred dollars per sale, if you stack enough of those sales together each and every month, you’ll have the financial success you’re hoping for. However, unless you’re a prolific writer and can crank out page after page of great content on all sorts of different topics, creating content for several sites at once is going to be a challenge for you.

For our case study site (RecessionEarning.com) I quickly decided to outsource the writing. While I know a fair amount about the economy and could write intelligently on the subject, I simply don’t have the time. Also, another goal I have for this project is to outsource as much of the work as possible, thereby proving not only that money can be made in a fairly short amount of time, but allowing me to focus my time where I’m most effective.

Unfortunately, this is where my best laid plans first went awry. I outsourced the content job to a company called Cyber Hub Online (when you piss me off, you get a nofollow tag on your link that’s just the way it is). They had been recommended to me by a fellow site flipper and their package prices looked great. I opted for the 5 article package for $15 and waited for the 48-72 hours to pass for delivery.

After a full week of waiting for the content I contacted CyberHubOnline and they promised me that my content would be in my inbox in less than 24 hours and that it was undergoing the final quality review. 48 hours later, I finally did have the content in my inbox but I’d have a hard time believing anyone reviewed it for quality purposes. I’ve published a couple of the articles on Recession Earning but I’ll have to go back and edit them later.

Chalk content creation up as one more area in life where you get what you pay for. I do have a couple more leads for higher quality copywriters that I’ll be trying out and reviewing in the next week or two. If you have any tips on other places to use feel free to let me know in the comment section below.

WordPress Theme

Once I had the first batch of content to throw on the site (even if it wasn’t what I would consider quality content) the next step was to settle on which WordPress theme to use. Aside from actually selling the site, this is probably my favorite step in the entire process. But, if you’re not careful, you can wind up spending a LOT of time playing around with all sorts of themes and before you know it you’ll have to make $1,000 from the sale to cover the time you spent messing with themes.

When trying to decide between themes, I use 4 main criteria to determine which I’ll use on any given project.

Design

Naturally you want to start out with a theme that looks good. A great site design can increase your sale price by hundreds if not thousands of dollars so do NOT make this decision lightly. If you’re a fan of any of those real estate rehab shows on TV, the outward appearance of your theme is your “curb appeal” and we all know how important that is. (They have a whole show dedicated to the topic for crying out loud!)

Flexibility

Having a theme that can be tweaked and worked to fit my needs precisely is critical. There are a lot of great looking themes out there but many of them are so rigid that you end up just keeping the default settings and your site ends up looking just like the hundreds of other sites out there using the same theme.

Ease of Use

While Flexibility and Ease of Use are very closely related, they aren’t the same thing. When I talk about Ease of Use I’m talking about how easy is it to insert an image into a post? How easy is it for me to swap out one ad for another? Is it a chore to edit the footer or to find where to drop a button to allow people to subscribe to the RSS feed?

Price

And last, but certainly not least, you have to consider the price. While it would be fantastic if you could afford a custom designed theme for each and every project, the simple fact of the matter is that 95% of the time, you won’t see a return on that investment. Also, while the developer licenses for themes might not have appealed to you previously, they can save you a lot of money in the long run, especially if you’re planning on buying and selling websites on a regular basis.

Using those 4 criteria I settled on the Thesis Theme by DIY Themes. I had heard a lot of great things about it’s flexibility and it definitely did not disappoint. There are more options in the settings panel than I ever thought possible from a WordPress theme and yet, it’s still pretty simple to use. They also allow you to upgrade to the developer license at any time after you’ve purchased the single use license (which is something I haven’t seen from most of their competitors). I don’t have time to do a full in-depth analysis of the theme, but if you still have questions about it go read Sugarrae’s review and you’ll be sold.

So there you have it, despite a few unplanned delays, Recession Earning is one step closer to completion. Even though these two tasks took more than a week to complete, when all was said and done I actually only used about an hour of my own time. Buying, installing, and tweaking Thesis was a snap. Surprisingly, I actually spent more time hounding CyberHubOnline to fill my order than I spent on all the other odds and ends for the site combined!

Expenditures

As I mentioned previously, the CyberHub articles were $15 and weren’t worth a penny more. For the purpose of the case study I used the $87 single license as the cost, but again, I highly recommend the multi-use developer license.

Obviously if you already own a developer license or a theme you’d like to use instead, you could avoid this cost. However, as I mentioned before, design is one area that you shouldn’t go cheap on. And, when listing the site I’ll be able to use the value of this premium theme as a selling point to drive up the cost.

Running Total: $110 and 2 hours

My two previous site sales have involved sites that I’ve worked on for a long period of time. One site was 8 months old at the time of sale and the other was nearly three years old. While I think selling older, more established sites will generally be my M.O. , I’d be remiss if I didn’t attempt to capitalize on the shorter term site sales as well.

The stark reality is that most people trying to make money online never actually succeed. There are a whole host of reasons, lack of effort, paralysis by analysis, information overload, etc. but the biggest culprit I’ve seen is lack of action. People won’t actually put the methods and information they’re learning into practice. With that in mind, rather than spending all my time planning, plotting, budgeting, etc, I’m simply going to jump in.

Also, there has recently been quite a bit of discussion that the market is saturated and/or that the economy has reduced the number of interested buyers for younger sites. To put it bluntly, I believe there will always be a demand for high quality, profit producing websites. Site flipping has been growing more and more popular over the recent months and unfortunately, I think many of the new recruits are focusing more on quantity, rather than quality.

So, over the next 30 days I’m going to be starting a website (likely a blog) from scratch, promoting it, monetizing it (as best I can in such a short time period) and then selling it off. Not only will 30 days give me a chance to really launch the site properly, but it will also allow me to list in the Established Sites section of Sitepoint when it comes time for the sale. The entire time I’m working on the new site, I’ll also be chronicling my efforts here so you can follow along and use it as a game plan for a short sale of your own. I’m sure I’ll make a few mistakes along the way (that I promise to share here) but at the end of the 30 days, I’m also sure that I’ll prove there is a large market for quality sites and make some money along the way.

How much? Well, you’ll have to follow along to find out…

• Day 1: Choosing a Niche & Finding a Domain Name
• Day 2: Creating Content & Choosing a WordPress Theme