I get asked that question a great deal and I will get to that in just a moment.
The answer depends on many things.
But first you need to ask a few other more important questions-
Do you even want to to do them yourself?
If so, how much time do you have available if you are building the sites yourself?
Do you want to create the content for the sites yourself or outsource it to a ghost writer on Elance etc?
How many domains do you have to develop and are you kidding yourself that you will ever get around to building them all out!!??
(I own approx 900 or so domains and I know that I will only ever get to developing a fraction of those)
The answers to the above questions may very well make the first question mute!
If you get to the point where you do want to develop your domain names yourself then here are some of the software platforms that I use.
For anything website / blog related, as far as I am concerned the king of the hill is Wordpress. I have tried the others over the years but still keep coming back to Wordpress and it just keeps getting better and better each year. It is open source so it if free to use!! Yey!
It has a huge community behind it and most decent hosting companies using C/Panel or alike suck as Host Gator have automated installs and updates available which makes it very easy for the new person getting started with Wordpress.
I have about 10 sites that I currently have running in Wordpress including my Biodiesel Kits website and of course this one. So check it out at www.wordpress.org
The other software program I use and have done for the past few years is XSite Pro 2. It is a fantastic HTML / WYSYWIG website design package that is taylor made for web marketers and has many great templates, widgets, scripts etc built in.
The latest version 2 has only been out for the past 4 months and is a great improvement over the first version which was still great for its time.
XSite Pro 2 has built in scripts for your AdSense account details so it makes it very very easy with just a few clicks to have ads placed wherever you like on your site.
A site that I have just started which is on the subject of water purifiers in India called www.waterpurifiers.in was built using XSite Pro 2. It won’t win any design awards, but in my experiance in internet marketing over the past 5 years “slick is dick” and as long as the site is fuctional and has good information that is all that most visitors give a hoot about. The more bells and whistles you have on a website IMHO the worse it is for the user.
So thats my 2 cents worth on the matter and I welcome any useful and relevant comments.
Cheers
Ed
September 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
900 domains is a lot to develop! Always interesting to hear what other people use. I was using wordpress a lot before but it’s a hassle to maintain and update. I mostly use MissPark now, saves me a lot of time, soon at my 20th developed site! And the other domains I’ve made a default page and copied it to about 200 domains, just for receiving inquires from buyers etc. and getting found by google. I buy content occasionally from Helium etc, what about you?
September 16th, 2008 at 12:48 am
I am amazed at the number of plugins available on Wordpress. If you have only looked at Wordpress and a few themes, you’re probably missing the whole picture. I’ve become a convert of Wordpress and will likely move future sites to it. It’s definitely not for blog/news sites only. I think once you spend some time viewing what can be done on Wordpress and with the hundreds of plugins, you will be impressed. However, as a simple html guy, I do find the CSS and design of pages a bit intimidating. But you can get great templates, tweaks, and designs accomplished for very little at eLance and Rentacoder.
September 16th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Wordpress is the best…
Just get content on the site rather than parking.
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Nice posts Ed.
I’m curious to know if you personally recommend a method of finding a reliable content writer at a decent rate? Obviously there’s plenty of potential by hiring people from developing countries, but their English is often not up to par.
Also, I’m curious to know what sort of fluctuations do you receive in search volume over time? Personally I’ve found a fair bit of variance.
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Hi Alex
No simple answer mate.
Had to go through a few to find the good one.
When you do find them hold on tight to them as they are rare.
I did find mine on eLance and there was a big variation on prices and quality.
But ended up going for someone that was very well priced and the best qualified for my job.
Just make sure you get to see work they have done for others before committing.
Hope that helps in some way.
Ed