Mini-Site Race

retired_member16 · Nov 5, 2007

Would anyone be interested in a Mini-Site Race ?

For example

A - Paticipents manually reg a domain on day 1

B - We all create a site from scratch

C - Using different techniques and skills, we watch to see how we bring in traffic (without using links from our existing sites or by spamming forums) and rise up the search engines

D - This allow us to

d1 - See how different techniques work and which are the most affective
d2 - by setting up a new Adsense account, we can check revenue for each site.
d3 - Award the money earned to the winner or donate to charity.

Obiously this will need a little planning and a few ground rules, but it may be beneficial to the forum and a little fun?

Any thoughts or pitfalls I may have missed?

ratboy · Nov 5, 2007

I was thinking about this the other day actually.

I'm game...

Admin · Nov 5, 2007

I love the idea, although the choice of keyword could affect the ability to get to number 1 in Google for example, it it is a popular keyword it will be tough.

Choose a common theme?

mxm · Nov 5, 2007

hit green cold xray dreams

cool idea... count us in...

obvioulsy, untill race over, stats / methods / how etc would have to be kept between players... thus eliminating any "copying!" once mini site up maybe a weekly update from players on a sticky to indicate how they are doing e.g ROI / stats / hits / $ nett... etc

sounds like fun, time limited would make it even better... e.g no1 in google in 4 weeks, $100 bucks in a month rev, highest by xmas etc etc...

maybe admin can be judge.. as mods will be in the race... and come up with a little medal for the winner / 1st / 2nd / 3rd ???

DN reg must be clear as well, e.g someone reg Cats.com will have more chance than CatsLickMilk.com etc

something to pass the time in the fall and into, what will be a very slow Q1 of 2008...

especially the donate to charity bit!

paul · Nov 5, 2007

I might take part I love a good competition

yesterday · Nov 5, 2007

It'd be fun.

Winner takes all sites.

Somehow there has to be an honesty box so that people actually tell what they've done or it'll just become a willy waving contest.

How can we encourage contestants to be forthcoming with their techniques?

Admin dishes out the domains randomly at the start.

yesterday

philliph · Nov 5, 2007

I'm up for that. Can the domain be related to anything?

mxm · Nov 5, 2007

french polish good fruit gage

yesterday said:
It'd be fun.

Winner takes all sites.

now thats a good idea! :-D winner gets all sites, ip, whatever as a personal prize and maybe all rev up until the win, goes to charity (nominated before race) of winners choice?

retired_member3 · Nov 5, 2007

Won't it be hard to police? Like if I link to my minisite from my pr9 site or i pay for adwords etc....

How about a community effort whereby everyone works on building 1 site and adding their skills to it? It would be like that making a site earn £1 a week thread? Everyone could post what to do and it would create a great thread for people to learn from?

Could then sort out a comp for someone to win it?

mxm · Nov 5, 2007

go

hammer said:
Won't it be hard to police? Like if I link to my minisite from my pr9 site or i pay for adwords etc....

How about a community effort whereby everyone works on building 1 site and adding their skills to it? It would be like that making a site earn £1 a week thread? Everyone could post what to do and it would create a great thread for people to learn from?

Could then sort out a comp for someone to win it?

even better idea to add to the original post! that way, using a combo of skills, methods etc the site would get listed / linked / seo'd from all angles! the charity would then benefit from everyones efforts and the winner keeps the site or something :-D

ScottJ · Nov 5, 2007

I don't see that being practical (sharing one site), there is not that many jobs to building/ranking a mini site to let many users contribute and the main areas that define success are only down to 2 or 3 jobs, keyword research, content, backlinks imo.

ScottJ · Nov 5, 2007

My take on making a fair competition would be

1/ Choose one word, (chosen by Admin or random from dictionary)
2/ All users must make a mini site related to that topic
3/ Domain must be registered on or after the day the comp starts (level playing field) and declare their one url in a competition thread (transparency)
3/ Winner after 3 months is the person with the most traffic gained from Google (stops someone using their own traffic to inflate stats)
4/ All mini sites must use an open stats program for public stats like extremetracking.com so we can all see real data on each other sites.

This tests lots of things, you need to weight up the popularity of keywords in that niche against the likelihood of you being able to gain any traffic for them within the 3 months so if the word was 'dog' then going after dog would be suicide but perhaps dog sitting or dog beds etc you can get organic traffic.

I would tend to allow users to use existing sites for links etc as it is meant to mirror the real world to some extent and this would also be valuable info, remember only referral traffic from Google would count.

After the comp ends all the other competition sites should be 301'd to the winners site for at least 12 months.

philliph · Nov 5, 2007

On first read it sounded good doing one site, a sort of community project although their could be big problems later on.

who would actually have total control and decide what's done and whats not?

cmrule · Nov 6, 2007

What about 2 or 3 teams each with a site?

retired_member3 · Nov 6, 2007

sounds good. We would have to agree that the domains are equal.

Perhaps a subject is chosen we then get together a list of domains that either people will donate or are free to reg.The names are shortlisted to a fair balance, and then 3 are chosen?

Maybe seperate teams like for the meets? we could have london vs manchester vs the rest???

You would also need a chatroom or somewhere private for the teams to discuss tactics or maybe just email distribution list. We can then post what was done after the comp is finished?

yesterday · Nov 6, 2007

Teams are a good idea.

Maybe domains should be selected from admin's available list on the start day.

2 prizes: 3 month and 1 year

All revenue from all teams goes to the winner at 3 months and then same at 1 year (should be worthwhile!).

After that, all sites get pooled and either sold or continued on a revenue sharing basis with all entrants.

No rules with regard to promotion etc, anything goes ? - just a suggestion.

yesterday

deconstruction · Nov 6, 2007

like the idea..

cmrule · Nov 6, 2007

Should there be a maximum that teams can spend per month/over the year to make it fair all round??? Or the teams with fatter wallets will probably win!