What it really costs

Almost every figure below belongs to somebody else and changes without telling you, and the largest line item is not money.

The first site is the slowest thing you will build, and the reason is structural. There are about a dozen decisions to get through — the phrase to target, how the pages are structured, what goes on the profile, how the tracking is wired — and search results answer you in weeks. So you get about one lesson per month. Most of your early guesses will be wrong, and you find out slowly, one at a time.

That is the actual mechanism behind “the first one takes forever”. It is not that a search engine punishes beginners. It is that a beginner's feedback loop is a month long and there are a dozen loops to run. The second site starts with all twelve answers already in hand, which is why people who stay in this describe site two as a different job entirely.

• Bought links and private networks. Against Google's own guidelines, and what you paid for can be devalued or deindexed on a schedule you do not control.
• A designed brand. Nobody has ever chosen a plumber on typography. The page needs to load and put the number where a thumb lands.
• Six domains at once. Six sites means six wrong guesses running in parallel instead of one you correct.
• Paid ads “to test the site”. Ads test whether the offer converts paid traffic, not whether the page can rank.
• Software subscriptions before there is a single call. The only tool you need on day one is a tracked number.

A vague worst case is one you never price in. The realistic bad outcome: you spend a few hundred dollars across several months, the site is indexed, and it sits on the second page for a phrase contested by three businesses who have been there a decade. The phone never rings. You stop, and you are out the domain, a few months of a phone number, and the evenings.

If you find yourself reasoning about sunk cost after two months, notice that the sunk cost is the price of a couple of takeaways. The thing you are really protecting is your time.

Split those rows into two piles, because they behave differently when you walk away. The domain and the pages are paid once and keep existing — a domain you stop renewing is gone at the end of its term, and until then the site is still there to sell or point elsewhere. Hosting and the phone number are running meters, charging every month whether anything is happening or not.

A dead project quietly costs money for a year after you stopped thinking about it. That is why the last lesson of this course is about writing a kill date, and it is a reason to be relaxed about the one-off costs and strict about the recurring ones: pay for the domain without agonising, and know exactly which day of the month the number bills.