Case Study: Dire Wolf Site Flip

The blog got a redesign, a new premium wordpress template free of charge thanks to Deniz at Awakening, thanks a lot I really like the theme and hope that my readers do as well.  Anyways I have fully moved into my dorm room, my class’s start in four hours and I am excited.  I will give you guys a report of my first day of class’s tomorrow.  As for this case study, I hope to present an accurate depiction of how I flip sites and what it takes, I will tell you everything that I did in my last site flip and show you how you can start to make you’re first bucks online.

I got the idea to make a Dire Wolf site from a history channel show featuring prehistoric predators, there I was sitting in my living room with my laptop open browsing the television.  I saw the history channel program and got interested, I watched for a while and at the first commercial break I searched SEOBook for Dire Wolf, and Dire Wolves.  The search volume turned out relatively high, higher than I usually chose for micro niches but I thought I would give it a whirl.

I used blueprint to get an easy CSS layout for my template, you can either go with CSS or wordpress for these kinds of sites.  Usually I have picked CSS as it is easy to create and offers relatively easy control over ad placement, but the last few sites I have chosen wordpress for its ease in adding content and the made for AdSense templates that they have.  Anyways I got the layout up and running, you can find it here.  Of course I bought a domain, dire wolf.com was taken so I had to settle for www.dire-wolf.net, not my first choice but it will due.  I got the layout all made and now I needed a banner, I searched Flickr for Dire Wolf to get some free images that could be used.  I found one suitable and created the header in a couple of minutes in photo shop.

Now I have mentioned this before, but I do not believe that I have gone into great detail about this common effect of advertising on the web.  The term is called Banner Blindness and it refers to using a bright banner so that the reader will be confused and think that the ads are plan text, thus clicking on them and giving you money.  That is why we make the ad text colors similar to the rest of the site, to induce banner blindness.  This technique is commonly practices and is known by most SEO’ers, that is why I use bright banners that attract the readers attention.

After getting the banner up, the next step is adding content.  Now I went to SEOBook and Google Keywords Tool and found the most common searches related to anything Dire Wolves, this is to create the pages that I will fill with content.  I wanted to come up with around 6-10 pages, and came up with the following:

• Dire Wolf Information
• Dire Wolf Discovery
• Dire Wolf Hunting
• Dire Wolf Fossils
• La Brea Tar Pits
• Dire Wolf Extinction
• Dire Wolf Pictures
• Dire Wolf Products
• About the Site Owner

The last two are just fluff pages, the Dire Wolf Products page is loaded with affiliate links to amazon items that hopefully people will purchase, thus giving me a cut of the cheese.  The last page ‘About the Owner’ is just made up to create one more page to the site.  The navigation isn’t ordered in any particular way, and was produced through the most sought out terms related to Dire Wolves.

Next thing is to add the content, I do most of my research through the Internet, ironically using google to find the information.  I searched through about 20 google pages to find relevant information that I could put onto the site, here are the websites I used.  Once I found one I bookmarked it so I could keep it for later use:

• http://www.naturalworlds.org/wolf/history/Canis_dirus.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_Wolf
• http://faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/bstud/direwolf.html
• http://www.tarpits.org/education/guide/flora/wolf.html
• http://www.ansp.org/museum/leidy/paleo/canis.php
• http://www.itsnature.org/rip/recently/dire-wolf/
• http://www.cosmosmith.com/dire_wolves.html
• http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/paleontology/45065
• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_Dire_Wolf_become_extinct

I then began to read the pages, compiling information.  I always start out reading the wikipedia page to get a general jist of the topic, it is good for doing that but for detailed information.  Afterwards I began to scour the pages finding any useful and exciting information possible.  I tried to make each page from 350 words to 600, and that I did. I produced the pages needed for maintaining a good site, and then was done producing the content.  This portion is the most difficult and usually takes me a day or two, a day if I buckle down.

The hardest part was over with and now time for a little SEO, I gave the page a good wikipedia back link for link juice.  Although you wikipedia is no follow you can still get good traffic from wikipedia, although the links are hard to maintain.  I submitted the site to the familiar social bookmarks, and then let it sit for a while.  Since I intended to resell this site I didn’t do very much SEO back work.  Although I did start to remove some links to the Dire Wolf wikipedia page intending to rank it down in the search engines.  I got caught by a moderator and he promptly told me to stop doing that, in return I edited his page with some explicitives, haha.

The next step was to make the sell, I decided to sell over at DigitalPoint.  The first time around I did not receive any bids at all, but no matter, be patient and you will get a sell soon enough.  After re posting for a second time I got a BIN for $80, not bad for a website with very little time spent.  The second time around I made the thread a bit more flashy and added an image to catch the readers eye:

This seemed to work as I got a seller relatively quick.  I also put a call to action in the post, which basically insights the buyer to buy immediately saying that you are thinking about not selling or something like that.  It is a common technique by advertisers everywhere.  In the thread I mentioned the premium wikipedia link and told them that I had gotten a few clicks, I advertised the site as a micro niche with no competition.  I started out with a $50 dollar bid, and a $130 dollar BIN price, which is what I usually use on all of my sites.  After lowering the BIN price a few times someone bought the site, and I was $80 dollars richer.

I hope that this case study helped out all of you inspiring entrepreneurs out there,  I defiantly would have loved to have something of the sort when I first started SEO work.  Anyways stay tuned for more, and please do subscribe if you found the information useful.