Now that the WPVote site is almost complete I need to prepare it for release.
Since I have developed online all I really need to do is redirect the DNS from the current site to my own servers. However there are a couple of things I should take care of.
- The sites old content needs to be copied over to my installed version
- Set up a new development area so that I can continue developing without affecting the live site.
- Test, test, test
Additionally, if I want WPVote to succeed then I need to publicise it. unfortunately marketing is my weak point so I need a plan.
- WPVote Twitter account
- Promote via my Twitter, and the official Twitter accounts
- Facebook fan page
- Create widgets for people to put on their sites
- Buy Ads
- Promote on my own sites and get friends to promote on theirs
Hopefully this will help prevent the site from dieing a death before it has even started. Most of these things are now set, so I just need to tidy up for release... on February 1st. If you have any other promotional ideas then please let me know in the comments, anything I can do to improve my marketing skills / knowledge would be great.
6 Responses to “Building WPVote Part 6 : Planning for Lift Off” Leave a reply ›
I would be glad to write a post and/or place a link on my site. Do you have a logo or ad graphics that I could place and link to wpvote? Good luck by the way. I know I will be stopping by on the first.
Thanks for the offer Kerry, I hadn't thought about media packs but I guess it's the sort of thing I should include when I finish it all off.
Ben,
I have been (and continue to be) quite ill and have not been able to give you any decent feedback on your new site. I will try to do so this weekend/beginning of next week.
I think your marketing moves above are good and if people see the benefits of this site for them, it will catch on.
Many years back, when I promoted a site I had put together myself (later sold and now defunct), I did one more thing that might prove beneficial in your case.
For a longer while (for some sites even longer or until today, because they proved to be worthwhile) I got involved in other sites that were relevant to my site. By commenting, helping out, etc. - and because my various profiles were linked to my new site - users of other sites were drawn to mine. I devoted about one hour to doing this every day and in retrospect, I would say that this move brought about 50% of the final number of regular and active visitors to my then new site. To me, in total, this proved to be the most important move.
Of course, this kind of thing is always content-related and I have no idea if it might work for you. So, just a thought.
Volkher
Hey Volkher - thanks for the ideas. I must admit I am rather lazy and plan to automate as much as possible, but I also totally understand that you don't get things for free. There are a couple of WordPress forums that I help out on so I will continue posting on them and add the link to my signature etc.
Facebook fan page? What the hell for. Pure waste of your time
Button widgets to embed on posts is the obvious must do.
Twitter would definitely be my main promotion tool. I'd make things so that people would retweet a lot stuff from WP Vote. For instance what could be cool would be that when you submit a URL, you enter your twitter username too, so that WPVote tweets the new URL as well as your @user, easier for people to track and retweet.
I'd go with several Twitter accounts: one WPVote "official" account for main news about the site, one like "wpvoteurls" that would tweet every new URL, "vpvote50" to tweet URLs with more than 50 votes, etc..
Tweets should also have a branded short URL instead of bit.ly or whatever, easy to do with WP, so that retweets are more effective.
The typical tweet from WP Vote would be something like:
"Super Cool Plugin by @joe http://wpvote.com/ghYt"
You could also ask yourself what could possibly incite bloggers to use WP Vote buttons. Stuff like digg or reddit show how popular a post is, but maybe those services fail at doing something else cool that would interest people:
- simple analytics? (how many person sent, from where, etc...)
- easier sharing of links (a quick "post to twitter" or to FB or to delicious)
- something like a mini ad network: have a widget that would show on my site current popular WP urls, and my own current popular posts would be shown on others sites?
- auto submission to social services? (like, use the WP Vote stuff and *poof* your post get automatically submitted to reddit, digg, delicious, etc..)
- better tagging and archiving of posts. On reddit for instance, once a posts disappears from the front page, it's gone, and the search function sucks ass.
I'm not a user of digg & such so I don't know, just throwing ideas
But there has to be something cool that the others don't do (or don't do well enough)
The reason for the Facebook fan page is that originally I was intending to do the logins entirely through Facebook connect, but in the end I decided to just use the WordPress built in login system.
A lot of those features you've suggested are really good but I am building this entirely as a WordPress theme so they may be a bit extreme. I do like the multiple automated Twitter account thing and will likely set those up.
Since the system is built on top of WordPress the archives and searching are permanent and use the standard WordPress code which means they have been done already.
The idea of branded short urls is quite cool as well, might look into that for my own site too