I often think of my approach to site building as being like kite flying. I throw up plenty up in the air and if any start flying, then they get my attention and I then dedicate more time to them. Others fall by the way side and never progress further than the time it took to create them in the first place.

One site which has recently started flying is a site called Toys and Video Games, which I mentioned back in April when I developed it and made use of Amazon's Web Services. It was designed to hook up with the toy inventory of Amazon in the US.

After that initial development phase, which did take a couple of days whilst I got my head round Amazons Web Services and how I was going to make use of it, I've done hardly any work on the site at all except for add in a Transformers toy page and put a link to back packs on the front page for the Back To School period.

But despite it being left to its own devices (which thanks to the live product info through Amazon's Web Services is quite a reasonable thing to do), it has started to generate some very decent sales. Individual toys - and quite popular ones at that - have somehow ranked well within Google and Yahoo! and I've occasionally been knocked sideways after logging into Amazon Associates and seeing how many items a particular toy has sold in the previous day.

Whilst doing online marketing, the prospect of having a .com site, hosted in the US, promoting US products to US customers has always appealed to me (because of the size of the market) and I'm pleased that that's what I've got. So the site has shown me its potential so I hope to develop more actual content for the site before Christmas.

Labels: amazon, progress, update

With the end of 2006 approaching, it seems like the right time to reflect on what's been achieved in the last year.

Probably the single most successful online enterprise me in the last year was thanks to the browser, Firefox.

It just over a year ago - November 30th to be exact - that I was winding down for the evening and and suddenly had an idea for a website about Mozilla Firefox. It's no exageration to say that I had a domain registered and a small site ready to go within an hour or so. It's also no exageration to say that I've hardly had to do any work on the site since then - maybe another hour or so, here and there.

My intention was to pick up search engine traffic for a particular term including the word firefox. What I hadn't realised was that I was able to rank very highly on one search engine for the term "firefox" itself, which meant more traffic than I had anticipated.

Since that night last November, almost 10,000 people have downloaded Firefox through my site. When monetising sites works as brilliantly and simpy as that, this seems like the perfect job and if only every idea worked out as well, I'd probably be spending this Christmas on the beach somewhere.

Labels: adsense, firefox, progress