I’ve been working hard at getting another city guide up to add to my current London and Beijing (which isn’t actually even finished yet) sites. This one is aimed mainly at backpacker types who are thinking about heading to Sydney to live, work and play for awhile. Keeping with the ‘Stuck In’ theme, this one is called Stuck in Sydney and is similar to the others in layout and content. It’s still a work in progress but I’m hoping to hammer out a few articles over the next few days, create a header logo and get the thing out there into internet land.
I’ve registered a load of ‘Stuck In’ domain names and plan to create lots of city sites similar to these. I find they’re good earners with Adsense and I think there is a lot of potential for direct link sales with local businesses once the sites gain PR and a bit of traffic. Plus they’re the type of sites that can be built and forgotten about and that suits me just fine.
I had been a bit cautious about posting my intentions to my blog in case people try to snap up ‘Stuck In’ domains for other cities but I think I’m happy with the places I’ve nabbed and they’ll keep me busy for a long time to come. I like the idea of having a bunch of these sites all connected together as a network but that will be a lot of work for one person to accomplish.
As I started to feel overwhelmed at the thought of building copious amounts of city guide websites without much knowledge of most places, I started to wonder whether there might be other ways to go about it and came up with a few ideas…
- Form partnerships with people who know the city well – With such a mammoth task ahead I thought about bringing other people on board in one way or another. I toyed with the idea of having other people run the sites and splitting revenue somehow. Or even letting them keep all the revenue while paying me some sort of flat monthly fee for hosting, the domain name and links might work. Both of these options would probably be complicated to set up and being in a partnership of sorts might be more of a headache that it’s worth.
- Sell the sites and domains outright - I thought of building a site for each city with a Google area guide map and a price guide ready to go and then selling the whole thing, domain included. The buyer would have a working site and would onlly have to plug in some content. I see this option as a fast way to create a network of quality sites with each site owner being an expert on their chosen city so that the whole network grows and strengthens together. Having people on board who know their cities well and want to grow their sites and make some money would, I think, be much better than me having to pay for content and cobble together articles based on internet research. Plus it would be fast cash in my pocket but at the expense of potential future earnings.
- Keep control of the sites and pay writers to produce content - This is what I’ve done so far with my sites and it seems to be working. I write as much as I can based on my own knowledge and experience and then find other people to fill in the gaps. For my London site I was able to produce most of the content myself but for the Sydney site I will have to pay for most of it. Finding writers hasn’t been a problem but it is expensive and probably isn’t realistic with 50 sites to do. Contacting expats or bloggers who run city sites to write for me in exchange for permanent links on their articles might also be an option.
I really think I’ve got my plate full with this idea and am open to suggestions on what to do. I had been inclined to build all of the sites on my own but it is very slow going and I’m not sure it will be possible. I have what I think is a good site layout, target market and concept but I’m not sure I can realistically build all of these sites without seriously compromising the quality.
Would anyone have any suggestions on how to even go about a pertnership type system? Do you think buying this type of completed site would appeal to anyone? Or what about trying to find people to write for me in exchange for permanent links on their articles… do you think people would go for that?
What would you do if you were in this situation? Any ideas or suggestions would be great!
Here’s option that eliminates the need to come up with cash to pay the writers in advance: Put their Google Adsense ads on the pages they write. If their page draws a lot of traffic, they make a tidy sum. Otherwise they make a pittance. Either way, whatever traffic they generate comes to your site and their content serves your customers.
This is essentially the model that Wise Bread has been following (although they’re planning to change it). I think Vagabondish has been doing something of the same sort of thing. One bonus is that you don’t have to work out a mechanism to pay them–Google does that for you.
The whole thing depends on the writers having Google Adsense accounts, but many of the writers you’d be considering probably already do, and such accounts are free and easy to set up.
Not sure where i readit but the best I have heard to date is using craigslist if you need local articles will cost you a bit more but worth it.
I second Philip’s suggestion…
Many moons ago I was going to make a website about living in barcelona when I considered staying their for a period of time…
I advertised and got a tremendous response, I made it clear in the ad that each contributor would make money from their content added to the site and if they did not have adsense they could use my account and I would set up a seperate channel for them and automatically send off weekly stats and pay them with paypal.
Anyway I never stayed in BCN long enough and the point I am making is I think this would work far better if you were in the same city as the writers, otherwise I can see people losing interest with 5c daily clicks and initial small gains…
this might not be the case if you supporting them and sharing ideas in person.
Do you think it would be better to register one domain like cityguides.com and having each city a sub-domain?
Set up some kind of structure and then you could easily replicate it for all major cities and employ editors on a revenue sharing basis to produce content for that city.
Nice idea Philip… I hadn’t even thought of that. I’m not sure, starting out, that their Google ads would makes any money at all, that’s the only problem. I don’t want to seem like I’m promising people money only to see them discouraged because the site doesn’t do anything for six months or longer. But then again, if I were to pay a flat rate for an article like $15, once things get going it’s reasonable to think that their Adsense blocks will eventually earn more than that. Maybe.
I don’t think not being in the city is a big problem except for getting photos. With the type of sites they are, I don’t need continued interest from the writers. I only need them to get their articles on there and then forget about them and I then I’ll do my best to get the site to the top of the SERPs.
Mike I thought of that shortly after I registered all of the domains! Oops. I might try that out though as an experiment at some point though. I have a hunch that subdomain keywords don’t do as well as having the keyword in the domain bit but it’s just another one of those unsubstantiated hunches of mine, so who knows.
Neale finding writers hasn’t ever been a problem. Craigslist is good, Gumtree works for some places and Couchsurfing too. Plus, if I go down the Adsense route, I’ll probably end up hitting up people who run blogs for their cities.
well, I will write your bangkok pieces if that helps!
That would be great if you could Matt! So what would appeal to you more as compensation for articles of about 1000 words each… payment of about $10 to $15 per piece, the offer of a permanent link (or deep link) to a site of yours, or putting the code for three Adsense blocks on the page for each article to stay permanently?
What about the rest of you… which would appeal to you the most?
Would anyone else out there be interested in contributing? I’ve got most major cities outside the US covered.
My main goal for the next 12 months is to switch my main income from in-place work to online work. I have several sites that have good traffic but I’m a poor marketer and fail to attract ad clicks. When I see your income figures I know I’m missing something.
In any case, I could also be interested in a stuckin… domain or co-operative network. Flick me an email and we’ll see if it can work.
Is Denver one of the cities you’re considering? If so, I’d be interested in writing about it, since I already do.