I’ve got a new project site on my plate, and I’m proud to announce His1k!  The site is a blog for guys that highlights stuff we’d like that cost $1,000 and up.  Lets face it, there’s a ton of cool stuff out there, and much of it doesn’t come cheap.  His1k is the place to go to find the latest.  While we will cover things that cost wayyyy over $1,000, we’ll try to keep a majority of products in the $1,000-$2,000 range.

Why?

Part of the reason is it’s interesting stuff.  It’s a site that I would personally read, and if you ever want to be successful at blogging, you have to have a true passion for what you’re writing about.  The content is also considered to be very viral, it’s just like Carbon Fiber Gear…the right post will spread around the internet like the plague.  I turned Carbon Fiber Gear into a pretty valuable site fairly quickly, and I’m hoping to do the same with His1k.

How Will It Make Money?

There are going to be three stages of major revenue stream with the site, but will come in phases.

Affiliate Links

The first being affiliate links, which is also has the potential to make the most amount of money.  Since each post is covering a product, affiliate links will be used when possible.  By doing so, any person that purchases the product through an affiliate link, I will get a percentage of the sale.  This has the potential to really bring in the bucks because the products are all over $1,000…5% of a $1,000 product is a lot higher than 5% of a $20 product.

Advertising

Advertising can play an extremely powerful role in revenue stream down the line.  The target market is very valuable to advertisers, and can bring a high CPM with it.  You’ll notice though that there is zero advertising on the site right now.  Why is that?  Right now it’s time to build traffic, that is number one.  Bring the traffic, and then bring the money.  When starting a new site, you want to concentrate on building it, who cares about monetizing to make a few cents here and there…it’s just not worth it until you can command some real numbers.

Potential Store

Carbon Fiber Gear followed this same route, and has now opened a section where we actually sell products.  Margins are much higher, and we retain the visitor when we send them off to buy something since they don’t leave the site.  It also cross sells other products on the site.  The potential for His1k to launch a store is much lower in my opinion, but it’s something to think about.  As I mentioned before, build the site, get traffic, get a dedicated following, then worry about making money and expanding.  If you have traffic, you can make money.

Building His1k

As all my projects do, it starts as a concept in Photoshop, and then turns into a site.  I did a majority of the design in Photoshop, ported over it over XHTML, and then built a Wordpress template for it.  I wanted to keep it extremely simple at first, you won’t even find a main menu on the page.  Using custom fields and a couple of important plugins, I was able to build the site to functionally do and look how I wanted.  We’ll see how everything works out as it builds traffic, and adjust accordingly.

Next Steps

I can’t reiterate enough times, right now it will be all about writing new content and posting it consistently.  I’ll be taking on a couple friends to write for the site, we’ll see how that works out.  I can’t say I’ve had the best of luck in the past with friends writing, but who knows   Make sure to check out the site and subscribe to the RSS feed!  Any feedback, ideas, suggestions, etc are always appreciated.