What to do after having a brainstorm?

On the drive in to work this morning I had a brainstorm for a new site.

By the time I sat down at my desk in my office I had the rudimentary outline of how the site would work... how it would pay for all out going expenses, and how it would turn a profit. (the two are independant of each other).

I spent a couple about 30 minutes at nameboy searching for an available name and came across a 6 letter .com that is absolutly perfect... no numbers / dashs / crazy characters... just 6 letters - 2 words.... As well as having all the possible derivatives of it available as well. And it describes the site perfectly... Absolutely Perfectly

I wrote up my general outline and sent it to a couple of guys in the office. One being the graphical artist and the other being another php guy. Both agreed that it should work. Both agreed that they hadn't seen anything like it out there currently. Both agreed that the time requirements once set up would be minimal. (along the lines of 10 minutes a day)

The graphical artist agreed to create the logo and other related graphics as a favour (this guy is good... has a standing contract with 2 of the major car dealerships in houston as well as one for Jack Daniels, Sam Houston Race Park, and some other high $ clients... lucky to have him making it). The other php guy agreed to go in halvsies on any related start up costs. Which should be minimal (<$1k) since the graphics are going to be taken care of allready...

I'm going to need a running list of advertisers wanting to buy text links. There will be somewhere in the neighborhood of ~50 text links available per month in what would be most easily classified as a blog posts. Half of these links would be available to the public at large, half would be available only to visitors with paid memberships.

First question -
If I allow said advertisers to link to adult sites will that breach google's TOS? If yes what about YPN? This site SHOULD generate very high click through rates... Possibly insanely high so I FOR SURE do not want to breach their TOS even if that means limiting the income from the text links.

Second question -
I would prefer to have the text link advertisers set up and in place before taking the site live. How feasable is this without having a live site up and running? The idea behind the site is superty duperty simple so I'm incredibly leary of letting the cat of the bag before we have everything in place. Obviouslly I'll have to write up a non-disclosure agreement if this is feasable, but if it's not feasable until the site is running then there's no point in doing that... I know I personally wouldn't buy a link sight unseen (or possibly I should make the pun site unseen)... My initial inclination was to charge $5 per 2 text links (with one being in a public post and one being in members only posts), and raise the rates from there once PR is established. (I've got a semi-related pr7 another semi-related pr6 and a couple of pr5's to start the whole pr game off, so establishing the site to pr5 shouldn't be that hard.)

I'm posting this hoping to make sure I'm thinking of all the angles and possibly to come up with other ideas. So be sure to ask questions if I haven't given enough info... (However I won't be disclosing the idea behind the site until I've written up a NDA)

 

I'm not sure on the AdSense TOS with regard to adult sites, but just as an idea remember that it wouldn't be hard to program something where you could mark pages as having adult content and simply show adbrite or something else instead of adsense on those pages. Again I'm not positive this would completely avoid TOS issues (I don't know if their rules are about the page ads are displayed on or the site).

I think you might be rushing into the money side of things too quickly... who cares about a bunch of $2.50 text links when you really believe in your site? Even if you had 50 of them it would barely break $100 in revenue and it could potentially hurt your project. I'd wait on trying to make money until you've built a solid site that works well and gets traffic. I think a mistake many people make is they go into projects like this thinking $$$ without realizing that you won't really make good money until a site is strong/established and if you try to make money before then you could make it harder to establish your site.

Anyway, good luck with the project... to summarize: I think you should just focus on development and wait until you're getting a few thousand uniques a day before dedicating so much attention to revenue.

Just my advice

 

i'd have to agree with kkibak I would offer free links for the first month as a promotional strategy. If it's really that great of an idea I giving the first month or two away free with a notice of future charges. After you have reached a substantial amount of uniques and a reletively decent PR then you can charge.

I wouldn't pay 5 bucks for a PR0 link that I knew nothing about. I mean yeah that's cheap.. but not for what your getting. Really all people would get for the 5 bucks is maybe a few untargeted clicks and no PR gain because the first few months your site will still be establishing itself.

 

I agree with both of you. My thinking was to have this be cost neutral from the start, but the more I wrote the initial post the more I started asking myself "Why don't I just cover costs for the first few months"? You're both 100% correct in that focusing on links prior to having the site up isn't feasible.

I was going to tie the outlay to the text links, and that got stuck in my head... Thanks for making me take a step back.

I'm seriouslly thinking that Adsense will more than cover any outlay once it's up and running... I shoud just have faith in that... I was just looking at the possibility of this thing bleeding cash and wondering how to minimize the downside risk... Which is where I came up with the idea for the text links. But you're right, that's the wrong thing to focus on.

edit: As a followup, I made a couple of calls and secured funding for what I anticipate the first 2 months outlaying costs to be... That could be strecthed to cover 4 or as little as 1

 

Cool, glad you agree.. I personally use this advice on any project I'm 'serious' about as a long term endeavor. When you start putting ads all over the place you really hurt your chances of getting natural links from all places, but especially dmoz/wikipedia type sites, which is a big loss in my opinion. In fact w/my serious sites I usually pick a number at which point the money I'm losing by not having ads is too big for me to accept (for example, $50 a day). Then I make some rough estimates based on a conservative expected CTR / CPC and I can come up with a 'tangible' traffic level at which I'll start putting ads on.

Anyway good luck w/the project! Sounds like you're off to a solid start.

 

That's exactly what we did... and the way the site will be set up we can predetermine what the bleed rate will be... we're currently thinking around $15-20 a day. That should allow us to get through somewhere around 3 months before having to reevaluate.

As a caveat though we're going to start out with ad inclusion in certain parts as we think our visitors are going to want to click on the ads. Provided Google (or Yahoo whatever) gets the contextualisation right... This could end up being the hardest part as I think we're going to be dissallowing tons and tons of advertisers.

(also saw the rough mock up of the logo... it's awesome)... also turns out our initial domain name idea was registered on dec 9th of this year, but was able to find something possibly as good maybe even better than the initial one. Went ahead and registered the .com/net/org/info domains for it.

Do you think there's any need to worry about any of the other extensions at this point? This name is much more brandable than the first one we though of but instead of being a 6 letter.com this one is a 9 letter.