Creating a Ringtone Web Site - part #1 - introduction
One of the ten web sites that I will be working on as part of my campaign is www.outerspaceringtones.com
To recap (see the Gameplan page for a full breakdown of my overall strategy); I am going to construct (at least) ten sites, mostly in different niches and with different content types - in order to see which ones would bring in the income and multiply revenue (and also to “eliminate single points of failure”).
My choices were not entirely random - and were all based either on: my existing ideas; domain name acquisitions; and/or existing knowledge of successful niches.
One such was the ringtones niche. I found a few threads with examples of people making money in this niche - and although some people are claiming it is past its heyday, other people seem to be nailing it: Here’s someone claiming to be making $1000 per day in this niche monetizing with azoogle and sending traffic with adwords.
Some say that this niche is oversaturated - however there are strong counterarguments to this - which essentially state that if a niche is saturated, it is because it has strong potential: You just have to rise above the pack somehow.
One advantage I do have is that I have steadily been building up a catalogue of my own electronic music compositions of the last several years - and so have an enormous amount of content that can be turned into ringtones. Having actual unique free content of my own to give away is a distinct advantage; also I can use this to cross-promote my music site.
I also have some ideas for creating viral traffic to the site in other ways: I could create youtube videos featuring the ringtones; and possibly free onsite tutorial content. As this recent post by Mark Barrera (Apr 2008) suggests - there is room for SERP ranking within the ringtone niche when targeting specific phone models. I am an iphone user and I know how to create an iphone ringtone - so I will start there. Looking at google SERP results, there is definite demand here - and there are all kinds of possible permutations of “long-tail” search terms for this which would pull in traffic - such as “how to create an iphone ringtone” ; “how to make a ringtone for my iphone” - “where can I get free iphone ringtones” - so some onsite tutorial content targeting these search phrases will be almost certain to pull some traffic. Two notes on this: 1 - as a general rule, the longer the search phrase that someone types into a search engine, the more specific and strong their interest in the results. Note 2 - I’m working on figuring out how to include several of these long tail phrases in a web page and still have it appear as totally natural, uncompromised content from the reader’s point of view. 
Another lil’ advantage to my ringtone site is that I will feature flash rollover buttons to instant audition the ringtones. This uses a free tool available from beathive - this cool tool generates an embeddable code. Any enhancements to the user experience add to the chance of the site going viral - i.e. getting linked / talked about by others through enthusiasm - and creating a snowball effect.
A possible challenge that I may need to address is that there have recently been highly publicized investigations into possible malpractice in the ringtones niche. It seem that certain companies advertising free ringtones might not actually be legit. This obviously affects the niche and damages the credibility of all - but I also want to make sure that any ads I place on my ringtone site are legit. I’ll need to do some investigation.
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That’s it for the preamble and the market research; on to the business of creating the actual ringtone site - which at the outset I knew very little about - and the ringtones themselves.
AN
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