Part of my evil plan for world domination involves creating little useless websites to try to generate extra income. I put together a few of these crappy little sites about a year ago. I filled them with advertising, some bland copy, and left them to pasture. So far I’ve generated about $50.00 through Google Adsense clicks. Fifty bucks a year… hmmm… not great.
I know the “If you build it, they will come” philosophy to web development isn’t worth much, so I didn’t expect these site to do much. The time has now come to feed and water these sites to see if they can really become a source of extra income. The first site that I plan to focus on is the one that has gained the most organic traffic, www.licensetogrill.net. This site gets the most traffic because of a Food Network show that goes by the same name. I’m not sure if the show is still on the air, but I’m still getting traffic from people searching for it.
My plan of attack for this site is to try to make a social networking site for the barbecue inclined. I want to post interesting articles, recipes and tips. I’d also like a recipe ratings board and a forum. The content is one issue. Where do I come up with the content? I have some ideas, but I’ll have to get back to that. The other issue is code-base. That one is a little easier.
I plan to use Joomla for the CMS. Joomla is an open source CMS built in PHP. It appears to have all of the functionality that I’ll be looking for. The next hurdle is to figure out how to customize the Joomla interface so that it’s attractive and functional for my needs. If I can figure this out for my grilling site, then I’ll be able to apply this idea across the board with my other sites. It’s clear that an adsense farm will not produce much income without a compelling reason for users to visit. This is the challenge.