For Sale: Historical Site, Great Niche!

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Name: The American Civil War Photo Database

Description: Contains over 2000 photographs taken during the war, indexed and searchable.

Age of Site: Started in early December 2005!

Reason for sale: I need cash fast to invest in another project (videogame website)

Traffic: 90,000 pviews/January ; already 40,000 pviews/February 10!

Strengths of site: High quality one-way incoming links from directories like DMOZ, YAHOOLIGANS, YAHOO!, Wikipedia, and several universities. Great niche, little competition. Works well with AMAZON because most users are educated and well-read. ZERO EXPENSES (other than typical hosting).
Important info to know: Overture says top keyword ad starts at .40 cents. Wordtracker says that the phrase “Civil War” is searched over 11,460 times a day!!! Compared to the keyword “baseball”, Civil War gets searched more than and nearly as much as “basketball”! An undiscovered niche?

Weakness: Near empty forum, no Google PR – but keep in mind this is because the site is still brand new!

Advertisements, Revenue and SEO info:​

DMOZ: Listed

YAHOO! Directory: Listed

Yahooligans: Listed

MSN: #1 for “civil war pictures”

Google: Too early

Other high-quality links: civilwarclipart.com, jewish-history.com, civilwar.com, dsu.edu, wikipedia (lots of traffic here), usma.edu, civilwaralbum.com, unt.edu, and many more.

Adsense: $20/December (first launch), $12/January, but already $6 in February 10, 2006

Amazon: averages $50 quarter (a guess because quarter not over yet)

Casale Media: $26 in January; $12 in early Feb 2006

Notes: Now, I’d like to make one thing clear—this is very important. 100% of the photos on this website are in the public domain. This means that you can sell, modify, publish, etc do whatever you want with them. Not many other sites out there can claim this. Another important thing to know is that EVERY photograph on the website has a keyword/description with it. Google is sending me traffic from phrases like “lynching”, “Lincoln assassination”, etc.

Secondly, I am getting lots of emails from teachers/educators thanking me for this website. They said it’s making their research much easier when discussing the Civil War subject with their students.

Thirdly, I get lots of requests from people asking to buy photographs! Remember, since this is a public domain site, you can do whatever you want—sell them and make a profit.

URL: http://www.civilwar-pictures.com
Price: $500 or best offer.

You can PM me or email me at:

Thanks!

 

Wow this is a nice site. Good luck with the sale. I wish I had the money for it.

 

Great Site - Great Content - Best of Luck for the Auction

 

nice site. heh i like it but looking for something bigger.

 

Bed time, will answer any other questions or posts in the mornin' . Night all!

 

When will this auction close?

I do not want to place a bid in an auction that never ends.

 

Well good morning to you too!

It will end once I reach a price around $500-600.

 

Hi bid of $500 received. Will close tonight (10pm Central) if none higher is received.

 

Where did the pictures come from, is there a CMS backend? How is the site setup? Database?

 

Very nice site. I see the yahooligans, dmoz and wiki listings; I can't find the yahoo! directory however.

 

PM sent - waiting for reply

 

Buckyo, you appear correct. I don't know what happened, but I could have sworn I was in Yahoo! directory. Maybe they won't let you be both in Yahooligans and the Yahoo! directory at the same time?

Either way, I just checked and I am in the Google directory, instead. So, add Google's directory to the list of high profile directories that this site is in.

Also linked at gettysburg.edu (PR7) and images.google.com.

Here's the thing, I am having second thoughts about the sale now. The reason is because of the high number of one-way quality links and I am concerned that once it's out of the sandbox in Google, the traffic is going to surge.

 

I'll bid $550 on this. If you have a BIN and want to end it, feel free to PM me the amount btw, this URL is giving a 404:

http://www.civilwar-pictures.com/shop.php

 

Now, to answer my PMs and other questions in this thread:

Current private bid is at: $675 . Now, of course, if this person does not come through, or if the bid is increased, by 10pm CENTRAL tonight, it will go to the next highest bidder.

I have studied copyright law and have found that all of the images on my website are indeed in the public domain because they are government works AND are older than 70 years. That was one of the whole points in creating this website--I wanted to take advantage of this and just make a central place where people can search and download images from the Civil War. Aside from the Library of Congress, no other site has this many indexable/searchable photographs from the Civil War.

Some info about bandwidth and traffic from awstats:
Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2006 3839 5764 89563 400765 3.64 GB
Feb 2006 1928 2561 40818 180535 1.75 GB
*site in sandbox for Google search, but i'd say a top 10 listing when it comes out

Content Management System: I use menalto gallery to maintain the image gallery http://gallery.menalto.com/ . I've found them to be the easiest and most robust image system for my needs. The process is very simple: Just upload a photo as-is and then add the caption! That's all there is to it. If you're serious about bidding, I can even give you access to the gallery so you can test it out yourself. I know you will be very happy with it. I've used it for over 1 year now on other websites. A wordpress system is being used for the site's "latest news" page: http://www.civilwar-pictures.com/news/ I use this because it helps me anchor text target various albums and pictures in the directory. Remember, Google guy has claimed that this is a great way to get pages/photos listed. It appears to be working great.

Where did the photos come from? The photos come from a list of public domain sources available on the web. They are the result of weeks of searching and researching various libraries, universities, schools, etc. I made sure that I only copied that ones that were truely in the public domain. If you buy this site, I will give you the list of sites to find more photos from. However, I can tell you that I already milked most of them

Well, I hope that answers the questions so far. Feel free to ask more. You can also be assured that I am answering them honestly and truthly. Happy bidding!

 

Aside from the gallery, the rest of the site is pure CSS! Easy to maintain and customize to your heart's content. I also have the original PSDs used to make the site's theme, logo.

And....all content written on the pages are MY OWN WORDS. No worries about dupe content, etc. My #1 issue when creating the site was to safeguard against a DUPLICATION PENALTY. So, I can assure you that every caption, keyword, file name, article, etc on the site is 100% my own words. With my civil war background, I was even able to identify previously unkonwn photographs.

Sorry if I sound like I am over-selling, I am just real proud of this site and happy that I can finally contribute something for sale on this forum.

Lunch time. I'll check PMs, etc in about 2 hours.

 

Ill go $575 if the high bidder backs out.I may have missed this,but will you move site to winners server?

 

$725 bid from me...

 

Of course I would help move the site over to your server of choice. I'll be able to do anything you'd need.

By the way, I just received this PM in my inbox. I am sure that the sender would not mind me posting it, I thought it was a great post and I wanted to share it here:

"I just wanted to say the site is extremely beautiful and useful. To me that is what the web is about. To preserve history and share. I would buy the site not to monetize it but to offer a free resource for all students and teachers, advertising free."

This is the type of feedback that people have been sending me since day 1. To the bidder who wins: You will get emails like this once a week, if not more. I urge you to keep history alive.

 

I want to buy the site and monetize the hell out of it

Anyway, I like educational sites at the moment. 2 questions:

1. Where did you get these images from?
2. Do other sites have these images? If so, do you know any URLs?

Thanks

 

$800 from me.