At this time Cashculator enters beta testing but information and screenshots are already available on Cashculator homepage.

Since I was still considering being connected to the finances, I thought of creating a website that will be of service to traders. After some time some ideas arose and I started to write the site. I called it Trading-HQ. It still exists today. The idea behind the site was to create a resource:

• With reviews of brokers, trading books, information websites, stock pick websites and related software.
• Easy to navigate
• Easy to filter for needed information
• Ability for users to contribute reviews to presented information

On the technical side, I decided to go with ASP.NET, which I already knew somewhat due to my aforementioned work with the trader. For this I also needed a Windows based web server, which is a bit more expensive than similar Linux based, so I went with a relatively cheap one, to reduce my costs. After some time, the site went up.

What are the three main problems of web business? Traffic, traffic and traffic. Well, it’s not that simple, actually, as the content and monetizing are also very important. My knowledge at all the areas was pretty low at that time but I didn’t think so and I was anxious to progress. So what were my actions in of the three areas?

Traffic generation – I knew that I needed to submit my site to many other sites in order to get incoming links and thus raise the PageRank of my site, making it higher in search engines. So, I submitted to search engines and to some other trading related websites I could find. Not much more than that.

Content – I added all the content myself. I first wrote about what I knew first-hand from my previous day-trading experience, then I looked for sites on internet and wrote about them. Of the hardest to review were the books and stock pick sites. Books, since one needed to read them for a good review. Stock pick sites were not numerous and one needed to use their services for some time in order to build an opinion. I was hoping for people to contribute this content.

Monetization – I was building on advertising, like most people do. The easiest and almost the only way at that time was using Google Adsense ad publishing. Of course, there’s a lot to know about Adsense optimization as well, but this being my first project, I didn’t delve deep in understanding how Adsense should be utilized for the best returns. So I decided to put one tall ad space to the right of my main content. I understood though, that traffic was the key.

What were the difficulties when running the site?

Traffic generation was difficult and time consuming. Without advertising one could only get to cheap sites and the regular search engines. I didn’t know of blogs at that time and they were not yet that popular. Content was very time consuming and it was hard to create quality content without actual use of products, etc. So I mostly had to paraphrase existing descriptions for the various websites and program, taken from their original sites. I needed to search the internet for various resources, filter them and write content for selected items. Monetization was very low. Although Cost Per Click (CPC) was good for the financial sector, my low traffic and unoptimized ads were bringing extremely low income. Most of the traffic I had was coming from Google’s search but over time my Pagerank has dropped (most probably since I was very slow at updating content) and the site started to stagnate.

During the period when sites was still growing, me cheap Windows-based host died on me without any warning due to some theft they’ve experienced. The site went offline but luckily they agreed to send me my database, which held the content of the entered data so far. I then decided to move to Linux host, so I had to rewrite the whole site’s backend on PHP. Not a nice experience overall. Since then I’ve moved to more serious and established hosting providers.

Although I still believe the site could have been profitable and successful (if done right) it was a big failure.

Lessons learned

• Building the website itself is only the first step, often the easiest one. This is especially true today, when there are good ready platforms for almost any type of site you might want.
• Writing original content is hard and time-consuming work. Far harder than I first imagined.
• Building traffic on a content site is a hard process. One needs to know the web sphere related to the project. No content translates to no visitors for content-based site. It’s impossible to write all of the content for a site like this one by yourself, since you’re limited by your own knowledge, experience, time and finances.
• Traffic from search engines dwindles if the site is not updated regularly.
• It was difficult to lift and operate it all alone by myself.
• Web hosting stability is important. Not to look for cheap in web hosting as it often turns out badly.
• I still lacked in programming, SEO, website design and general site usability skills.

Conclusions

• It’s almost impossible to wear all the hats on web site like this one should have been.
• The business model and prognosis should be done ahead of starting a website like this. This could have me lots of time.

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