Some thoughts on my Beijing website
August 27, 2008
The Beijing Olympics are finally over and some people have asked me how the blog went. Financially the site didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The site started well during the opening ceremony. It also did well the first week when Michael Phelps won his medals and then traffic tapered off a bit.
If calculate the costs and time of running the site, then we did come out in the red. In terms of the knowledge I gained from promoting and marketing the site, living in Beijing while the Olympics were on, I don’t think you can put a dollar value on. We also now have a site that has thousands of links, which will be useful to launch other sites from and it will still continue to make money, although obviously not as much as when the games were on.
Even though the site wasn’t as successful financially as what I would have liked, I still think I will go ahead and try to put together an ebook on the methods I used to build traffic to the site. We had a lot of success using Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Youtube to drive traffic.
Huge spike in traffic
August 4, 2008
I am happy to say that we are getting a great spike in traffic this week on the Beijing Olympic website.
We have also put together a medal tally widget that can be easily added to your blog or website.
Things are going to be very busy the next three weeks, but I am looking forward to reporting back after the Olympics as to how much the site made and the levels of traffic. So far everything is on track.
My first media interview
July 24, 2008
A Brazilian journalist contacted me this morning about my Beijing Olympic site. I answered a few questions by email and he followed up with a phone call.
It’s exciting to finally have people interested in the site and getting different emails from people. It was a pretty long wait, but I am starting to feel more confident that the site will do well.
And if anyone would like to help out blogging about their favorite athlete, team or country in exchange for some links, please drop me an email.
Finally some love from the big G
July 17, 2008
It has only taken three years, but I am finally getting some love from Google with my Beijing Olympic site. Perhaps it is too early to mention this, but I couldn’t help writing about it.
Search engine traffic has jumped from 10 to over 70 per cent overnight. It’s weird because I have ranked well in MSN and Ask for some keywords.
I have some good inbound links and have done everything above board. I have spent zero on advertising but have spent many hours writing guest posts and trying to craft good content that gets links.
Persistence is the key to anything. I think many people would have given up long ago if they were in the position I was in with my site.
It might sound corny but I believe:
persistence + passion = profit
I know you can make money from researching obscure, long tail key word phrases, but if you have no interest in that particular topic, I think your only passion will be in making money rather than making a website or info product that is any good.
Success in small steps
July 2, 2008
I have been battling away now on my Beijing blog for nearly a year now and it is just over a month until the the games start in August.
The Wall Street Journal linked to the blog today and Problogger published an article I wrote on Facebook.
Traffic from Google still isn’t great, but I am expecting that to change when the Olympics are on and in the next thirty days as media networks go into Olympic coverage overdrive.
I still have no idea as to how the site will fare, but I am fairly confident I have done enough to at least get it to a point where it should do well.
I keep thinking of the analogy of someone publishing a book or releasing a movie - no matter how much work you put into something you have no idea as to how successful it will be until it is actually released. The site is live of course, but the start of the Olympics is going to be our “premiere”.
Shoemoney and his Fighters website
June 6, 2008
The Shoemoney show on webmasterradio.fm is currently one of my favorite podcasts. Shoemoney is doing live shows regularly and just by his nature you can pick up some great tidbits of information from his interviews and him just ranting.
He has been talking a great deal about his latest project fighters.com. Shoemoney could make plenty of money now by selling ebooks or internet marketing courses, but he doesn’t. He focuses on projects that he has an interest in and goes all out doing it.
Having lived in Japan for a long time I used to be a big fan of K1 and Pride. I could really get into doing a site like fighters.com if I lived in the U.S. Shoemoney recognized the importance of getting a good domain name and he paid somewhere from $50,000-$100,000 just for the domain. The previous owner originally wanted $250,000 for it. Since he bought it, he has already been offered three times what he bought it for. If you are going all out like he is on a site, I think it is worthwhile getting a domain which is memorable, especially in an area where people might not be tech savy.
He is also doing a lot of off-line advertising like sponsoring events and doing ads on radio through Google, which again having a domain name which is easy to remember is really going to help. If you look at the site they have anything from 1000-2000 people online at anytime.
Listening to the podcasts has given me motivation for my next website. The domain I have for it, is not as good as what he has, but I think it will still work well.
I will be happy when the Olympics are over.
Selling a website
May 27, 2008
Here are the details for anyone interested:
Don’t expect too much here for a while
April 13, 2008
I am spending more and more time on my Beijing Olympics blog, I just haven’t had the time to put into this site for now. I am also trying keep an offline diary of the different things I have been doing to promote the site.
I am going to release the diary as an ebook. I think it could become a good blueprint for someone attempting to create a website around a particular event. If the site does actually to go on to become a success, I will probably charge a nominal fee for it. If it doesn’t, well I suppose I will just have to give it away for free and let other people analyze what went wrong.
The weather is starting to warm-up in Beijing now and the apartment I have rented for the Olympics is starting to feel a little more like my home for now.
Aussie startup carnival
February 28, 2008
VS Consulting Group is running a carnival of startups in Australia. I think the internet offers a huge opportunity for Australians to start a web based business. We speak the same language (of sorts) as the biggest internet user base in the world, the United States and have pretty good ties with the other markets in Asia which will soon take over the US - namely China, Japan and South Korea.
Australia has a solid economy and a number of successful entrepreneurs but nothing like an Amazon, Google or Facebook. With so much money being made in property and the mining industry, it is not much of surprise that internet companies receive little attention in the media.
I have entered my Australia Forum in the carnival. I don’t think I will win any points for originality, but I think the forum is starting to a useful resource for people wanting to live or travel to Australia. They are currently looking for sponsors of the event.
One website or many
February 25, 2008
I am sometimes envious of people who have just one big website which they focus on. I can see the advantages of having just one thing to concentrate on. The problem I have is that I am always thinking of new ideas and always thinking the next site I develop is going to be “the one” that makes it big.
What I then end up with a hodge-podge of different websites. As long as I don’t have to spend much time maintaining them and they are able to grow by themselves with user generated content, I can’t seeing it being much of a problem. Adsense always seems to be up and down but every now and again I am approached by companies wanting to either advertise on my site or run an affiliate program.
Joblet approached me today to place a job widget on my Japan job site. You get paid for the referrals you bring in and looks like an excellent match for my site.
If you only had the one site you will be limited by these different opportunities.
