Realizing and Recognizing Success

It's a little bit funny. I look at StopMomStop and it looks like something that I could have done in just a couple of days - and really it is. The hard work isn't necessarily related to what is on the site right now, but in learning and understanding all of the little things that go on in the background.

In just a few days, the site has received 431 visitors and has served up over 1560 pages - nothing to be extraordinarily proud of, but being that there has been absolutely zero chance of a search engine visitor coming along, and that I've done no promotion as of yet that is a pretty strong success. There are plenty of sites out there getting less than that number monthly, and I'm 1% of the way to my goal of 8000 daily visitors to the site - the first 1 percent largely being the most difficult to achieve.

Add to that that I've had 385 pages crawled by Yahoo, Google, and MSN. None of the engines are showing much in the way of content in their indexes, but the bots have come by so I expect it won't be too long before I start to see something in the way of search engine organic visitors.

I didn't set out to accomplish this - in fact, I wanted to wait until things were settled down a little bit prior to making any attempt at site promotion. There were a few key things that I think brought about this little bit of success:

• asking for site reviews - I asked in four locations, one of them a private area for site reviews. This didn't bring much in terms of traffic, but it did inadvertently generate some halfway decent inbound linking
• Regularly updated content - Kind of a no brainer early on, but having something fresh is playing a big part in return visits.
• vBulletin and vbSEO - vbSEO's new pinging feature is helping to make people aware of the site. I think I've done a decent job on building the forum, so it helps to see that this is a quality site and not just a little bit of software thrown together
• Not a blog - blogging has a stigma about it with so many MFA sites out there being powered by a blogging platform of some sort. Having a blog is a good thing, but being nothing but a blog isn't. I'm managing the site greatly with a customized MT back end, but I've done a good deal of work to avoid many blog standards for the main section and individual articles.

Getting moving in the publishing side of the street has been something that has been continually getting delayed for several months, and the reason for that is that I wanted to get to a point where I could really manage things atomically and frankly I'm not entirely there yet, but I'm well beyond where I was several months ago. It's difficult to find the balance between search engine friendly and over-optimization along with finding a decent functionality-to-page-load-time ratio. Not to mention dealing with finding a new feature photo to attach to each published article.

It's coming together, and the important thing is in recognizing that the meager stats numbers are indeed a sign of strong success early on. From here, it's a matter of working the plans I've been putting together all this time. Once stabilized, I can start to publish some of the other things based on this first model. I'm thinking that it will take several days to get each individual site up and running - much longer than I want, but I would like to repeat these little successes with regularity.