So I was enjoying running the Ipswich Town site as a hobby and quite happy with it’s popularity. The only marketing I did was to post in a couple of ITFC forums and to ask for relevant backlinks. I did not understand search engines at this time and only sort backlinks so people would follow them, not search engine spiders!
So early in 2002 I decided to create a website hosting company. I set up a reseller account with fasthosts.co.uk and then attempted to resell domain slots. I spent quite a bit of time designing the site (sorry cannot remember the domain name, will post it if it comes back to me!) but nothing promoting it. I still did not understand search engine marketing!
My problem was that website hosting is hugely competitive and I offered no unique selling point. I never got any traffic from search engines despite submitting the site. I had no backlinks to the site apart from my existing (non-relevant) site!
Basically the project was a disaster and with no one signing up after a number of months I pulled the plug on the site. A lesson was learnt though and this helped me seek a niche area to exploit which I did quite successfully in my next web project (which ultimately failed) . To be continued in part three.