How I Made $150 On My Second Website Sale Friday, November 7th Money Making

When I first was introduced to website design, it was at a young age and I didn’t really get to terms with it. I was more about the ‘flash and pizzaz’ of the site, and because of that I had a hard time starting out. Obviously as a beginner I wasn’t going to be anywhere near as good as many of the professionals out there, but at that age I had the attitude that if I wasn’t amazing at something on first try, it wasn’t worth my time. I have now since learnt my lesson from that, and in university I picked website design up again – namely as I didn’t have a choice; it was part of my course.

So I learnt various bits about designing sites, about HTML, PHP, CSS, but never really saw it as an avenue making money, so I let my knowledge on the subject grow stale. Its only when I started looking to make money online, I found out about people selling websites online, and the various places that you can do it. Immediately I saw a gap for my old experience with building sites, and decided to take it. I looked around on Sitepoint, the first place I was introduced to, and started looking at websites I could essentially ‘copy’ to make the same type of profit on them. This led to me building a ‘favicon generation’ website, and selling it for $70. However, the building behind that took quite some time, as I was rusty with my old skills, and there were still a couple of bugs in it as I released the site – luckily they were fixed shortly after going live with the auction (first tip here, don’t rush into the auction just to get it ‘over-with’ like I did).

So I wasnt too set on my first website sale, I wanted to do something bigger and better, yet something that could potentially be less complicated, and something that no-one else was selling. Not asking for much I know! lol. Now I’m not sure how the idea popped into my head, but I came up with a website idea that, as far as I could see, had not been sold on sitepoint before and had definate potential – a route planning site. Now when I first thought of it, it sounded foolish as it seemed like such a lot of work to do – however I remembered that google had a route planning service on its google maps, and I know people have included google maps on their websites before, so why not google route planning? I dug a little deeper and found that essentially by ‘borrowing’ javascript code from their example pages, and putting it on my own site – wrapping it up with a logo and some design – I had a route planning website with little effort on my part. Now before we get acrried away here, I will state that this is legal, as the google maps is part of a freely available ‘API’ that allows people to incorperate it on your site at no cost. Just before anyone accuses me of stealing, haha.

I published the site for auction at 1am UK time – you can see the details here. I initially put a BIN of $200, but after a couple of private offers I lowered it to $150 and sold it within 12 hours of the site being up. Not too bad for my second attempt? All by finding something that is available free online, and putting it into a nice little ‘wrapper’. So to those of you looking to make a quick bundle of cash – try and look for something you can get for free that isn’t on sitepoint; or more importantly, you cant find recently on sitepoint. If you sell something as ‘unique’ or ‘rare’, you want to make sure that when people search for it in sitepoint, they don’t find any other sites like yours – even if they have been sold on sitepoint before. It’ll diminish the value of the site. Be sure that whatever ‘free’ thing you find to sell though, you make sure you are allowed to do so. I just profited from the website ‘wrapper’ surrounding the google API, not googles technology itself.

Now most bloggers would leave it there, and you would go off attempting to replicate what I did, with me remaining quite cool for making $150 off of something free (would I be cool for that? lol). Yet I’m not like most bloggers and I want to share my full experience. I did try selling the same thing again, however this time I made the site design even better with the same basic premise. You’d think that Id make near the same, maybe more with it being ‘prettier’ and better laid out. Yet maybe because of the time I posted it, maybe because of the fact I had sold a site like it before, or maybe because I wasn’t being looked on favourably by the gods of sitepoint that day, it only sold for $51. Now that’s not to say its a bad outcome – the fact it sold for more than it cost to create is good, but that site which is ‘essentially’ better than the one prior, should have sold for more in my books.

So in essence, originality and creativity is the best chance to make a big sale on sitepoint (at least in the ’startup websites’ auctions), but after the intial appeal of the originality is gone, it could be hard to make money off of it again. Let me know your experiences with Sitepoint, and what you feel has worked the best!

Dan