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- Marketing Ideas for StoriesAboutGod.org
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Here’s another episode in the continuing saga of developing and marketing a non-profit, personal ministry site called StoriesAboutGod.org. Today I’m thinking through the challenges of the site, and a response to those challenges.
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- You Might Be a Geek If…
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...you walk across the living room to pick up the “home page” of the Sunday paper…
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- A Vendor, An Online Community, A Textbook Case of What Not to Do
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Quite a while back I posted an article entitled Vendors and Online Communities, written to be a resource for vendors/manufacturers/retailers of commercial goods who want to try and sell to a related online community.
Picture a manufacturer of bike parts and supplies finding a site like http://www.bikeforums.net/, or a tool manufacturer finding a site like http://forum.doityourself.com/
From the vendors perspective, they just hit the jackpot. This community is made up of hundreds - thousands even - of members of their prime target audience. The vendor browses through the forums, reading thread after thread of people directly asking about certain products, posting questions about problems that the vendor’s product is designed to solve.
Finally - the impulse is too great to withstand, and with visions of upward-trending sales charts dancing in his head the vendor registers on the site, logs in, and begins posting in those threads.
This is where Robbie the Robot should appear on the computer screen - flapping his bowling-ball arms and yelling “Danger! Danger Will Robinson!”
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- Stories About God.org Updates
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A while back I posted about some frustration over the apparent performance of my pet project, StoriesAboutGod.
I was considering some major revamping to make the site function more like Digg. After following Digg for a while, however, I decided that while Digg has a great amount of traffic and quantity of posts/comments the overall quality of the community was pretty poor and not something I wanted to emulate. I’d rather the site be a source for original content rather than just another collection of links with some added comments.
From a design perspective - there’s just something about the look/feel/content of the Stories site that still appeals to me. Somehow it came out feeling elegant, quiet, and reflective— very different from other sites that I visit on a daily basis.
From a traffic perspective, the site is ranking quite highly for some pretty generic search terms - like “god’s provision” at #4 (!). It was the search ranking that sold me sticking to the current implementation, making some small changes, and then do more from a “marketing” perspective to drive traffic up.
And people keep finding it. Stories are still coming in here and there.
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- MannaIs.org Changes
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Just a quick note to point out that http://www.MannaIs.org now sports a ExpressionEngine-based Photo Gallery - now that we’re busy working on remodeling our new building we needed a place to put pictures of all the “sweat equity” in action…;)