As a freelancer, I work for many fairly large companies, charging them an hourly fee for my expertise. This is of course a nice source of income but it’s not why I’ve become a freelancer, although your mileage may vary. I’ve become a freelancer so I can spend a lot of time on putting my own creativity into building useful tools and websites when I’m without a contract, be it by choice or because of an economic crisis. Having an idea is easy. Having a successful idea is harder. Letting people know you have a successful idea appears to me to be the most difficult part of them all. With an internet that’s literally exploding with social networking sites and hundreds of thousands of people making their own websites it becomes increasingly more difficult.
So let’s skip the part of getting ideas; if you don’t have any ideas I can’t give them to you. As far as having successful ideas go, if you have a successful idea let me know! Letting people know about your potentially successful idea is a somewhat more exact science than getting ideas and determining whether they’ll be successful ideas, so that’s what this article will be about. I intend to make this some sort of a ‘live document’ where your input will be very much welcomed.
The most important of all: Content, content, content
I have found that despite all the documentation on the web on page ranks, search engine optimization, link sharing, etc. that by far the most important aspect of getting a successful site is to put stuff on there that people find interesting to read. My wife started making a website on Dutchie years ago as a pet project when it was still fashionable to have your ‘own homepage’. She started writing some personal stuff on there, put some pictures on there and used tons of tables and very simple, basic styling. Neither she nor I knew anything whatsoever about all the modern techniques to make your site accessible or optimized. So since at that time she was interested in Paganism, she also started making some web pages for the mailing list she had become a member of. Some friends on the list had already made some contents and with permission my wife put that in some HTML pages on the ‘The Witches Three’ homepage. Little did we know at the time that a certain phenomenon would soon explode into the face of the world: Harry Potter. It is completely amazing what side effects Mr. Potter has had. The Witches Three homepage also had some detailed research by Sarah the Swamp Witch on trees, called ‘Celtic Tree Lore‘. Obviously, wood is the material magic wands are made of. Mr. Potter apparently inspired tons of people to find out more about trees and their magical characteristics in order to decide for themselves what would be best for them to make a magical wand out of. So which page do people find when they start using Google or other search engines? Exactly, the Celtic Tree Lore. I only found out about this when I started doing some research into the site’s statistics and checked into the referrers to the page. I found out that the Celtic Tree Lore was apparently interesting enough to get on average a 100 or so unique visitors per day!
After finding out about the (to me) relatively high traffic, I decide I would try to help my wife to make the page look a bit nicer, make it SEO friendly, put some ads on it, get rid of the ugly tables that SEO consultants always say make the page harder to index; none of it helped a thing, the average visitor count is still approximately a hundred per day. A lesson I think we can learn from this is that an uninteresting page can certainly be made higher in all kinds of rankings with all the SEO techniques in the world. Interesting pages however speak for themselves; content is king. Also, after visiting the Celtic Tree Lore, one may observe:
- The content is original. Sarah the Swamp Witch put a lot of her own expertise and research into the Celtic Tree Lore. It’s information that’s hard to find on the internet because of it’s originality. My wife put a disclaimer on there ‘This document can be re-published and shared only as long as no information is lost or changed, credit is given to the author, and it is provided or used without cost to others.’ People apparently respect that disclaimer and most sites referring to it actually link back to the original where they found it.
Keeping people’s attention
While we’ve just established that content is king, it gets a little bit beyond my personal skills at this point to determine what’s the next most important thing. I’ve become the researcher myself here, trying to follow Sarah the Swamp Witch’s excellent example. What the site statistics showed was that people that visited the site would read the information, click another link or two on the site and then wander away. Google analytics is excellent in showing that information: 00:01:55 Avg. time on site. So while we’ve made a decent attempt at capturing people’s attention we’re not doing a great job at keeping people’s attention.
I intend to better analyze the reasons why people come to the Celtic Tree Lore but these are the indications I’ve seen so far:
- People looking for information on magic wands
- Pagans or people interested in pagans searching for additional information
- Herbologists wandering by
I’ve gathered this information from Google Analytics but also from a mechanism I’ve built into the TW3 homepage; all the pages inside the TW3 homepage contain some PHP code that tracks the so-called ‘referrer’ links. When such a referrer link is found, the PHP code checks a database to see if it’s a referrer it already knows and if so it will increase a referral counter. If it’s not a known referrer, it will add the referrer to the database and make it an unapproved, automatically added link on the TW3′s links page. I periodically check these links through an administrative interface for the site and if the referrers are valid pages I put a brief description on the link and approve the link so they automatically show up in the TW3′s links page. From following all those new links, I’m getting a pretty decent impression on what sort of information people are looking at just before they reach the Celtic Tree Lore. When we know where people are coming from, we can make intelligent decisions on what we can offer them to do next. This is an idea that’s still lingering in my head, where we classify the source people come from and based on that give them certain tags to choose from in the navigation. I’d love to hear responses from people that have already done something similar so I can try to assess it’s impact and let people know.
Use your social networks
These days, tons of people are using the internet to communicate with friends, family, business contacts, etc. People share links through such sites as Digg and Delicious and they tell their friends, family and business contacts about what they think is useful, funny or original through sites like Facebook, Hyves or LinkedIn. Some of those contacts may be pretty savvy and realize that they help you building a successful site by submitting your articles to all those services. Most of them don’t! So why not point it out to them? There’s no need to beg for it, but when you’re making what you think may be the best thing since sliced bread, why not just explain to your contacts in person what submitting your articles to Digg or Delicious, or making a simple post on their favorite social networking site means to you and the success of your site? There are tons of tools out there that will do this automatically for you but the overly savvy should be mindful of one important thing: people mean much more than tools. You’ll be surprised how many people will actually come back to your site every now and then when you take some of your time to simply explain how they can help you become successful and by doing so learn more on how to use all these tools out there.
Disclaimer
Like Sarah the Swamp Witch, or my wife in proxy for her, I don’t charge you for any of this information. I hope a lot of people will write suggestions to me and I will accredit everybody for their contributions. I will make this a ‘sticky’ article on the site (even though I don’t know how to do that yet) and make this a ‘live’ document with frequent additions. If you find anything useful on here by all means mention it in your own writings, but please credit the 3DN blog and link back to the source of the information you’re quoting.
