In order to fix the marketing atrocities commited against Operation Happy Hour, I've devised a high-level plan for the steps I plan to take on the road to recovery. Call it a "Website Rescue & Recovery Stimulus Plan," if you will.

Click to bigify:

Stage 1: Fix Lunacy

Having let the site slide for over a year, some things have stopped working, there are numerous bugs and multiple basic, usability issues. These need fixing first - it's a waste of time promoting if shitty issues turn users away at the first page view (unless they leave via an Ad of course ).

Stage 2: Populate Forums

Worse than bugs, the site resembles a bad case of city planning (shit loads of new office space and no tenants) - there are numerous features that only "work" when populated with active users, of which the site has none (the bounce rate is currently 97%). Visibly empty forums exascerbates the lack of participation  - a vicious circle - if no one's participating, why stick around?

Populating forums serves two purposes - it starts to form a community around the site, which is very important later on, and creates the appearance of "popularity" through active participation. Happy forum users are not particularly good for Ad revenue, but that's irrelevant - a loyal who doesn't click on ads is worth much more to a site than any ad revenue they may generate over time.

Since I don't have (a) the time and (b) the motivation to spend every day spoon feeding the forums, I've been working on an automated solution to populate semi-interesting content - a strategy that will quickly increase the post count (an important metric for would-be community members in early days) and most importantly, create a reason for discussion. The existing forums are a joke - self serving non-entities which offer no purpose to users. If I sound like I'm self flagellating, I'm not really - I never spent more than a few minutes on the forums originally.

With content going in on a regular basis, the next step is to attract people to look at it. Existing site traffic is all well and good, but I have a (for the time being secret) plan to promote a piece of viral content as a means to focus traffic on the forums.

Hopefully, an increase in traffic will create participation from more than just me (oh the shame) which leaves one last strategy to get the forums buzzing - competitions. I've thought about these a little, they'll basically be half decent prizes for users who contribute interesting content into the forums. 

If I get to the end of all the that, I hope the forums should have a life of their own by that point.

Stage 3: Broaden Reach

The currently survives under the tryanny of Google - 97% of all traffic, and 100% of (albeit insignificant) revenue. Whilst I don't really care short term, this can be addressed in a couple of ways. Providing access to the useful service the site offers on different platforms should hopeful create a new avenue of discovery for would-be users.

The plan is simple - a simplified version of the site formatted for both stand-alone desktop and the iPhone. Without giving too much away at this point, both these platforms provide some virtually "free" marketing capabilities that should increase overall traffic, in bounds links, and thus authority for subsequent search engine indexing.

Stage 4: SEO, PR, Promotion

This may be a mistake, but I don't intend to embark on significant Promotional and Link Building activities until the site is at a point where it's worth promoting. I think it would be a waste to gain a flood of traffic from viral campaigns or otherwise, for visitors to arrive at the site in it's current condition. This isn't strictly a fourth stage though - I will start promotion of the Viral content and iPhone / Desktop solutions as soon as they are ready.

Much work lies ahead

I have no timeline in my head for the above. I'd love it all done tomorrow, I'm not sure if 6 months is even realistic. I'm nearly done with fixing stupid bugs (1) and almost ready to go on automating content to the forums. Once that's going, it's time for the Viral campaign, which I'm really looking forward to.

Stay tuned for more ...