Friday, May 22, 2009

The Fully Automated Website

There are many strategies to monetize websites (making money out of websites). However, the most effective way is to make the website do all the work. Namely, automation.

Websites the likes of 6alabat.com and similar shopping and delivery websites are a good way to make profits. But you must provide services, maintenance and delivery operations, which are costly. This is not what I want. I want to make a website and totally leave it for years, while it continues to make profits. I can do that with scam websites, like registering the domain gogle.com (notice the missing 'o') and fill it with ads for all those who mistype the word google. But I don't want to do that also. I want people to benefit from it and that will make them come again and tell their friends about it. So it must be also useful.

Also, the last thing I need is a running cost for the website. Hosting the website and registering domains can be very expensive if I don't shop around for best deals. Never go to a local company for web hosting and design. They will charge huge amounts of money for few man hours of work with free open-source web applications, pre-made templates, and slow locally hosted servers. You can find online retailers who charge $20 for the whole thing but you have to do it yourself.

So the website must be automatic, useful, and cheap. Add to that some paid non-intrusive ads and a nice design and you're set to go.

We use automated website everyday without knowing. Fully automated websites require minimal intervention once its off and running. I strive to come up with ideas to develop such website. The kind of websites where you "set it and forget it." My first inspiration to this idea was Google News and then came Techmeme, a technology news aggregation website. The owners of these sites rarely even look at them once in a while. Techmeme recently hired the site's first editor, three years after launch! The editor's job is to visit the website once a day (from home) and promote news stories to the top of the page if he thinks they're important.

Techmeme attracts adds from companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Adobe. The owners have three more similar websites aggregating politics, baseball and celebrity news, and I imagine more websites coming very soon. Because once you create an automatic website for a specific topic, you can copy it for other topics and attract even more people and serve more ads.

Step 3: profit!

3 comments:

  1. Here is a great automated Kuwaiti site:

    http://www.alzebda.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. 3ayal check voteforkuwait.com and deera-chat.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. ok ? then you are still looking for it or u have an idea on ur mind?

    ReplyDelete