A New Challenge – Effectively Marketing a Local Website

Despite of me being totally busy with work and other stuff, I decided to launch a new website purely based on it being a hobby (or maybe not even really).  ‘Passion projects’ aren’t really the best thing in life because aside from the fact that it doesn’t give you assurance of making money, its also a time sink and something that could hinder you from doing other things that are more “worth it” financially speaking. But life is all about being happy eh? 😛

Anyway I’ve been sort of into the headphones and audiophile space for quite some time (past 1 and a half year) and even though I don’t consider myself as one, I’ve been religiously following the popular community sites on this subject.

Long story short I started a site called Headphone.ph which is obviously a local site. Early this year I was kind of like thinking about the headphone space and if there are a lot of people here who care about good audio reproduction through headphones, and also if there are community sites already about it locally. I briefly checked and the availability of the domain and was shocked to see that its still available (headphones.ph is not). So I grabbed it and just parked it for a couple of months.

There’s been a lot of planning and thinking behind it but an obvious lack of action on my part. One thing I was sure of is that I don’t want it to be just a review site or a content site in general. I want to build up something more than that, perhaps an e-commerce site or what have you. And again long story short, I sort of figured out that whether I like it or not I have to start with just something. I cannot build it as it is so if i need to put up a bunch of content for the meantime for it then I should just do that. And that’s how it is right now, a blog about headphones.

As mentioned above, I do not consider myself an audio expert or someone who knows a lot about headphones and whatnot but the main goal of the site is to really just write about headphone stuff for general consumers and enthusiasts. So its not like I’m writing to a highly knowledgeable group of audiophiles about something. (Hopefully that would be clear to them)

In my succeeding posts I will be sharing some of the things that I’ve done and learned throughout the process of marketing this hobby site. Again I am  very new to this, and with that I mean local marketing. Small things like indicating the price in peso instead of dollar are the things that I am sort of adjusting to right now. Another is getting more into local communities rather than international communities. Sure, some international traffic won’t hurt but the site is for Filipinos so I have to do a better job there.

And lastly, this site is under the technology/electronics market and considering the topic I may need to spend some money buying stuff in order to get things going. -_- And the ironic contrast of that is however big the site can ever become, I just don’t see myself making realistic money at all. Oh well its a ‘hobby site’, so let’s see how it all pans out.