Earn Online CashEarn Online Cash with Flagship Sites
As I’ve mentioned before, building your own flagship site is great for SEO purposes and can be used to leverage your own brands and those of partners, both online and offline. While it can be difficult to make quick money online with these sites, they can be great for enhancing your standing within a niche community and launching other ventures.
Blogging
Of course, a flagship blog is perhaps the main type of flagship site, one that you’re probably already familiar with. If you’re in the “make money online” or other Internet marketing type niche, chances are that you won’t make much money at it. The odds are stacked against you due to the heavy competition and the expectations of the audience. This is true in some other niches as well. However, there are many other niches to consider where you can begin earning quickly and even get a big single payday, such as my friend Allyn Hane got when he sold a flagship home improvement blog for $30,000. But, even if you aren’t looking to cash in for 5 figures, a flagship blog can be a powerful SEO tool for launching new sites and products.
If you know WordPress it makes it easy for you to create a flagship site. Maybe this is all you want or need but sometimes, some people, want to venture out into other areas and try other scripts and what they offer. It can be quite valuable to go off the beaten track sometimes and find a new way to do things when it comes to building a flagship site.
CMS
After blogging platforms, we have general CMS (content management system) scripts like Drupal and Joomla. They’re a bit more flexible than WordPress’ blogging paradigm although they are more complex to use. These scripts are also the guts behind many membership sites, social networking sites and aggregation sites. If you have a particular site design in mind that isn’t necessarily blogging oriented, check out these scripts. I’m currently looking into them myself for a new project I’m working on that isn’t a blog (thus the inspiration for this post).
Forums
Forums are another great way to build a big flagship site. The forum can either be the main focus of the site or a sideline. The downside of them is that if they get popular they can be very time consuming to manage and moderate. It’s very popular these days to spam profile links on forums as well as doing automated posting so it can be a real chore. Keep this in mind if you decide to go this route. You will want to take anti-spam precautions otherwise your flagship forum project will simply become a bad neighborhood link free for all.
On the free side, you have phpBB and Simple Machines Forum. These two scripts can be installed directly from Fantastico on any decent webhost. I’ve mainly used phpBB myself since it behaves like a lot of other forums I used in the past. On the paid side, the powerful and popular VBulletin is the main game in town. If you want to have a serious, big time, forum site you should invest in this script. While the free forum scripts work fine for a sideline, if you want a flagship forum site you need VBulletin.
Social Networking
Lastly, I wanted to mention two community building scripts, Elgg and Dolphin. These scripts are perfect for helping you build a niche specific social networking site.
Elgg was originally designed for the education community and can be found on many .edu domains. However, it can be easily customized for any niche. While it is lacking in some features, it is a decently solid social networking script. If you don’t want to put a lot of money into a niche networking site, this script will do the job.
Dolphin is from Boonex, a web development firm specializing in community building applications. Their strategy has been to release Dolphin for free and charge for addons. This a-la-carte feature system allows you to only purchase what you need as you need it. This script was originally popular for dating sites and, while that still seems to be the main focus, they are trying to popularize it for other niches as well. If you need a feature rich niche community site, this script is probably your best bet if you don’t want to go the forum route.
Final Thoughts
The bottom line is that there are several ways to construct a flagship site to support your efforts to earn online cash. My own strategy is evolving toward developing niche specific flagship sites and supporting hub sites as well as continuing to build the more narrowly defined niche sites I currently do. My observation is that the direction that Google is moving toward is “go big or go home” or maybe “go branded or go home”, so that’s the direction I’m going to be heading in 2010. I’m not dropping my niche sites, they still do quite well for now. It’s just the current trend seems to be moving away from the small mini-site and toward the big mega-flagship site.
What are your thoughts? Do you think that big mega-sites are the future of earning cash online? Are there any content management systems you like for building flagship sites other than those mentioned? Let me hear from you…
Comments RSS feed for this post
3 Comments »
Thanks for the mention brutha.
And you’re right, having a flagship blog in a niche outside of MMO and tech can really generate fast cash if you are willing to lay down the hammer! (pun!)
>> Lastly, I wanted to mention two community building scripts, Elgg and Dolphin.
I thought there are also Pligg and Scuttle? Or have these two scripts been devalued by the search engines because too many spammers use them?
Overall, a useful post on some of the alternative means of building flagship/authority sites. If I am not wrong, most or all of the scripts you mentioned use the MySQL database. What are your thoughts about scripts that use flat file databases? I know that they are probably less scalable if you do a lot of data entry, e.g. for social bookmarking sites, but for blogs and CMS which mainly dispense read-only data, could they be more resource efficient and easier to maintain?
I ask this because now that I have about 20 WordPress instances running (for niche sites), I find myself having difficulty keeping all my sites updated with the latest version. I believe that Drupal and Joomla would have similar problems. Being popular scripts, there would be many crackers targeting them and you would need to spend a lot of time upgrading them and testing them to make sure all the functionality still works.
I realize that by definition, you would not have more than one or two flagship sites. But still … the thought of having my primary means of income go down indefinitely because of an upgrade does not make me at all happy. And from prior experience (I worked in IT), the more changes the more likely there is that something would go wrong. A case in point is the recent WP 2.9 upgrade. It broke the scheduled posting function for some people, and the WP team needed to release a fix, WP 2.9.1 in a hurry. For other cases of bigger failures, I remember that my upgrades from WP 2.7.x to 2.8.x and from 2.8.x to 2.9.x caused a few of my plug-ins to stop working.
As an aside, I wonder what you think about using article directory scripts for flagship sites. They should be able to work as a pretty decent CMS, shouldn’t it? I’ve never used them before, and I have also never used Drupal and Joomla before, so I cannot compare them. But do you have any thoughts about this?
On Pligg and Scuttle, they can be useful although, as you noted, you have to take tough anti-spam measures to avoid having them devalued. However, they’re essentially a “one trick pony”, social bookmarking, and don’t offer full CMS capabilities. They could be of value as part of a integrated flagship site though.
There are some flat file blogging solutions around. They’re great for running niche sites where you don’t want more advanced features that require a database. About 70% of my niche sites run on PHP scripts that don’t use a DB or static HTML.
So far as updating goes, the best thing to do is to lock down access as much as possible. Most hacks to WP these days happen because of user registration backdoors, remote access via XMLRPC and bad/evil plugins. So the basic thing to do is to restrict access and only use a few well known and trusted plugins. You could even lock things down further by not allowing comments and making a few other changes.
As with any upgrade, you do have to weigh it and decide what’s best for you and your situation and not upgrade blindly. For example, just look at how many businesses are still using Windows XP and are avoiding upgrading to Vista and Windows 7 even though the security is, in theory, better on those OSs.
As for article directory scripts, I’ve tried a few of them and I’ve found them to be poor CMS systems as compared to WordPress and Joomla. I think there are some article directory components you can get for WP and Joomla but I haven’t tried any of them.
The drawback I see with trying to build an article directory as a flagship site is that it requires a very intensive moderation since there are so many tools out there that pound directories with automated entries and poorly spun content. Plus, since most of your content will be duplicate unless you heavily moderate it, you will have trouble ranking well unless you’re able to nail down considerable site authority.