Developments – 17 April 2010
We are progressing further along the path of building up our new site and launching a new business. Read on to find out the latest news.
This week we made a major step forward in developing new site content. We have quite a number of excellent articles based on themes that are popular on our other sites. Working with our writer, we have moved ahead and have a stockpile of new material ready for release.
We had some issues with a previous writer who simply disappeared. Sometimes that happens with contractors – you take the good with the bad. Our latest writer is excellent. For the previous one, I had to file a arbitration request to get my money back. This is a key advantage of using Rentacoder – firstly there is a reputation system, and secondly if it doesn’t work out and the person doesn’t deliver, then there is a way of getting back your money.
Rather than waste time, I overlapped the new writer and following the procedure to recover my funds from escrow with the last writer.
Currently we are focused on using writers who are native English speakers, and the quality of their work is great. I guess the lesson is to never underestimate the benefits of using someone who is in a developed country even if the rate is higher. The downside is that the amount that you pay may be higher, but in my experience, this is compensated for by the higher quality and more natural English. There are always people who want to make a bit of money on the side who can offer attractive rates.
We have started including pictures with our articles. Not only do they liven up the article, but they also allow us to include some extra keywords to help search engines find our pages. Some of the pictures are purchased stock photography (from iStockPhoto), the others are free images from SXC.hu.
To date, nearly all our traffic comes from posting blogs rather than from search engines. This will hopefully change as the site matures. Whilst it is great to have blog traffic, only search engine traffic will lead to a site that attracts the number of visitors that we need to survive as a business. To get search engine traffic, you need a site that is designed to support search engines, you need good content, and you need external links. We are working on all of these factors.
I’m not an SEO guru, but I built my first site in 2001. These days I use WordPress as it offers excellent content management functions. In my time I’ve had some successful sites and my share of failures too. The best thing is that the cost of building sites is quite low, so the failures don’t hurt too much. I am hoping that this site will be a success and form a viable business.
I read an interesting study about business survival. A leading ratings agency did a massive analysis on the factors that could possibly influence the survival of a business. After a lot of work, the conclusion was that one factor was by far the most vital – sales. If sales were healthy, then the business was likely to survive, if not, it would fail. When you translate that to a website, sales can only come one way – from web traffic.
Whether you get your web traffic through organic search engine traffic, blogging or paid advertisements, you need to get those visitors to the site and convert them into sales. We haven’t put our one product on the site yet, but we are very much focused on increasing the number of visitors to the site over time.
We have got our first comments. Unfortunately these are not from legitimate users but instead are spam comments. Fortunately we have a system that filters these out and deletes them. If you have any comments, we’d love to hear from you (provided that you are not an automated spammer!).
One other part of a website is the graphical design. Our favourite graphical designer is now working on our site header and logo. The logo, or printer’s mark, will be included in our book. It might take a while, but you can look forward to a sensational new site header.
Tags: entrepreneur, Site news
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