Big Site Journey

Big thanks to BTB for his thread on Build and Bank. Like many others, it comes at a great time for me and has actually inspired me to write up my own journey.

I understand the power of well-executed niche sites, but my plan is to build out an authority site that focuses on three broad (and perennial) topics, with many micro-niche sub-categories.

I have a question regarding the viability of building a large site like I describe. You see, I have a very large database of niche emails, almost 200 hundred different niches, each with several thousand addresses.

My plan is to build the site structure first, then begin adding well-written articles and sending out an email to all the niche lists that might be interested. I've found that those types of emails get a very high open rate, and high CTR as well.

My question is, does a large and responsive list make building out a huge site more feasible because I can drive my own targeted traffic to it? It seems like a game-changer, and I'd love BHW opinions on it.

Subscribed, will check in here every now and then!

Best of luck,
hekke

Wish U best of luck with Your plan.

Good Luck with your journey !

I'm moving to another state this week, so updates will be sparse...by the way, I'm not selling anything here, either directly or indirectly. Just trying to share my approach and give back a bit.

My plan is to base the site on three perennial interests: relationships, money and health. I have put sites on G's first page many times before using organic SEO and I'll be working that a bit. But my main goal is to put up really good content that brings strong value to readers, and show ads on the same page. Some of those ads will be my own CB links, others will be adsense.

The home page will have mostly editorial content, perhaps one banner ad to get them used to there being adverts onsite. The interior pages will be ad heavy, although how many per page and how targeted/broad will be just one of the many things I test.

I'm using a mail server in Pakistan and they are very unreliable. It's been down for two weeks and I can't get a straight answer on when it will be running again. If anyone knows of a reliable and cheap service that doesn't mind lots of bounces please let me know. I'm running Interspire with IP rotation. Any suggestions on a better system would be welcome.

Once the server is running again I'll begin emailing, starting slowly at perhaps 250 per hour, just to warm things up. The email will not have any sales content at all, just an excerpt from the article I'm promoting and an invitation to read more. I'll make it very easy for them to unsubscribe as I really want to clear out everyone but the really interested.

Once the model is tested and I know what's converting I'll start sending more per hour. Once I get a few articles up I'll split the day's mailing into segments to each article. This diversifies the risk and also keeps the ESPs from seeing massive amounts of mail with the same message coming from my server. My goal is to get up to 300k sent per day, but I am not in a rush to get there and if my results are better than I'm estimating now then I'll coast along a bit.

Right now I'm estimating a 1:1000 conversion rate, and a $30 profit per conversion. I've written very successful ad copy and landing pages for my clients (in a very tough niche) and I've done direct marketing for a long time, so I'm confident I can get a good CR -- just not sure at this point what good actually is. Could it be better than 1:1000? Sure, but will it be better is the question. Thoughts on CR, given well-crafted creative and perceived value content?

I'll be driving traffic with my emails -- the lists need to be cleaned out, so I don't actually know how many verified addresses I have. But if just 5% are current I can send out to the lists for a long time without ever sending to the same email twice. A database that size is quite unwieldy, so I need to figure out how to keep those who subscribe happy and still keep mailing to the raw addresses too. I may need to go bigger than 300k per day. Or set up a second server for the subscribes? That probably makes the most sense. Thoughts?

I think that's it for now...

PS. Getting quick and informative metrics is one of the things I love best about online marketing. I will be testing EVERY aspect of the site and campaign. Once I get a control I will try to beat it. This, my friends, is the most important part of every campaign and what so few do.