Syte Black Review

I was contacted by Adam Carn requesting a review of his product, Syte Black (www.SyteBlack.com), on this blog in exchange for use of a beta version of the product. As it is relevant to the blog, and as I’m interested in trying this out to see if I can make some money from it, I accepted. Please keep in mind that this is a beta version of Syte Black and therefore not necessarily exactly how the final product will be.

This review is more of a first look at the product itself, how easy it is to use and understand, how easy it is to create a site from it, as well as my initial thoughts. As I have only had this for a few days I can’t say whether or not it will make you money, but I can give some thoughts as to what I think the potential is here, so that’s what I aim to do. I will follow up over the next few weeks with some updates on my own Syte Black test site so, if you’re not already signed up, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up-to-date on my progress.

What Is It?

Syte Black is a Windows application which allows a user to easily create a potentially money making website which consists of sleek, modern graphics, well written content and three income streams (ClickBank, Adsense and Amazon).

Here’s the official blurb from the Syte Black website:

“It will be your own ready-made money making website with cutting edge features and super-sleek graphics. No need to put up with an ugly website anymore!

Once setup (it’s easy) Syte Black will make you money on auto-pilot so you can get away with being lazy.

Are you a newbie? No problem! Syte Black will be totally newbie friendly too!”

Installation

The installation of Syte Black is fairly simple. You just unzip the file to your C: drive (must be the root of C: otherwise the application doesn’t work as it should – as I found out), so the SETUP folder is found under C:\SyteBlackFiles. Within the setup folder there are a couple of exe files, install.exe and SyteBlackSetup.exe. Now, you’re supposed to just be able to run SyteBlackSetup.exe, but this didn’t work for me the first time. In the instructions this is mentioned, and in this case you need to first run install.exe, then SyteBlackSetup.exe. Personally I think whatever install.exe does (I believe it copies a required file to your system folder) could be integrated into the main app to avoid this extra step and make things just a little smoother. However, it’s no big deal and the application ran fine following this step.

Setting Up a Site

The application itself looks pretty straightforward, and every field available has an explanation in the setup instructions provided.

SyteBlack Interface

In the first section all that is needed is to enter the domain name you will be setting your Syte Black site up on (without the http or www part, ie. example.com), your ClickBank ID, Adsense ID and Amazon ID. Just one thought on this… I haven’t tried setting a site up from Syte Black on a sub-domain yet, but I have a feeling you’d have some trouble with that as it seems to assume the www part of the address, so putting in something like subdomain.example.com might break things a bit in the site with it trying to use www.subdomain.example.com. I’ll try this out and report in a future post.

The second section allows you to specify a page description and keywords for each page, as well as to specify a URL to an article to be included on the page, this article must be from ArticleDashboard.com. It’s fairly simple to find related articles on ArticleDashboard, and there is quite alot of choice.

You are given set topics for your pages (there doesn’t seem to be a way to change this). The pages you get for your site are:

  • cars
  • computers
  • finance
  • Index (your home page, co you can choose whatever type of article you are after for your site here)
  • privacy (no need for an article for this one - not sure why you are given the option to, maybe to specify a custom privacy page?)
  • shopping
  • travel

I know that this is aimed at beginners who might not need or want to, but I think it would be much better to give a user the option to set their own page titles/topics, rather than force them to use these preset ones.

Once you’ve specified the above, you simply hit the Modify files button and the app will go through each HTML file, insert your ClickBank, Adsense and Amazon IDs, as well as page description and keywords, into the relevant places and download and insert your chosen articles. Once this is finished you are ready to upload the files to your site. See, it’s that simple.

You will need to already have web hosting and a domain name ready for your Syte Black site, and you’ll need your FTP details for the next bit.

All you need to do is to enter your FTP server address, username, password and specify the path to the root of your site (this will normally be /public_html/ but you should check this first). Now, just hit the Upload Files button and the app will go ahead and upload all the necessary files to your chosen site.

Once that’s done, that’s it! Your new site is up.

What Does The Generated Site Look Like?

Here is an example of what a Syte Black site looks like, this is using the default images.

SyteBlack generate website

You can also check out the site I used to test this on, since it’s on a domain I once bought but now doubt I’ll set any other type of site on :) . The site is www.antique-watches.info.

You can swap the site images with your own, or even edit the default ones (PSD files - for use in Photoshop - are provided). This way you can give your site a unique look so it doesn’t look like every other site created with this software.

I think it would be a great idea for Adam to also release optional graphics “packs” that users can download and unzip straight into the folder to change the look of the site. He may already be planning this, but it’s just a thought.

Will This Make Me Money?

The big question.

Once your site is up, you do have to do all the marketing yourself; submitting to search engines, directories, forum marketing etc. It’s all up to you, so maybe one of the biggest factors in whether you make money or not would be how hard you work to market your site. Adam has mentioned that he will be providing guides with this product for going about doing marketing but they aren’t quite ready yet so I can’t comment on those.

At the moment I honestly don’t know about the money making potential here as I’m also fairly new to this. I am going to be testing this with a site of my own and posting results back here during the next few weeks, and I hope it can make the kind of money claimed on the Syte Black website!

Syte Black should be available for sale in the next 3-4 weeks, most probably for a price of $97.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this post, I will be trying this out over the next few weeks and will post back here with any action that I get on my test site, subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up-to-date.

My First Domain Flip

As I mentioned in my October earnings report I went through my first domain flip last month, but not with the great success I had hoped for! In fact I made a loss on that one, but did learn a little bit along the way.

This post I will go through what my experiences were with domain flipping and where I think I went wrong and could improve upon for the next effort. Hopefully this will also provide some good pointers to others who are new to this.

Picking a Good Domain Name

Firstly, looking at it now I don’t think the domain I bought was as good as I initially thought it was. I rushed a bit to buy one (excited to get started I guess), and I should have done a bit more research into what types of domains sell, the keywords used etc.

The domain I chose was to do with the new Google G1 phone. I saw domains selling for $100-$200 or even more and thought I could get in on that action :) , but my domain obviously didn’t carry as much weight as the others that were selling for high amounts. As I said, I rushed it, basically throwing words together with “G1″ or “Android” (the new phone operating system) that I thought sounded good. What I should have done was do some research and see what types of keywords people include in their domains that sell big, and tried to work around those.

I think that when picking the niche of the domain you want to flip, look at what else is selling well right now, and just generally keep an eye out for any big things that are going on, ie. in the news, on the internet, in the technology world etc.

Where to Sell

I chose to sell my domain on eBay.com. Although I know SitePoint and Digital Point Forums are both popular places to trade in domains, eBay was an easy choice for me to start off with as it’s familiar and I would think a little bit safer to start off with.

I’m not sure yet where the best place to sell domains is, I need to sit down and really look into this some more. Apart from the sites mentioned above there may well be much better places to sell, and if you find a place where there are lots of buyers then obviously you’ll have more chance of your domain appealing to somebody who’s willing to buy it.

How Much to Sell For

I actually started my auction at $0.99 with no reserve. There were a couple of reasons for this: 1) To keep the eBay fees to a minimum ($0.15); and 2) To encourage potential buyers to keep an eye on the auction in the hope of a great bargain. Of course doing it like this means you run the risk of making a loss (as I did). Other domains I’ve seen that have sold for hundreds of dollars have also started at just $0.99 so I have no doubt that this would work, but it definitely has to be a good domain, as I found out! If I had started my auction at $10 to cover my costs I have no idea if it would have sold or not. Maybe I will try this out next time, I’m not sure yet :) .

What I’ll Keep In Mind Next Time

  1. Check anywhere that has an active domain marketplace and have a good look through to see if there are some particular niches that are really doing well.
  2. Once I’ve got my domain niche in mind, start coming up with some domain names. Again, see if there is a trend in what keywords are selling and try and incorporate those into the name.
  3. Again, look through any marketplaces I can find that are very active and see if any one of them tends to have higher sale prices than the others. Find out where the big buyers are hanging out!
  4. Review the “start at $0.99″ strategy - see what others are doing, try to gauge the potential worth of the domain I get (if that’s possible!)

Hopefully with this experience under my belt I can have a bit more success with the next flip. I’ll keep you posted and no doubt next time will have some more tips for you!

Wish me good luck…

October Online Earnings

It’s been a bit quiet round here for the last couple of weeks, my New York trip just seems to have knocked the get-go out of me, but I plan on changing that this week :)

As a consequence, I only really worked on my sites for the first couple of weeks of October, so I’m a bit disappointed with myself. However, I didn’t actually do too badly compared with September. I also won $100 in Tyler Cruz’s cash giveaway which provided a welcome boost to earnings :) .

October also saw my first attempt at domain flipping. This didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, in fact the domain only sold for £1.39 ($2.26), and seeing as I paid £5.66 ($9.19) for it + eBay and Paypal fees I made a bit of a loss there, the cost of experience I guess! I’ll be posting more about how I went about this, what I’ve learned and what I plan to do differently next time so keep an eye out for that post this week.

  • Affiliates - £14.80 ($23.97)
    I managed to get a couple of “big” eBay sales last month which meant the earnings from there was just over £10. I also referred one person to Pepperjam, so that’s $7 (about £4.30) to me for that.
  • AdSense - £2.97 ($4.81)
    A nice increase on last month, but still not an earth-shattering amount. Still, if I can keep it on the increase then I’m happy with that.
  • In-Text Advertising - £0.06 ($0.11)
    Hardly worth mentioning, but there it is!
  • Domain Sales - £1.39 ($2.26)
    My first domain sale, and that didn’t work out too well seeing as I made a £4.72 loss. But seeing as it was my first time I think I’ve learned a little bit and will definitely try some more this month, fingers crossed with better results!
  • Competition Winnings - £61.64 ($100.00)
    As mentioned already, I won $100 on Tyler Cruz’s cash giveaway. Probably not repeatable for next month but still online income.

Total = £80.86 ($131.15)
Expenses = £8.70 ($14.13) - domain and eBay/Paypal fees

Total Profit = £72.16 ($117.02)

I really need to get my butt into gear and get into a proper routine for my online work and once I can do that I’m sure my earnings will increase much faster. For now though I can’t be too unhappy with last months income :) .