Building a successful Chinese social media network from scratch.

I mentioned BA’s “secret” in-house project a little while back (here); this project is an attempt to create a popular Chinese social media site from scratch, solely using China’s already established SNS.

Now the initial impression for something like this is “yeah right good luck buddy”, and to tell you the truth I also almost bought into this line of thought. How did I pull myself away from this dark pit of skeptism?

 
From ground zero to 67k in one month.

The challenges in doing something like this are obvious; the first is that I’m essentially competing against many other already established sites that command huge amount of traffic daily; how would my “David” compete against the many “Goliaths”?

Well sister, as I’ve said before in some post some place, it’s all about content; our project focused on special content that simply isn’t readily available in China, and from ground zero (ie: no previous brand knowledge) we’ve managed to build a mini-brand that pulled in 67k traffic, and over 600 email subscribers within a month.

So the next question is how will we make money from the site?

Well since we’re a tiny baby site we’re going with an Adsense campaign to begin with; this isn’t because we’re expecting windfall profits, but more to test the waters on what we can expect in the future.

Our numbers aren’t high, but they do seem to generally be trending upwards (Google Adsense  policy states we cannot show you the actual numbers). I’m also assuming numbers to grow after we hit the 6 month mark, this is when Google’s “sandbox” effect gets shaken off, and our new digital baby gets a chance to shine.  

To augment the site, we’ll also prepare a media kit in the future, thus allowing clients/brands to advertise to our visitors; though this won’t happen until we at the very least hit 500k visitors/month.

As for geographic reach, we’re basically all over the place, but more focused on the top tier cities. This is to be expected.

So why won’t I tell you the site name? Is it because I’m an a-hole jerk off? We’ll that’s partly it, but also we’ve seen some other sites steal our content already, and we really don’t want to get into a fight until our new baby learns to walk. I’ll reveal it all in good time, and those of you who know me probably already know which site this is; toward the end of the year I’ll reveal the address along with updated stats, as by then it should be fully built (we’re still working out the bugs, and have a redesigned version in the works).

The moral of the story then is that through creation of value add content, and the proper seeding of said content in China’s current SNS networks, you can build a pretty good online campaign with zero dollars spent on banners or PPC advertising. The caveat though is that it takes time and energy and a lot of creative/strategic thinking to get it off the ground (especialy when you’re working with an unknown brand) – but as I hope to prove at a later date it’s possible – and profitable to go this route for the long run.

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Tagged as: China social media