If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I started a new website today at footballrecords.org, so I thought I would walk everyone through the entire setup process and what I will be doing to market the site.  This will be a project for the fun of having it not for profit so I don’t mind sharing everything that I will be doing to get it up and going.  It started a couple of days ago actually when I decided after having problems with PHP-Nuke before that it had some features that I really wanted to use so I would give it another shot.  Well it was an entire day setting it up before I realized that users couldn’t register at the site, so I scrapped an entire day’s work.  But that is another story.  So I spent the entire day today setting up the site with Joomla, and it still has some bugs to work out but that will come over the next couple of weeks.

It is really funny how this one started, so I will start from the very beginning.   I am a member of the domain name aftermarket and received the regular newsletter about domain name and one of them for sale caught my attention because it seemed so overpriced.  It was footballrecords.com, and the starting bid was 5000.00 so I went and did a little research about the niche to see if it was worth the price.  What I found was 60,000 competition and about 1000 searches a day during the season.  And some other related searches that were okay.  Which peaked my interest just a little in the niche, but not anywhere near $5000.00 worth.  So I went and looked and found that footballrecords.org was available and unclaimed.  I figured for the 10.00 reg fee I would give it a go.  And since I am a football fanatic and also love hanging with sports fans I thought it would be one I could spend free time with and make it a super fun site.

I went with Joomla because I knew it had to have a huge forum for every team including the college teams and the members could contribute to making the site a success.  I started by setting up the standard site and then added the key components to it that make a community site a lot of fun.  First the fireboard forum because of what I said earlier.  Fireboard forums aren’t the easiest to set up when you are doing a ton of categories but the look great and work great.  Then I added community builder from Joomlapolis so that members could interact with each other in other ways besides the forum, and it has other great features that I will tell you about in another article.  Yes it really is that great that it deserves an article all its own.  I then added a video sharing component called Seyret.  There are other ways to implement video with Joomla but Seyret is a self contained video component from Joomlaholic that is super cool in my opinion.  Besides some other little tweaks that was all I really added to the site.  Of course setting up categories and adding videos took the rest of the day along with testing.

I put up a short welcome message and added a couple of posts to the forum and that was it for the site on day one.  The only other thing I did was write a hub for hubpages titled Dallas Cowboys forum and pointed the link to the specific Dallas Cowboys forum. That should give you a really good idea of how I will be marketing the site.  I will be using article marketing at hubpages and a couple of other sites and will be linking directly to the relevant pages on the site.  And then of course other general articles will point to the front page of the site.  I will also let you know what I will be doing to build other links into the site, and we can watch it grow together.  As of today 04/02/08 the seoquake toolbar shows no indexed pages and no backlinks which is correct.  And since this site is for fun and not profit I will walk you through all of the things I will be doing to promote the site, so that you get ideas how to promote your own.  Remember it doesn’t take money; it takes effort to make a site successful.  If I can pull of building a large community site right before your eyes then you will know for sure that you also can build a great site.