Promoting a new directory: The worst of times
(Launching a new web directory, continued from previous posts)
This was the worst period so far, encompassing more trouble with rival sites, face to face sales, dynamic content causing unexpected layout breakages, and unexpected reserves of grim determination…
26/9 Made some calls to find out more about this rival website. It turns out it wasn’t the school themselves who sent the letter to Rotary, though they did encourage the site owner in mass mailing of local charities and businesses. It’s definitely a business not a Young Enterprise project and I still think it’s wrong for them to be involved in promoting a local business at all.
Distributed some more cards around:
- Business card in the launderette
- Business card in the market
- Postcard in another town centre newsagents for 2 weeks.
- (Saw my postcards on the front desk in the town hall
) - Gave a business card to the man in Cartridge World. He seemed unimpressed but said I could leave some on the counter.
- Gave a business card to the photographer’s up the road and offered them a free featured photo spot for a month. Was too nervous to go over well by that stage but let’s keep fingers crossed for it.
Added more green related news feeds to the website, and some accessible alternative text.
Went round the print shops in town getting quotes for car stickers. Easy choice: only one shop in town could do them and also would do small numbers of them. They also charged half the best price I’d found on the internet, so I ordered 5 from there.
Consulted everyone on whether or not to capitalise the words Stairway and Devon for the car stickers. It seems more readable but less attractive looking with the capitals. I asked loads of people’s advice, and they were split 50-50. I ended up asking the man in the sign shop, then realised I couldn’t then not do what he recommended! So we’re going with lowercase, probably for the best, on expert advice
Ordered a load more stuff from too: another t-shirt, more business cards and postcards (redesigned this time and hopefully improved!), a note pad, some funny post-its, and some more magnets. Thought I might offer some of these fabulous free promotional magnets as a freebie on the website.
Some more emailing to ask for link swaps: LoneShark .com (music promoter), Digital Image Works (photographer), Coast watch (web cam), Wild link (webcams and site as a whole)
Tried again with web directories, but so many of the ones whose listings say they are free turn out not to be. Added one more: http://www.pagan-directory.com/dir/submit.php (2 months estimated wait). Then found My green corner web directory: http://www.mygreencorner.com/ (which added my link then removed it) and
Earth directory: http://www.earth-directory.info/, The free directory UK http://www.the-free-directory.co.uk/ (which has turned out to be a good one)
Great news: one of the people I wrote to who registered during early teething troubles has come back and entered a listing! 46 listings in there now (most of which I put in myself!) – will take a deep breath at 50.
27/9 More bad news – checked out the school website which says the Town Council is also promoting my local competition. Town Council has it linked on their website as ‘Exmouth’s newest website’ . Huh.
My mother thinks if the school is promoting businesses (which she also thinks it shouldn’t) I should just bite the bullet and ask to get involved in that. I begin considering it.
Emailed ‘Beautiful Devon’ tourism directory to request a link exchange or listing.
As a continuation of the ‘promoting within a niche market’ idea, I went to the Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts fair, and had a very constructive day (as well as finding lots of nice things to see!), finding more new listings, leads, contacts etc. Met some nice people there and saw lots of lovely craft work and fun looking things to do.
Came home and started adding them to the directory.
Visitor numbers seem well down from the last couple of days – wonder why. But good news – I am on the first page of Google for the term ‘Devon directory’ which is about as relevant as it gets! Emailed Broadway house directory, who were first on the list, to ask for a link.
Most people don’t even reply when I email them – it’s as if there’s no difference between a personal, carefully thought out email and a piece of junk mail spam (and some of these are people I even know!)
Added the rest of the craft listings to the directory.
Emailed Christine Pattison, crafts tutor and designer at Duchy college, about her listing and offering membership, new listings, pictures, listings for the students etc.
Almost immediately I got some very bad news from my mother in law and a quick check confirms it: the site’s layout is completely broken in Internet Explorer. I take it offline and try undoing various things I had changed yesterday. After a few minutes I figure it out: I had a visitor from Serbia and Montenegro, which made my Visitors by Country column too wide to fit in the menu and that messed up the whole thing (for some reason, it even messed up the pages it wasn’t appearing on). Dreadful timing, when I have been working so hard to promote the site for the last few days. Removed the visitors by country from that column – it will only have it’s own page now. But this means the site has been out of action in Internet Explorer for the whole day 
I guess it’s a good thing after all that I didn’t have so many visitors today. Wondering how many people (and who) saw it all messed up today, and what opportunities did I lose – very stressful feeling, though at least not as bad now it’s fixed. I suppose this is the kind of problem that can happen early on in a more complex site with dynamic content, especially when the content arrives automatically and unexpectedly.
Feel tired of this (literally as well as it’s half past midnight!) and need to work on another project tomorrow, so nothing else had better go wrong for a while.
Comments
This was by far the worst couple of days, due to a stressful combination of new-site bugs, new competition, the uncertainties of any launch and the requirement to go well out of my comfort zone in learning new promotional skills and adapting to sales situations.
A lot of this stress goes along with creating and launching a website on a shoestring: no doubt expensive testing, marketing, advertising and salesmen could have averted much of this! However, with the extreme budget approach, the site remains a work in progress for a much longer time: new design and usability considerations are constantly emerging, along with new sales and marketing opportunities, and all of this requires time, which costs money. But then, if you’re going for the extreme budget approach, like me, it’s probably because that’s what you can afford, so you’re stuck with it. It’s not that bad, just stressful!
The other comment at this stage is to repeat that given this situation again, I would add a lot more listings using DMOZ data before launching. The discovery of more and more ‘authorities’ backing an unexpected rival is psychologically stressful, but not necessarily that relevant: in the end I don’t think it had that much of an effect on my site. This sort of competition can either be worked around, adapted to and emulated (to some extent), diverged from, or best of all ignored: focusing on your own site is far more important in getting it launched and working.
Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory