www.oddpodz.com is a site for creative minded businesses and people. Our goal is to provide network tools and content to help small business grow.
Getting the site to where it is has been a long, expensive road. We made some wrong turns early on. We have a small team and not many financial resources. We have over 4000 pages of helpful content and our membership grows every week. We just need to get our community more active. Any ideas? We have some limitations to what we can change on the site. Some of it is hard programmed and some CManaged. thanks!
oops forgot to request emails of replies. k
thanks! appreciate the feedback
Y`know, this is an interesting and repeating topic. The question is how to get more audience, basically. It doesn`t matter if it`s a product or a networking site, a directory or a catalog. Whatever it may be, the site is out there and people want more visitors and members.
I spent my first career as a musician, going from high school into the business, leaving when I was in my 30s. Obviously, in the entertainment industry the key question is how to get famous----how to get more audience. Countless people spend massive amounts of time on the question, and there are a huge number of different thoughts.
But the fact remains that some bands get famous, others don`t, and people want to know why.
There always are going to be a majority of bands that just aren`t all that good. It`s pretty easy to see the 50 things wrong, what they could do to improve, and so forth. Most of the time, those bands don`t care. They`re so caught up in their own little world they don`t really understand why they`re going nowhere.
When you get past that majority, and enter into the serious bands, things get a whole lot more complicated. For example, the Beatles began with drummer Pete Best. He was fine, and the band was doing okay.
Pete Best became ill, and the band replaced him with Ringo Starr. Would the Beatles have been "The Beatles" with Pete Best? Nobody knows.
Then you have so-called one-hit-wonders; bands we all recognize on the basis of their single major hit. Why couldn`t they come up with another major hit? How come someone like Stevie Wonder has smash hit after hit, with countless successes?
Think about the original cast of M*A*S*H, the popular TV series. Then think about the careers of the people who left the show to go do something else. So many of them never repeated that first success.
Can we really analyze popularity on the basis of pure science, logic, intellect? I think we can do some of that, but mostly in that lower 90% arena. But when we get up into that top bracket, "pre-success" for want of a better word, I doubt it.
The only solutions I`ve ever seen are basically two. The first is that you have a vision, it`s totally original, and you stick with that vision no matter what. Years later, you either were "brilliant" or a "failure." No real in between.
The other is to tweak and change, try this and that, and continually do different ideas, seeing what works. It`s the "trial-and-error" concept.
I`ve often used electricity as an analog. Nikla Tesla represents the single vision, never changing, clear as a bell and unique. Thomas Edison represents the trial-and-error, inventor`s research complex, with a hope that something will succeed.
Oddly enough, Tesla invented the foundation of what we now consider ordinary electrical engineering. Yet few people have heard of him, and he died broke. Edison added a significant portion to modern electricity, everyone knows him, but Tesla`s legacy massively outweighs what Edison created.
With 4,000 pages of content and an active community, it sounds like you`re in that upper 10% bracket.
your feedback is always insightful. thanks!
how about comeing up with 3 or 4 ideas and posting a poll right on your front page so your users will engage with the site. Or set up a button on the front page that directs your users to a form to fill out that says give us your ideas to improve our site for you.
thanks, do you know of survey tool that is free? We just canceled our monkey survey because we were not using it. the second idea we do add with a banner and email link.
thanks a bunch
K
If you incorporate a survey tool on your website and it proves unpopular, you might want to come up with some small rewards for participation. While the anonymous internet is the home of the vulgar and unwanted opinion, when an opinion is wanted, getting it is like pulling teeth. You can`t really get anything for nothing. The easiest way to increase user engagement is to offer a reward for it.
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Making limitless possibilities much more limited.
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