I purchased a website not sure what to do

RL,

This is a nice first venture. But there are 2 holes in your plan.

First: automation.

The only way to achieve close to what you want is semi-autopilot:

1. Virtual staff for social media management and website updates.
2. You manage the staff.

And if you're on a relatively small budget, this won't be possible.

The alternative would be to manage user-submitted content, but you'll need traffic in order to encourage their involvement, and even then you'll be required to manage operations.

Second: lack of niche.

The market is saturated with tough competitors. In your shoes, I would likely scrap the domain, try to flip it on Flippa or NamePros, and go niche, instead.

Example: 10 Ways.

10 Ways is a similar business model, but in this case they're specializing in ways for British students to save money, mostly by updating their audience on time-sensitive offers.

They do it fairly well, too. Close to half a million followers on FB is the "fairly well," but where they fail is utilizing other avenues of social media and directing traffic to a decent website with optimized email and social capture and social sharing integrations. They could, in short, be doing a great deal better.

Point is, though, you can learn from them. Specifically: identify an evergreen niche with a core audience in desperate need of your information, and provide that information without any cost to the audience, yet monetizing of course.

I recommend you keep this project super simple, RL, with it being a first venture.

• Identify a strong niche.
• Reverse engineer competitors in that niche or similar niches, in order to learn from them.
• Setup a simple yet professional-looking website, where you integrate strong social sharing and following functionality, as well as email capture.
• Setup key socials (Facebook being one).
• Brand your socials.
• Link your socials (to the website).
• Grow your socials.

The key to this working well, RL, is niche selection. You get that right, your efforts should be worthwhile. What you don't want to do is devote time and money to a project (even a learning experience project) without first knowing that your efforts at least have a chance of paying off.

Best of luck, and remember to have fun. When you have fun in IM, you generally do well.

- Tom

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your detailed reply I really appreciate and the more I thought about it like you articulated the more I see that it would be difficult and the market is saturated with the big players and in all honesty probably better of working on other methods to make money online first.

As the site is about holiday deals do you think there is a niche in reaching out to the smaller players in the Australian market maybe even local independents who offer amazing holiday experiences within Australia but not necessarily are well known or have that reach on the major websites and might be unknown to potential tourists but are probably better experiences then staying in a 5 star hotel in Sydney.

So instead of focusing on a hotel deals in a major city we focus on as an example an Australian outback experience with 4wd safari where you visit hot springs and lagoons?

Again not really sure if this could be a one man job that just runs as a blog style / promo offer but maybe focus on advertising some unique / unknown Australian holiday destinations I'm happy to outlay a little money like $500 for content to be written etc. again this might not be enough.

I'll try keep thinking of ideas I know one will come to me eventually but if nothing happens still happy to sit on the domain for a while

Good example of a holiday location might be like from the Crocodile Dundee movie (if your seen it) a safari to walkabout creek where you wrestle crocodiles lol

RL

good luck with this bro, have you done any research into this, as there are lots of sites here in Australia that are authority sites, It all sounds easy to make a website and make money from it lol far from the truth, How old is this domain you bought hope it is not sandbagged, how many back links dose it have what is its Alexa ranking, what platform are you going to use, etc etc etc then you need traffic...

You can fully automate it using a deal scraper script

That solves your content issues right there.

Tie this in with a 'notify me of deals' automated email system and you solve a large chunk of your traffic problems as well.

Best automated income system. You can also do classifieds this way.

The key is to have many sites generating a small amount of cash each.

Gather all that cash and you're looking at a nice river of income. You earn money while you sleep.

One warning though: Make sure to upgrade your scraper cuz content sources update from time to time and send back junk info.