Random ideas to fruition in 10 hours or less

Today, I decided to have one of my random days that I have from time to time. Sometimes, responding to the never ending emails about what will the weather be like a week on Friday; or how the 4th storey 3rd room from the left of the Salvia Condos fared after the hurricane becomes a little tedious.

As I often do, last night I was punching random words into wordtracker and brainstorming with myself. There’s been some discussion on the sea lice phenomenon observed in Cancun at this time of year recently on the Cancun Message Board, so I typed in the phrase “sea lice” to find that a decent amount of searches have been made for that particular phrase recently on the search engines, and some of those phrases were connected to Mexico.

An idea was born:

Many questions often arise about Sea Lice on the forum at this time of year.

Sea Lice are not in fact lice at all, but tiny jellyfish larvae that can get through your swimsuit and make a nasty mess of your naughty bits. And everyone needs naughty bits, especially on vacation!

I see the same questions coming up year after year and realised there was no definitive guide to dealing with these critters, and especially how to deal with them here in Cancun.

Webmasters often say “content is king” and write what you know about. It’s good advice, except I dont know much about anything. But, this is something I’ve read countless posts on over the last few years, with that and a little Googling I was sure I could put something together, so I decided to look for a domain name.

sealicecancun.com was available and, while not a particurlarly attractive name, it does what it says on the tin and hopefully the search engines will like it. I bought the name, set the nameservers and added it one of my shared hosting accounts this morning, with a different IP to the sites on the same account.

After 10 hours or so, I finally have a finished site. It would have been quicker but for my sloppy photoshop skills and I spent far longer than I ought to have making the navigation tabs and rollovers.

A simple mini site of just 5 pages that requires next to nothing in maintenance. No email addresses given nor requested, and no sales nor queries to deal with. A factual site with original content and no fluff.

I added Google Adsense plus used my affiliate account with Amazon for sales of the Sea Safe product - even though the commissions are terrible. I aimed to ensure the Google Ads delievered Cancun themed ads, with a few skin treatment ads peppered in.

Total cost was 8.95 for the domain, 50 cents a month hosting and $1.50 a month for the extra IP. So annual costs of $26.95. I’m hoping that with a little promotion it might make 1 maybe 2 dollars a day on average throughout the year. At only a dollar a day that’s $365 a year. I’ll see if I can remember to post an update in a few months time as to whether I was accurate or not.

$365 a year I agree, is not a lot of money but a 1,350% return on my annual outlay and $338 profit. It took 10 hours to make and it will be there forevermore, and with no maintenance.

Now, I just need to build another 500 sites like that! If i worked 10 hours a day 5 days a week it would take 2 years.

But I cant, I’m busy answering emails about the Cancun weather a week from Friday.

Check my new site out:

Sea Lice Cancun