The Planning Cycle

If you go to the main NBTD website right now, you won’t see much. I’ve been talking with our hosts for a while now, trying to get it set up so I can do my database editing in Dream Weaver, since I have a huge aversion to writing connect scripts on my own. Nothing has come of it, so as of right now, we have no main page, except for some links to the blogs and forum, which I have gotten running just fine.

Since I’ve spent the past week talking about how to plan a website, its time to describe a practical example, how the NBTD website has been planned out, from start to its current state, with a little about the future plans. Since the website currently doesn’t have much actual content, my focus will be on my blog and the forum, the two parts that are working and I’ve worked on promoting/monetizing.

Starting from the beginning, I was re-launching the NBTD website. We’ve been around for quite a while, a year and 4 months, give or take a little while. Originally, the website was NBTD-animations, and was mainly a site to promote some flash animations we had done, and allow Josh (one of the other members) to post various comics he did. I never really got around to promoting the website much, and almost all of the traffic was from school friends, who got on the forums to talk. Josh had been updating on a fairly regular basis, about once a week, give or take, he’d put up a handful of comics. Everything was going fine, and we were making money, until he stopped. After a month of that, most of our friends stopping coming on the site. A month later, the NBTD crew itself wasn’t visiting the site much. By graduation in May, just 6 months after the website went up, almost all traffic was gone from the site. When November rolled back around, and our hosting deal/domain name was up, I decided to call it quits and not renew the site.

Then, by February of this year, I was really missing having a website. I didn’t have a forum to screw around on whenever I wanted. I didn’t have hosting to post anything I wanted to share. It wasn’t right, so I got together some money, and at the beginning of March, the new NBTD Productions was launched. The new name is significant, we’re not just animating now, its more of a general production group. Currently we’re blogging, video blogging, Josh is still doing comics, and there are plans to start doing Podcasts. The future looks bright, as long as we can keep the site up and afloat.

Which is what you’re really interested in, whats being done on those terms. What am I doing to promote the site, and keep it profitable? First, there are/will be 4 portions of the site:

• The Main Site, which will work much like a blog/feed of whatever projects the crew is working on. They’ll post stuff, it’ll show up on the site, and you’ll be able to look at it, nothing terribly complicated.
• The Blogs. Josh and I are both blogging, him just because he thinks its cool, me partially because I’ve got the time for it and partially because it will hopefully bring in traffic to the website as a whole.
• The Videos/Podcasts. 2 years ago we did a series of half hour to hour long animations. Once things get rolling with the site again, they’ll be posted up here to view, along with whatever podcasts we do, and Josh will start hosting his video blogs here.
• The Forums. These are the heart and soul of NBTD, because its what keeps us together. Without the forums for us to chat on all the time, we become distracted and fall apart.

Each of these has a number of unique features and challenges, each requiring its own method of Monetizing and Promotion. I’ll be discussing them all in order.

The main site has yet to have any promotion at all, except for being linked in forum signatures by Josh and me on the other forums we frequent. Despite this, and the fact that there is no actual text on the main page, its still ranked on the first page, when searching for NBTD. When doing any type of promotion, this is vitally important. You MUST put a link with your search terms in forum signatures. A forum is the easiest way to generate some SEO, many public forums allow you to place the link in your signature, or even let you post advertising threads. This kind of things greatly raises your ranking on Google. While you’re at it, if you’ve got a personal MySpace or Facebook, on any social site like that, link to your site, every link counts. Consider making special MySpace accounts for the site as a promotion method, it will help more than you think.

When it comes to ads, we don’t have a lot yet. The plan, right now, is to stick with Project Wonderful and Adsense for the main page once it gets up. I figure most of our traffic will be Loyal Followers, so the Adsense ads won’t get many hits, but the Project Wonderful stuff should bring in some sort of profit.

The blogs are much more developed, at least mine is. I’ve spent quite a bit of time the past two weeks promoting my blogging, going everywhere trying to get links and hits. You’ll notice quite a few of them around the site, but there are others too:

• EntreCard. Its a must register for a blog. You’ll get a lot of bounce traffic, but if you’ve got good content people will start sticking around and reading your blog. Its just a matter of keeping at it. Dropping on other sites are almost as good as advertising, since you will often get the person who owns that site to drop back, and hopefully become interested in your site. Just try and stick to the pages that have similar themes, so that users are more likely to stick around.
• Bloggeries. Its a relatively small forum with quite a bit of information on blogs. I’ve found a lot of good information there, and from posting on the forums have generated a good number of hits to my blog.

Right now those are my biggest avenues for promotion. I prefer a viral approach to marketing, since I believe it promotes more of a Loyal Following, rather than Answer Seekers. Its also considerably cheaper, and we don’t have much of a budget here for advertising.

We’ve got to offset our costs some how. We don’t have a lot of costs, but they still need to be paid for. You can see most of them on this page, but there are a few others that I haven’t fully implemented yet.

• Adsense. Everyone uses adsense, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. Just make sure that you put it places it will be useful, remember you don’t get paid unless they click, so you want Adsense ads where people coming to your site, looking for an Answer will see and click on it.
  
• Project Wonderful. Great people there, they’ve got a cool setup, and it generally means you’ll always be getting at a few cents a day from them.
• Moola. Not an actual ad, I keep talking about Moola a lot. Its a game, where you gamble with advertisers money. Great concept, and fun, plus its referal only and the referals get a cut of your winnings when you cash out. There’s nothing not to like about it.
• Pay Per Play.  I have yet to add these yet, but I will be adding them to our Video/Podcasting pages. Each of the Videos/Podcasts will play in a pop up, which will contain at the very least a line of Project Wonderful ads at the top, and row of Adsense ads at the bottom, and will play the audio supplied by these guys before playing the actual video.

Now, I’ve still got some work to do. I definitely need to keep working on promoting the site, thats a major thing to do. I’m going to be turning this past cycle of blog posts into articles and submitting them to a bunch of article databases, in hopes of getting hits from there. I’ve done this in the past, but haven’t kept up with it on the website planning posts, so I need to get to it. I’ll probably post a blog about submitting articles sometime in the near future. Also, I’ll be trying to funnel traffic. One of my short term goals is to build special entrance pages for each of my ads. All forum links will go to a specific page (they might go to the main page, not sure yet), all Entrecard traffic will go to another page (definitely), and so on. This way, I’ll be able to tailor those pages in hopes of catching their attention quicker. I’ve got no idea how well this will work, its going to be an experiment.