Anyone of you guys internet marketing gurus?

[yoav]

Originally Posted by PenBoy

I'd politely disagree. It's sort of a tracker for various celebrity topics, plus it's real-time so you get it as it's published.

Think a real-time Digg without you having to post stories/links. You can determine to the people you follow what you find relevant. It's FAR from what you called it.

Thanks for your feedback though.

Originally Posted by PenBoy

Sadly most of my friends are not into celebrity gossip either. I should've gone with sports. Oh well. But I like your suggestions a lot. I will def. try them.

first of all everything mumblyjoe said.

second i'm not feeling the ui at all. the colours make my eyes hurt and it's hard to see where to click, my eyes don't know where to look for buttons/text/etc.

also i'm in chrome on a mac and the ui is broken in a bunch of places.

third what's the value of the site? the only thing i saw you mention is that the stories are fresh off the internet press, but why wouldn't people just use google reader or some other aggregator that works better and gives them better control and integration.

even you don't see the value in it. if you don't use it how can you make it better and if you don't like gossip then what are you doing making a gossip site.

it takes time out of people's day to go to a given site, you have to create something that makes it worthwhile. it needs to solve a problem. it needs to do that in a compelling way to justify a person changing their habbits or adding the site to their todo list.

there are already million ways to aggregate and in a fine tuned personalized manner, on top of that aggregating something common like gossip or sports won't get you anywhere.

your best bet is to find a niche that's under serviced and have a site that curates the best stories from that niche, as well as editorial content relating to said niche. if you're gonna curate, then curate.

re: monetization, it's extremely rare for a new site to make money. stuff like google ads don't really pay and if you have less than 3000 visitors/ month you're fucked. you need to be able to sell adspace to companies/products and to do that you need a few months of analytics that show a big audience(and one that doesn't just arrive via search engine and leave immediately)

so either find a niche or do something porn related. either way you need editorial content and a better ui.

[PenBoy]

Thanks for the honest feedback guys and thanks for going into specifics. I really appreciate it, esp. the bluntness. I am going to have to think long and hard about what to do next.

Ps: Mumblyjoe, nice portfolio man.

[yoav]

Originally Posted by PenBoy

Thanks for the honest feedback guys and thanks for going into specifics. I really appreciate it, esp. the bluntness. I am going to have to think long and hard about what to do next.

Ps: Mumblyjoe, nice portfolio man.

i thought about the ramifications of suggesting this but i think at the end of the day it benefits everyone based one what those parties said they wanted.

penboy, take your whole site down, replace it with some kind of anime background, try find something that's CC licensed and link back to the artist, and embed this video in the middle [ YouTube - doctorsleap's Channel ]

below it make a thing with thumbnails each one linking to a different page on the site with a different video from that user on it.

link back to katg, this thread [ Am I at least Dateable ] or the main site, that call is up to you

now use facebook, twitter, digg, etc to get the word out.

if it goes viral you get adsense or whatever
drsleap get's exposure for his videos (which he said were for some site)
bob get's whatever thing he wanted
katg get's hits and is the birthplace of another internet thing.