As you may remember from Part #1, I decided to go ahead and start the Blog on Quadcopters (consumer drones) and started looking for domain names and/or possibly an existing site I could purchase and expand.
My list of possible (available) domain names is shown below….
dronerise.com
clubdrone.com
dronecamp.com
astrodrone.com
dronemeet.com
dronebooth.com
dronecafe.com
dronedeal.com
dronenuts.com
dronetopia.com
dronecrazy.com
dronehut.com
quadcoptertalk.com
multirotorchat.com
alldroneforum.com
flyadrone.com
multirotorinfo.com
rotorforum or rotorforums.com
bestrcforums or forum.com
equadrotor.com
rcquad.com
rcelectricforums.com
emultirotors.com
electricmultis
multirotor-rc
multirotorforo.com
multirotorchat.com
imultirotor.com
multirotordrone.com
multirotorplace.com
multirotorsite.com
multirotorbb.com
multirotorhome.com
rcmulti.com
Of these, I liked the ones in bold just a bit better than the others….
At the same time, I emailed the owners of a couple existing sites to see if they had interest in selling. One of them, a relatively new but quickly growing site, answered in the negative. I was ready to pay quite a bit (5 figures) for this particular site, but the owner must want to develop it. I didn’t receive an answer from the other one.
At this point I considered giving up on the idea of starting from scratch. Starting any web site with ZERO visitors and then building an audience is a very difficult task. As an example, this blog (my personal blog) has been live for 3 years. I had some advantages such as linking to my blog in my signature on my main (hearth.com) web site. This blog started out with about 50 visitors per month in 2010 and now is up to over 400. Still, that is nothing compared to my goals with the new blog and forum and I would be extremely disappointed if it took years to get to hundreds of visitors per month….or even per day! My goals for the new site are to have many hundreds or thousands of visitors each day! I had to start with SOME visitors!
Luckily, I was able to find a small quadcopter/drone blog which was started about a year ago and now looked like it was forgotten or abandoned by the author. But there was a start – a framework, a domain name (as good or better than mine) and possibly some visitors. I sent an email to the owner and asked if he would be willing to sell. He answered in the affirmative and asked what I would offer for the site. I asked about vistors and he showed me the stats – which I confirmed though access to his google stats account. His abandoned site was still receiving 2,000 page views per month! I felt this was enough to work with – and, at a much lower price than a more popular site. I offered him a relatively small amount and he accepted the offer. In terms of the actual price, it was less than 2K (just as a guideline). For him it was found money since he did not have the time or energy to continue the blog and had not written an article in nearly a year!
And so, at the start of February, I took over the domain Droneflyers.com.
The site was a mess – and still somewhat is, but I went right to work putting things in order. Although he offered me free web hosting for 6 months, I decided I would be more comfortable moving it to new host. I own a dedicated server for Hearth.com, but since this is a separate startup project, I decided to “rent” another small web hosting service for the princely sum of about $10. per month. I transfered the domain and reinstalled all the existing wordpress software and was able to move with almost no burps.
I have had the site for almost 3 weeks and already there is some good news to report! This will be the subject of Part #3, which will be coming within a few days!
In case you wanted to review Part#1, here is the link.
The Blog/Forum that this series is referring to is http://droneflyers.com