Hey everyone, I've recently launched a website, theblognerds.com (is it cool to link it? Don't want to seem like I'm here to just get hits, I can edit it out if it's an issue) and we're now in the process of growing an audience. Our main focus is this: - We're posting new, and what we hope is interesting content, every week and daily news from the industry; - We're very active on twitter, we interact with people in our verticals (blogs, bloggers, news sites, etc), distribute our content over tweets, retweet what makes sense; - We're releasing a weekly video to go along with our content, basically it's a synopsis of the main content that week; - We're answering questions in /r/blogs on reddit, or any other subreddit we find that makes sense - Searching Yahoo answers to see where we can help and obviously soft promote our site As for forums, well, I get a little freaked out there. We have forums on our site that we hope we will grow an audience with. I'm quite sure I want to post on blog specific forums because it might seem I'm trying to pilfer their community. Any thoughts on this specifically? So that's what we're working on now, we've got a marketing budget that we're going to play with but we're going to wait on that until we have content and some measure of audience. Does anyone have any additional suggestions and where / what we can concentrate on to help grow our site? We're in this for the long haul, we don't want to take any easy roads and we're absolutely willing to work our asses off to do this right. Any help from your pros out there would be immensely appreciated. Also, if you do happen to happen to visit our site and find there's an opportunity to work together, please feel free to contact me directly. Thanks guys!
Nice site! Is your goal to make money from Sponsored Ads and/or some backend product or service? It matters Best of Success!
Thank you Stephan. Our financial plan includes ads + sponsored ads, services (we're working on partnerships for a job board, event catalog), a resource centre which will hold affiliates, products (whitepapers, data distribution, etc) and a secondary site / application (online, android, iPhone) which will be in the exact same vertical that and will be in the discovery space. I also think, if we stay true to our idea, that we have more opportunities to create products and partnerships that will work well with our audience.
In these days of Reddit, Buzzfeed, Gawker, etc you'll want to differentiate your site. And I don't think having more ads than Slate is the best choice What attracts people and keeps them coming back is a high ratio of content to ads. Not to mention the well-know phenom of ad-blindness - better have a ton of quality traffic. How many people really want to be sold to? I suggest having a relevant sponsor per page, or content area, and up-sell members into specific value-added services and on-site experiences.
I agree with you when it comes to having a high content to ad ratio, I have no interest in leaning in Slate's direction but I guess, it works for them... so who am I to argue. I like the sponsor per section area, I've already had a hosting provide approach me with something similar. To be honest, I've struggled with the on-site experiences so far. We know that we want to introduce our audience to a larger ecosystem when we introduce our app and that we will have to evolve TBN at that time, I'm just not quite sure what the whole package will be just yet. Thanks for your thoughts though and if you have any tips on audience building, traffic building above what I mentioned earlier, I would appreciate your opinion on that also.
Indeed! Well, Slate is bankrolled by Microsoft and gets about 10 million unique visitors a month. Size matters http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slate.com PM anytime, and Best of Success!
You should try to use SimilarWeb.com, a free tool which gives your traffic report for any website. You can use it to identify your competitor's traffic and benchmark your site against them. Learn where they get traffic from and simply start promoting your site there. Best of luck!
Hi Danny, I have seen your site. You have really worked good. I like your design. You are looking for traffic to your website, So I would suggest you to be more social. Be more active for user by replying his/her replies to your post. You can also use other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Linkedin etc to get more audience to your sites. It advised to share unique content on your site. It will helps you to get more hits. I also advise you to go for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Try to optimize your site to increase usability.
Hi Jaydeep - thanks for your input and suggestions. Right now we're on Twitter which is doing fine but I appreciate what you're saying about Social Media networks. Of course we can't ignore the value of networks like Facebook, Google + and the rest of them but my concern is how do we provide value to our readership on these networks. Of course we want to get into them in the future but I don't want to be there just for the sake of being there. Personally, I think something like a Facebook fan page is great but if we're not providing any real value to our visitors with it than what's the point. Right now we want to create good content, earn the trust of our readership and then, when we can provide real value, dive deeper into the social media pool. As for the SEO thing. Yeah, I'm struggling with this right now. My SEO is doing funky things in Google that I need to figure out. I'll be investigating these forums to see what I can fix. Thanks again for leaving a comment, I really appreciate you taking the time. Cheers, Danny