I feel good that many members of my old forums have found me here & are contacting me about Japanese development. I realize I could offer content creation as a service but that’s not my main goal. I’d like to stay unbiased & offer you ways to doing it yourself. These are a few things I’ve done & recommended to people. It’s like I can copy & paste the answes to questions they are coming in so frequently now.

1. Pick a domain you actually know about the subject
If you know about the subject of the domain or can familiarize yourself with it, it leads to you being more creative in your development plans. You can think of what to write about in the site, or generally what the content is about.

2. Don’t translate
I run campaigns for clients & oversea campaigns for Japan & Korea. One of the biggest time waster is translation. Know the domain’s subject & give a writer the subject to write about. It will make the process faster freeing up your time & not having to literally write the article twice.

3. Find student writers in your area
When I was in Boston for 2 years I literally spent the first year putting together a plan & piecing together scripts to create a Japanese portal site. I also knew I couldn’t write Japanese on the professional level so I looked for student writers in Boston. I used things like CraigsList or other SNS sites. Try to meet with the writers. Offer them something even if it’s $5 an article. Give them a quota per week & have a plan on how you make that back. Let’s say you just have $100 budget a month work out how much they will write for you & maybe even divide it amongst difference sites so you can have fresh content on multiple sites. As for my portal project I was creating in 2005. I spent 1 year developing it, finished it launched it & the phpbb & mambo site was hacked within a week. I will never use phpBB software again in life.

4. Have a role in your development
If you are expecting to have the domain & find people who will develop it & come up with a plan for it think again. If you are a high roller in Tokyo, smart businessman, famous, sold a company or two then yeah. If you just hold a great IDN in 2010 this won’t happen (it won’t happen this year unless you are lucky).
Look at having a significant role where you are dedicated to the development as much as the team. Even if it’s just the funding of it that would be enough. Maybe you are good at marketing plan creation, or the development graphics etc.
Tokyo has a vast amount of media savvy individuals. We need more than just a great IDN. It’s a potential piece of the success puzzle that is currently overlooked but it’s not the only piece. I get questioned about it & can usually answer & compare questions about domain marketing with other media marketing.

5. Get a CMS system
I’m big on CMS systems as you only design it once & then just do content creation. Put in the Japanese interface. Don’t leave the interface in English & content in Japanese. I do not recommend forums for Japan they don’t exists the way you would imagine. If you can’t read the Japanese it is more likely to be a troll spot if users do posts. Blog comments maybe different.

6. Think mobile
For Japan iPhone does not equal mobile. iPhone is like less than 10% of the Japanese market. (I know it’s way less but forgot the real figure). With CMS like Joomla for example there are Japanese plugins for mobile. 2 of my Japanese sites I haven’t updated in a while gets more traffic from mobile in a day than this blog gets in a month. This right here is probably the most important thing you’ll read on my blog.

Also I usually don’t write about developers but if anyone wants mobile developers that develop large scale projects $10,000 & up. I can put you in touch with a company I recently discovered from my Agency Night Event. Native English speakers that develop mobile applications, sites, & systems for Japanese.

I’ll have a few more sites up soon. My process for getting new writers is to get young people that are friends of friends who have a passion about the domain subject. Not one of the immediate domains but I’m planning on redoing my Japanese Idol site. The site will give new talent to appear on the official site for the keyword Gravia Idol. Plus photographer friends I know will be willing to shoot to build up their portfolio. I’m just not sure yet if I want to use the dot com or use the dot  jp.