Launch of a Side Project 5ones - Actions Sports Hub W/ a Little blog Case Study Mixed In
Last Summer Cameron Olthuis and I met for the first time in person at SMX Advanced Seattle and we quickly became friends as we found we had a lot of things outside of seo in Coming. We both love to surf, he lives in my hometown near San Diego and I live near his home town in Utah and we both had been thinking for years how we wanted to use our seo/promotion skills to launch something in the Action Sports Industry.
After the conference we both said to each other lets just start a blog to at least get something going in action sports and we can figure it out later. We wanted to have something tangible to start with to at least commit us to starting on a project in action sports.
Why Action Sports? Well first like Cameron I don’t watch football or baseball I watch the X-Games and live feeds of surf competitions. I don’t subscribe to Sports Illustrated I subscribe to Surfer, Trans World, Skateboarder, Snowboarder etc. Action Sports have always been a part of my life and they always will be, it is a passion of mine. I was born and raised by a Mom from Oahu and a Dad from Manhattan Beach, we grew up in the water and surfing as well as other board sports have been in our blood for generations. The business reason is also a very good one as well, Action Sports is a 91 billion a year industry, with Skateboarding and Surfing making up the majority of that. We are talking billions a year for each sport and it isn’t slowing down anytime soon. The other reason with this is there isn’t a lot of Action Sports websites and communities that are adapting the new trends of the web. Companies are just starting to add blogs, but they are usually sub domains on a free service and they are not promoted or optimized at all. We have always been disappointed with the websites available in the space so we decided to do something about it.
My brother who is just as dedicated to action sports as we are and a killer web designer joined us and we built an all things actions sports blog called 5ones(don’t ask about the name I don’t have a good answer). This was last summer. We just finished our official web design and launch and are now prepping it for some mainstream exposure. We have seen some really cool things from our quiet push over the last year. We have over 5,000 natural backlinks we have been accepted into Google news which is a must for any news site. Our traffic literally doubled from Google referrals when we were accepted. We are also growing a large fan base.
Some things we found interesting when promoting something in the action sports industry, is first because Web 2.0 is still so new to the industry the large media outlets are not used to having people post opinions about brands or products. The industry is good and bad that way, it is good because everyone is cool with each other even if they are in competition with each other, but it is bad in that there is a lot of stuff that goes unsaid because people are afraid to ruffle some feathers or hurt their “bro” status. We came into the industry with no “bro” status so we would write posts about brands and we criticize them or praise them in a very opinionated fashion, and we see a lot of links and traffic from these types of posts because it isn’t being done anywhere else.
We also add our marketing twist to things and talk about things like why Volcom was able to go mainstream but still be core, and why other brands are diluting themselves by partnering with the likes of Wal-Mart. All in all we have been very well received.
One thing we found very surprising is very few people subscribe to RSS they all bookmark the site and come to it each day (which is good in the page view world) and if they are technologically advanced enough for RSS it is always to the email subscribe and rarely to the Feed Reader subscribe. It definitely gets you thinking about different approaches as we are both used to the tech savvy world of people subscribing to anything and everything they find remotely interesting.
If you are launching a blog some words of advice, set up alerts for anything and everything, submerse yourself in the industry, don’t be afraid to voice your opinion and if you cover news be very quick on the trigger and make sure you get into Google News. Then come up with posts that haven’t been done before and reach out to others in your community and you will see growth 100% of the time. Focus on good thought provoking or informative content and you will get a user base before you know it. Most important of all blog about something you are passionate about, it is true just as in business that if you are passionate about it, you will give it 200% and you will reap the rewards.
Also if any of you are looking for a designer by brother is one of the best bar none, you can find him at Modern Blue, and Cameron Olthuis really is one of the pioneers of Social Media that guy understands the Demographic like no one else. Follow his stuff.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow Chris Bennett on Twitter and make sure you check out our free analytics product BLVD Status and Social Media for FireFox Which is used by more than 500,000 marketers
Related Posts:
Good stuff!! Thanks for sharings.