First Post - When To Be Like Chris... when Not To Be?

[proweb]

Hey All,

Long time reader, first time poster. I've been watching Chris (admiring, not stalking) for about 3 years. I first saw him on SitePoint forums and then saw some of his articles / blogs over there and then came to this site.

Well, something's been bugging me for a while and I thought I'd post it to this super smart / experienced community.

Long story short, I own about 30 sites that range from 2 impressions a month to 2 million impressions per month. I'm ready to move onto a new project / site and I've got a few ideas.

I noticed that Chris has some sites in very niche markets (http://www.diycostume.com) and some in pretty large markets (http://www.backyardgardening.net). One of the ideas I want to go into is in a large market, but already pretty saturated, but I think I can leverage my existing community, platform, etc. I'm just worried that the time / energy / money won't "pay off".

My questions:

1) Is it better to have a large part of a small pie or a small part of a big pie?
2) How do you determine if a market / niche is good to move into?
3) How do you calculate a ROI for your time, money, and other resources you put into a new site?
4) Do you only go after a market if you think you can do a better job than everything already available?
5) Do you ever enter a large market, even if already saturated with some great sites, so you can get a piece of the action (even if you don't have the resources to be as good as some of the other sites)?

Chris has a ton of sites / projects (some more popular than others), and I'm sure he's also got about 500 more ideas. I'm sure all of us have a few ideas, so how do you decide which sites to develop and which not to?

[Chris]

I just want to bump this thread. I don't have time to respond to it right now, but I'll get to it this weekend. I just wanted you to know you weren't being ignored.

[proweb]

Thanks Chris. I figured other members:

1) Were struggling with the same questions and didn't have answers
2) Had all the answers but didn't want to share the goods
3) Were turned off by the title because they all felt they should always "Be Like Chris"

Looking forward to replies from you and other WSP members!

[peach]

*sends reminder

[Cutter]

Follow two rules:

1) Enjoy and be generally interested in the niche/market/topic

2) Your time is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money you have to invest.

These two things will change the way how you answers all of the other questions. I'll leave the exact answers to your questions open. There are lots of unique ways to approach things, and I don't think one is superior or absolutely right, it depends on who you are, what your goals are, and how you like to work.

[proweb]

Follow two rules:

1) Enjoy and be generally interested in the niche/market/topic

2) Your time is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money you have to invest.

These two things will change the way how you answers all of the other questions. I'll leave the exact answers to your questions open. There are lots of unique ways to approach things, and I don't think one is superior or absolutely right, it depends on who you are, what your goals are, and how you like to work.

Agreed, but it would be nice to see a plethora of different takes / opinions on the questions. It would be even more helpful to hear from members' experiences where they either:

1) Went into a market that seemed saturated and were successful, or
2) Went into a marked that was saturated and got nowhere.

[Cutter]

I have plenty of experiences with both, and if I would have followed both those rules I could have cut my losses with the failures much more quickly.

If you are really interested in the saturated market that you go after, and honestly put in the time, work, and capital necessary, its hard not to "succeed." (thats presuming you have had success in the past and know the right direction you are going after.)

The tricky part comes in defining success. Lets say you want to go after the internet dating market. Is success going to be being the #1 dating site in the United States, or making $500,000 a year off a niche market? As long as you don't have to be #1, there is a lot more room for "success" than most realize.

[proweb]

The tricky part comes in defining success. Lets say you want to go after the internet dating market. Is success going to be being the #1 dating site in the United States, or making $500,000 a year off a niche market? As long as you don't have to be #1, there is a lot more room for "success" than most realize.

Excellent points. My target market is large enough that I don't mind a relative small part of the big pie. With my other major site I have the #1 spot in a small niche. Hard for others to knock me out of #1 spot, but not a lot of room for growth (small market).

One of my problems is that I have a hard time not having the best offering available. The relatively large market I want to move into has a lot of big players with great offerings. I personally struggle with going in to compete and not having the resources or features / offerings they have.

So, tyeing this into the original post, let's use an example: Chris has his gardening forum http://www.gardeningforums.net which is part of a few of his other garden sites. Compare his forum / offering to http://www.gardenguides.com. If you were Chris and were starting your garden site today, would you do it knowing it is a pretty saturated market?

Chris, it looks like you started your gardening forum back in mid 2006. Do you mind sharing with us why you went into this pretty saturated market? Did you think either:

1) You could develop / offer something better than the other options on the net?
2) You didn't need something better because the market was large enough for a relatively smaller player / offering?

[Todd W]

Excellent points. My target market is large enough that I don't mind a relative small part of the big pie. With my other major site I have the #1 spot in a small niche. Hard for others to knock me out of #1 spot, but not a lot of room for growth (small market).

One of my problems is that I have a hard time not having the best offering available. The relatively large market I want to move into has a lot of big players with great offerings. I personally struggle with going in to compete and not having the resources or features / offerings they have.

So, tyeing this into the original post, let's use an example: Chris has his gardening forum http://www.gardeningforums.net which is part of a few of his other garden sites. Compare his forum / offering to http://www.gardenguides.com. If you were Chris and were starting your garden site today, would you do it knowing it is a pretty saturated market?

Chris, it looks like you started your gardening forum back in mid 2006. Do you mind sharing with us why you went into this pretty saturated market? Did you think either:

1) You could develop / offer something better than the other options on the net?
2) You didn't need something better because the market was large enough for a relatively smaller player / offering?

He went into this area because it's a topic he's interested in.

-Todd

[proweb]

He went into this area because it's a topic he's interested in.

-Todd

Todd, I'm not questioning his interest in the topic, but I also know Chris is incredibly busy and I believe, from what I've read, that he wants to get an ROI on his investment (financial and time).

IMHO, interest alone is not reason enough to invest the time and energy into developing a site and especially a forum / community which he'll have to manage (directly or indirectly). Example, unless he's using a pirated version of vBulletin, he's already $80 + setup time into that forum.

I may be wrong, and will wait to hear from Chris to verify, but my guess is that even though he is interested in gardening he has motives for creating and managing a gardening forum above simple interest in the topic.

[Chris]

$80 is nothing.

I got into gardening sites because I like gardening. I launched by gardening blog in late 2005, it was already a saturated field, and it didn't take long for it to be #1 in google for "Gardening blog."

Forums are more difficult, you cannot really manufacturer a community, but it is a long term project for me, 10 years. You may notice I put no work into promoting that gardening forum, because it isn't a priority for me right now. I just have it out there, getting almost no traffic, and I'm fine with that.

I will continue building my gardening network, writing more content, and when I feel like it has reached a critical mass, then I will start doing heavy promotion.

The main point to learn from this is if you have an idea, get it launched. Even if you don't think it'll grow quickly/fast at first because you cannot yet make it a priority, get it launched. It might not earn much, but it'll earn something, it may not get many backlinks, but it'll get a few. I own more sites I do no work on than sites I work on regularly, they're just small, often less-than-complete, sites but they've got age, links, a little bit of traffic, and make me money without any effort. One day I might revamp them and do a marketing push (recently done with my drug site for instance), and upgrade them to a site I actively work on.

Of course I want to make money on it one day, and gardening ads do get a really nice CPM, which was partially my motivation. If the topic didn't make money I wouldn't have gone down that road, but it does, and in the long term I'm confident I can build it into a vibrant and popular site, but I do mean long term.

[Chris]

1) Is it better to have a large part of a small pie or a small part of a big pie?


Either, really. half a dozen of one, 6 of the other.


2) How do you determine if a market / niche is good to move into?

It is a factor of my interest, and what I perceive as competition. How much I think I can make as well. The #1 factor though is potential synergy. If I think I can do cross promotion with other sites of mine I'm substantially more likely to enter a niche.



3) How do you calculate a ROI for your time, money, and other resources you put into a new site?


I don't usually. You can't. Say you write a piece of content, that content is going to be earning you money for years and years, as well as increasing your site's footprint and so providing traffic to other articles as well. You can't measure that.

Now sure, when I'm buying content, buying software, paying programmers, I consider this, but for writing content I really do not.



4) Do you only go after a market if you think you can do a better job than everything already available?


No, the goal isn't always to be best, just be successful.


5) Do you ever enter a large market, even if already saturated with some great sites, so you can get a piece of the action (even if you don't have the resources to be as good as some of the other sites)?


Yes

[proweb]

$80 is nothing.

Agreed, but the time you spent in setting up vBulletin, doing the theme, setting up categories, forums, etc. etc. was definitely an investment, right?



Forums are more difficult, you cannot really manufacturer a community, but it is a long term project for me, 10 years

Is your realistic goal to eventually be ahead of many of the other sites out there? I guess a better question is this: How do you measure success? Is it by uniques, pageviews, revenue when compared to other sites YOU own, or when compared to other sites in your niche, or something else?



The main point to learn from this is if you have an idea, get it launched.

I think this is the biggest take away! Every entrepreneur book, blog, podcast and TV show that I've partaken of always have the person commenting on the need to just do it and take risks.

My follow up question, which is never answered, is how much should be invested? Should we put in just enough design, just enough programming, just enough SEO, just enough marketing to get the thing started or do we go the WebVan way and say "if we build it, they will come" (okay, an extreme case, but you get the point).

Chris, when you did your gardening forum did you start out thinking, "I know this isn't going to be the next gardenweb out of the gate, but I'm going to build it because I'm interested."? I'm also wondering how you decide how much time, money, resources to put into a new project, especially if you don't expect it to be huge for the next 2, 5, 10 years?

[proweb]

Thanks for the replies Chris. I believe you validated some of my assumptions about the way you move into a market and also described what I've been doing. Basically, you don't have to be best or first to be successful, but it really helps if you are interested in the topic and have the ability to leverage other sites / resources.

My story:

I started a vibrant community a year ago which was and is growing quickly. About 6 months ago I knew I needed to leverage the community into another complimentary niche / website. I started getting the feelings many of us know... a dash of excitement, a pinch of impatience, and a mad mix of great ideas. During my research I discovered a company that had recently started a site in the niche I was going after that already implemented pretty much all of my ideas, and they were implemented beautifully.

I was totally deflated. This company is a conglomerate of many sites and had the ability (employees and money) to launch a great site and leverage the other sites in their network to quickly build up traffic and rank very high in SERPs for all the key terms. I pretty much gave up on the idea... I was pretty depressed that I didn't have a value proposition that was better than everyone else already at market.

A few weeks went by and it was gnawing at me. The fact that community members (who didn't know about my idea) were asking for a site in this niche made the gnawing even more severe! :flare:

I realized that:

1) The niche was large enough for many players
2) I didn't have to be better or first to be successful

So, I got over myself and built the site. I'm happy to report that my existing community seems to be receiving it very well.

BTW, why is my post count still 1 ?

[Chris]

Is your realistic goal to eventually be ahead of many of the other sites out there? I guess a better question is this: How do you measure success? Is it by uniques, pageviews, revenue when compared to other sites YOU own, or when compared to other sites in your niche, or something else?

Notsomuch. The largest garden site, gardenweb, was the largest component of ivillage that sold to NBC for what? Half a billion dollars. I don't need so much money. Being even in the top 20 for garden sites would likely bring in 7 figures.



Chris, when you did your gardening forum did you start out thinking, "I know this isn't going to be the next gardenweb out of the gate, but I'm going to build it because I'm interested."? I'm also wondering how you decide how much time, money, resources to put into a new project, especially if you don't expect it to be huge for the next 2, 5, 10 years?

Yes, I did think that. And I really didn't put that much time into it. I got 1 logo for all 3 of my garden sites for like $100, the vbulletin was like $115 for an owned license for me, and I'm rather adept at skinning it by now so.



BTW, why is my post count still 1 ?

Posts in general chat dont' count.