I’ve been working hard at getting another city guide up to add to my current London and Beijing (which isn’t actually even finished yet) sites. This one is aimed mainly at backpacker types who are thinking about heading to Sydney to live, work and play for awhile. Keeping with the ‘Stuck In’ theme, this one is called Stuck in Sydney and is similar to the others in layout and content. It’s still a work in progress but I’m hoping to hammer out a few articles over the next few days, create a header logo and get the thing out there into internet land.
I’ve registered a load of ‘Stuck In’ domain names and plan to create lots of city sites similar to these. I find they’re good earners with Adsense and I think there is a lot of potential for direct link sales with local businesses once the sites gain PR and a bit of traffic. Plus they’re the type of sites that can be built and forgotten about and that suits me just fine.
I had been a bit cautious about posting my intentions to my blog in case people try to snap up ‘Stuck In’ domains for other cities but I think I’m happy with the places I’ve nabbed and they’ll keep me busy for a long time to come. I like the idea of having a bunch of these sites all connected together as a network but that will be a lot of work for one person to accomplish.
As I started to feel overwhelmed at the thought of building copious amounts of city guide websites without much knowledge of most places, I started to wonder whether there might be other ways to go about it and came up with a few ideas…
- Form partnerships with people who know the city well – With such a mammoth task ahead I thought about bringing other people on board in one way or another. I toyed with the idea of having other people run the sites and splitting revenue somehow. Or even letting them keep all the revenue while paying me some sort of flat monthly fee for hosting, the domain name and links might work. Both of these options would probably be complicated to set up and being in a partnership of sorts might be more of a headache that it’s worth.
- Sell the sites and domains outright – I thought of building a site for each city with a Google area guide map and a price guide ready to go and then selling the whole thing, domain included. The buyer would have a working site and would onlly have to plug in some content. I see this option as a fast way to create a network of quality sites with each site owner being an expert on their chosen city so that the whole network grows and strengthens together. Having people on board who know their cities well and want to grow their sites and make some money would, I think, be much better than me having to pay for content and cobble together articles based on internet research. Plus it would be fast cash in my pocket but at the expense of potential future earnings.
- Keep control of the sites and pay writers to produce content – This is what I’ve done so far with my sites and it seems to be working. I write as much as I can based on my own knowledge and experience and then find other people to fill in the gaps. For my London site I was able to produce most of the content myself but for the Sydney site I will have to pay for most of it. Finding writers hasn’t been a problem but it is expensive and probably isn’t realistic with 50 sites to do. Contacting expats or bloggers who run city sites to write for me in exchange for permanent links on their articles might also be an option.
I really think I’ve got my plate full with this idea and am open to suggestions on what to do. I had been inclined to build all of the sites on my own but it is very slow going and I’m not sure it will be possible. I have what I think is a good site layout, target market and concept but I’m not sure I can realistically build all of these sites without seriously compromising the quality.
Would anyone have any suggestions on how to even go about a pertnership type system? Do you think buying this type of completed site would appeal to anyone? Or what about trying to find people to write for me in exchange for permanent links on their articles… do you think people would go for that?
What would you do if you were in this situation? Any ideas or suggestions would be great!
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