Newbie Dilemma

First content site, lots of unfinished content, do i go live or wait?

[brickwall]

Hello. Iam a newbie here and this is my first post.

Iam currently developing a content site. It's quite ambitious and somewhat large. I have the structure in place but Iam just starting to write the content. It will take a while to get a decent amount done, perhaps a month or two. My question is: Is it wise to already go live and advertise a content site even when much of it is not yet online? Or is it better to wait until a good amount is done before telling the world? I have set up some affiliate adverts with reviews in them and they are somewhat related to my content and they are already done so I thought maybe these are good enough to start with. Will it hurt me or disappoint the first visitors if I do decide to launch this now?

[instinct]

Welcome to Webmaster world!

As far as your dilema goes, thats a tough one. Something to keep in mind is - Is your site good enough that other decent websites will want to link to it? Link building should definitely be a consideration.

If you contact another webmaster today and he sees your site and decides it's not up to par - does that ruin your future chances of him/her ever linking to you?

On the other hand - opening the site up and submitting to Google right away is also advisable. Many here believe that it now takes many months just to rank these days. This is commonly refered to as the Sandbox - do a search for this term for more info.

My advice is to 'open' your site, submit to the search engines but wait until it is more developed before starting an agressive link building campaign.

Good luck

[brickwall]

Thank you very much instinct, that was sound advice. Iam also thinking of the time I will be losing on G if I wait for a couple of months, besides from the potential revenue I might get by launching early.

Anybody else here who want to contribute an opinion based on experience? Will be much appreciated.

[caveman]

Get it up, market when you're ready. If you have entire, self contained sections that are ready now, market just those now.

Cavedad's favorite saying: "Ready, fire, aim!" :-)

[nativenewyorker]

Get the site indexed by the search engines as soon as possible. Don't worry about the handful of people that stumble on the site and find it unfinished. Most of those people will just click on the back button and go onto the next search result if they don't find what they're looking for at your site.

Going the other route of build it first and they will come is foolish. You may knock yourself out writing lots of content and then find out that there is no traffic to view it. Some webmasters with new sites report on forum 3 [webmasterworld.com] that they are still in the Google sandbox from Q1 2004.

[brickwall]

Thanks guys. I just learned about this theory of Google's sandboxing and I believe it should really be considered in making decisions on when to launch. I'll go live soon and start submitting to directories and SEs.

Thanks again.