PublisherSpot Back on Track
March 4, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzIt’s been a while since I’ve really talked about any of my projects, and many people have been asking to hear about them again, so here I go!
Remember PublisherSpot.com? It’s been slow-going, but I’ve been determined to stick with my plans of keeping it as close to my high standards as possible. Consequently, progress has been slower than I would like, but I think it’s been worth it.
There are three main hurdles that I can foresee with the site.
Hurdle #1
The first hurdle was to write out a detailed project description and plan and write it through the eyes of a project manager as to give to my programmer. My actual detailed description blueprints of the site were actually only 3-pages long, but it was really the foresight and planning out of what exactly the site would be that was important. I then worked closely with my programmer to make sure everything was as planned. Finally, the backend was completed, and after a labourous search for a designer to… design.. the site, my programmer coded it in and the project’s foundation was complete. That was the first hurdle: pre-planning, backend development, and design.
Hurdle #2
The second hurdle was to populate PublisherSpot with reviews. While sounding simple, this has proved to be extremely difficult, and I had not expected it to be so. After labouring over several dozen review applicants, I had finished by turning them all down; none of them had any writing ability, and I was surprised that nobody could write reviews of the calibre I was looking for. Keep in mind that I was offering $40 per review.
Fortunately though, I managed to hire my friend Melissa, of whom I’ve hired in the past to write reviews of poker rooms. She’s a double English major at Berkeley, and since I’ve worked with her many times in the past, I was glad to have her accept my offer. So far, she’s only written the Google Adsense review, but is almost done reviewing Casale Media which should be up on the site in a day or two.
I’m paying her $40 per review as well, which I believe to be a fair price for everyone. That’s $400 for 10-reviews… $800 for 20… so it is expensive on my end, but these reviews are professionally written, 100% custom to my site, and are researched and written in great detail in an objective manner.
Now that I have somebody to do the reviews, I can start to focus on the site again.
Hurdle #3
The third hurdle will be marketing and promoting the site. Now, you’ll have to excuse my confidence and ignorance, but I don’t believe there will be a huge problem in this area. Marketing a site such as PublisherForums is far more difficult for two reasons.
1. There is heavy competition in the niche; there are no good ad network review sites from what I could find.
2. But more importantly, the difference between direct ROI of advertising a forum versus advertising an ad network review site is drastic. Using AdWords alone I think would be enough to warrant a profit.
But we’ll see how it goes when I get around to this hurdle. I want at least 10 reviews on the site before I start to advertise it.
So those are the main hurdles. Right now, I still need to finish the static areas of the site such as the Glossary and About Us pages, but those shouldn’t be too challenging. I also expect there will be a need to improve and modify the programming of the site as to expand on the site in terms of features. I plan on always keeping the site simple, clean, and dedicated to objective ad network reviews, but I’m definitely open to added features such as a commenting system or even more advanced search engine.
So there you have it. An update on the progress of PublisherSpot. Keep an eye on it… hopefully you’ll see big things happen soon 🙂
