Hi RH Gang.
Some months back I had the thought to make a B2C website. After much thinking and knowing that I would put all of just my own money, I got www.dhodaala.com created. Basically a cricket site with RSS feeds from few sites. I dont have too much traffic on it cos I haven’t spent anything on promoting or social media. I started off with the theme that Dhodaala is all about victory ( in the sports sense – beating the opponent hands down )
As step 2, I did the mobile optimization So the same url when accessed thru a mobile device, serves the mobile optimized experience. because it just showed 15% of the website, it looked pathetic.
The website still remains a just cricket site, which I may or may not change depending on acceptability.
As step 3, I now have re-designed the entire mobile site and the all new Dhodaala
Home Page, has 7 sports featured, which are , Cricket, F-1, Football, Soccer, Tennis, Rugby, Basketball.
Here my thought is that there is a rapidly increasing base of sports enthusiasts for non-cricket games in India. We are already seeing the F-1 buzz, and India will soon have its own club teams like EPL .
The content is sourced from RSS feeds and showcased here.
As I am not really doing any transaction or selling anything on this ( currently), there is zero revenues. I want to now scale this up. If I go the ad network route, I will spend more money to get traffic and make lesser monies as a publisher.
I welcome ideas on how I can scale this up. I am also open to anyone who has a good mobile traffic and can promote us on a rev share model. I have integrated with 2 networks who will keep serving banner campaigns.
Some friends suggesting creating a launcher App, which can be placed on Android and ios markets , ( free app ) and then promote it. This I believe would be a fairly big cost to be recovered from just advertising.
If i do similar efforts on the website and then add an e-commerce angle to maybe sell sports goods, will this help? considering the big guys like flipkart and many more already have sports eqpt
.
So RH friends, ideas and suggestions are welcome and so is any partnership option.
Cheers!
Sridhar V
I feel the last point on adding sports goods looks promising. A platform where people can buy sports goods, equipment, merchandise, accessories, etc may be useful for sports enthusiasts as well as for companies selling such goods.
You can think of starting a forum where people discuss on recent matches, players, controversies, statistics, etc.
Cricketing/Sport contests may be another interesting add on.
Prateek Mishra
Before making any hasting foray into selling goods I believe you should concentrate more on content and its promotion, I think diversifying to other sports would give u better visibility among niche sports fans. get the content rolling and thn something of ecommerce or affiliate can be thought of, I would suggest finding synergies with people like leh leh sports.
Regards
Prateek
Hardik Khanna
Hi
1. You can start by streaming these feeds on facebook and drive some traffic on your website.
2. Start email activity – to your friends and relatives with latest news feeds.
3.See to it that you religiously update/cover F1 event. It will be most searched in coming days.
4. Add as many share features on your site as possible. You would want your visitors to get you more traffic.
5. E-Commerce is good, but then its a different business all together. You would not want to mix latest feed and e-commerce models.
6. Get feeds of international sports events and focus on top 5-6 sports which will you think will make your website stand-out from the crowd.
Indy Singh
Flipkart and Infibeam have a wide variety of products and you can easily join their affiliate programs to incorporate their products on your site. Their affiliate models pay up to 6% depending on the product and a RS.2500 minimum payout via EFT. Flipkart has ~ 450 products relating to your niche ‘cricket’.
Again this is all on an affiliate model, which means you will not generate any revenue unless a buyer is directed from your site to theirs. Flipkart has a 24 hour cookie with LAST CLICK WINS.
The #1 problem with your site is exactly what you have mentioned – it is primarily RSS based, so you are just regurgitating the news/info. You need to provide the user a compelling reason to come back to your site. If you are able to provide your users with some unique content maybe even 2-3 posts a week on the BLOG link on your site – that may be a good start. Keep in mind, there is nothing worse that visiting a website with outdated blog posts, so you will need to keep on top of the blog posts on the regular!
Even better, incorporate the blog posts with actual affiliate links. This will not make it seem like you are pushing advertising onto the users, simply informing them.
Excuse my ignorance; I have never played or watched the sport, but it can’t be that far off from baseball… so an example would be comparing 2 cricket bats – discussing the pros and cons and linking to the bat pages on flipkart with your affiliate ID in place. This way if a user lands on flipkart from your link, any items purchased within 24 hours of that occurrence is commissionable to your account. You can also create polls, discussions, etc… with aff links in place.
The whole point is to engage the user and offer them something they cannot get on other sites. Once you get to that point and are starting to drive users regularly to your site, you can do some A/B tests with a little more intrusive ads (which pay on CPM basis) and see how users respond to it.
Seems like you are passionate about the sport and promoting your site. Off to a great start – all the best in your venture.
Anil
Thanks Sridhar , Prateek, Hardik and Indy for all the valuable suggestions ….