As a developer, I build projects with the hope that it’s useful for others and to earn an income from it. There are plenty of developers out there that share the same mentality.
To launch and grow a project to any type of profitability takes both product development and marketing skills.
For this reason, I’d like to share how I’d approach growing other side projects as if I owned them. I might even consider building them out myself :)
If you’re new to SEO / digital marketing, I hope you can learn something from these posts!
What you can expect
In this and future posts, I’ll choose side projects from websites such as 1kProjects and SideProjectors and break down:
- Why the project is interesting
- Keywords to target
- Explore ways to monetize the project
If you’re a developer and are interested in growing traffic to your own side projects, make sure you check out my course SEO For Profitable Side Projects.
Let’s begin!
Why the eBay Calculator?
After browsing 1kProjects, I found this cool tool called the eBay Calculator.
I found this project fascinating because there are many eBay sellers out there.
Some could be doing it part time as their own side-project, and others could be doing it full time and earning a living out of selling on eBay.
Of course, eBay isn’t the only platform / website out there that allows you to sell something and take payments. You have places like Etsy for hand-made goods, Shopify if you want to build your own store, Amazon because it’s Amazon, and Stripe if you build your software products.
And all of these places charge a fee for processing payments.
These other platforms could be great extensions to this project to grow it further. You can build fee calculators for each one.
Having a handy tool to help you determine how much fees you’d pay based on how much you price your product can make calculating things a lot easier!
Keywords to Target
Putting the domain into an SEO tool like ahrefs shows the following stats for the current domain, http://instantebaycalculator.com/
It is a side project that someone is trying to sell off, but it seems to have something you can work off of if you decide to buy it.
If we click on Organic Keywords, something way more interesting shows up:
Look at the volume on those keywords!
The best part is, the KD - keyword difficulty - isn’t absurdly high too. This means it’s totally possible to rank for these keywords!
As mentioned in the section before this one, you could target other keywords such as:
- Etsy Fee Calculator
- Stripe Fee Calculator
- Shopify Fee Calculator
And so on!
Here's a screenshot of the volume of the these keywords:
This is totally doable :)
Monetization Strategy
Since it would be tough to charge for a project like this, the various ways one could monetize this project are:
Ads. You can use something like Google Adsense and generate revenue from these ads. You can also grow the traffic then sell ad space to maybe marketing, consulting, or product companies that want to get in front of eBay sellers.
Affiliate Marketing. You can use the traffic you get to promote affiliate programs.
Promote your own products. Having an online property that generates organic traffic is an amazing asset to have. You can use it to funnel people into other paid products you have if it’s the same target audience :)
Conclusion
This is how I'd attempt to grow this project. There are many keywords you could go after to drive traffic and there are plenty of ways to monetize this side project once you have traffic going to the website!
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