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Assuming this is to make some actual money, and not just a proof of concept -- sites like this live or die on the strength of their SEO. People need to find it
by gyardley 15y ago
Assuming this is to make some actual money, and not just a proof of concept -- sites like this live or die on the strength of their SEO. People need to find it when they're searching Google for storage products.
You need an individual product page with its own URL for every item, and you need a strategy for getting inbound links, including to those deep product pages. You need content on those pages - reviews and ratings (scrape Amazon, maybe, or product catalogues).
In other words, to make some cash out of this (and the five gajillion other sites you could set up in other niche verticals), you have to content spam the holy hell out of the Internet. Not something friendly to the HN crowd, but that's what works.
Once you've done that, and you have some traffic, you can sell CPC traffic to online stores in exchange for favorable placement. And once you've done that, you're probably making enough money to start measuring the expected value of a user for each inbound search term and buying more, paid traffic - especially when your SEO doesn't have you in position #1.
And then you'll have a comparison shopping site, which can print money - until Google updates its search engine and pulls the rug out from under you. Print the money, but put it in your pocket.
Immediate steps for expanding your product selection / hopefully making more cash - most of the major comparison shopping sites today have affiliate product feeds.
- palish 15y agoThank you very much! "content spam the holy hell out of the Internet" How? (In what way would you go about doing that?)
- gyardley 15y agoWell, back in the day, it was stuff like setting up blogs that linked back to your site, making somewhat-relevant blog comments elsewhere, submissions to directories, issuing 'press releases', making forum posts (especially with signature links), making somewhat-relevant contributions to wikis, 'contributing' to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, providing somewhat-relevant answers on Yahoo! Answers, you get the idea. If you could stick a link in it, you stuck a link in it. For all I know any or all of these tactics could currently be the search engine kiss of death - so don't do any of them without doing your research first. Search engines have probably gotten a wee bit smarter. The other, more ethical way to do it is to produce great content (reviews, tutorials, photo shoots, etc.) that people might actually want to link to of their own free will, but this is time-consuming and hard to scale up.