I added the “Diamonds” side of the site over the weekend, set up the landing page and moved a few blog posts over. I also added more posts and a few new female reviewers.
A few points:
- I’m actually not an engineer, I learned most of this just by doing. The things I didn’t know I hired people to do.
- Hiring people is easy these days. You can find qualified folks all over places like eLance or just by asking your network. My graphic designer was a girl I dated a few years ago and my developer is someone I’ve never met who I hired through a website. Total costs for both of them so far are around $700.
- Total costs for the rest of the site are less than $100. That includes domain registration ($50), hosting ($10 a month), WordPress CMS (Free), Outbrain recommendations (Free), various Google tools (Free), Share This plug in to allow people to “like” posts and share them (Free), Feedburner plug in to allow people to subscribe to a feed of new items (free) and pizza for my first feedback session where my friends told me what they thought of the site ($30).
- No complicated business issues so far. The only relationship I had to form was an affiliate one with Amazon. They’ll take care of actual ordering and fulfillment and then pass along a share of the profits. Sometime in the future I might work directly with drop shippers but that’s too complicated right now.
- I’ve gotten amazing support through my network of friends and family. I’m about to publish my dad’s profile and first review plus one of my close friend just got his mom to sign up as a new reviewer.
Next!
My next goals are to start marketing the site.
- AdWords campaign
- Facebook campaign, which I’m hoping you, my readers, will help me with
- eMail campaign
- YouTube video. Yes, I have a good idea for a YouTube video about gift giving.
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Best of all, this has been a ton of fun and I’ve learned a lot.
Special thanks to my wonderful wife who keeps testing things, making sure what I write makes sense and giving my great ideas for how to improve the site.