I'd like your thoughts on the following strategy.
I may have the opportunity to buy a 21 year old generic domain. It's a PR5 - and a real PR5. I'm familiar with the history of the site, guy built it in the 90's and got a lot of good press and backlinks. It's a site that I used to have backlinks from (it was one of my secret/cherry backlinks).
Q1) The only potential problem is, the site has had a parked page for about a year. So first Google SEO question - if I start to throw up new content over a parked 'Hosted by" page, am I likely to retain any historical love from Google? i.e. will new content likely rank based on an old, quality backlink profile?
Q2) Thoughts on my business plan? I'd like to turn it into a news blog site, but I can't write all the articles myself. So I was thinking I'd recruit say 2-3 other experts in my industry. Then we'd have a cycle of blog posts like this:
- D1-weekend wrapup from around the web.
-D2 - article by me
-D3/4 - articles by other experts
D5- week wrapup from around the web.
Monetization initially in three ways. 1) I own an ad network in the industry, so I have that :) 2) high end guest blog posts - I think I can get the occassional one for $500+/post if this is as high quality site as I'd like. 3) Develop email list to send out notification/updates, and allow occassional sponsorship.
Thiis is primarily, but not solely dependent on getting google rankings. I also have the ability to get some press on about 50 of the top blogs in my industry as an announcement.
Not sure how to pay the other other experts. It's the old don't want the risk, don't want to pay conundrum. I suppose I could pay a minimal fee with the idea that the experts are going to be writing to promote their own business - that's upfront cost but maintains control. Or I could pay them something like 5% of revenue, so no upfront costs but I'm losing control. Not sure what's more attractive to industry experts?
