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Hot New Product coming out, need some help making money with a niche specific website.

by Rob28x
6 replies
Ok so my hobby is radio control cars. The hobby grade ones, not toy's r us.

Back 10 years ago I had a forum that dealt with a hot truck at the time. I was a teenager back then and had someone offer me $1,500 for the forum. I took it and was stoked.

Forward to now. There is another truck coming out that is going to be a game changer, with a few other vehicles to follow that fit with it. It was just announced today, so I grabbed a few .com's that had to do with the truck to get a jump on everyone else.

I want to go big this time and make lots of $$$

What I am looking to do is something like these sites:
Ultimate RC - Friendly forums, honest reviews, unique projects
RCCrawler.com - RCCrawler.com is the #1 source on the web for Radio Controlled Rockcrawling

I want to make some real money with it this time around. I want to have product reviews, a forum, blog, affiliate marketing etc.

I have been trying to figure out the best way to do this, but before I throw a bunch of time at it trying lots of stuff I thought I would ask the experts. I am wondering for the main site, should I do a wordpress site or is there a better option?

Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.
#niche #specific #website
  • Profile picture of the author IMHypeless
    I'm no expert in that niche, so I can't help you with monetization issues (probably your best bet is to contact retailers directly and arrange some kind of affiliate program or direct ads, of course AdSense is always an option for forum/blog).

    As far as content goes, just copy what sites you mentioned do and make a few twists of your own. Better web design wouldn't hurt. Cover every possible aspect of your niche - post reviews, news, Q&As etc.

    Do a proper KW and competition research, form a list of core long tail keywords. With good content and decent link building, you will probably grab a lot of traffic with LTKW.

    As far as promotion goes, if you really want to invest time and money into this project, maybe you can try creating some crazy videos where you goof around with your RC, create some scenes with action figures, firecrackers blowing around the vehicle, cool music in the background.

    Show your audience/potential customers how much fun they can have with that toy. Create a fan page around it, share cool video, organize challenges or small competitions, for example who can make a better stunt or make the coolest modification.

    Does that make any sense?
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  • Profile picture of the author Rob28x
    Yep some good tips.

    I probably should have worded the first post better. I am wondering for the main site, should I do a wordpress site or is there a better option? The forum is the easy part for me, the rest not so sure on.
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    • Profile picture of the author IMHypeless
      Originally Posted by Rob28x View Post

      Yep some good tips.

      I probably should have worded the first post better. I am wondering for the main site, should I do a wordpress site or is there a better option? The forum is the easy part for me, the rest not so sure on.
      I would go with Wordpress, you can do pretty much anything with it, it's intuitive, flexible and since it's the most popular online publishing platform, you can easily find programmers if you need some advanced stuff.
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    • Profile picture of the author Sherry Han
      Originally Posted by Rob28x View Post

      Yep some good tips.

      I probably should have worded the first post better. I am wondering for the main site, should I do a wordpress site or is there a better option? The forum is the easy part for me, the rest not so sure on.
      In my opinion Wordpress it the way to go, especially since you mentioned in the OP that you want to run a blog on your site. With Wordpress you can set the homepage to a static page and the blog (that's automatically updated as you make more posts) to another page. I've tried other CMS before such as Joomla and Drupal, but you just can't beat Wordpress's user-friendliness and the abundance of useful plugins. Just make sure that you properly secure it as well as the database it uses since hackers target Wordpress sites so much.

      The only exception is if you're going to be doing e-commerce. It sounds like you aren't, but in case you are planning to in the future, I don't think Wordpress is good for this purpose. There are tons of plugins available for selling, but a lot of times you find that they just don't have everything you need. I'm in the toy niche as well (namely accessories for foam blasters), and we recently switched to Volusion from Wordpress because none of the e-commerce plugins had every feature we needed. Each one is missing something, whether it be a robust affiliate program, compatibility with our accounting software, customizable coupon codes, and so on.
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  • Profile picture of the author crissie
    A marketplace for 2nd handers comes to mind. A "parts" marketplace.
    A "golden oldies" section where maybe you can relate the new model to older ones (opens up your market-target).

    If you have one of the new trucks (?) maybe you could do video reviews, test-drives...
    Ideas are endless.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rob28x
    Originally Posted by Sherry Han View Post

    In my opinion Wordpress it the way to go, especially since you mentioned in the OP that you want to run a blog on your site. With Wordpress you can set the homepage to a static page and the blog (that's automatically updated as you make more posts) to another page. I've tried other CMS before such as Joomla and Drupal, but you just can't beat Wordpress's user-friendliness and the abundance of useful plugins. Just make sure that you properly secure it as well as the database it uses since hackers target Wordpress sites so much.

    The only exception is if you're going to be doing e-commerce. It sounds like you aren't, but in case you are planning to in the future, I don't think Wordpress is good for this purpose. There are tons of plugins available for selling, but a lot of times you find that they just don't have everything you need. I'm in the toy niche as well (namely accessories for foam blasters), and we recently switched to Volusion from Wordpress because none of the e-commerce plugins had every feature we needed. Each one is missing something, whether it be a robust affiliate program, compatibility with our accounting software, customizable coupon codes, and so on.
    I too use Volusion for my eCommerce sites, works great for me.

    Originally Posted by Brian Owens View Post

    I'd recommend focusing on the forum aspect. You can always build pages off of your forum later, but here's why I say focus on the forum:

    1.) You've already had success doing it this way. Do what you know, and you'll know what to do.

    2.) Your atmosphere automatically gets positioned as the authority site because of all the discussion and helpful posts.

    3.) You can get plugins for vbulletin and wordpress (whichever you go with) that integrate your forum registration pages with aweber so you can build that list!

    Also, you never know when a hot new product will come out that you will want to get in on...By having the list ready, you can launch new sites using the traffic on your existing forum and with your newsletter.

    On that note, why not just start a big generic RC Cars forum with sections for each specific model? I see the value in specializing, but seems it would be a lot of work to build a new site every time a new model comes out.
    I had thought about that as well. The plan is to have several different ones going. I also have the domain name RacersHQ.com that I plan to put together a racers forum with.
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