"Forum Project" Update

[KUJustin]

Well, the site is live though I'm not going to start promoting widely until tomorrow most likely.

www.dailyprojections.com

I'll give a quick overview of how I got from here to where I am now. Hopefully I can come back to this when I have more time and really elaborate for you guys.

Domain Name
I went with dailyprojections.com. I would've liked to have something more "brand" than "bland" but this is exactly describes what I want to do and it's easy. I was surprised the name was even out there, so I had to go for it.

Got it from www.godaddy.com. I don't think it really matters who you register with.. hopefully.
Cost: $8.95 for 1 year

Hosting
The theme here is "good enough for now." I wanted to get this site up as quick as I could so I just guessed in most spots. If I tried to get each piece perfect it would've taken forever. Sometimes the best way to learn what you need to do is by jumping in and trying something.

I chose hostgator because it's cheap and I don't need 99.999% uptime (yet). It had some handy script to install phpBB and Wordpress (though I didn't use it for Wordpress) saving me who knows how long.
Cost: $.01 for 1 month with coupon code

Site Design
I bought a template from www.luckymarbletemplates.com. I don't like the cookie-cutter approach but the options were:
1. Spend weeks/months learning how to make a website less attractive than this one
2. Spend several hundred dollars paying someone to make it for me. Spend days/weeks finding someone and days/weeks having it made.
3. Buy a template.

Overall I think it's looks pretty good (not great). The template was easy to modify relatively speaking. If you have no web design savvy at all it will challenge you. The help section of that site is EXCELLENT. Step-by-step instructions for everything and videos, too.
Cost: $69.95

Forum
Any 2p2er should be able to see that forums can be the real backbone. I considered Vanilla 1.1.2 (or something), but it basically lost out do to the auto-install script for phpBB offered by hostgator. I found a quick reply and a WYSIWYG post editor for phpBB with some googling and installed those myself.
Cost: free, open source

Blog
Went with Wordpress by default basically. They have a service where non-commercial sites can have someone install their blog for free. I don't know if I'm non-commercial but with no intent to monetize for almost a year I didn't feel too guilty. Found out later hostgator will do this automatically. I don't have much to say about the blog except so far, so good. I'm sure many others know far more than I about this.
Cost: free

Content
I spent a lot of time before this process started brainstorming what content I would want and how to seed discussion threads. I put up a couple of blog posts that I think demonstrate what I'm about and give some decent value to my target reader.

I'll be posting daily updates of stats for fantasysportslive.com because they currently offer none. And standings for rotohog.com because theirs are essentially broken. This should help me build a base of users that return every single day.

The forum has some seed content and a lot of potential. FSL.com has no msg boards and rotohog has a VERY bare bones offering.

Overview
I'm writing this at about 70wpm without stopping so I'm sure I left out a lot I'd like to say.

I'm working 9-5 every day and spending at least 2 hours/day on my fantasy games and I was able to get this site up in ~10-12 days. I hope this will inspire some people. Spend some time really considering what content you have to offer the world and what value you can create and then get out and do it. It's not as hard as we sometimes think. Figure out making money off of it later. If you're smart and thinking and creating value you will be able to monetize.

Umm.. I guess that's it. Feel free to ask questions. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but don't get too brutal; I've been working my butt off on this and I'm kind of stressed, but do be honest.

PS - At the risk of offending some I'm not above asking you guys to refer any friends to my site if this is their kind of thing.

[Tupacia]

Justin,

First and foremost, congrats on putting up such an attractive and well-designed site in the time that you did. Given your timeline, I confess I was thinking the final product would have been mediocre at best. When I saw the finished product, however, the first word out of my mouth was "wow!" Don't sell yourself short, I think your site looks very professional.

Things You Need:

1. Aweber - Aweber is the premier email marketing service around (I use it on my site and absolutely love it). For $20 a month, the amount of features you get is unreal. Grabbing the email address of your visitors is an absolute necessity given your long timeframe for monetization. I would write a small report (5 pages or so) along the lines of "How To Draft Sleepers In Fantasy Baseball Drafts, convert it into a pdf at www.pdfonline.com, and then offer it as an incentive for joining your mailing list (which should also include a monthly newsletter about the latest updates and happenings on your site). This is especially needed during the baseball offseason where your traffic will likely decline and you want to make sure people don't forget about you. If you check it out, I'd appreciate if you went through my affiliate link: http://www.aweber.com/?220653. Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Things You Probably Want:

1. Greater SEO-Friendly Design - If you want organic search engine traffic, you have to litter your pages and departments with relevant keywords. Although departments like "Home" and "Blog" are necessary, you also needed departments entitled things like "Daily Fantasy Baseball Projections" or "Fantasy Baseball Draft Tips." PM me if you have any questions about how to do this.

2. Tell-A-Friend functionality - get a simple script that you can insert on your site so that users can click a button to send an email to their friends about your site. Underrated traffic booster.

There are other things I'm probably forgetting. May add more later.

[JoshK]

Cloak your affiliate links. It's proven to increase conversion rates.

[ddollevoet]

Looks good so far Josh. Keep up the good work. Thanks for the update.

You have inspired me to move ahead on an ecommerce site.

[KUJustin]

Hey guys thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I kind of took a day off (aside from the hour or so to update the daily info on my site) because I'm burnt out from working on this so much. But I'll be back at it tomorrow and I'll look into your suggestions.

Josh, I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to the FSL link on my site?

[BradleyT]

Your home page is fixed width but the content pages are full width - I don't like it.


Instead of having your link go directly to FSL?affiliate=JIBJAB you create a link that looks like it goes somewhere on your site. The link then does a redirect to FSL.

Current link -
FSL.com?affiliate=JIBJAB
New Link -
mysite.com/FSLOffer/

You either do some mod rewrite rules or manually create that folder with a blank index file that does a redirect.

[JoshK]

Or download a 2p2'ers (avfletch) free program. http://www.freelinkcloaker.com

it will format your links to be like www.kujustin.com/recommends/fsl

Also you can do it with some simple php scripts. Brad is making it a bit too difficult.

Just google link cloaking.

[mtgordon]

There's a typo on your front page:

"What if we our projections were dynamic, fluid, constantly up-to-date"

I'm pretty sure you just need to delete "we"

[john voight]

KUJ, thanks for updating.

I am on the same path as you; starting out a website. I plan on starting a poker website (a bit late eh?) and just liek you, I want a blog, forum, and pages with content. So this thread is perfect.

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

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

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

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

BTW, now that you are running, I suggest you check out the folks at Digital Point. They have a forum over there which is very useful in any questions related to running a website.

[ddollevoet]

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.