I've been lamenting about the miniscule traffic at my Field Of Dreams and the time, effort and funds I've put forth to get it to where it is today. I coded it from scratch not knowing a thing about HTML. (I need to thank the ASP.NET forums profusely for all the excellent hacks). I thought now might be a good time to do a little introspection and consider what the next prudent step should be. I'm not asking for your sympathy but rather your comments and whether your experience has been similar to mine. First, the finances. Domain Registration: $12.95 for one year Web Hosting: $590.00 for one year Visual Basic.NET book: $20.00 CSS Book: $40.00 Javascript Book: $40.00 Visual Studio for Web Developer Express: Free download, courtesy of Bill Gates Third party web controls: $800.00 CSS consultant to spiffy up the site for me and have it render correctly in all browers: $1,800.00 GoDaddy SSL Certificate: $36.00 for two years Google AdWords all time: $2,253.58 (@$10.00/day budget) The total hard cost as of today is $5,592.53. Next, the time. I estimate that I spent over 800 hours coding, setting up the SQL database and making the site function to my specifications (a conservative number to be sure). At a beginner VB programmer prevailing wage of $20.00/hr, my soft cost is $16,000. Being that I worked on this puppy as a hobby for my own amusement, I consider my fee to be pro-bono. However, I did treat myself to countless six packs of Budweiser Select and cartons of Camel Lights during the dark moments of "tags not well developed", onery connections to the remote database at the hosting site and the painfully mollasses-slow performance of my 512K RAM workstation. Finally, the effort. Coding ain't easy at t'all when you don't know squat about HTML, VB or SQL. Nevertheless, through brute force I persevered with the help of the beer, nicotene and aforementioned forums. All I can say it that I put in the hours to make this thing go and then some. I wasn't going to let this quest get the better of me. In my humble opinion, making money in this cut-throat industry is difficult, if not impossible just due to the obscene number of sites trying to compete for traffic, hence the dollars. There are some of you out there that are exceptions, but the reality is that the vast majority of publishers (including yours truly) will never make a reasonable income from their sites. I created mine for fun and accomplished what I set out to do. I did incorporate some AdWords Link Unit javascript onto one aspx page out of the 20 or so total pages at my site but this is really nothing more than gravy. I guess the next step is to keep my day job and have another beer and cigarette.
Well ... in the online field you don't have to start that big to achieve something start it small and develop it with time
wow, i spent $10 for a domain, and $10 a month for hosting, and just grew with that. A lot easier that way. Sure, my sites weren't that fancy to begin with, but not I make a decent amount and have some sites I am proud of.
BlueCars - when it comes to business on the internet, you can really spend a lot of $$ and time digging the hole to find the treasure at the bottom...I hope you are digging in the right spot. Did you leave out the expense for Unique Content???
Bluecars, it sounds like you started a really good hobby. Like many hobbies, they cost money. Take golf for example. My neighbor golfs 3-4 times per week and with green fee's, clubs, and golf cart he spends around 5-8 thousand per year. I also fish, spent 18,000 on my bass boat last year, that with all my rods and tackle, well....lets just say my wife does not need to know the total. Im just saying that its a hobby and you have to think of it that way. If your hobby makes you a small or large return on your investment, then you will be way ahead of me and the 7.6lb bass I caught last year. btw give up the url, sounds like you worked hard on the site, show it off.
The lesson to be learned here is that you are just getting started into something new, you better take it easy and grow it slowly. I mean, you don't learn how to drive wtih a Ferrari! You spent too much money for hosting for once. Start with some cheap hosting at less than $10 a month until you actually have a site with more than a couple of visitors a day. Paying for books is not a bad idea but you can learn HTML and CSS online for free. Coding a site from scratch yourself, even though it can be rewarding, as you found out it is very time consuming and in the end you might have to pay a pro to fix it for you; and they charge a lot don't they? You could have started with a simple Wordpress or Drupal site as you get comfortable with HTML, CSS and other technologies. That said, I hope that your site will take off soon and pay off for all your hard labour and money invested. So, care to tell us what your site is? Cheers!
Wow that's a lot of money to spend on a site. You probably could've gone to somewhere like RentACoder.com and had the whole thing put together for $1,000 - no books needed, no CSS experts, no 3rd party controls. You don't HAVE to spend money to get stuff done on the internet. There is almost always a free way of doing things, especially things like traffic generation. $590 a year for hosting? Check out http://IncredibleWebHosting.info It's about $70 a year. So what are you planning with the site next?
I post on a forum to earn my domain, paying for hosting 5$ per month (reseller), installed wordpress and learning things like php online.... It is not a "Field of dreams" but it is not 5k either p.l.u.r.
Oh man!!! You have spent way to much money on this thing as a starter. I spent €2,50 (that's $3) on my first hosting per month, and got a domain name for free. The books you bought are probably a good investment, although most of the information in there is probably somewhere free on the Internet. But, what you really screwed yourself on was the third party control (come on, do you really need that?) and the AdWords campaign. I think, in the end, you should have started smaller, and should have invested more time searching for free or cheap products instead of the things you paid. For a hobby, you do need to spend money, but you spent too much for too little return.
I started small, cheap domains, hosting etc, and its now starting to pay for itself (only just at present.) But I also spent £5000 (about $9500?) on a home learning course that I have hardly even started... Once I have done the training, I will have good knowledge of php and other stuff, but I have since found out I could have learnt it all for free online. Stick at it though, if you have chosen a niche you are passionate about, I'm sure you can recover your costs and turn a profit. Good luck, and keep us updated on you progress! DD
Hi everyone, I want to thank all of you for your wonderful responses and insightful comments. The site is: w_w_w_.j_o_b_s_c_a_p_e_.n_e_t and it’s a free job posting portal. I’d like to clarify the costs involved so you’ll have an understanding as to why I spent so much on this site. The web hosting fee is approximately $50.00/month because I have the use of a stout industrial-duty SQL2000 database on the hosting servers; their basic package doesn’t include any databases at all. I used a free Mollio template in the beginning but the site wouldn’t render properly in Firefox, Opera, Mac and other browsers so I hired a professional web designer to create from scratch a brand new CSS file for me so the site would behave like it should in all browsers. He also designed the logo and cleaned up all the broken HTML tags. The third party datagrid control is more flexible and dynamic with its AJAX functionality than the standard VSDWE datagrid, so I chose to use this control on my site. The ASP.NET forums were of invaluable service to me. From that online community, I found and incorporated into my site the zip code scripts, a script to convert web addresses into hyperlinks and others. But for all intents and purposes I built the site from scratch and wrote the code all by my lonesome. Once the site was up and running, I decided to market it using Adwords. As you can see, the landing page has zero content (zilch, zippo, nada); without content there is little hope of getting indexed with the major search engines. It’s a price I must pay in order to maintain a clutter-free and elegant site and I’m okay with that. I don’t want to compromise the easy navigation and clean design. The site is not unique; there are many other free job posting sites on the internet. Nothing differentiates mine from the rest. My intent was to provide a service and an alternative for people seeking employment and I think I’ve met that intent. This is my first and last attempt at web programming, by the way. Once again, thank you all for responding. Ed P.S. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask all of you for your input to make the site better than what it is. What additional features/text/functions would you as the user want to see? Is there something that detracts you? Do you have any general recommendations? How would you market it above and beyond Adwords? Your comments are greatly appreciated. _____________________ "Tell me all your thoughts on God" - From 'Counting Blue Cars' by Dishwalla
I'd like to addend my postscript if I may. P.P.S.: I have no trouble getting people to post their jobs on the site (almost 8,000 job posts in the last 6 months, nothing to write home about but there IS interest out there). I'm having trouble getting job seekers to view the job listings. They don't know that the site exists which is populated with real and legitimate jobs. Any ideas as to how to get the word out to the masses?
I would suggest that you try some offline marketing such as buying a small ad in a local newspaper. Also, you might want to consider adding a blog to the site (say about how to prepare a cover letter, prepare for an interview, tips for finding the best job etc.) This might bring you some traffic from the search engines and maybe get you some link bait. Is there any way for the search engines to index the jobs posted on your site? I can't find an option to browse the jobs without searching first. If there are 6,000 posts and Google cannot find them, then your site looks like a single page when it should look huge! BTW, I visited your site and I thought that it was nice looking and clean but I would have liked to have seen some of the available jobs on the landing page. Say for example, you can show the 10 newest jobs and/or allow the visitor to select a category and see the 10 newest job postings for that. Also, maybe a few examples of the most popular searches on the site would give people a hint about how to search for jobs.
I mostly agree. Some websites of mine probably needs quality links (PR4+) to achieve greater ranking and more traffic. But, I'm not sure if I put 500$ yearly for it would it worth, so I'm waiting some time
i would like to suggest you should talk with local business and ask them to post their jobs on the site. contact local newspapers agenies. have a PR released talk with tech magzines. You wont get traffic unless you have thousand of jobs posted.
Hi Bluecars, you seriously need to add more to your home page find a way to have a blog attached where you can have industry trends linked to the front page, this is very good for the search engines and if you become a slight news set-up it will draw people to return to your site. Good luck