LM, I don't understand your business model. How are you going to involve a lot of guys and use the platform to listen rather than talk?
If you have enough budget, I have an idea I believe will work fine for the techies. But first I'd like to hear from you in order not to propose something unsuitable.
RedSea: Great question (and warning- if you can't tell by now, I write stream-of-consciousness and can be a long-winded MF'er, so apologies for the length of my replies
)
Obviously, the site will be used to convey information. The objective is to compile as much good, quality information as possible that people can learn from. There will be times when Expert A says the right way to do something is this, while Expert B says it's that. In those situations, I want to present both viewpoints...
As far as "business model", this is a tough one to articulate, but I'll try.
I'm involved with a development partnership, but we only loosely pool our resources. For sites that I do for straight profit (for example, generating insurance, travel or mortgage leads), I handle those in one way... Boring, straightforward, but nicely profitable.
For sites that strike within my own personal spectrum of interest (like this one), making money is much less important, perhaps even unimportant. I sincerely want to make a genuinely useful and good tech diving site that helps people of different skill levels. Forums? Reinventing the wheel... There are already established forums that users can go to and I have no desire whatsoever to compete with them...
I realize cynics will be suspicious, believing that money is the prime motivator for all things but really, sometimes, with some people, it isn't the alpha consideration. If at some point a monetization model comes along for TechnicalDiving.com, I'll examine that, but for the first few years, I just want to create something meaningful that people like and use.
I'll give you an example.
I love playing Fingerstyle Guitar. I'm pretty good- by no means world class- but know a few artists here and there.... In 2010, the domain name "FingerstyleGuitarists" became available, so I snagged it.
When trying to explain what fingerstyle guitar is to laypeople, I found it was hard to elucidate just how it differed from regular acoustic guitar, so we made a dead simple little videobook- carefully edited by myself and some world-class artists- to showcase top-top talent. We also do interviews with artists, etc. Here it is
Fingerstyle Guitar Players (<- shameless SEO link format
)
In a short period of time, the site has become relevant. We got a decent amount of social media chatter (just added the FB like button this month), really good artist submissions and have interviewed some of the premier fingerstyle players out there today.
You will notice the complete absence of banners, adnsense or monetization of any kind on the site. If I never make a dime off that site, I'm OK with it, no different than if I don't ever make a dime off TechnicalDiving.com, I'm cool with that too. I just want to create something good, useful and helpful stuff that delivers quality information on a topic I'm interested in for all people to enjoy.
In order to keep my sanity, I dedicate 20% of my development efforts to projects that I'm genuinely interested in. The other 80% is the bread and butter that pays the bills. TechnicalDiving.com falls squarely in that 20% that I'll do for love, rather than money. Some day, I will dive deep wrecks, I will dive in a cave. In building out this site, I'll probably receive a helluva education on the topic along the way.
Could I make the site into a straight moneymaker? LOL, in about 10 seconds... I want to go about this in a different way. I dont' want it to be an enterprise that considers commerce first, everything else second. I want it to be a project that is first helpful, relevant, perhaps even innovative. Everything else is secondary to that.
My thought was an infobase, but I'm open to any suggestions. I'm quite sincere in that I just want to be helpful. Could I make TechnicalDiving.com crassly commercial? You bet. In about 10 minutes, I could install an Amazon affiliate store, populate it with tech Diving stuff, throw up Google Adsense and have the site earning a few hundred bucks a month. I don't care to do that. It would make me money, but it would be taking the best possible domains and using them for greed rather than for good.
