April 30, 2009

  • Why People Leaving Xanga Fail at Building Their Own Websites

    I have noticed over the last 4 years that several people on xanga have decided they want to take the big leap and start their own websites.  The people starting their own websites are often very popular on xanga but struggle to translate that into popularity on their own website.

    Many of you have watched the process.  Popular blogger decides he/she is too big for xanga.  Popular blogger steps out into the internet.  Popular blogger sets up his/her site.  Popular blogger spends days and even weeks designing their site.  Popular blogger picks out catchy website name.  Popular blogger links to their new site from their xanga site.  Popular blogger does this for about four days to one month.  Popular blogger comes back to xanga talking about how you just can’t beat the community feel of xanga.

    Where did the blogger go wrong?  Why did the popular blogger fail to succeed on his/her own site in the same way they succeeded on xanga?

    It is pretty simple and predictable.  Traffic transfers slowly to another site.  Have you ever watched a site get featured and get 100 comments and then looked at the very next post and see 3 comments?  Why does that happen?  Traffic transfers slowly to another site.

    The reality is that most of the people going out on their own don’t realize that having a handful of friends linking them from xanga is going to have very little impact on their traffic.  It will give them a sudden rush of excitement of having a few thousand hits only to cause depression to set in 5 days later as they realize they are all alone.  As they develop their new site, they pay attention to the layout and the content but have learned very little about how to drive traffic to a website.

    How does a person gain traffic on xanga?  They comment which leaves a link for a person to come back and comment.  They plugz their site.  They may even get featured or make top blogs.  Perhaps they get a bunch of recommends.

    What should we call all of these traffic gaining strategies?  We will call them links.  A comment left on another site is a link to your site.  A comment on a popular site is a great link to your site.  A featured post is an awesome link to your site.

    So Mr. or Mrs. popular blogger takes a journey out into the Internet with no real strategy for growth other than to link the site from their popular xanga site.

    This is a stupid strategy.

    The key to gaining traffic to your website is simple.  You must get people to come to your site and you must retain the people that come to your site.

    This appears obvious but it is the point of failure for most sites.  There is no real plan to gain traffic to their new site.

    So let me walk you through what I would do if I was going to start my own website off xanga. 

    First, you need traffic (or links).  Let me tell you one way to get traffic.  The best way to get traffic is to get email addresses.  This is pretty easy because people will give you their email addresses.  Recently I wanted to see if I could get 2000 email addresses in 20 minutes.  I wanted them to be real email addresses that people use.  I enlisted the help of five helpers.  We set up 100 email accounts.  (We only needed 20 to pull this experiment off).

    We posted ads on craigslist.  We posted several ads in different sections all at one time.  We received a few thousand responses to our ads in 20 minutes.  I have to estimate because I did not count all of the responses but based on the ones I did count I am certain we received well over 2000 responses.  If I responded back to any of the emails, I received a response back.  Most of the responses were from non bot sites.  In other words, they were real people.

    So in 20 minutes I was able to gain 2000 emails.  I am pretty confident that if I did this alone, I could gain 20,000 emails in one day.  Would that be a ton of work?  Yes.  It would be one huge effort.  But I believe it would work.  Now you would need to respond to those emails and invite the people to your site.  Is this spamming?  Not in my opinion.  You would simply be responding to someone who emailed you first.  How is that spamming?

    You would need to hit this effort for some time working at it every day.  But the effort would pay off.  Craigslist is just one example of a website that can be used for this purpose.

    The problem with most people that start their own websites is that they are unprepared for the effort that it takes to market their new site.