I'm collaborating on another web project called VijanaFM.com. I posted on the site about what we're doing to increase web traffic. Posting it here as well for my readers.
VijanaFM is a very young blog and is constantly competing for eyeballs among the plethora of content that is available online. That being said, the VijanaFM team is actively working to increase its web presence and gather sustained web traffic from its primary audience group, East Africans.
#1: Content is King Blogs are about content. The more original, interesting and relevant content that is posted the greater our our traffic. VijanaFM has therefore increased the number of voluntary contributors to its site in order to maintain a steady flow of new content. The VijanaFM team is also very diverse in their experiences which leads to diverse content, again, a plus! We also realized that we need a good balance of Swahili and English content in order to gain greater acceptance among locals in East Africa.
#2: Make it easy From a usability perspective, we're also trying to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. We're maintaining a consistent tagging mechanism for all our posts and removing any overlapping and unnecessarily tags. We're also working on categorizing by the three content types (audio, visual, text) that our platform seeks to promote.
#3: Just Google it We all know Google is the top search engine so how we rank on the search engine is a key priority. Now Google automatically increases your rankings as you have more visitors to the site which #1 and #2 are also helping to do. Each of our postings is also disseminated through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, this increases the number of 'backlinks'(other websites that link back to yours) and thus increasing your rankings. Lastly, we're also monitoring the portion of our web traffic that comes from organic Google searches and optimizing our site for the most actively used keywords for our target demographic.
Do you have any experiences of your own with building a sustainable web presence? Any strategies that worked for you? Please comment.
Crowdsourcing is a modern term that describes the use of a group or community to complete a task at hand. This crowdsourcing phenomenon as it relates to the internet initially started with creatives tasks such as design work being crowdsourced by companies large and small. Small or freelance designers suddenly had access to projects for the biggest brands while small businesses could now relatively afford high-end design work. The internet was the perfect medium for such services as it brought millions of potential creative folks together right where they were needed.
This phenomenon like many others on the internet has since been ported to other applications. These range from crowdsourcing solutions for complex R&D problems to getting mechanical tasks completed. You can find more examples here.
This seems like a wonderful idea, but is everything all hunky dory? Crowdsourcing has faced criticisms in that:
Quality of work received is often lower
A lot of wasted effort in crowdsourced competitions
Difficult to maintain relationships with crowdsourced workers
I feel that although these criticism may be true, businesses (those paying for crowdsourcing) need to understand that not all tasks are appropriate for crowdsourcing and they must pick and choose when the pros outweigh the cons.
I posted a crowdsourced logo design project on 99designs.com a short while ago. On a relatively small budget, I quickly realized that most of the projects offered rewards much greater than mine and it seemed apparent that the higher the reward the greater the number of submissions. I understand that this is completely rational since more designers will be attracted by the prospect of more $$$. The key question is, will the level and quality of my designs be lower than if more money had been offered? I'll wait to find out. Eventually I think it all stays the same, since the money offered by larger companies will always be higher than what a small business owner can offer and thus attract better designers. Just like a non-crowdsourced project.
Have you conducted a crowdsourced project? What was your experience?
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