Project Fridays: Niche Portal Beginnings

August 22nd, 2008 Posted in Website Management

Today marks the beginning of a new series of blog posts I plan on touching on every Friday - I call it Project Fridays. Project Fridays will follow the progress of the many in-house ventures here at Insidedesign. We have a small network of various websites, both successful and not so, and this series will grant us the opportunity to share their progress with our readers. I will also take the liberty to use this as a platform to inform and teach on the subject of running your own portal or niche website! A learn by example if you will…

This week, we discuss our newest venture - a Starcraft II portal…

No, no. Not that kind of portal - a web portal!

So, what exactly is a web portal? Essentially, a web portal is an entry point to many different services (such as email, news, video - think yahoo.com) and types of information. There are two types: horizontal and vertical.

A horizontal portal offers multiples services and information on a whole wide range of topics. A perfect example we are all familiar with is Yahoo.com
A vertical portal, or vortal, offers services and information on one specific topic. Mashable.com, while their title says they are blog, is a vertical portal on the subject of social media.

Building a successful horizontal portal is very hard, as many entrenched players exist (yahoo.com, msn.com, aol.com) and these sorts of websites require large amounts of capital to get off the ground. A vertical portal requires much less capital and resources. And thousands of opportunities exist for vertical portals, as they are only limited by the number of niche subjects you can think of (tennis, dog handling, laptops, politics, etc).

We love portals, as it allows us to play with our hobbies and interests on the web. These portals also act as a playground for testing new SEO techniques that provide valuable information when working with clients on their own projects. Our newest in-house project is a portal on the upcoming video game by Blizzard Entertainment, called StarCraft II. But how and why did we choose this particular topic for our portal?

Choosing a topic

This is extremely important, as this sets the entire subject of your website - which everything will revolve around. Because of this fact, you need to feel comfortable with the following:

You are an expert on the topic.
The topic is evolving, meaning there are new things to report and discuss on a regular basis.
You have lots of spare time to continue research into your topic.
You believe there is an interest online for your topic.
There is room within the current competition for your site.
Can you envision profiting from this topic down the road?
Are there short domain names available for your topic?

So, lets apply this to our new portal we are launching:

Yes, I used to play StarCraft since it was first launched in 1998. As I was young at the time, I played it religiously.
Since Starcraft II has yet to be released, there are tons of new tidbits being released. Once it is released, the developments will continue to grow as the game changes over time and more people play it.
Well, I don’t have tons of spare time - but enough time to research and write 4 to 5 new posts a week.
There is a very strong interest in StarCraft II at the moment. The original StarCraft was by far the most popular computer game, selling well over 3 million copies. Many of these fans are looking forward to playing StarCraft again.
Currently competition is limited. It includes large game portal websites, such as IGN.com and GameSpy.com, and smaller portal sites run by teens and older gamers such as myself. Since the large portals are not solely targeted towards StarCraft II, I am not worried that much about them. And for the other portals run by smaller entities, most seem inactive and poorly managed. Only one real competitor looks to be of concern - as this particular website has a clean design that is aimed toward gamers, has an active messageboard, and updated news on an almost daily basis.
Most certainly! Advertisements via Google Adwords while traffic is low, and selling AD positions to interested advertisers as traffic grows.
Yes, we snagged www.starcraftzine.com

Keep in mind that there are numerous other questions you can ask yourself. The main point of going through this process is to ensure that you are (a) comfortable, (b) interested, and (c) knowledgeable about the topic. There also has to be a market for this topic, because eventually the website should be paying for itself. While competition can exist, you do not want to jump into a topic that has tons of competition when there is another topic just as good, with little competition. Take care of these areas, and you will glad you did later on.

Follow this process for several topic ideas you have, and simply pick the best one. Next week, I will go over the beginning stages of getting your niche website/portal running quickly.

You can visit our StarCraft II portal here: http://www.starcraftzine.com/

Already running a niche/portal website? Please share your topic and why you decided on it…

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