First Day - bought the domain

I have decided to attempt the documenting of an affiliate project.
"What a fantastic idea", I hear you cry. "What amazing, exciting subject have you chosen ?"
"Buckets" I reply.
"Wait...uh.. what ?"
"Buckets"
"No seriously, what's the subject ?"

I don't doubt that this will be a common reaction, but I don't care. This is an experiment - it says so in the blog name.

"Who the hell are you to document anything ?"

Well, I'm Daniel Goodchild. Primarily, I'm a recruiter - I co-own and work for Goodchild Smith. We specialise in Online Marketing recruitment (particularly Affiliate Marketing).

However, I'm also an affiliate. I own and run a few sites, which were originally intended to help me improve my knowledge of the industry.

Inspired by Smingle's fantastic thread on Affilates4U I have decided to try and give something back too. I'm no expert and some of my web skills (and all other skills) could be improved, but the sites I have generate a pretty decent income with very little work (5-10 minutes) each day.

Smingle made it clear that .org.uk domain names were perfectly reasonable and assuming there was enough demand and little enough competition, it could make a commercially viable affiliate site.

I have my business to run, so I can't spend a huge amount of time on this - but I am passionate about Affiliate Marketing. Conseqently, I'd guess that I'm representative of a large proportion of Affiliates in the industry.

Step One - Research

I did research, I checked out a number of topics. I had 3 tabs open in Firefox - Google Search, an ISP domain checking tool, and the Google Keyword Tool. I tried to think of topics with 2 words, so that it was not too generic (eg. widgets) and not too niche (eg. blue and pink widgets with curly spigots). I spent the whole evening searching for alternatives but settled on ice buckets.

Why ? Well, amazingly there are an average of 4,400 exact match, UK searches for "ice buckets" (the plural) and 12,100 for "ice bucket" (the singular).
There are 38 Google Ads for "ice buckets" (the plural) and 32 for "ice bucket" (the singular), with an average CPC (cost per click) of £0.67 and £0.62 respectively.
It also seems that the .co.uk versions of the domain I have in mind are just holding pages and for sale (and consequently not being optimised for search).

So there we have it - a decision - www//// icebuckets/// org/// uk

At the moment, i don't want to create a link to the site as I don't want Google heading to the domain, finding it empty and deciding it's pointless.