In part 1 of Building WPVote I mentioned how I have recently purchased WPVote from Jean-Baptiste Jeung.
The first thing I did before I even spoke to Jean was trying to think of simple things I could do that would add the greatest value with the least effort. This was a project I wanted to monetize from the start, and I didn’t want to spend months and months developing it.
I intend for the site to be a WordPress resource. A bookmarking and voting site much like Digg. I also wanted it to be easy and free to use. As such, I came up with the following list of things I could add to improve it (note: this is a wish list and not a to-do):
- Twitter account
- Ajax voting
- New design
- Make voting more prominent
- Add content categories and tags
- Blog widgets
- Content API
- Facebook connect login and wall posts
Now that I have done some work on the site, this specification has altered considerably, but it was a good starting point and will help guide future development.
In terms of monetizing the site, I saw a few options.
- Sell ads with BuySellAds (These are sold on the current site but will probably be removed for the initial launch)
- The classic – Adsense
- Promote my own WordPress themes
- Promote other WordPress related goodies via affiliate schemes
- Sell the new WPVote theme on Pro Theme Design
With all this in mind, I was pretty confident that I could get a return on whatever I spent relatively easily while building something cool – so I started talking to Jean.
After some back and forth (and a lot of questions from me), we came to an agreement, and Jean sent me the domain name, theme, and site content so that I could start the build.
The build has now been in progress for about 3 weeks, and I hope to release WPVote in early January. If anyone has any feature suggestions or ideas for a Digg-style site with a WordPress focus, I’d love to hear them.
In the next post, I am going to talk about some of the things I went through to research the site – hopefully, I will get it published before Christmas.
How was it for you? Let me know on BlueSky or Mastodon
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