Today I wanted to tell you about my new Templates For Website site. I wanted to start offering various website components for sales, both my own products and Private Label Rights (PLR) products. I considered doing it here but I decided that the best option would be to establish a separate site for this purpose and that’s how Templates For Website was born. In this post I’ll tell you about some of my goals with that site and my thoughts on how I set it up. Hopefully you can use these methods to earn cash for yourself and perhaps you can use some of the website template products I’m offering to help you in that goal.

The first challenge with the site was which platform to use. I considered using a popular ecommerce script like CubeCart, OS Commerce or Zen Cart.  There were also other paid ecommerce scripts that I looked at. In the end though I decided to keep it simple and use WordPress along with e-Junkie as the shopping cart, payment processing and delivery system. Why did I set it up this way rather than using an ecommerce solution?

The important thing to remember in Internet Marketing is that time is money. I realized that I would spend a lot of time futzing around with a new and unfamiliar script. Sure, as a web developer, I enjoy experimenting with a new code base and figuring out how it ticks. But, I don’t get paid for that in this case. I compared the amount of time I would spend tinkering with code vs. how much it would cost per month to outsource the shopping cart to e-Junkie. And, in the final analysis, it make more financial sense to pay less than $50 a month to outsource than it did to go the “do-it-yourself” approach.

Of course, this is the point of outsourcing and of the templates and such I’m selling, to save you time and money. One problem I see a lot of people encountering, especially when they don’t know a lot about developing websites, is the cost of outsourcing, of paying for custom development. Well, services like e-Junkie and products like my website templates give you a way to get pre-fab products and services at a very low cost that are often just as good as the much more expensive custom made products. Sure, there will be times when custom, either do-it-yourself or purchased, will be the right choice. But, if you’re building a lot of $7 Script sites, email marketing squeeze pages or other mass niche sales and marketing operation having an inexpensive option is to your advantage.

My next choice was pricing. I decided to go the discount pricing route rather than the premium pricing route. Both ways have their advantages. Low prices help bring in impulse buys and multiple buys while premium pricing results in fewer sales but higher profits per sale. Since I love a good bargain myself, it was almost a no-brainer for me to go the discount route. Most of the web templates I’m offering over there will be priced $1.97, $4.97 or $7. Which pricing method is right for your products? That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself in the course of developing your own business strategy that fits your product(s) and style.

Another choice was in how to promote the site. I could go for the niche marketing approach and stay under the radar or I could go with the authority/flagship approach. After a bit of internal debate, I decided to make Templates for Website my 5th flagship site.

The way I see it, which style to choose depends a lot on your competition for your keywords as well as the overall goal of the site. In my case, the keyword competition is rather tough so it would help me to get natural links from friends and customers. There is also some value to discreetly marketing the products via social networking. Although this isn’t nearly as effective as search based marketing or even personal referral marketing, every little bit helps. And, unlike an affiliate program, I don’t have to worry about having a bad CTR, being ’smart priced’ or ‘quality priced’ because I’m in charge, not someone else at a big corporation. Now, if I were to start a product niche site on ‘fluffy zebra bedroom shoes’ I would take a different approach as I’ve outlined on some of my other posts on this blog.

Lastly, I’ll wind this up with a few technical details about the site that you might be able to use if you want to setup a WordPress site with individual sales pages.

For a theme, I used a slight modification of one of my Info Magazine WordPress themes. The theme is simple and dateless and doesn’t have a lot of junk in the stylesheet that tries to reformat posts. I added in a few elements to the stylesheet, such as styles of red text and bullets, specifically for the site. Using this method, I can easily borrow graphics from PLR sales pages if I want. I most often edit posts directly in HTML rather than in Visual mode. This prevents problems with certain elements that WordPress’s visual editor ‘helpfully’ strips out.

For Plugins on the site I use: Advanced Excerpt, Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, Old Post Promoter, Platinum SEO and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If you have any questions about Templates for Website, please feel free to ask and, if you need mini-site templates, WordPress themes, web graphics and so forth please take the time to visit and check out my products.

Frank Carr September 19th, 2009 Features

Features
CubeCart, e-junkie, ecommerce, email marketing, niche blog, OS Commerce, outsourcing, PLR, squeeze pages, ugly websites, web development, website templates, wordpress, Zen Cart