DonationsAvailable.Com Part 1

Once upon a time I had decided to make a website to help people in need solicit donations for whatever their hearts desired. I called the site http://www.begfordollars.com/ and its design was simple, because simple is good and can often times be profitable.

Now to fully understand how this works we should travel back in time to another site I was running called http://www.complaintservice.com/. One afternoon I was thinking of various website ideas and it just so happened I was reading a forum where the employees at my real job were complaining about this and that. I remember saying to myself that "everyone has something to complain about" and from that came the idea of ComplaintService.Com which was extremely simple:

• Post a complaint about a business, product, or service.
• Leave comments for the complaint
• Have Adsense contextual ads through out

On the back end I had to do alot of PHP coding to display the complaints, to make the complaints searchable etc. It was a real pain. I promoted the site exclusively through Google Adwords. Several months in to the project I was actually generating some revenue, so I started another site called petitionservice.com, then another called corruptreport.com, and then finally usefulcomplaints.com. Within a year I stopped all Adwords ads and relied only on the natural search engine traffic that those sites were generating. Suddenly the money started rolling in, as did threats of lawsuits. The money was great, but the hassle of editing and removing complaints were not. I eventually resolved not to renew the domains and the "complaint" legacy came to a close.

Through that experience however I learned some valuable lessons. The first is that a site does not have to be fancy, or require extensive programming to be profitable. Starting with PetitionService and going forward with the rest of the complaint sites they were all set up through Blogger.Com which might have helped with the cross promotion. Secondly the less you have to maintain a site the better. Blogger did all the work because it was a simple script that submitted the complaint via email that then got published in the blog automatically.

Eventually I adapted those lessons into BegForDollars.com. A simple blog, that allowed people to submit a request for cash that would get posted. No Fuss. Two years later and over 2000 requests have been made. An important question remains though, has anyone had their financial requests fullfilled. The answer is yes. How many and how much money they received I'm not sure about but I have received plenty of "thank you's" for the site.

So anyways about a month ago I found a coupon code for GoDaddy.Com for $2 domains. I tried a few random names until I found that DonationsAvailable.Com available. So of course I bought it.

And here on SalzMafia.Com I'm going to detail step by step what I plan to do with that domain. Its concept will be similiar to BegForDollars.Com, but it will be implemented a little better with some lessons learned from both that and other sites I have ran. I hope with it others will learn that its easy to set up a site, make a few bucks, and have fun doing so with as little investment of time and money as possible. I'll even track the actual amount of money (Rounded up to the dollar) and time invested:

DonationsAvailable.Com
Money Spent
Total: $3
Domain: $3

Time Spent
Total: 15 minutes
Searching and Purchasing Domain: 15 minutes