BIG Plans for Website and Forum

 

Hey guys

I'd like to discuss future plans for our website and forum with you all, likely only three--me, gazuz and ravique--are here regularly.

My goal is to make significant sum of revenue from this site that is dividable, so that each of us will get home some cash every day. I want to hit the street big and make money from both forex and website. But all of us must join hands and fight together. I believe we can make it in group. This is more like joint-venture proposal. We will be all Administrators if you agree.

* There're three revenue sources:

  • Google ads on website.
  • Custom banners.
  • Paid membership subscription (like that of forex-tsd).Google Ads: For months, i'm paid around $7 for 1,000 page visits. If we can get 10,000 page visits a day, Google will pay us more than $70 a day or $2,100 a month. We can do that. Getting 10k of traffic is not hard, because forex-tsd can gets at least 50k a day. The ultimate goal is get as much traffic as possible. Possibly 50k traffic a day that earn $10,000 a month.
  • Custom banners: We can ask interbankfx, fxdd and other brokers if they're willing to advertise with us. Now as we're getting low traffic, we ask them $100 a month. We get 5 advertisers, we will earn $500/month. When traffic surges to 10k a day, we can make $2000/monthPaid membership: $19.97/month for premium membership. $39.97Total Revenue: For 10,000 page visits per day, we can earn more than $5,000/month. For 50,000 page visits per day, we can earn $20,000/month
 

** To achieve the goal, we should pay:

Hire 10 experienced traders and some metatrader programmers. We pay them $0.1 for a post they reply. We want some activities in the forum to encourage visitors to register and new members to post regularly. Our paid posters must do something every day like discussing strategies, bring in interesting info & systems, helping, coding indicators & experts, etc. We can limit $33 a day spending for 300 posts and threads. We'll spend only $1,000/month to gain 10,000 posts and threads. (For last two years, we total only 3,500 posts). We will hire many more when our revenue picks up.

Develop free online version of ZeroCode for Metatrader 4. I'm sure i can do this. This will attract 150% more visitors to our site. Online version means we can put ads, and we will earn more. In brief, this tool will triple our revenue. We will send newsletters to 1,500 members inviting them to try it out. It will boom like hell-fire!!! We might have to spend $1,000 for one-year license of development toolkit.

Develop advance economic calendar like that of ForexFactory.com, maybe even better one. This will double our revenue for sure. We will have to pay to get data feed maybe from Reuters or from ForexFactory. We can scrap free data from forexfactory, but that might get us in lawsuit or worse.

Rent a dedicated server which costs $300/month to host our site. This will leave some room to grow.

Total cost: more than $1,400/month. ($1000 posters + $100 toolkit + $300 server). There're more hidden costs that I overlook.

 

*** To sum everything up:

Total Net-Profit: Should be not less than $2,000/month for 10,000 page hits. Not less than $15,000/month for 50,000 page hits. What about 100,000 page hits a day? That's possible.

We will need roughly $10,000 for 6-month run. It seems awkward to propose this to you. We're still strangers, though we've met for 2 years 2 months now. But if you dare to gamble for a future with me... I actually have the money to do it alone. The thing matters the most is group work. How am i going to do this all alone? Develop softwares, take care of public relation, manage the site, and keep spammers out at the same time? It would never happen if i did it all alone.

What do you think? Would you like to become an owner of fxfisherman.com or just a dear friend of owner?

Scorp

 

I would likely contribute, within a month or so I can start making regular payments, right now I`m quite short.

But still, it all won`t happen at once, all the projects like ZeroCode MQ4 , Calendar, Trading Signals, Hired traders , Advertisment`s of brokers , memberships ( wow, 6 projects i counted, that is a lot of work, that`s nice ) they should be started one by one.

UPD: We should create a thread for each of the projects, because if we will be discussing all this here, it will be a mess.

Scorpion, how many visitor`s a day our current server may handle ?

First I thought that we should start with general advertising, you know, placing links on different forum, participating in threads and giving links to people there, but this is not a very pleasent thing to do, because we may be convicted of spamming or advertising.

THe other way to go is to attach all this publicity to Forex Calendar, wich could be the first project. We could organize a poll here, to find out what makes a calendar conviniet for traders, becouse most calendars aren`t very convinient to use, so we organize a poll under the slogan : "Let`s make the best forex calendar together." Or "A calendar by traders for traders in the making". So we organize this poll and we can start sending emails out to traders to participate in this process, so in the future they could use something they helped to create . There are different advantages this way :

1). People would likely use a thing they helped to create , so they will think like that : Ofcourse I can go and use a calendar on ForexFactory, or I am using one right now, but I gave my opinion to guys from FXFisherman when wheir calendar was in the making, took it to their attention, so I helped create this calendar , So it`s working thanks to me, I`ll go use it, because it meets my needs.

2). When people will participate in the poll, they will already raise the amount of visitors, and some of them may think : Huh , this is a nice forum, maybe I will register.

3). We are doing a good deed, and it is not commercial at first sight, so we can`t be convicted of spamming or advertising

And that way we will aready increase the amount of visitors even before we release our calendar. And this may bring in some cash for future development.

This scheme can be applied to all of the six projects. It makes the publicity for the project even before the project is out and working. It raises the amount of visitors too. It should , as I think of it.What do you think ?

 

One more thing that we can do, something like this:

We will search the net for the most popular and interesting trader`s blogs. We will make a list, and we need a script that would take all today`s posts from theese blog and broadcast them all somewhere here on one page, so that a visitor could access a page on our site and he would see and read all the upadtes on theese blogs. He doesn`t need to go from one blog to another, he can just read it all here. This can be managed personally trough RSS on each computer, but I doubt that all of the people know how to do this, and want to spend their time to know and configure. Anyways we can try and see the result, and decide , whether there is point in doing this. This is a three step project : 1). Writing a scrip 2). Contactin and inogociating with blog owners 3). Advertising this new service.

I think that the blog owners will agree to this, because it makes them , and their blogs popular, and most of the people like popularity, and it could give us some additional visits.

 

That's a damn nice idea! It's relatively easy to read RSS feed and display them in one page. There should be pre-programmed script ready for us.

 

I'm having difficult time finding the posters. In other forex communities, I know only a few guys. Will ask those friends to help me out. In fact, i want them to be my posters, because they know mq4 coding.

 

Scorpion, how many visitors a day can the current server handle ?

Let`s think what we can start with, something that doesn`t require cash, like theese blogs or maybe something else. For the calendar , as I understood we need to buy the data ?

If you give a "GO" for the blogging thing , I can start searching for blogs,and talking with blog owners.

And about the posters, generally, what makes people post ?

 

It might be able to handle 4,000 page views. The traffic is rising to more than 700 page views a day. Most of the cash is needed to build a group of paid posters and to advertise.

Told you that i need team work of community spirit, because I want multiple functionalities working at the same time. Each of us administers different project. Like this, I create and maintain ZeroCode, Advance Calendar and website; B takes care of the paid posters including payments and moderations; C works in public relation, advertising and building banners & links; D takes care of research of new information, post it in forums, and blog it every day; E leads a group of experienced traders to create trading systems and indicators; and if we're big, we'll hire some staff to moderate the forums.

 

Sorry guys I havent talked in the forum too much, I've just been skimming through. So I wanted to say the number one thing that gets people to come in is liek Moneytech, people want in for the money. As bad as this may seem that was the reason I joined, i read about the FxFisherman a few years back in a yahoo or msn or some kind of group so I joined the forum. However through this I learned many things about programming, a lot of what to do and what not to do by sharing my opinion etc. I think the idea of having other programmers would help because right now Scorpion is the only person that can code/help me fix experts and indicators.

What makes people posts in my opinion are live results of experts. Now the following may just be a little section of the forum, I don't have a name for it but here is my idea, I've thought about this before but never knew what it requires, etc. The idea is basically an interactive demo account based online. People upload their scripts to their own user data (max 1 expert per user, interchangeable) and run it through the server. Basically it becomes a huge competition of who has what it takes to be in the forex industry. The user may delete their expert whenever they wish and upload a new one. We could have different "cycles" where people could be competing for cash (paid by adverts). They each start with $10,000 and the person with the highest % increase wins X amount of money. The only requirement for them is to post what the expert does, we will not make the expert public but it will give people ideas that they might not have thought of before. For example someone may have an expert and they just claim that it trades when CCI and Stochastic cross together, that will be fine. The idea of the project I have is to get people to share their ideas.

We could as well have a "Classified" (not for ads) with a buy/want to buy section where people could ask for someone to program their expert for X amount of money or a programmer may advertise their service (we could also make money with this via escrow payments, taking a small percentage per transcation). This will as well promote the use of the competition as more people could get their expert coded.

Now to your ideas,

-The idea of the calendar could be nice. Forexnews.com shows every news and I'm starting to learn a bit which news affects the market. We could start posting only the ones that affect the market. An example would be to warn people to watch the trends between this and that time. This what I understand what the calendar should be.

-The expert programmers would probably also be interested in the above Classifieds section that I mentioned

-ZeroCode online is also interesting, I'm sure it could cost a lot less to make it available online since it has already been coded. Maybe we could do a request & receive type of thing but that would defeat the purpose of an online version. We should try to find out otherwise if some freelancers could do this for about $300, I'm almost sure that its possible.

-Trading Signals could be on a paid subscription basis. As much as this might seem like any other site it could be more interesting if we could make it with poles, etc. The only problem with that is that I don't know we could feed the information without it being stolen and re-distributed on the internet.

-You mentioned about $7/1,000 page views but watch out because we might be getting more blind hits once we get more people so that number may go down (or up). I know a few good websites where we can advertise PPC, just let me know if you need some names.

-Research for blogs should be easy, if they are well-known then they should pop right up. The hard part here would be finding a deal with them... What exactly would we offer them for their links towards us?

 

I love you guys! You gimme the best idea i never think about.

Gaz, i like the contest idea. But i think the implementation is very difficult, due to technical limitation. It might be possible only if we buy a metatrader 4 server license which is $50,000/year. Then we can host contest like that at interbankfx. Contestants must run experts on their own pc/server. I wonder how metaquotes host the auto contest 2006. Do they have a special software to run a bunch of experts at the same time?

Ok, "Classified" you mentioned is commonly called Marketplace like the one at SitePoint. Buy/seller pays 5 to 10 dollars for each listing at marketplace. DNForum.com also has marketplace, and the listing is free, but monthly-paid membership is required to post. We can do marketplace thing only if there're around 100 members online. Another good income source when we gets big.