Thursday, July 14, 2005
Mulligans anyone?
I don't play golf, but I hear that a Mulligan is a golfing term for a do-over, a chance to take a shot over without penalty. And today seems like a good day to talk about decisions I've made (or haven't made) that I wish I could do over.
The idea for tonight's blog entry comes from some keyword research I did today for One Stop Web Support. Unfortunately, I saw that very few of the articles I've written really target any keywords effectively. So I decided to look back on my career and discuss some of the lessons I've learned along the way.
Going back to my first ecommerce work, my early work on MasterVisions, two things come to mind.
Mistake #1: I built that site to launch as a completed entity and it took three months to get it launched. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have broken it into modules and gotten the most important product line up in half the time, and then added the other two product lines as I got them done. The site would have broken up perfectly into modules, but I never thought of doing it that way and it cost the site owner a six-week head start he could have had on getting a foothold in the search results.
Lesson #1: When faced with building a large site, split it up into pieces. Especially now with Google downgrading new sites until they've around for a number of months, it's crucial to get something up as fast as possible and add to it as you go along.
Mistake #2: Be focused instead of scattered in your approach. Once the MasterVisions site was up, I generally jumped on whatever promotion technique I happened to read about that week. The result: multiple campaigns started and then put on the back burner in favor of other promotion ideas. The result: again, promotions developed more slowly than they needed to.
Lesson #2: Focus, focus, focus. Don't worry about some great idea getting away if you don't jump on it now. Better to have one campaign carried out to completion instead of ten in varying stages of development.
Mistake #3: Plan carefully instead of letting things develop on their own. One Stop Web Support was in the back of my mind for the last couple of years and I wrote a number of articles in anticipation of it over that time. There never was any set plan for the articles; they were simply topics I was thinking about at the time. When I finally set out to make the website a reality, I took these random articles and developed a structure in which they could fit. The result: a site with a whole lot of articles in some areas and none in others, with weak connecting tissue to bring them into a cohesive whole. In addition, since the articles never considered keywords that people were searching for, very few of them target keywords effectively.
Lesson #3: Take the time to plan how people will find you (by properly targeting your articles to the keywords they're searching) and how they will proceed through your site to the solutions for their problems.
I'll be generous with myself for now and leave it at these three mistakes that have been on my mind lately. May you learn from them and not repeat them.
Jeff
I don't play golf, but I hear that a Mulligan is a golfing term for a do-over, a chance to take a shot over without penalty. And today seems like a good day to talk about decisions I've made (or haven't made) that I wish I could do over.
The idea for tonight's blog entry comes from some keyword research I did today for One Stop Web Support. Unfortunately, I saw that very few of the articles I've written really target any keywords effectively. So I decided to look back on my career and discuss some of the lessons I've learned along the way.
Going back to my first ecommerce work, my early work on MasterVisions, two things come to mind.
Mistake #1: I built that site to launch as a completed entity and it took three months to get it launched. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have broken it into modules and gotten the most important product line up in half the time, and then added the other two product lines as I got them done. The site would have broken up perfectly into modules, but I never thought of doing it that way and it cost the site owner a six-week head start he could have had on getting a foothold in the search results.
Lesson #1: When faced with building a large site, split it up into pieces. Especially now with Google downgrading new sites until they've around for a number of months, it's crucial to get something up as fast as possible and add to it as you go along.
Mistake #2: Be focused instead of scattered in your approach. Once the MasterVisions site was up, I generally jumped on whatever promotion technique I happened to read about that week. The result: multiple campaigns started and then put on the back burner in favor of other promotion ideas. The result: again, promotions developed more slowly than they needed to.
Lesson #2: Focus, focus, focus. Don't worry about some great idea getting away if you don't jump on it now. Better to have one campaign carried out to completion instead of ten in varying stages of development.
Mistake #3: Plan carefully instead of letting things develop on their own. One Stop Web Support was in the back of my mind for the last couple of years and I wrote a number of articles in anticipation of it over that time. There never was any set plan for the articles; they were simply topics I was thinking about at the time. When I finally set out to make the website a reality, I took these random articles and developed a structure in which they could fit. The result: a site with a whole lot of articles in some areas and none in others, with weak connecting tissue to bring them into a cohesive whole. In addition, since the articles never considered keywords that people were searching for, very few of them target keywords effectively.
Lesson #3: Take the time to plan how people will find you (by properly targeting your articles to the keywords they're searching) and how they will proceed through your site to the solutions for their problems.
I'll be generous with myself for now and leave it at these three mistakes that have been on my mind lately. May you learn from them and not repeat them.
Jeff
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