Penny DVDs goes live...

Towards the end of September 2008 Penny DVDs went live without much of a fanfare. Although I had built database driven sites before at college this was a first for me in terms of hosting a db driven site in the “real world”, and I have to say I was quite amazed it worked at all – although I shouldn’t have been as it worked fine on my Apache web server at home.

There were a few bugs on the live site that didn’t surface at home but after a few days I had these mostly ironed out.

As soon as the site was running I set up some “Google Alerts” to search for blogs with keywords such as “Penny DVDs”, “Cheap DVDs”, “Cheap Movies” etc. this would give me a good chance to post comments or articles on relevant blogs and get some back links to the site.

The first blog I posted on was a site called http://www.getrichslowly.org/ in response to a post titled “The $22 Movie”, here’s my post:

Noel Says:
September 26th, 2008 at 6:57 am
$22.00 dollars!! I feel bad for you, I can beat it though, my wife and I paid £12.50 each to see Charlie Wilson’s War at Leicester Square London, when it came out.

That’s pounds, so about $25.00 each, just for the movie!

When the guy said £25.00 I nearly passed out, no snacks for us so you were lucky in that respect, needless to say since then we have only gone to the local cinema and mostly use LoveFilm.com (similar to your netflix, I think). If you want to see movies and keep them I would recommend http://www.PennyDVDs.com they have a USA site coming in November.

Now bear in mind I had not submitted the domain to anything, least of all a search engine… within three days the site was listed in Google and every page had been indexed! All on account of this one post. If that wasn't amazing enough a week later (after a few more posts, not many though, just a handful) I typed in “Penny DVDs” into Google.com to find my site on the first page in 5th position and on Google.co.uk on the first page in 2nd position! I kid you not.

...yes I still have that Google alert running and am still posting. On the strength of that I don’t see any reason not to rank 1st on both pages, I'll let you know...