New website looking for partners/contributors

Kevboom

Hi All,

I'm thinking of setting up a new website covering both light hearted stories and some serious articles online, the sort of things people would see browsing Twitter/Facebook/Reddit.

The problem is there are several sites already established in this area so it would need to be done properly with ideally a team of people to post articles regularly.

The other problem is getting people interested enough to do it!

Any ideas?

Thanks

The Guvnor

It is a good idea - the workload might be huge mind you.

If the content can be fresh and regularly updated then it is worth doing.

Kevboom

Yeah I would need a good few people on board to post regular articles so the content is fresh. The likes of JOE.ie would be probably the biggest competition so not sure I would have the resources to go up against them but nearly all of their content seems to be just scraped from online sources.

killiank

Following a few of these sites on twitter its clear that someone somewhere posts a funny/interesting article on twitter & within a few minutes these websites have a page on their own site making reference or linking to the original post.

Are you looking for sport/business/entertainment articles or just general random contributors.

Kevboom

Yeah I guess it's quite hard to post an article that's 100% original given the likes of reddit, twitter etc. I would be looking for people who can post good quality articles in those areas, particularly sports and entertainment.

Graham

What do the partners/contributors get?

What will you be doing differently to compete with the established sites?

Kevboom

It's all just in the planning stage at the moment to gauge interest so I'm still yet to find a niche that will separate it from the other leading sites. The thinking was to post articles created by site from scratch and not just scraped from social media so possibly getting people to send in their own stories or videos.

With regards to contributors, most of the income would come from advertising revenue once the site is established so they would receive a portion of that.

Atomico

Kevboom wrote: »

It's all just in the planning stage at the moment to gauge interest so I'm still yet to find a niche that will separate it from the other leading sites. The thinking was to post articles created by site from scratch and not just scraped from social media so possibly getting people to send in their own stories or videos.

With regards to contributors, most of the income would come from advertising revenue once the site is established so they would receive a portion of that.

With these sort of projects it will be loss-making at the start as you will need to factor in a period where you are just investing in content development and promotion, to get to the stage where you can solicit advertising. This could take years, and as such would require a fair amount of time and money (and of course time = money).

Cianos

Kevboom wrote: »

Hi All,

I'm thinking of setting up a new website covering both light hearted stories and some serious articles online, the sort of things people would see browsing Twitter/Facebook/Reddit.

The problem is there are several sites already established in this area so it would need to be done properly with ideally a team of people to post articles regularly.

The other problem is getting people interested enough to do it!

Any ideas?

Thanks

You're not going to get anyone behind you unless you have a platform you've already built and can demonstrate you're getting some kind of following. Even if you start out with a simple site, writing your own content, and build up even a small audience, it shouldn't be too difficult to attract guest writers who want to gain a bit of extra exposure for their own material.

Kevboom

Yeah it will be loss making for a period of time but I have set up and managed a lot of websites before so I have learned how to achieve it with a small enough budget. It's a long term project

Kevboom

@Cianos

The plan is to build up a following as you say and start driving hits to the sites along with likes/followers through social media.

tom.jerry

yeah, it won't be easy, but if you've made the decision, just ignore those who have established, and try your best to make yours better and better.

The Guvnor

Does the content need to be fresh or just a fresh perspective on something already out there?

Joe.ie seen them not on them all that often to be honest but have liked their facebook page so see the odd item on FB timeline.

Are they just as suggested above repackaging stories from elsewhere with a smattering of original Irish based content?

Peterdalkey

I assume the plan would be to build traffic and then monitise it with advertising streams?
From my perspective, we are already heading for digital news overload and I find that I now seek out media/sites/blogs etc that cater for my specific interests and just delete the non-specific stuff other than the mainstream newspapers online sites.

Bartley201

Great Idea, Its always better to take suggestion before starting any business. I think you have done great research. I would suggest build fresh and useful content which is helpful to the users. This will generate traffic to your website and helps your website to become popular.

Lostinspace

If you look at joe.ie it took a few years to take off but they really focused on Facebook to drive traffic back to the website. They're now getting over a million unique hits a month. Realistically they weren't able to monetise it until they got the traffic and it did take a lot of work from the journalists to come up with unique and interesting content. Yes they might take a lot of the content from Reddit and Balls.ie for example but they do make the effort to re-write an article for everything that they post up and they give credit to whoever supplied the content.

You really need to focus on a niche rather than being all things to all people. Easier said than done. Have a look at the Google Keyword tool to get an idea as to what people are searching for online. That might give you a few ideas.

The key is incentivising others to write content for the website. I remember a few years ago pumps.ie had some sort of incentive scheme to encourage people to post up fuel prices. I'm not sure if that's still going on but worth having a look at. Also have a look at http://tweakyourbiz.com/ and http://www.smallbusinesscan.com/ as they rely on user generated content to keep their websites fresh.

Lord TSC

I'd be more than happy to write and contribute to a site like that. Thing is, I've written for other sites that offer the same ideas and promises of payment down the line, only for nothing to ever come of it in the short or long run.

I say this as someone who also offered those promises as well; you're going to have to develop a more serious set of principals and ideas before you get good writers to get on board on a voluntary basis. For instance, I think a general site will get lost online when there's already millions of ones out there; I think some sort of a niche is vital starting off (if only to advertise yourself as a general sports, entertainment, gaming etc website, and appeal to that market). I ran a site a few years back and even focusing on gaming and media reviews (in both text and video format), I still found it impossible to stand out from the crowd online, where anyone can now start up a website for a few quid.

Likewise, you're going to have to sell yourself a bit if you are asking people to have faith in you and work hard for no reward; for instance, have you experience on other websites, both in terms of producing and editing material? In other words, why should we trust you that the site will reach a stage where people get paid? How many people would you be looking to recruit at the start (this will give indications of how much ad revenue you'd be after as well, cause obviously have 20 writers and only 20€ a month isn't going to be much of an incentive long run). Have you experience advertising websites, or developing websites? (Really, that leads back again to "why should we trust you?").

I say all that because I'd love to get involved with a website with genuine potential and desire, but I've seen so many identical ideas for sites posted up which barely get past this stage.

Kevboom

I've built and run several websites over the years ranging from e-commerce to sports. I appreciate all the feedback which has helped tremendously. Like I said it would be a very time consuming plan and a long term one at that. I'll be doing a bit more keyword research on possible niche markets and update.

Kevboom

If anyone is interested in pursuing this idea or has any similar projects they would be interested in starting up, PM me. Cheers!

Peterdalkey

Interesting related article http://www.irishtimes.com/business/if-you-want-to-do-a-job-make-sure-it-pays-to-play-1.1470732

Twoandahalfmen

If you need help I'm on board

Kevboom

Just an update on this, I've decided to go ahead with planning a sports based site so if anyone is interested please PM me. Thanks!

wkkk

All this can be done with a poster bot. You need a single person to setup/code a bot for your specific requirements and then maintain it once in a while.