To be dead honest, I'm only 22 years old and I'm still in College, so I'm obviously somewhat poor.
I've always had a great passion for this sport, much like the rest of you, and I've always wanted my run my own MMA website. I don't want to half-ass it either. I want interviews, inside scoops, pictures, videos the whole deal. I want to do it right. I'd say I have above average computer skills and mma knowledge.
To anyone who has experience running or working on a website, I'd love to hear the best approach on how to get started and how to be successful. I'm well aware that it is not easy and it takes alot of hard work if you actually want to succeed.
I have absolutely no connections in the mma world either, which kind of sucks lol.
Any suggestions are welcomed. Thanks
TR
^ Yeah that was my biggest concern in the first place. But I figure, I'm young, I have the time, obviously I'm not gonna start some juggernaut MMA news site right off the bat. Even if it doesn't end up working out, at least I can say I tried and would have alot of fun while it lasted.
no money means you have to play rough
google "black hat SEO"
once you've got 20.000 unique visitors per day, you can use that to get interviews with fighters.
or you can focus on getting interviews with less known fighters, do profiles on the guys fighting in bellator and so on.
find your niche. if you're gonna be a generic mma site like every other one out there, you'd better have a shitload of cash or become great at dirty marketing and SEO
^ Thanks. Sounds like quite the risk. If I got caught, sites like google and yahoo would ban the site from it's listing, which pretty much put a quick end to anything I have going.
But, I guess it's a risk that I have to look into taking if I wanna make anything happen with not much money.
Thanks again,
TR
BanTheUKmmaNoobs - Maybe you could do something as simple as a blogspot site, do a few interviews, a few articles, see how it goes and maybe expand from there.
Or you could always try to hook up with an existing site. A lot of sites are struggling to get by and could use the help.
This is also an option. Thanks!
BanTheUKmmaNoobs - MiddleEasy
Anyone that actually goes to MiddleEasy, has got to be a complete moron. One of the guys running the site is an inbred jackass.
I'm not even that familiar with the people who started these major websites.
Did the crew from Mmaweekly and Sherdog have a bunch of money when they started or did they just have mad connections?
Others like Tracy Lee have good success has well but she is also beautiful, seems to be an extremely motivated and hard-working woman and is friends with just about every fighter out there, lots of connections.
Then theres me. A 22 year old student , who has never even met a professional MMA fighter, and doesn't have much money to spend. I will not be denied lol
ttt
AngusWilson - no money means you have to play rough
google "black hat SEO"
once you've got 20.000 unique visitors per day, you can use that to get interviews with fighters.
or you can focus on getting interviews with less known fighters, do profiles on the guys fighting in bellator and so on.
find your niche. if you're gonna be a generic mma site like every other one out there, you'd better have a shitload of cash or become great at dirty marketing and SEO
LOL you're totally wrong. You don't do black hat seo on a site you want to build and keep. You do black hat on sites you know are going to get banned in a short time. Please don't give seo advice.
He'd want to do a ton of white hat seo on the site.
ThreadRuiner,
If I were you I'd start with a blog, learn SEO. Go to your local mma events and interview some of the fighters. Post the interviews on popular video upload sites and put the link to your blog/site in the description. Embed the videos on your blog and write an interesting text-rich post on the event.
Go to your local BJJ/MMA gym and tell the owner you want to write an article about their gym.
Start local
Do white hat seo
Post your vids on youtube,vimeo,dailymotion,etc. and link to your site.
Exchange links with other similar sites
worry about advertising revenue when you hit atleast 10k visitors/day.
Find a good URL that will help you brand your site and be intuitive with regards to what your direction/content is. Something unique yet snappy.
Decide what kind of news you want to do -- original stuff? Second-party news (what cagepotato and other sites are very on top of and good at).
Most of the peeps who are successful at MMA had a combination of amazingly hard work, paying tons of dues, doing lots of things unpaid or at cost to them, and we were in the right place at the right time (though it was a long time coming).
When I started at maxfighting circa 2001, the staff consisted of a lot of people. Tom Gerbasi, Joe Hall, Josh Gross, Jake Rossen, lots of people. Pretty funny to think that nearly ten years later we're all still doing it....but I also drove to Vegas a zillion times on my own dime (covered boxing back then as well) before anybody wanted to pay me. You have to love it if you want to succeed at it.
the internet..............
You need to Hire OMA, TrainJudo and McCorkle as your Brain trust to get started! They will catapault you into MMA Web site Uberstardom!
hahah thanks guys.
I guess the real problem with covering local MMA is that I live in Ontario. haha. So I either have to get the hell outta here or pray to god that they one day sanction MMA in this great province.
ShaqNoob -AngusWilson - no money means you have to play rough
google "black hat SEO"
once you've got 20.000 unique visitors per day, you can use that to get interviews with fighters.
or you can focus on getting interviews with less known fighters, do profiles on the guys fighting in bellator and so on.
find your niche. if you're gonna be a generic mma site like every other one out there, you'd better have a shitload of cash or become great at dirty marketing and SEO
LOL you're totally wrong. You don't do black hat seo on a site you want to build and keep. You do black hat on sites you know are going to get banned in a short time. Please don't give seo advice.
He'd want to do a ton of white hat seo on the site.
ThreadRuiner,
If I were you I'd start with a blog, learn SEO. Go to your local mma events and interview some of the fighters. Post the interviews on popular video upload sites and put the link to your blog/site in the description. Embed the videos on your blog and write an interesting text-rich post on the event.
Go to your local BJJ/MMA gym and tell the owner you want to write an article about their gym.
Start local
Do white hat seo
Post your vids on youtube,vimeo,dailymotion,etc. and link to your site.
Exchange links with other similar sites
worry about advertising revenue when you hit atleast 10k visitors/day.
Typical ignorant reponse.
Only black hat done bad will get you banned.
Not to mention he could build an mma blog farm with scraped content, build backlinks and myspace links and what not to those blogs, and then link from those to his site.
if he uses proxies he's safe for his main site, and almost safe for the blogs.
the rest of your advice was good though. like I said, do lesser known fighters, whether that means local or international orgs or bellator or all of the above.
notyou -Which guy are you referring to? We have an entire stable of complete moron inbred jackasses so you may have to specifyBanTheUKmmaNoobs - MiddleEasy
Anyone that actually goes to MiddleEasy, has got to be a complete moron. One of the guys running the site is an inbred jackass.
ThreadRuiner, check your msg inbox.
Never-mind, you don't accept messages from muds so I'll just post it here..
I have been interested in starting an MMA Blog for a while now. I went to school for writing and would mostly like to focus on tongue in cheek posts (like CagePotato) and compile List Articles "Top 10 WTF Moments in MMA..etc"
I also live in Florida which would give me access to the belator fights that are coming up soon.
Get in contact with me if you would like some help/extra writers if you get your thang rolling.
Step 1 : buy a URL
Step 2 : buy web hosting