Actually making money - Forum Project

[elus2]

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farang0,

It really has nothing specifically to do with me (my priority isn't to "learn the ropes"). I'm questioning how you will motivate the people who start off with obviously disadvantaged niches to do any work.

There's obviously only a limited supply of them. I think the number for most topics is well below the 100-200 range. As some have suggested, breaking it up by location may be one solution to this. But I'm still skeptical.

Edit: Actually, yeah, breaking it by city for sports for example actually would cover 100-200 pretty well. Just gotta make sure something w/this wide a base is picked.

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Topics like restaurants/food/diet or money making on the internet can be broken down into hundreds of smaller niches as well.

If we can get many of the people here making a couple hundred bucks a month on their sites and learn many things along the way with regards to marketing, technology, working with other people, etc. then I'd consider that a success.

It shouldn't be max's or anyone else's responsibility to motivate people anyways but rather we should be using the tools that we have to network and come up with innovative new ideas and try to execute those ideas.

[elus2]

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This rules out some otherwise good ideas...for example jurollo's regional food review idea...I'm in NJ, so I might visit a sight about NJ Restaurants...but I'd have no interest at all in following a link to Las Vegas restaurants...so we'd be losing out on one of the big benefits of doing this project as a group

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Untrue. By creating a north american/international network of restaurant reviewers, we can drive our local traffic to others within the network when these people visit other cities. For example if I have a loyal readership in Vancouver and some of them visit Las Vegas for a weekend, if they've looked around the site long enough they'll know that i'm part of a network of other independent restaurant reviewers. If they like the content I've provided, chances are they'll give other people i've linked to a look to see if those guys can deliver the goods as well.

In my opinion, using the internet to deliver locally targeted marketing initiatives still has a long way to go in this industry. There are plenty of business models that can work too. Selling ad space to local restaurants, charging a fee for emailing our list with coupon offers, etc. By joining together and creating unique and valuable content we'd be able to tap into a highly targeted/motivated demographic willing to spend money.

[calmB4storm]

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I'm definitely interested.

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[kyleb]

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I'm definitely interested.

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[Warder]

Somebody want to create an IRC channel for this once we get the namelist compiled?

[elus2]

#mmf on efnet good?

[maxtower]

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As to the linking....doesn't having lots of outlinks reduce your google pagerank?

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I've done some research on this. As best as i can tell, only google knows for sure. For the following reasons, my guess would be that it doesn't.

1. Besides pagerank, the other major internet search algorithm looks at 2 types of sites, hubs and authorities. Hubs are directories of useful authority sites. So if somebody built an entire algorithm around this, i doubt google would penalize sites for outgoing links alone.

2. The argument for penalizing sites with tons of outside links is preventing link farms and other black hat SEO techniques. Google seems to be focusing more on penalizing sites in "bad neighborhoods" rather than the structure of a site itself.

3. The structure of this idea is very white hat, so google will smile upon it eventaully, even if they don't now.


Also, count me in.

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It will be interesting to see how quickly our page ranks jump after we're all linking to each other. A lot of the information about google page rank is speculation because the actual algorithm is proprietary.
The very first website I ever made was on the 4th page of google for a particular keyword and the 1st page of altavista. I am not too worried about being on the first page of google. There are other search engines who may look favorably on a bunch of sites internetworked like ours.

Max

[elus2]

I read an article on johnchow.com where he's been gathering statistics about where most people's search engine traffic comes from. It seems that all of the webmasters he talks to have > 90% search engine traffic coming from google

[NNH]

In. Email sent.

[maxtower]

Perhaps the people he knows just optimize for google. In the investment literature I have seen, google owns the dominant share of search, but MSN and Yahoo both have sizeable chunks. I also remember reading somewhere that ask.com is currently the fastest growing search engine and they have a lot of ads on TV. I haven't seen google or Yahoo relying on TV ads.
John Chow seems to know what he is talking about, but I can't believe google is 90% with all the other options available.
As far as search technology goes, I know google has even been criticized for their search engine because it creates a chicken/egg problem for new sites to get good rankings as a result of the importance placed on links. Even if you have the best content on a particular subject, if no one links to your site, no one will ever find you through google. The criticism is valid I think because of the example of academic research... a lot of valuble information never gets a big volume of links and therefore will remain in the shadows of more popular but watered down content.

oops. I got carried away on a tangent.