Thread: NEED Honest REVIEWs of My Marketing Plan -Entering a Cut-throat Niche

For the past 3-4 months I've been browsing these and many other forums, info-sites and blogs on webmarketing. I've built up a body of knowledge I hope to take advantage of in making my site successful.

My site is in the general video game niche, meaning I'll be going up against giants Kotaku and likes. I know you'll say that doing that is sealing my fate but I have enough confidence in what I'm offering and an enormous knowledge in the subject (video games) that I will be able to take a piece in the greater pie.

Here's my plan going forward after I launch my website. I'd like an honest review on what else you think I could do as far as marketing my site goes keeping in mind the niche I'm competing in. I realize everyone wants to keep the best ideas to themselves, but I still ask for genuine help in improving my plan and success going forward. I've invested over 700 hours and even more money into this project and it is crucial that I succeed. Whether your suggestions are outragious, logical or obvious, they're all welcome!

My plan:

-Launch myspace site same day as my website. I will have benefits given to those that add me as friends hopefully enticing people to join. I will add 50 friends per day.
-I have done extensive searching for major forums in my niche. I've identified more than 20 forums encompassing over 50 thousands members and even more visitors on which I will post relevant articles linking to my site. The articles will be legitimate and not spam. This will also create backlinks raising my PR and helping create organic traffic in the long term.
-I will answer 10 yahoo answer questions a day relating to my site, again, not in a spamming fashion.
-I will submit articles from my site to video game sites that feature user submitted content.
-I will add a a Digg button next to my articles allowing users who enjoyed it to Digg it, gaining traffic from Digg visitors.
-Some of my articles will contain references and content relating to other subject matters as well, allowing me to link those articles at sites that aren't about video games diversifying and expanding my visitor base.
-I will have an affiliate program in place which I will not talk about here as it hasn't been done before in this particular niche.
-Create relationships with small, game specific websites in the niche.
-I'm currently working on identifying blogs related to video games to built a relationship with. Commenting, linking, etc.

My goals:

-1500 unique a day traffic by the end of my second month. At an estimated CTR of 2% and 0.20 CPC, that would be 180$ income for the month.
-3000 uniques a day traffic by the end of my 4th month. (360$ per month)
-A levelling out of about 6000 visitors by the end of my 6th month. (720$ per month)

Originally Posted by VideoGamer

For the past 3-4 months I've been browsing these and many other forums, info-sites and blogs on webmarketing. I've built up a body of knowledge I hope to take advantage of in making my site successful.

My site is in the general video game niche, meaning I'll be going up against giants Kotaku and likes. I know you'll say that doing that is sealing my fate but I have enough confidence in what I'm offering and an enormous knowledge in the subject (video games) that I will be able to take a piece in the greater pie.

Here's my plan going forward after I launch my website. I'd like an honest review on what else you think I could do as far as marketing my site goes keeping in mind the niche I'm competing in. I realize everyone wants to keep the best ideas to themselves, but I still ask for genuine help in improving my plan and success going forward. I've invested over 700 hours and even more money into this project and it is crucial that I succeed. Whether your suggestions are outragious, logical or obvious, they're all welcome!

My plan:

-Launch myspace site same day as my website. I will have benefits given to those that add me as friends hopefully enticing people to join. I will add 50 friends per day.
-I have done extensive searching for major forums in my niche. I've identified more than 20 forums encompassing over 50 thousands members and even more visitors on which I will post relevant articles linking to my site. The articles will be legitimate and not spam. This will also create backlinks raising my PR and helping create organic traffic in the long term.
-I will answer 10 yahoo answer questions a day relating to my site, again, not in a spamming fashion.
-I will submit articles from my site to video game sites that feature user submitted content.
-I will add a a Digg button next to my articles allowing users who enjoyed it to Digg it, gaining traffic from Digg visitors.
-Some of my articles will contain references and content relating to other subject matters as well, allowing me to link those articles at sites that aren't about video games diversifying and expanding my visitor base.
-I will have an affiliate program in place which I will not talk about here as it hasn't been done before in this particular niche.
-Create relationships with small, game specific websites in the niche.
-I'm currently working on identifying blogs related to video games to built a relationship with. Commenting, linking, etc.

My goals:

-1500 unique a day traffic by the end of my second month. At an estimated CTR of 2% and 0.20 CPC, that would be 180$ income for the month.
-3000 uniques a day traffic by the end of my 4th month. (360$ per month)
-A levelling out of about 6000 visitors by the end of my 6th month. (720$ per month)

it's good to have a plan of action- but I think you're shooting too high already.

Ok, you asked for reviews so here is mine.

My plan:

-Launch myspace site same day as my website. I will have benefits given to those that add me as friends hopefully enticing people to join. I will add 50 friends per day.

Why launch it the same day? Start your MySpace page now and get the buzz going. Make people interested and excited for when the site does eventually become live. You’re missing out on obtaining good viral traffic NOW.

Saying adding up to 50 friends per day would be better. If you just go around adding people, you are not guaranteed to make them friends.

-I have done extensive searching for major forums in my niche. I've identified more than 20 forums encompassing over 50 thousands members and even more visitors on which I will post relevant articles linking to my site. The articles will be legitimate and not spam. This will also create backlinks raising my PR and helping create organic traffic in the long term.

If you want to get back links worthy of Google/Yahoo!/MSN’s attention, put your effort into putting them articles on a blog and linking from a forum.
PR means nothing but if you insist on having PR and your articles are worthy enough of a back link, and then let it flow naturally.

Also your thinking is seriously flawed.

-I will answer 10 yahoo answer questions a day relating to my site, again, not in a spamming fashion.

Ok, that’s fair enough

-I will submit articles from my site to video game sites that feature user submitted content.

Wrong. Write a unique article for each one. Submitting the same article over and over again will do more harm than good.

-I will add a a Digg button next to my articles allowing users who enjoyed it to Digg it, gaining traffic from Digg visitors.

Only because you have a Digg button there doesn’t automatically mean your article will be “dugg”. If your articles are good enough then yes.

You might want to look into SMM (Social Media Marketing)

-Some of my articles will contain references and content relating to other subject matters as well, allowing me to link those articles at sites that aren't about video games diversifying and expanding my visitor base.

Yes and no but make sure the site is RELEVANT.

-I will have an affiliate program in place which I will not talk about here as it hasn't been done before in this particular niche.

If it has not been done before, it’s not been proven so therefore it might be a flop. It might be a winner also.

-Create relationships with small, game specific websites in the niche.

Well that’s obvious. But how do you intend on doing that?, how ill you approach the site owner?

-I'm currently working on identifying blogs related to video games to built a relationship with. Commenting, linking, etc.

Nothing new there.

My goals:

-1500 unique a day traffic by the end of my second month. At an estimated CTR of 2% and 0.20 CPC, that would be 180$ income for the month.

-3000 uniques a day traffic by the end of my 4th month. (360$ per month)
-A levelling out of about 6000 visitors by the end of my 6th month. (720$ per month)

Doing a financial guage is fine but that’s silly what you’re saying there.

You have to take many things into consideration. What kind of advertising are you using, AdSense, YPN, AdBrite?

What are going to be YOUR advertising outgoing? Do you plan to do AdWords? MS Ad Center?

Have you factored in hosting, design, maintenance, server usage, bandwidth costs....

Have you factored in on-site SEO. Even the “sandbox” effect etc etc.

You need to think more about this because you are FAR from having a finished product.

Thanks for the honest opinion, I appreciate it a lot!

Why launch it the same day? Start your MySpace page now and get the buzz going. Make people interested and excited for when the site does eventually become live. You’re missing out on obtaining good viral traffic NOW.

Saying adding up to 50 friends per day would be better. If you just go around adding people, you are not guaranteed to make them friends.

Yeah, you have a good point and I thought about that one. Some of the problems I thought of were that I didnt know what day exactly my website will launch and Im afraid saying something generic like end of may would do more harm then good. Also myspace users never tend to actually check on their friends pages, so if they add me now theyll likely not check back on my page. When they check my myspace page I want to have a link ready to my gaming website for them to click on...Though at second thought, thats what bulletins are for...hmm...

If you want to get back links worthy of Google/Yahoo!/MSN’s attention, put your effort into putting them articles on a blog and linking from a forum.
PR means nothing but if you insist on having PR and your articles are worthy enough of a back link, and then let it flow naturally.

Also your thinking is seriously flawed.

What part of my thinking is flawed?
I researched which forums use no follow tags and which ones count as a backlink. The ones that allow backlinks are the ones Ill be posting on primarily.
So youre suggesting I dont post my articles on forums but rather link back to them on my site? Wouldnt that be considered spam?

What I was thinking of doing is posting excerpts of my articles onto relevant forums and then saying *if you want to read the rest of the article click here* linking back to my own site. If the article is strong enough then it should pull in visitors looking to read the whole thing.

Wrong. Write a unique article for each one. Submitting the same article over and over again will do more harm than good.

Youre right. Also, when posting on forums perhaps its best to post each article on a few forums, rotating which forums I post links to my articles too everytime I write a new one so they dont become redundant or overexposed.

Well that’s obvious. But how do you intend on doing that?, how ill you approach the site owner?

Thats a great question and one that I dont yet have the answer to. Ive been searching for websites that I would think would be worth approaching but I dont know how to approach them yet. Mainly because Im not quite sure what Im looking for from the relationship exactly. I dont want link exchanges, but more along the lines of cross referencing eachother in relevant articles. So far Ive built such a relationship with one gaming site through DigitalPoint, but of course I need more than that.

-1500 unique a day traffic by the end of my second month. At an estimated
Doing a financial guage is fine but that’s silly what you’re saying there.

You have to take many things into consideration. What kind of advertising are you using, AdSense, YPN, AdBrite?

What are going to be YOUR advertising outgoing? Do you plan to do AdWords? MS Ad Center?

Have you factored in hosting, design, maintenance, server usage, bandwidth costs....

Have you factored in on-site SEO. Even the “sandbox” effect etc etc.

You need to think more about this because you are FAR from having a finished product.

Hosting is 30 a month. It includes optional site updates such as graphics, some coding etc. It also includes the SEO work. The design is already paid for.

Im going to be using adsense, one banner add and one skyscraper on the home page as well as one skyscraper adbrite ad. Ill also be using amazon as my affiliate. The better CPM and CPC networks arent available to me yet since its just an upstarting website. Ill be contacting game publishers (I have the contact info of most larger ones) once I build traffic to offer them advertising space.

Whats the sandbox effect?

Thanks again for the review, I really appreciate it!

Haven't red your full plan but your calculations with adsense are only theoretical.

You can make $180 per month, but when you double your traffic your earnings are not going to double because you will get tons of $0.01 click at next point.

This is because advertiser in any niche are limited to some budget per day and at the end of the day you end up with adsense arbitrage guys or whoever.

Your $720 per month in adsense is very unlikely to happen. Still you can try with CPM maybe later.