I've been blathering about this new community blog over the past few weeks. It's all coming together nicely now and is pretty much ready to rock and roll.

All I need to do is create a static front page explaing the features, advantages and benefits of why potential users should use a community blog rather than use blogger or set up their own wordpress. I also need to tweak the theme a little more to make it a bit more presentable.

After that is done, it's full steam ahead for the project, which should be very enjoyable!

Promotion

As I intend for this project to be "not for profit" (at least in the short term), I am absolutely unwilling to spend any moeny to get "customers". My thoughts for promoting this new site are as follows (in no particular order);

• Squidoo
• SEO (the site is already in the SE's which helps)
• posting on associated forums
• making comments on blogs

Ongoing Work

As I am not charging for access, I decided to devote only 15 minutes per day to this project. If it's a success, then great. If not, well, I haven't lost out anything. The 15 minutes gives me ample time to do all the admin that needs doing.

Future Monetisation

I'm really unsure of how to play this. My initial thought was "adsense", but then I thought that it would not be conducive to getting the community going. What I might do is add adsense to each individual post, perhaps 6 months after they are written.

Other than that, I am going to checkout any Affiliate schemes for the subject, as well as look into utilising eBay for making pocket money…

I may also create an area where people can sell and buy items to each other, but I am unsure about that at this moment – I think that might come, perhaps when the site is (hopefully) popular.

To be completely transparent, I really don't mind if the site never makes a penny – it's on a subject that I enjoy immensely, so reading other authors stuff is quite payment enough.

Conclusion

It's been quite fun to try and source all the plug-ins I have needed to change WordPress into a community blogging platform. I wanted somehting extra simple, so elected to get my hands dirty with WP code, rather than go for an "off the shelf" solution such as WP-MU.

It's been a steep learning curve, but well worth the effort, as I have also managed to launch a whole new business on the back of my tinkering on this community project.

That new business has sold 15 or so products at $30 a time, so far But that's something for a different post on a different day