"Forum Project" Update

[KUJustin]

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How many hours do you spend (average/week) on developing and maintaining your website? (before launch/after launch)

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I spent probably 40 hours getting it together to launch. That included all of what you see above to go from nothing to the site I had at launch (which included a fair amount of seed content).

I now spend probably 10 hrs/wk on it though 20/wk would be better. I've been insane busy and I'm struggling just to keep it updated at the level I launched at let alone moving forward.

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How many hours a week do you spend on content creation?

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I included that above. Main content creation tasks are:
Update my "stats" for the left bar, update the schedule notes, update rotohog standings, update FSL stats, write blog posts, and participate in forum discussions. This stuff is all daily. Blog posts take me far longer than they should.

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Do you know much about MySQL, PHP, or HTML? If not, is it still generally easy to start a website like yours?

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None, none, and very little. It wasn't too hard. Knowing some of that would help me to offer more useful numbers on my site but I just don't have that luxury for now.

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How do you plan to make money (from the website)?

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I'm going to have a subscription model in which I offer projections for each day of the season as well as frequently updated "rest of season" projections. That will begin next spring. I hope that it'll show a good return next spring but I think a year from then is more realistic.

[KUJustin]

[ QUOTE ]
Justin -

What html editor did you use to edit your template? Did you need any special software or was it pretty much plug and play? thx.

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Dreamweaver. You can use Frontpage or DW and that's all the software you need.

[KUJustin]

I hope to start a new thread on Monday to talk about taking the next steps in developing a site after it's birth (including some of the ideas mentioned in this thread).

In the meantime I wanted to post this link I found about SEO. SEO is a topic I know nearly nothing about, but this article summarizes what my goals generally have been. I'd be interested to see what some of the experts here think about it.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-01-07-n13.html

[ahnuld]

can you please post your next update in this thread? No need to start new ones every time, easier to follow too.

[Badger]

Site looks nice, but I know nothing about Fantasy Baseball. Why the "real" rotohog stats? Explain to me how you justify redoing their ranking system.

[KUJustin]

ahnuld, you got it.

Badger, Rotohog's game is based on total "usage" if you will. You get to use 162 games at each hitting position, and 1300 innings for all pitcher positions combined. If a player uses all 1300 innings in the first 2 months (as some do) he'll be "artificially" moved up to the top of the rankings. My rankings adjust for that. Aside from the blog, those rankings are my bread and butter judging from my statcounter info.

[KUJustin]

Step 2: Generating Traffic

I launched my first downloadable set of daily projections last night, this is a sort of "preview week" in which I'll be doing that every day. The content being offered is pretty similar to what I hope to sell as a subscription, though there will be a lot of improvements before then. With the week off of work I'm focusing on building traffic.

Link Exchanges
In getting targeted traffic, a link exchange with a popular and relevant blog strikes me as pretty crucial. A friend of mine who blogged about similar ideas has been making some contacts for me, and I should have several of these in place soon. It seems somewhat hard to measure their effect because you can see how many come from the link but the real question is how many of those return daily after that.

Tips on exchanging links ranging from who to target and how to approach them would be beneficial.

Search Engine Optimization
As I posted before my philosophy has generally been build good content and the SEO will take care of itself. However, I'm sure there are some simple design things I need to be doing. Still, here are some results after just a couple of weeks with no attempts at SEO:
Google Ranks:
daily projections 1st
daily baseball projections 6th
rotohog 8th
midseason projections 8th
rotohog projections 1st-3rd are all me or links to me

Email Collection
Baseball is, of course, extremely seasonal and my big push will come right after the offseason so I agree with Tupacia about finding a way to collect emails. I haven't really thought about exactly how I want to do this but I'll be working on that.

If anyone has any other ideas for things that this project should be focused on right now, let me hear them. Obviously there are 100 things I could do, so I'm trying to focus on 3-5 really crucial ones to start out.