Back in the October 06 yours truly dreamt up a silly idea to create a simple website that lists local bars & pubs by their proximity from you, called Operation Happy Hour. Based on your location (set in Google Maps) I figured I could calculate the nearest bar to you and this would be a novel feature...
What should have been a simple directory of bars quickly blew up to feature all sorts of add ons to the idea, including the addition of user generated content - photos from the bar.
It's a classic case of over engineering, and having been crammed full of features, went live in April 2007 suffering a severe identity crisis - what does it want to be to users?
Er, Marketing Plan?
Initially I thought the key was "social photography" - get people taking snaps, they put them on the site, share with their friends, ad nauseum. The two main barriers to entry for this were (1) The sheer amount of time for me to pull this off on my own part time and (2) a little website called Facebook came along which decided they wanted to own the business of photo sharing (not that it's by any means unique).
Additionally, I figured I could get local venues interested in some free promotion on the site, but even cold calling with a freebie was met with indifference, which goes to show the importance of networks and building relationships.
Fuck it.
Disheartened, I figured if I couldn't even promote it by offering to provide a service for free, on a site with next to no traffic and cents of AdSense revenue, it was a waste of time.
Whilst this may seem a harsh reaction given all the work I've put in, I realised there were much more lucrative things I could be working on with a far greater ROI, and much less painful marketing strategy.
So in October 2007, Operation Happy Hour was left for dead...
Time heals all traffic
Over a year later, something interesting (though not surprising) has happened. With literally not a single second of promotion spent on the site, Google has slowly
and increasingly sent more and more search engine traffic to the site, to a point where it is bringing in a small, but consistant amount of revenue, and reasonably
regular stream of users.
Let's fix this shit.
Given my shocking lack of updates to this blog (TGNWG), I figured I could kill two birds with one stone by using the lots-of-problems-to-fix site (Operation Happy Hour) as a case study, documenting everything I do to get it off the ground.
Whilst I had initial goals for the site, I'm now interested in simply growing traffic through non-painful methods and trying to claw a little revenue back to cover off my initial investments. In effect, I don't really care what happens to the site, so I'm willing to take a cavalier attitude to promotion exercises - risky moves are on the table
. Hopefully, if it ends up getting a big fat Google bitch slap, at least we'll learn something on thie blog.
Website CPR
I'll post the activities I'm conducting regularly, all laid bare for you to copy. Stay tuned to the RSS feed, first step to resuscitation will be up shortly!