Long term project - huge blog

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swohlert

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Hello,

It's been a while since I've been here. I've been busy establishing a new company of mine selling window frames. That's all going very well and I'm actually looking for a new challenge. I've been thinking of setting up a completely new website, and form it into a huge blog that's about a lot of different subjects. I see this as a long term projects, where I have a few dozen bloggers who write content about subjects they're interested in. Budget wise, I'm thinking of starting with $100 per week to start, and slowly bringing that up to $1,000 per week (paying $0,10 per word, mostly to students).

The idea is that great content will market itself, so Im not planning on doing any linkbuilding, but let the content spread out itself via social media, and then backlinks will appear on it's own.

What do you guys think of something like this? Maybe too general to really make a lot of money from it, or if you look at it in a few years time, a money making machine on which I can sell nearly anything?
 
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I think $0.10 per word is quite a lot! You could be outsourcing your content much more cheaply than that.
 
It probably is possible to get it cheaper, but I'd like to focus on quality, and I think I'm better of calculating $0,10 per word for top notch quality.
 
Ten cents per word is very generous. You will get good quality content this way.
 
$1,000 per week is a hell of a budget. You'll be able to negotiate will writers for extra words / articles etc if you're spending that sort of money.
 
Yes, it's a lot of money, but that's the great thing about already making good money. If I make something like this, I really want to push out at least one high quality article a day. Still in doubt though about what topics are good together and with what programs to monetise them. AdSense could be an option, but I think affiliate is better. Still got a lot of planning to do before I start this.
 
From CEO of Microsoft perspective, i think u r doing wrong.

I don't have time to explain u why u r doing wrong :D

j/k (2nd half of 1st line is right actually)
 
If I were you, I'd spend HALF on content and HALF on promotions.

There are tons of free traffic sources out there.
 
Last edited:
swohlert said:
Hello,

It's been a while since I've been here. I've been busy establishing a new company of mine selling window frames. That's all going very well and I'm actually looking for a new challenge. I've been thinking of setting up a completely new website, and form it into a huge blog that's about a lot of different subjects. I see this as a long term projects, where I have a few dozen bloggers who write content about subjects they're interested in. Budget wise, I'm thinking of starting with $100 per week to start, and slowly bringing that up to $1,000 per week (paying $0,10 per word, mostly to students).

The idea is that great content will market itself, so Im not planning on doing any linkbuilding, but let the content spread out itself via social media, and then backlinks will appear on it's own.

What do you guys think of something like this? Maybe too general to really make a lot of money from it, or if you look at it in a few years time, a money making machine on which I can sell nearly anything?
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Well, to start I wouldn't hire anyone that knows what your current and long term budgets for the project are. They only need to be concerned with your budget for their specific task.

As for my personal opinion, you'll have a tough time coming in as a brand new site and becoming an authority on a lot of different subjects. If you're going to do this, the best way would be starting blogs for each individual niche and building them up to become an authority site in their respective niche. Best of luck to you.
 
@Kory1,

You're probably right. I'm still thinking about what niches to cover; they should be related, but also should be large enough to build one big site I can monetise enough to have a decent income. Things that have been on my mind are: Students, Home owners, Sports

Those have a wide range of subjects to write about, but can be contained in one authority website.
 
$1000 a week sounds like overkill, are you sure you'll be able to generate enough revenue from the blog to support it?
Have you decided on a target audience yet?
 
My advice at you would be to think about a specific area and do some extensive research about it before starting. Also, make sure you hire the right writers who are actually familiar with the topic, and direct them in a way that not every article is a stand alone thing, but rather a part of something bigger with lots of value to the reader.

Simply throwing money at writers and hoping they make something good doesn't work too well in my opinion, even if it's something ridiculous like $0,10 per word.

warm regards,
neocortx
 
swohlert said:
Yes, it's a lot of money, but that's the great thing about already making good money. If I make something like this, I really want to push out at least one high quality article a day. Still in doubt though about what topics are good together and with what programs to monetise them. AdSense could be an option, but I think affiliate is better. Still got a lot of planning to do before I start this.
Click to expand...
So you are making enough right now to cover $1000 per week?
 
LoftPower said:
So you are making enough right now to cover $1000 per week?
Click to expand...

My company is going very well so my income is high enough. But as I said: I want to start with $100 for 7 articles (I know, less than $0,10 a word) a week. When I see social media engagement grow and more people visiting the blog, I will increase the budget and eventually go for 5-10 articles a day, depending on the price I have to pay for good quality.

Neocortx said:
My advice at you would be to think about a specific area and do some extensive research about it before starting. Also, make sure you hire the right writers who are actually familiar with the topic, and direct them in a way that not every article is a stand alone thing, but rather a part of something bigger with lots of value to the reader.

Simply throwing money at writers and hoping they make something good doesn't work too well in my opinion, even if it's something ridiculous like $0,10 per word.

warm regards,
neocortx
Click to expand...

Thanks neocotx, you are right, just throwing in money doesn't work. That's the reason I want to have one big audience, and make the topics match. Right now I'm leaning towards home owners, as my own company sells window frames and pergola's, and since we're looking to ship to the US as well, that might be very interesting. Home owners are very interested as you can cover quite some topics, and sell them quite a lot of products.

DarkyTheWolf said:
$1000 a week sounds like overkill, are you sure you'll be able to generate enough revenue from the blog to support it?
Have you decided on a target audience yet?
Click to expand...

$1000 is a lot, and I'll build up to it. I'll start with 1 article per day and build it up to 5-10 articles per day. Revenue isn't a problem in the start. It's an investment for the long term. With the right target group, I can eventually sell about anything. I want to keep it ad-free for at least a few months.
 
for $1000 a week, hell a month, I will write for you non-stop
 
You should also spend money on marketing and promotion.

Lets say you have a product that can cure cancer, but nobody knows it because you didn't do any promotion. Well you may say that you can tell your friends or your co-workers. That's already word of mouth marketing. Anyway, most companies spend 60%-70% of their budget in marketing and promotion.
 
faithjhung said:
You should also spend money on marketing and promotion.

Lets say you have a product that can cure cancer, but nobody knows it because you didn't do any promotion. Well you may say that you can tell your friends or your co-workers. That's already word of mouth marketing. Anyway, most companies spend 60%-70% of their budget in marketing and promotion.
Click to expand...

Probably, but it's a long term project and I also want to do some testing, see if I can make a money machine purely by good content and organic social media sharing/SE traffic. So I'll first spend money on content and see what it does, and in the log run I might spend some money on marketing. Will also not manually build links or buy any links: pure content, social media and natural links.
 
This is neither a plan or a long-term project. It's a simple un-flushed idea that needs a lot more time and thought prior to spending $1k/week. Based on your opening post on this thread it pretty much sounds like your plan is to throw spaghetti at the wall, and see if something sticks. I have a toilet at my house you can come throw $1k/week into - it will yield the same results as the "plan" described above.

Flush it out, and put a bit more effort into a real idea/model as this undoubtedly will simply lead to repeated losses of $1k/week. Your budget is way to big, and you appear to be from the "bigger is better" school of thought. US Big Banks used to be in that mindset too. Don't waste your money unless and until you have a real fully developed plan. This is just a bad gamble as is.

Online is not a place where you just throw money at stuff UNLESS you are already a multi-millionaire with money to waste. In that scenario I have seen your plan work after an entrepreneur sank almost all their money into their efforts and finally got lucky enough to find some spaghetti. Not a good idea unless money literally means nothing to you.
 
Davers, thanks for your honest opinion. As I stated: it's an idea, just wanted to see what you guys think about investing in a bigger authority site, instead of setting up 50 MNS and monetise them. I'm not going to simply throw in $1000 per week without any plan, don't worry. If I start this, I will make a detailed plan with topics, ideas to share the content and how to handle writers etc. It's all in very early stages and will take a few months before I can really start it (if I see it as something worth it).
 
10 cents per word? Damn man count me in for writing! That aside i think you would get better results with Adwords or backlinking services.
 
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