Here’s a quick update from a pair of blogs I have recently begun developing in the hopes of turning a quick profit. I am definitely a strong believer in using traffic trends to your favor. As such, one of the most popular topics in today’s headlines (and search results) is the 2008 United States Presidential race.

I don’t want to start debating about which candidate will lead this country to a brighter tomorrow, I just want to make you rich. So let’s take a look at the most recent speculative “gamble” I made by registering two solid domain names McCainsBlog.com and BaracksBlog.com in the hopes of turning them around for some quick profits on a minimal amount of total work.

The Story
I am fed up with hearing about how people are making money by flipping domain names day by day (slow as this is), so I decided to give it a go myself. But after purchasing the domain names, I thought to myself hey… why not try making a custom design and loading them with a few articles to boot? After all, if I can pump out a quick custom job in a few hours… I can increase my profit margins tenfold in the long run. Initially, I wanted to hold both of these until after the election, banking on the one winning blog at the end of it all. However, I am a greedy man and I think that I am just going to go ahead and do this as more of a short-term move. This way, I have the room to rinse-and-repeat if things work out well.

The Downside Risk
When you think about speculation, the first thing that should come to mind is risk. Risk is the downside potential that you take on when you try to unlock higher upside (profits). With a quick domain flip, the risk is only about $8 per website… but with a full-blown website, it is a bit more. Let’s tally things up so you can see just what I’m dealing with.

I got the design for free from a hot tip that my buddy Nick Throlson gave. And after seeing it in action at Barack Obama’s Blog, it was hard to look away. Unfortunately for me, Republicans aren’t the web design type… so I had to whip up my own quick McCain theme to fit the bill. This theme is called the “Probama” theme and it was originally made by the folks at Category 4. It fortunately came with the Photoshop .psd editing master file… so switching out a picture of John McCain was easy!

Domain names set me back $12, and I already had a web hosting account. Even if I didn’t, I probably just would have used a free hosting account to save money… so let’s mark that as a zero risk fee. I haven’t done this yet, but I anticipate buying some articles for around $90 total. Finally, SitePoint listing fees will bring my total up $20 ($10 each site) to a grand total downside risk of $122 and about three hours of my time. Let’s see if I can get a decent sell price and get a nice net return on my investment, eh?

BaracksBlog.com: I anticipate that this will be the higher selling blog, but as I am not sure I wanted to buy both domain names. Why? Well fans of Barack Obama will be more likely to be web-savvy than supporters of McCain. It’s just a fact of life. I am planning on gathering some good articles for this website about things like his energy policy, alternative energy plan, healthcare policy, his wife, his running mate (Biden) and his background. With content that is targeted and heavily searched, it shouldn’t be too hard to get things looking professional and well researched.

McCainsBlog.com: Admitting that John McCain will drive less traffic, I feel like a lot of this risk is balanced with the betting sounding domain names that I got with John McCain. As people refer to Barack Obama as “Obama” and John McCain as “McCain,” I got the short end of the stick with my BaracksBlog.com. For content, I am going to focus on the war on terror, energy policy, gas taxes, stock market/economic conditions, his background and his health. Again, this stuff is heavily searched and should pull in some good visitors well into the future.

Again, I am not a professional and do not claim to be. I do not intend on spending any large amount of time building up these websites, and am strictly going to be doing the bare minimum on both. Regardless, I think that this is an interesting speculative project… and I feel that the upside is too great to ignore!

-The Net Fool

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