Over the last few months myself and the team have been working on a new project, something I have wanted to work on for a while (I bought the domain back in 2014). I thought it would be a good idea to document the journey on this new project.
A couple of weeks ago we launched the website, UK Air Dates (www.ukairdates.com). The site is purely dedicated to TV shows airing in the UK, when they will air, which channel they will air on and related news. This is WOW’s first new consumer project in a few years (the last one I believe was our mobile games back in 2015) as we have been purely focused on WOW TRK for a number of years due to is fast unexpected growth.
Not such a simple project
At first, the project seemed relatively easy but as we worked on the site over the months before launch it became more complicated than we first anticipated. Whilst not purely a blog, a big part of the site is the TV shows news section.
Many people claim running a blog is passive income and whilst I’m a big fan of finding new ideas for passive income (in fact, I will make a note to write a post on this next month) – running a blog is NOT passive income.
There’s almost nothing passive about it, in my opinion, you’ve still got to write content, optimise the site (SEO), update ads, grow membership areas like newsletters etc to keep people coming back. Sure you could take a day or two off and still make money (like many online businesses) but passive income, in my opinion is something you can look at and easily tweak every few months / once a year and even then that’s optional.
Regular updates to succeed
The TV news section has to be updated with content every day about TV show updates, cancellation news, air dates etc which is an extremely time-consuming process. Along with this, we need to ensure we are updating TV show listings with the latest airing information and creating new listings for TV shows. A process we are constantly changing and improving.
With over 350 TV shows listed on the site now (and a plan to have 1,000 listed by the end of 2018), ensuring we have the correct operational plans in place is vital to the project’s success. We need to provide timely updates to visitors about TV shows, not providing timely and accurate updates will result in visitors losing trust in the site and not coming back.
Long-term plan
Now the site is live and we have a lot of processes in place to help ensure the content is regularly updated, now the really hard part starts – growing the traffic to the site. In around 3 months time, I will provide an update on how the project is coming along.