🔙 Hindsight

Today I was hard at work…okay, not all that hard…on another fake ecomm site.

Using my normal stack of Woocommerce + POD products, I finished up the site in just a couple of hours.

As I was looking over it, I was struck by something.

(Quick reminder - you can see my recent emails in the archive here)

Half-assing it

The site I spun up this morning looked good. Really good.

Like I would legitimately try to buy a product from it good. I really went the extra mile designing this homepage.

I used to have a niche site in this very niche. Smashed by HCU, of course.

And it struck me that maybe, just MAYBE, if I’d put this much effort into making the niche site more of a business - like a real ecomm, not a fake one - then it might not have gotten hit.

Yup, I was half-assing it in the rush to get as much shitty content up as possible….like everyone else. I was much better about the sites I was building to sell compared to the ones I was keeping.

And now, of course, it’s easy to see that it was short-sighted approach.

You might be wondering why I’m making a fake ecomm site then? Well, if it ranks then I’ll convert it into a real ecomm.

I have a test site in the ‘riddles’ niche - another fake ecomm. I started it as a test cause I knew that if I could get it to rank, then I could sell ebooks on there. Especially around the holidays.

Guess what? It’s ranking. So, now I get to put it on my list to turn into a real ecommerce store.

Though I guess that makes it more of a digital products store?

Anyways, me and chatGPT will be making some riddles books in the very near future.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for over a year now (I think?) and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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