And to bring a little culture to this blog…

August 1st, 2006 by Chris

I just launched a new site, Balthasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom. It is just a newsletter site, and I mention it here for two reasons. One of which is because this work, written 400 years ago, is often used like Sun Tzu’s Art of War, as a guide for modern day business. Since most of the readers of this blog have their own business I figured it is something many of you would be interested in.

It also illustrates a website publishing concept of building off of existing sites or finding new applications for content. My literature site was my first successful for-profit website, so I’ve had it a long time now (started work on it in 1999). I have spun many sites off of it though. The first was a mythology site that takes content from one of the books on my literature site and packages it in a different way by indexing it by myth rather than original chapter. I should also add some user comment functionality to the myth site if I ever get around to it. I also have another newsletter site, Shakespeare’s Sonnet-a-Day that was run as part of my literature site for years before being spun off. The content for this site is entirely available on my literature site, but here its in a newsletter form with rss feeds and is updated every other day automatically. When I noticed the personal poetry section of my forum growing I launched The Poetry Post which is still growing and not meant to make money but by tying it in with my existing forum it had a large built in userbase upon launch.

I have plans for more spinoffs, specifically most of the books that are delimited into short content sections like The Art of Worldly Wisdom or Shakespeare’s Sonnets, I plan on turning into newsletter sites. All with content I already publish, just offered in a different way. These sites are relatively easy to make, are cheap to host, and really just run off 3 or 4 files, but they attract incoming links and let me build a large list of email subscribers that can be marketed to.

The point of all this is that when you want to expand your business, look at your existing sites first. Chances are you can think of a spinoff of some sort and you might even already have content to power it. Of course I’m not advocating making duplicate sites with the same content, but I think I’ve shown that you can use the same content and turn it into very different sites.

Posted in: Website Management » by: Chris

4 Responses to “And to bring a little culture to this blog…”

Lord Brar Says:
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:30 am
Chris, a question — Are these newsletter sites of yours actually managed by timed auto-responders or you have coded something custom. Just wondering how you do it technically.
Chris Says:
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:34 am
I have my own little script that increments the database to display the next entry each day or whatever. Then I use aweber.com to send out the sonnetaday newsletter from my rss feed, but I think for future ones I’ll just use feedburner’s feed sending.
Lord Brar Says:
August 3rd, 2006 at 3:58 am
That’s an excellent idea actually and would be pretty cheap. And with some imagination, you can actually place ads in FeedBurner eMails.
ToddW Says:
September 25th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Great advise about using existing sites to expand more.