So I thought I’d share another site of mine with you that I built recently www.jointswood.com.
1927 Woodworking Joints
It is a republished book from 1927 of all woodworking joints used in carpentry at that time. I have learned a lot by working with the material in the book whilst building the site. Some very smart stuff indeed, practicality rules!
I loved the puzzle joints so much I have a separate site coming on those puzzlejoints.com - there’s a bunch of stuff on youtube I can collate as well but there’s nothing to see for now 
Anyway, I wanted to explain how I could could get access to a document of I guess about 25,000 words and 400+ images. The answer is it was in the Public Domain. Existing Copyright laws according to a fixed set of criteria permit for documents & media with un-renewed copyright to fall out of copyright into the public domain. There’s an amazing array of stuff available
When something is in the public domain it is made available for general use and the benefit of mankind…kind of. Such material is available widely in words, images and video and may be used in a wide variety of manners, including being developed, resold, repackaged and many other ways – visit the Gutenberg Project for much more information and a goldmine of free reading. The works of Shakespeare are one example, the Bible is another but there are many, many less significant works.
Arising from my searches for interesting stuff in my niches of drums and instrument building, I happened upon a public domain woodworking joints document that I felt would be appropriate to dust off and re-present. Woodwork Joints from 1927. I did some keyword research on the subject and settled on the name jointswood.com. Why jointswood? well woodjoints .com was taken (and in fact is just parked with some cheap ads on it). But google looks at people’s searches for ‘wood joints’ as being the same search as ‘joints wood’ ! Therefore the keyphrase ‘joints wood’ carries the same traffic potential as ‘wood joints’, which is pretty significant, but there are also existing sites to compete against for position.
Of course I need to get the site ranked for all of that optimisation to mean anything but I am confident that the keyword.com domain plus heavily optimised pages & images mean that it should rank well when I focus on spider love.
Why am I doing this? well a couple of reasons. Yes it is fun, I admit and I like the result but primarily, it’s a brick in the wall of an online pension-building plan. I create small niche sites on interesting (to me) topics and place advertising on them. With a rare exception, the information I provide is free but I get a small cut from someone clicking on an ad. Many small sites with good search engine rankings that contain low-maintenance information that stays ever-relevant should over time equal a contribution worthy of the initial effort to create. I hope.
Sites I built 4-5 years ago on a whim are now ranking well with little optimisation work. Solid evergreen information supplying a niche with low existing provision will plant roots in search engines that will feed traffic for years to come as you develop niche authority. I’m just sowing those seeds, some will take, some won’t :)
So in line with my www.f1circuits.com task, I’m looking for top 10 in google.co.uk & .com for my keyphrases wood joints (easier) and woodworking joints (much harder) although I should pickup a lot of long tail and specialist traffic with the unusual tools and joints discussed. There is competition in this niche because most hobbies are well catered-for online.
10 unique visitors a day is a good target (thank you Matt Levenhagen). 50 impressions/pageloads a day is successful enough to let a site ride indefinitely building traffic & authority as a mature base for future development later. If a site pays for its hosting costs and renewal it can stay, generally.
Ok that’s that, www.Jointswood.com another brick in the pension
