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 Posted: Thu, 9th Apr 2009 03:11 Post subject: Looking to make my own review site, need "template" |
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Ok so ive been thinking about this idea alot lately, which turned me off is the fact that i have little programming experience, i wouldnt be able to program a site in php/sql in this lifetime.
But using wordpress gave me hope that there might be a package available that is customizable.
For example, lets say i want a review site about clubs, site would start with a selection of towns, whereafter there is a selection of the clubs in that town, when you click that specific club link you will see the following:
A picture of how it looks outside, the address with a link to google maps etc, the basic info
Next is the complicated part, people should be able to comment on it , sorta like digg.com, and give a 1-5 stars rating , you can sort the comments by new , highest etc
so i hope it sorta gives an idea of what im looking for, are there any packages that i could put on a webserver and custumize like that ?
thanks
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Rinze
Site Admin
Posts: 2343
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| Posted: Thu, 9th Apr 2009 04:07 Post subject: |
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Just download the proper plugins for Wordpress/Drupal/whatever CMS you want to use. The popular CMS's will have plugins for google maps, lists, voting, etc.
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| Posted: Thu, 9th Apr 2009 05:24 Post subject: |
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A little c/p from another forum, to give you ideas on how to monetize your site  Not sure if that's your endgame, but I'm guessing it is.
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I don’t normally go posting this kind of stuff unless I am getting something in return of equal value, but I am fairly new here, so I thought I would share a story with you that will essentially spell out how to create a new businesses. I don’t really have the time to be doing this, but who knows, maybe I need a favor in the future and somebody will be able to answer that favor.
OK, you ready to find out how you can earn AT LEAST $200K in 2008?
Local Search Engine Control
If you're like me, I use Google or have used Google in the past to find restaurants or supply shops in my area. If I am looking for a chinese place because I just moved to the city of OceanSide, then I type in:
oceanside "chinese restaurant"
What I see is that there are roughly 25,000 listings for that phrase. That's under the 40K mark which I set for myself as an upper limit for a niche term to dominate. This becomes important, as you will see in a minute.
Using whatever methods you want to build pages that will get ranked (usually social network building) you can pretty much get anywhere from 1 to all 10 listings on the first page of Google for that 3 word phrase. There are a variety of ways to do this, but I am not going to get into that, because that is an extensive course in of itself.
If the search results were over 40K results, then it would be tougher. If there are only 5,000 results, then you'd probably get all 10 results on the first page. For example:
rosamond "chinese restaurant"
So I could dominate the city of Rosamond, Ca. for this niche. It’s a small town out by a race track on the outskirts of L.A. county.
OK, so where do you go with this? Easy. Here's what I did.
Let's say we start with Rosamond. You go in and you capture all 10 spots (or as many as you can) for the key phrase you are going after, and on those pages you promote a fake chinese restaurant. Where the name of the restaurant would go, you call it "Your-Name-Here Chinese Restaurant." There should be links on the page to one or two high PR restuarant guides, as this will give you even more link juice and help you capture as many of the listings on the 1st page of Google. You also link to your website where you describe your services, and you have a phone #.
Next you put together some kind of marketing campaign for restaurants. You want to hit all the restaurants in that city, whether they be chinese or pizzarias. Doesn't matter. You do some direct mail pieces to them. You have to have REALLY good creative in this piece to grab their attention. If you aren’t a great writer, outsource this to elance, or invest in a really good copyrighting course.
Tell these owners how they may increase their revenue by 208% (or whatever percentage is factual based on how you spin what you’re telling them) by being on the 1st page of Google, blah, blah, blah. Pull up the stats and make it compelling. 80 to 90% of people won’t look past the 1st search results page. Use stuff like that.
The clincher here is you tell them that you put your money where your mouth is. You won’t charge them a cent unless you can get a page on the first Google results page that mentions their company and is fully controlled by them. This means they can say whatever they want on the page. You’ll need to make sure it still has enough anchor text and keyword text to not drop its listing spot.
Now you can charge them for this service. In my case, this was a $900 one time charge, or $197 down and then $97 per month for a year. Most take the $900, ONCE they see results.
But what really sells them is that I tell them to go to Google and do the search term for the ROSAMOND “CHINESE RESTAURANT”, just to show them that I can do what I say. I tell them that in less then 2 weeks, I have displaced all of the Rosamond, Ca. Chinese restaurants, pushing them off the first page, and they’ll see that I now control those pages. Hell, I could now put text on that page that says:
“Why would you eat Chinese food when you could have a delicious Pizza at Tony’s family Pizzaria. BLAH BLAH BLAH” Believe me, I have sold Chinese pages to Hamburger joints or sea food places. They are cut throat and want to advertise to anybody looking for a restaurant to eat at. You don’t have to do this, and you can reserve those Chinese pages just for a Chinese restaurant. You create scarcity, and people will be compelled to buy (that’s a whole different educational course.)
You’ll be surprised how many businesses see that you have done what you said and want you to do that for their business in their category. You can make it even better by telling them that once that restaurant type is taken (one store only), that its closed, and that’s it. If you’re a Chinese Restaurant owner, the last thing you want is for one of your competing Chinese Restaurants to own the majority of the 1st page rankings on Google, especially when your restaurant doesn’t even show up on the first 40 results. And trust me sir, I have sent the same offer to ALL of your competitors. I only need one of you to say YES and then the offer is closed.
I doubled my income when I changed the formula a bit. For people that wanted to me on the monthly plan, I told them that I wouldn’t charge them anything, but the price was $900 if I could get them on the 1st page. I would then charge an extra $200 for every additional listing I got on the first page. On average, I was able to get 6 to 7 listings per page. The bill would be over $2K and I would tell them that I would make them a deal. If they pay me the $900 upfront for the 1st listing, I would take the remaining $1,200 (6 other listings) and knock it down to just 2 more payments of $200 each, spread out over the next 60 days, or $200 right now (That’s $1,100 total), and 75% of the time I would get my money up front right then and there, because the owners want to save $$$.
This is important because sometimes a city is too small and just doesn’t get a lot of traffic through Google, so the owner may feel they aren’t getting their money’s worth if they track their online traffic to their website or phone # or coupons, etc., and they stop paying you. You are in the business of making money, not trying to collect it.
Another thing is you should never give up the logins and pw’s to the pages you have created, to the owner, until you are fully paid. I learned this lesson the hard way when I got stiffed and tried to go in and slap the owner and restaurant on the very pages I had created for him, but he had gone in and changed the passwords.
I could write 10X more than what I have now, but this should already have gotten your brain going.
Why am I posting this? Surely I will get competition right? Eh…. Maybe, but here’s my thought on it. First, 99.99% of people will never take action. It’s a proven fact. I bet 99.9% of the forum users here have ebooks they have downloaded that they haven’t even read yet. It’s just the way we are built. We scramble and want to move on to the next thing. For that 0.01% that does take action, good for them. There’s plenty of room.
There are roughly 20,000 cities in the USA alone. I could do this in Canada too, remember! And there are at least 10 different major types of restaurants (Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Irish, Sushi, Buffet’s, etc.) That’s over 200,000 potential paying accounts, IF only just one of them per city per category type signed up. You could easily sell 2 or 3, making that 400K or 600K paying customers At my rates, the 200K is $180 million dollars, assuming I never upsold them. And that’s just one category. I only tap a very small fraction of this amount. And every few years, most restaurants are out of business and you have a whole new pool of customers that have replaced them. It’s great!
What if instead of restaurants I want to go after car stereo shops, or fitness centers, or dentists, etc. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of niches you can get into.
Instead of brick and morter shops, you could go after online websites and do this globally. Now you have access to tens of millions of businesses!
I’ve done it part time, outsourcing almost all of it, and it’s generated well into the 6 figures per year. 2008 will probably double for me. This is just one of the many things I do, and one of the smaller ones.
Please don’t PM me about this, as I don’t have time for individual chatting or tutoring. If you have questions or comments, post them here for everybody to share.
I would love to hear from those of you who actually do this. Post your results here in this thread.
And before you post a question, really THINK about what you’re about to ask. 90% of what I see asked in this forum is really annoying because the answers are readily available if you only did a quick Google search. Use your brains. Thin outside the box and be creative. I did, and it paid off. |
Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly
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spankie
VIP Member
Posts: 2958
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Thu, 9th Apr 2009 11:10 Post subject: |
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experience teaches me that a crap site with advertising drives customers away becuase they smell you are doing it for the money...
First make a nice design, then monetize. I agree that Drupal, wordpress and other CMS are ok, but my experience is that it never does what you really want. So you will have to customize it, or do as i do. Make your own thing and just pick pieces of code from the source of those packages. I am not a php or sql wizard, and i never followed any courses or so, but i managed to make very nice simple design.
So just get a php manual and start, contact me via pm if you need some help. I have been thiking about making a movie review site myself, but i just havent got enough time in 1 day. Thats the disadvantage of starting from scratch, you need a lot of motivation because you have very poor results in the beginning and it might scare you away...
Btw, the monetizing up here looks $$, but my experience teaches me that when you get $1000/year, your site needs to be very nice, and it isnt that easy. Making 100$ a year is easy, and pays your "hobby website" hosting costs, but you cannot live off it. And monetizing and earning thousands without any coding experience... Your server will crash or you will get hacked, thousands of $ means lots of visitors and exposure and probably some badass hax0rs...
Btw, you might consider using the MediaWiki, but that is a real pain in the ass to customize, but once you understand the structure, you can do it. Wiki had shitload of plugins, map plugins etc that are "templates". Wiki has skins that make your site look like a regular site. You can customize everything you want very easily because there is an api.php and plugins that make 'advanced db querying' easy. Lets you do difficult queries on a easy way. Using some php layer above this api your basically doing advanced queries by consecutively using easy api queries.
Anyway, if you need help on that, also drop me a pm.
and btw, Have Fun! Making your site ok will take a lot of time and a lot of *** debugging in the end
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| Posted: Thu, 9th Apr 2009 11:20 Post subject: |
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thanks for the advice, this site is first of all for fun, and to make something constructive that people can use and enjoy , i would really like it if visitors came back often.
At the start i dont plan to have any ads at all to keep the site a clean look and not scare away the few early visitors, if this site does get a high turn out, i would consider custom made flash banner on the side or something specific for one client.
Im familiar with wordpress cause my friend uses it for his icehocky blog, but i never knew how costumizable it was, i found some nice rating posts plugins etc, but im honestly overwhelmed by the amount of plugins, where its not easy to find what you need.
So what would help the most is someone who uses a very customized wordpress, so i could check what the useful plugins are to give me a headstart.
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spankie
VIP Member
Posts: 2958
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Fri, 24th Apr 2009 13:49 Post subject: |
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how is your site going btw?
about the plugins... I find it very distracting to see all the plugins. You discover all the plugins and you want to use them. So you start finding reasons to be able to use them. The best thing you can do first is: determine what functions you need and then find a solution for your problem. And then you realize you probably will have to make it yourself partially or use an existing thing and customize it to your needs...
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