I’m fasting this week, not food or TV or beer or even the computer. I’m abstaining from work on one of my websites. I’ve got a site that most of you reading this already know about, PolFeeds. It syndicates news from Congress, the President, and the Presidential Campaigns, and with the election heating up, I’ve been working hard to promote the site.
I’ve got a lot of sweat equity in this thing. I’ve spent tens if not hundreds of hours building and growing it. In other words, it is important to me, but I realized that for the past week it has been consuming my life, taking me away from time with God. So I need to put it down for a while, to refocus. I’ll still be blogging. And I’ve got some other projects that I need to work on, but as difficult as it is (especially now when the opportunity for growth is so great), I’ve got to let this one go for a few days so that it doesn’t become my God.
So, my question is, what does it take for a website to become the next big thing? I recently launched polfeeds.com, which syndicates the RSS feeds produced by politicians. I thought (and still think) that it was a pretty good idea. It makes easily accessible a lot of information that a lot of people want.
At the same time that I was launching and promoting PolFeeds, I started this blog. I’ve written a total of 8 posts (9 including this one), mostly on politics, and my traffic here is currently significantly higher than my traffic on PolFeeds.
When it was initially launched, PolFeeds got written up on a few niche blogs and received a fair amount of StumbleUpon traffic. However, without telling you exactly how sad the traffic on PolFeeds has been recently, I’ll just say that this blog, which is getting more traffic, was visted all of 45 times yesterday.
Now, I enjoy writing, but especially considering that this is my first experience with blogging, I don’t think that these posts are of an exceptionally high quality. I certainly doubt that what I have here is more useful than a tool that allows you to keep up with a great deal of the goings on in U.S. politics. Of course, much of the traffic that I’m getting on this blog is from friends; bless you souls who actually read my drivel. However, the majority of the visitors are actually coming from StumbleUpon, a TechCrunch trackback, and Google. In fact, in a strange development, I am the top Google result for “obama donor counter,” right above Kos.
I imagine that part of what has limited PolFeeds’ growth is my own lack of knowledge about how to market a website like that. A blog is relatively easy. You write, link to others and get trackbacks, submit interesting articles to Digg/Stumble/Reddit, et cetera. This may not make you as popular as TechCrunch, but you’ll probably get at least some traffic.
So, what is the secret? How do you market a website that’s not a blog. There’s always AdWords, but there’s got to be more to it than that. What do you recommend? What does it take to be the next big thing? How do you become the next Facebook, or even just the next Xanga?
