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This one was a community site, launched in April 2003 with a view to monetising it. It was built 100% on the design ethos of Brett's 12 month guide....
I note from my first post that we kicked it off and launched (via one dmoz link) with 100 pages in the index and an empty forum except for the two posts by me and my partner.
Now as at June 2004 we are approaching 2,000 members, 7,000 posts on the forum, 25 member submitted widget reviews (the ones we approved - i.e. the good ones that are published) and some 2,000 other pages of 90% member produced content (mostly me doing the balance).
I haven't looked at page views recently, but last time I looked it was about 11k a day.
It's #1 in every search engine for every conceivable term relating to widgets.
It now produces very good money via a combination of private affiliate marketing and a smattering of AdSense. With that income we're funding a couple of dedicated servers for other projects and we split the cash difference between the two of us. We've also used some of the surplus cash to pay other web developers to build/create web related projects for us rather than do donkey work php etc ourselves.
Why bother posting about it? Well I regularly see threads about Brett's original 12 month guide and questions relating to it standing the test of time and does it really work?
This is my example of a text book application of that guide. To the letter, and in fact Brett's original promise that you'd hit 10k page views within 12 months was pretty accurate too.
Our second major site was launched a month ago and has taken off at an even faster rate (again community based and averaging 12-15 new members per day).
The second one has partly been my own experimentation with real world marketing, letting the SEO take care of itself as people naturally link to good quality resources. Rather than the dmoz link, this one got it's launch courtesy of an article in a major UK national newspaper (the Guardian).
The design still follows the same philosophy of Brett's original guide though. We're sandboxed at the moment I believe (thank god for real world marketing) so all traffic is type-in (brand brand brand is my motto), but I have no doubt in 11 months time we'll be smashing everyone else to pieces in the SERPS.
It's really good fun this game (when you're not relying on it as your main source of income anyway!) and I really need to thank each and every member on this forum, and Brett for that original 12 month guide, without who I would never have got any of these sites off the ground.
TJ
It's true, most of what you learn is by doing it, scr*wing something up and then coming over here to get the answers!
The nice thing is once you've collated the answers, you're able to help other members on here when they post with that exact same problem as you had. I remember in my first month here I helped about 4 or 5 people who were having the same googlebot problem we did by recommending they check if they are serving googlebot a Session ID. What goes around comes around.
The biggest thing I have learned through experience with this particular site, and perhaps Brett's 12 month guide in general (or any other form of long-term strategy for that matter) is that a "top of the mountain peak" ultra-niche community site will expand width-wise over time. I think this is largely because once you have a reasonably large number of members in one place talking about widgets, a sizeable proportion will always end up also wanting to talk about wodgets and will demand a new forum and new reviwes section etc. This seems to be a continuous sideways expansion as you start to cover the overlaps and thereby cross over into new terriotory.
To try to give an examplified description of how that worked for us, if you imagine we had a site about red cars with softops (ultra-niche), inevitably some of the discussion cross-relates to blue cars with hardtops. Once you get into that, the width expands out to trucks, lorries etc.
We started "ultra-niche" for which authority came quickly, after some time we became authoritative for just plain "niche" and are now heading towards being authoritative for "general".
That brings in new members, more content, more links and more anchor-text. Oh and more affiliate opportunities off the back of that content.
I could walk away from it at this point and it will continue to grow.
We've taken a similar philiosophy with the new site. It's general on it's topic (very competitive) but specialises in a niche subset. The idea is to target that niche, and allow the general to come through on the back of it's success and established brand.
TJ
