Imagine what you can do with a website that is specific, just generic enough to get some interest from a number of directions, and yet it’s unbelievable that YOU got that website, that it wasn’t snarfed up years ago.
The answer is, of course, that it WAS snarfed up years ago — by me. I saw this coming, as you’ll note in “SlimeWars”, and predicted every single thing that’s happening now. It may be news to you, but it’s not news to me — it’s the same old story, told in a new way.
Okay, so what do we have here to work with?
A website, “vehiclecollector.com” is the starting point that I’ve selected for the purposes of this demonstration on how to connect a website to sales pages, to turn a domain name into a working selling website, to which we can drive customers for our products, and also perhaps a customer for the website itself.
So … what can we do RIGHT NOW to make that website attractive and money-productive?
To begin with, it’s just a name, just a blank page in the World of Nowhere.
There’s a specific PLAN involved here, and if you don’t follow it precisely, you will feel the pain. We can add as many selling sites and links to same as we wish, but let’s just start with the one that will yield the fastest results.
So here’s the $1 Million Dollar Cash Cow Rundown, FOR FREE:
- Buy a KILLER domain name, like “vehiclecollector.com”.
- Put up a website with that name, and get ready to work the index page a little.
- Start a zazzle account with that website’s name, minus the dot-com, as in, “Vehicle Collector”, related to the website, “vehiclecollector.com”. You don’t include the “.com” in the account name on zazzle or any other POD site, do you see?
- Go into Second Life and take some screenshots. Don’t change them, just take them in straight, into a specific folder, of course, so don’t just say “save”, say “save to”, get it?
- Use the graphics obtained in Sl to make four hot chocolate mix products, and put them on the front page. Go look at the website url and see the effect.
- Start to build a backstory with text on your website’s front page, and make sure the store info matches that story.
- Use a Second Life screenshot for your store BANNER graphic, and make it compelling and attractive, even seductive, drawing the customer into the shop by sheer fascination and curiosity.
- Now find as many items as possible already on zazzle that fit in perfectly or closely enough with your website’s theme.
- Okay, now start branding your stuff, to the point that you could walk into a local shop with one of your hot sauces, one of your chocolate mixes and one of your chocolate samplers and sell the hell out of them!
- Find something unique about your website and exploit that in the form of products on other POD sites — cafepress, redbubble and paom.
- Now list the site on eBay, along with 15 years worth of statistics and facts about the website. It’s not just a name, it’s a working business.
- While you’re waiting for a Big Sale, the sale of the website, for AT LEAST $500 or more, and maybe a LOT more, you might make some sales from the traffic you’re driving to the sales pages from eBay and related sites.
Where do we start???
So for “vehiclecollector.com”, how about a chocolate shop featuring auto graphics as a front page draw?
Well, that’s just for starters, because if you give it some reflection, you’ll realize in a split-second that vehicles are not limited to cars.
In fact, if you thought at all about it, you’d include boats, planes, motercycles and even skateboards, and that’s what I’m going to develop, is what I have available to me at this moment. Skateboards are a product you can actually offer on zazzle, did you know that?
But you start with a car, just one car. Start small. It’s a startup, and you have to start small, even if you have big capital, which nobody I know is able to manifest at the moment, so we’re at Square One, with a beginning concept and proof of concept plan.
Okay, so we get onto zazzle and start with the hot chocolates, just to get going and to give ourselves a good “hook” into the shop, which IS the point, even though ostensibly we’re trying to flip the website itself.
You can find hundreds of items that, if you stop to think about it, actually DO related to vehicles, especially to pictures of vehicles, and have you considered adding vintage photos of vintage cars, especially cars whose makers no longer exist?
I can see a line of graphics around carriages, stage coaches, covered wagons and even kiddie rides and toy “Matchbox” cars of extreme rarity. Not the things themselves, just a photo, the rights of which you totally own, or forget it.
It’s easy to get rights to photos, but be sure to actually DO it.
You can’t use photos of famous people, even if you have the photo rights and permission from them in writing. The POD sites just don’t want to take a chance. Of course, there are always plenty of people in deliberate or ignorant violation, usually it’s of the ignorant variety, as you’d expect with humans of Planet Earth.
Look what they’ve done to the environment, talk about stupid.
Ekkkhhh, don’t get me started. POD sites — POD simply stands for “Print On Demand”, which means you can order one item for the same price as if you’d ordered a thousand of them at a time, making this the first time in human history that you can start up a company with your own 150 factories turning out your custom products, as if you had millions of dollars of backing, but you don’t.
In fact, you might not even have the price of a meal, but you can still do this gig if you can scrape up the $8.99 for the domain name, and the $20 a month or so you might be able to pay to get it up and running as a website.
You’ll need a modicum of html, and if you can handle html5, so much the better. You won’t need much:
- <a href=”your url address here”>click here</a> will get your client to the page. Simply encapsulate anything you want to include, such as a graphic, inside the <a> and </a> set, see? You’ll note that the text “click here” is tucked in between the opening and closing remarks, get it? If not, you can ask at the ICW.
- <img src=”the url address of the graphic goes here”> where you put the image url address into the space between the quote marks. If this isn’t clear, be sure to ask about it at the workshop this morning.
Okay, if it’s about cars, what about putting up a series of interesting key rings? Sure, the new cars don’t have keys, but the old cars still do, and there are plenty of folks needing key rings and some of them might like a key ring with a vintage car theme, see?
Or how about a variety of water bottles, cups, mugs and flasks, featuring vehicle graphics? These can be absolutely stunning, such as a Zippo lighter with a Wright Brothers Airplane or a Saturn 5 Booster on it?
Or stationery featuring every kind of vehicle, motorized or self-propelled. There are literally millions of vehicles, so your problem is going to be not getting ideas, but limiting them to a manageable few that sell really well, because that IS the point.
Sure, the website should reflect what you like, your interests and your tastes. Go ahead and commit yourself to it, get into a frenzy about it if you wish, but always keep in mind that when you DO finally manage to flip the website, if ever, all they’re going to want is the domain name.
Within a few days, you won’t recognize your old site, nor will you want anything to do with it, once you’ve sold it.
The Plan is to Buy to Flip, Make it Market-Worthy, then Flip It.
That IS the whole plan.
It’s like real estate. Anyone not Eminently Un-Hip should be able to figure it out and wind their way through the basic concept, getting hold of it, wrapping the head around it, so to speak, grokking it, digging it, to wit:
BUY TO FLIP!
Look, this principle applies to everything from cars to houses to cell phones to equipment — you gotta be thinking of the value of a thing should you need to sell it on the open market.
If a thing loses half its value on the way out the door, like a new car does, then you have to be thinking you’ll keep it forever.
A house, you might decide to live in for the rest of your life, barring emergencies. A car you might also like to the extent that you don’t plan to ever own another car in this lifetime.
Oh, it suddenly occurs to me that I should perhaps have mentioned it ages ago, but you should only plan for the events of one lifetime at a time.
Never think so far ahead that you’re already looking at the next lifetime. If you were driving, you’d look a little ahead of you, not around the corner. Same with lifetimes.
You might also believe that you plan to keep the same doctor, dentist, lawyer, broker, accountant, parking attendant, and real estate agent, but don’t count on it. This never happens. Go ahead and plan for things to last forever, if you want to. Hold onto your home, your job, your lifestyle and your family for the rest of your life.
But this should not be true of a website.
While people are busy looking and thinking and considering and weighing the facts and their feelings and preferences and ideas about your website for sale, which they’re visiting because you’re driving them there from an eBay listing under “websites for sale”, they might just weaken for a moment and buy something, maybe a chocolate treat, maybe a pair of “vehicle collector” high-top runners, maybe they’ll find their way around on your selling page and find something totally unrelated.
Wouldn’t it be funny, interesting and ironic if the website started producing so well that you were now reluctant to sell it?
Well, hell, that’s a GREAT position to bargain from, don’t you see???
You never know whether anyone will buy anything or not, but one thing you DO know for sure is that if nobody ever walks into your store, either in-person or online, you won’t be selling much stuff. They gotta walk in the door in order to ring up a sale, don’t you see?
So how do you get them into your shop?
Well, first, you have to get them SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE, and then you can offer visual treats and the usual graphic and text seductions.
Sounds awful, when you lay it out straight, doesn’t it???
Well, can’t help that — marketing is marketing, and never the twain shall meet, or so they say they say.
Whether they actually say or not, I can’t say.
You need to drive them to your website and, once there, to your selling pages. This is not nearly as hard as you’d think, but you need to master and understand what net marketing is, and you’ll have to learn how to hook up all your marketing accounts, such as eBay, amazon, google, facebook, insta-gram, twitter and more, into one INTEGRATED whole.
Integration is the key.
So how to proceed? First of all, I’d establish in your own mind and expectations that most of the vehicles they’re going to see are actually screenshots from Second Life, GODD, or photos you took at the junkyard, or snapshots of your uncle’s second-hand car collection.
Laugh if you will, but I can see a profound marketing plan around nothing more than “Junkers” that LOOK amazing, but obviously are beyond driving.
Another possibility would be paintings, sculptures, and photos of vintage die-casts, but keep in mind that under no circumstances should the site actually sell cars.
If someone wants to sell automobiles on your site, dig in your heels and make them pay, and pay plenty, for the privilege. That’s a hefty domain name for a vehicle peddle, and that’s my point entirely.
When I buy a site to flip, I want a customer on the other end who can afford my price.
Okay, so put some screenshots or photos or graphics of some kind onto a number of items and get them into a collection on zazzle, then connect that collection up with the website, and write some backstory on the whole deal, and at that point, take a “Prt Scr” — which translates to “print screen” shots of your website front page and the front page of your zazzle collection page, and prepare to use them in your eBay listing, to show what the site looks like, more or less, and that there are sales potentials RIGHT NOW for that website.
The whole idea is to show that it is a working website, and that there is a concept behind it, with a marketing plan and a whole design level at their command, if they buy the website plus a store that you will develop for them in their name with their own accounts and access codes, which they change when you finish their account, see?
Or they might hire you on to flesh out the website and sales pages, and keep them up to date, which might be an attractive way for you to earn a few extra bucks on the side, although those jobs tend to be labor-intense and you do it as a favor, more than as a source of income.
If you want to attract folks, you can do this with graphics and text, but the best way to get attention to your website is to put your “for sale” listing on eBay — with of course the connections that eBay establishes with other sites such as google, without your having to do anything to make that happen — and drive folks there through that eBay ad.
Now, if you want to really get a large NUMBER of folks there, make the listing a 7-day auction, and give it all the spice you can. This will cost you about $50-$80 a month to make happen, and you might not want to spend that kind of money, but it is a great way to drive potential customers for product to a website.
If they immediately SEE something they want, or you can make them curious about something, they WILL click on it, and WHAM, you have them in your grubby little meat-hooks!
Sell, Sell, Sell. That’s the idea, in this particular TrumpWorld. You’ll need to Transcend, and fast, so get that Diablo 2 Magic-Find working!!!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby