New online business question - opinions?

cagedbiker

Hi all,

Not a usual poster to this forum (as you can probably tell by the username I'm usually in the motors section) but i've read a lot in here over the last while and was hoping to get some opinions for an idea of mine.

I have (far too many) quite a few domain names, some for sale, some up and running and some earmarked for future projects.

Of the future projects, the websites will need content - it is key afterall - on a variety of subjects and will be funded by paid listings from relevant companies.

My main concern is that it's not a full time job for any one website. It would be a full time job split over three or four websites and my projections have been that I could probably take the risk over 9 years (five year plan for 4 sites, one new site launching each year) and hire one person to look after all four on a salary of about 40-50k. That person would look after general content which would be sourced from many places (identified already) and primarily dealing with advertising clients.

I would handle the general upkeep of the website and the marketing - my two areas of expertise competence interest.

the other option is to offer one site part time to someone like a stay at home mom or someone who wants to work part time from home - it really only involves selling two or three advertising slots per month and maintaining the other clients on average as well as posting about two articles a week that can be informed from a variety of other sources - we're not looking at a new wikipedia or one man about.com here!

This is a new venture for me, the other sites I've done (all with Joomla) have been handled exclusively by myself and I have a full time job (and family with new baby) so I can't do it all but I feel that I have to get these ideas into the real world or I'll go crazy.

My other sites could probably also do with some regularish updating and monitoring - more than my time will allow.

Do any of you more experience/intelligent folk have any advice or opinions on this, anything would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Stephen

EKRIUQ

Hi Caged,

I'll try to answer as well as I can but just to clear up a few things

Have any of your sites generated enough income to justify paying someone a salary of 40-50k?

Are you selling a product or service on your website?

Have you considered the cost of promotion for your websites, to get people to your web site

Are your sites that so well know that advertisers will pay money to advertise on them.

Have you a business plan to show your projected earnings and shown it to a consultant to find holes in it.

WebExpert

Hi Stephen,

I am very interested in this.

I would consider myself a bit of an expert in this area.

PM me please if you are interested, I will be able to help you with this.

Thanks.

cagedbiker

Namesco wrote: »

Hi Caged,

I'll try to answer as well as I can but just to clear up a few things

Have any of your sites generated enough income to justify paying someone a salary of 40-50k?

Are you selling a product or service on your website?

Have you considered the cost of promotion for your websites, to get people to your web site

Are your sites that so well know that advertisers will pay money to advertise on them.

Have you a business plan to show your projected earnings and shown it to a consultant to find holes in it.

Hi Namesco, thanks for the input.

My projections do seem to justify a salary of that level, as the salary is going to be split over the different sites in relation to their projected percentage of time spent on them.

The sites are informational on specific subjects and the revenue for these will be driven by specific advertisers on the site, rather than a physical product. Some sites are simply a repository of information linked by a common theme of advertisers.

I do have a (admitedly modest) marketing spend allocated to each site but I'm planning on organic search engine growth marketing - my area - and very little by way of paid advertising or google adwords as my experience hasn't been great for these.

Have a vague business plan in my head and scraps of paper, I am not looking at launching this next week, it's just recently come out of the "kernel of an idea" stage and is in the research and development stage. I have shown some of the figures to confidantes to guage their reactions, my background is in business and marketing with a fair bit of web design/marketing/implimentation experience but I don't have the patience for content creation and would rather look at the big picture...

I do take the comments about making sure that I'm likely to recoup my losses, it's going to be my money (or at least my responsibility!) and showing it to independents is on the cards too when the idea is more formalised and the business/marketing plans are formed and importantly written down!

Any other thoughts on the idea?

cagedbiker

WebExpert wrote: »

Hi Stephen,

I am very interested in this.

I would consider myself a bit of an expert in this area.

PM me please if you are interested, I will be able to help you with this.

Thanks.

Hi WebExpert,

Sorry to sound pessimistic but this is your first post on boards, so I won't be going to PM you about this - even though you say you are an expert and your nick is WebExpert...

If you have any comments please feel free to post them here though...

Thanks

WebExpert

cagedbiker wrote: »

Hi WebExpert,

Sorry to sound pessimistic but this is your first post on boards, so I won't be going to PM you about this - even though you say you are an expert and your nick is WebExpert...

If you have any comments please feel free to post them here though...

Thanks

Ok,

Well my general thoughts are:

1. You just want someone to keep content fresh/update new content and liase with clients. 40-50K is a hell of a lot for a web based business to do this. There must be one hell of a market and you must be very confident of finding a steady stream of advertisers. I can get someone to do the content part for about $200 per month and write about you want or come up with interesting articles.

2. "Showing it to independents" - this is very important and you need to find independents who are critical. Find a VC that invests in web based businesses. His feedback will in be very valuable.

Overall it will need to be a great market to make 40-50K from advertising alone.

cagedbiker

Thanks, and thanks for the PM, a lot more info there!

In response to your post:

1. I know that 40 - 50k is above the odds for content only (wasn't sure by how much though as I'm new to this side of things) but I was focussing on content and sales for this person too.
The 200$ per month is for four sites or for each site, just out of curiosity - as i said I'm new.

2. How does one go about meeting with VCs in Ireland, I'm based in a family business which is running smoothly and self sufficiently so we've never needed anything like this before.

Each website wouldn't make 40-50k, but each would make about 7 - 15k per year each after paying their share of the 40-50k salary and advertising, don't know if that's what I got across in the initial post...

WebExpert

cagedbiker wrote: »

Thanks, and thanks for the PM, a lot more info there!

In response to your post:

1. I know that 40 - 50k is above the odds for content only (wasn't sure by how much though as I'm new to this side of things) but I was focussing on content and sales for this person too.
The 200$ per month is for four sites or for each site, just out of curiosity - as i said I'm new.

2. How does one go about meeting with VCs in Ireland, I'm based in a family business which is running smoothly and self sufficiently so we've never needed anything like this before.

Each website wouldn't make 40-50k, but each would make about 7 - 15k per year each after paying their share of the 40-50k salary and advertising, don't know if that's what I got across in the initial post...

Yes, I understand alright. Anyway you must be confident enough.

The $200 should cover a lot of work for all sites.