Hi all. Here is the second phase of "My Challenge - Part 1".
The first part of my challenge was to secure hosting and a domain name for a site within the diet industry. I chose to create a site based around dieting and snacking. Why did I choose that particular niche? I did so because I remember when I attended Weight Watchers a few years ago, that 98% of the discussion at weekly meetings centered around how people could still get their sweet cravings taken care of while staying on point with the program. It aways struck me as funny that the one thing that probably put a lot of people into Weight Watchers, snacking, was the one thing that no one wanted to do without. So I figured why not create a site around the issue which focuses on that desire while providing healthier alternatives. Whereby basically, you could have your cake and eat it too...
So I registered the domain name and secured hosting. I chose the address specifically (see sig) with those three key words because I feel that they represent the "nature" of the site and may help in higher placement on the search engines.
In the past two days I also began designing the look for the site and adding a small bit of content within one of the categories (cookies). This obviously takes a lot of time and I will no doubt be tweaking design and content as the site develops and begins to pick up traffic. I figure it may take another week of writing content for the rest of the categories due to a couple of web-design clients I am working for at the moment.
I also added some monetization on the site in the form of Google Adsense and the Amazon Associate Program. I have also collected a lot of information concerning other affiliate programs and will swap or add these to the site as it develops...but I wanted to start somewhere so Google and Amazon were it.
If you check out the site please realize that only the "cookies" category is "hot". I haven't begun the other pages yet. Also, and this is very important,
PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ANY OF THE ADSENSE ADS. For two reasons: One is to stay true to the rules of this board, and the second is that the whole site is not ready to go live yet and I wouldn't want to be somehow penalized by Google for clicking on ads on a site that is not yet ready for mass viewing.
There you have it. Stage 1 and 2 of my Challenge completed...more or less...obviously the site still needs the rest of the content to go on before I can begin promoting it, which will be the Third Stage. I'll keep you all posted when the site goes live and I begin Stage 3. Take care and all the best and thanks Lisa for allowing me to show a work in progress.