So much for the holidays here at Nine Lives Media Inc. Amy and I are working overtime to get MSPmentor.net and TheVARguy.com ready for fresh launches in early January 2008. While I polish new content and site navigation features, Amy is finalizing several new business relationships for our company. We’re also leaning hard on our site developer (ContentRobot.com), and they’re doing a bang-up job turning our vision for the sites into a reality.
When MSPmentor.net debuts around January 7, you’ll find that it’s already rich with content and reader comments from leading voices across the managed services community. Similarly, when TheVARguy.com launches a few days later, you’ll discover that our resident IT channel blogger already has hundreds — no, thousands — of comments from eager readers.
How did we build such strong, reader-driven communities before launching both sites? Here are the details.
Instead of building complete, comprehensive, well-polished sites from the get-go, we focused on “soft launches.” We’ve been building and experimenting with MSPmentor.net since around September. The “beta” site was open to managed service providers, VARs and other folks interested in managed services trends.
As traffic built and reader interest grew, we knew MSPmentor was ready to become a full-blown gathering place in 2008. We kept the beta site going through the holidays but we also began working on a 1.0 version of the site. It debuts in January and we think you’ll be impressed.
The VAR Guy
Meanwhile, The VAR Guy has been blogging across multiple sites for about a year. And he’s built quite a following over that time. His unique voice has added wit, controversy and insight to key IT discussions. Apple.com, Dell.com, LinuxToday.com, Wired.com and TheWallStreetJournal.com have linked regularly to The VAR Guy’s commentary. His observations have also flowed across Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, SeekingAlpha and other major Web sites.
Within a few days, The VAR Guy will have his own web site — a central gathering place for his fans (and critics). Thousands of eager readers stand ready to engage in healthy debates about open source, unified communications and other IT channel topics of the day.
So there you have it: MSPmentor and TheVARguy.com are new sites. Yet they will enjoy built-in audiences from the start.
