The Challenge

How to build out and monetize a commercial ".com" domain. The requirements, though, stipulated that it should be operationally low in maintenance: how to run this site with minimal efforts in server maintenance, minimal work on new content creation, but maximum uptime and performance (both server and monetization performance).

The Solution

The project began with site architecture. This domain owner had no content yet at all, so everything was to be done from scratch. To begin with, it's a small site. At launch time, only 5 HTML pages were used (plus CSS and images). It's static content, so server performance can be optimized and server security risks greatly reduced.

Discussions led to a base content framework, write-ups for those first few HTML pages, and a search for relevant images. A VPS web server was built out at very low cost.

At first, the only monetization was the Adsense ads. But Search Engine Optimization factored in heavily in the plans (to drive traffic to the site).

This alone began to grow stale after the first several months. Next up: the 2nd release expanded to include more images, more relevant content, and importantly, the addition of affiliate marketing monetization. This was done through Amazon's affiliate network.

Results

The site "Ropeswings.com" is one of the leaders in its niche of yard and patio toys and furniture. The success has more than paid off the initial investments and further releases are planned. In spite of running very few content updates, the site has not lost its appeal with customers.

As originally specified, the uptime and server performance have exceeded requirements.