Domain Spotlight Tuesdays EducationalSolarKit.com

Today’s domain spotlight is very special to me. To put in bluntly, this is the first day that I am placing the spotlight on a domain in my portfolio.  Direct your attention towards www.EducationalSolarKit.com a site which has undergone several different transformations but has finally found its hoopla!

It all started in May of this year. I was browsing through one of the many magazines I tend to receive and ran into a short blurb about “Educational Solar Kits.” Looking a little further into these solar kits, I discovered that these items were being utilized to teach kids about solar energy. The products worked so well that kids had no idea they were actually learning important concepts about solar energy!

Since I was acquiring product based domain names at that time, I decided to check the google keywords tool and see if anyone had been searching for that term. After seeing that there were some steady searches being conducted for the term, I decided to register it. Good thing I did! Once the domain was registered a few weeks passed by and I moved forward with installing wordpress, a wp ecommerce plugin, and the vanilla cart theme.  Google then indexed the term and the organic traffic started to flow.

I then proceeded to sign up for the eBay partner network to generate affiliate sales using the website. After eBay accepted me I added a few products to the website (easier said then done!) and struggled a little bit with configuring external links in conjunction with buy it now buttons. This turned out to be a huge bug with the entire wp ecommerce system, one which still hasn’t been completely fixed as of yet! Once I realized that adding products manually to my site was not efficient, (fast forward several months) I decided to look for a new solution.

So what did I find?

I found a script called TWP Auctions and guess what!  The script is free and very easy to setup.  I plan on writing a future blog entry about the exact steps I took to develop EducationalSolarKit.com, but for now I want to say that the script provided me with the right platform to launch a site which runs itself.

In the end I was able to develop an internal process for creating efficient minisites.  This process is one that I will continue to use for future product based domain developments.  There are still a few issues I am working out with the current platform, but most of the issues pertain to visual elements caused by the theme that I have selected.