Anatomy of a Launch
Hi there 101'ers
My colleague Diane Bjorling and I will be sharing with you the forum readers a little of our experience with the creation of BlogNetAwards.com and our subsequent launch (which this forum thread is all about)
The discussion between us all will certainly determine the length of this particular thread, and I'd just like to invite all of you to share any of your experiences, or ask any questions you might have.
Of course a new website in "launch mode" seems to hover in that state for some time. We're nowhere near our goals at this point, but the activity is increasing on a daily basis, and on something like this that doesn't offer an immediate reward for the participant (like building a list or a downline in a matrix) we have to accept that there isn't a feeding frenzy mentality at work here. We expect our growth to be slow and steady..
People are busy. That's just the fact.
We were actually a little behind in some of the things we wanted ready for the launch, so in hindsight this "soft launch" is just what we needed.
What we're finding out initially is that contrary to the general belief that launching on a holiday is a bad idea, our launch on Labor Day Monday was actually not bad for a new blog.
Remember..this isn't a site with an affiliate honey pot of cash. People actually don't have much of an incentive to refer others *unless their blog is nominated* in which case then there is a lot of incentive. In fact that's something I'm looking to work on. If there's some way I can work a referral rewards program into this..you can bet I will ;-) The issue there is that while we know of ways to track the traffic you might bring to the site, there's no way (that we know of yet) to link that person to you when they become active on the site.
Anyway.
The creative process was actually rather rapid. About the middle of July I had a brainstorm one morning in the shower, and the name came to me right away (sorry but that's where I do some of my best thinking..in the shower)
It was in fact a little crazy to embark any new project when in fact we already had too many other things to work on, but that's the way things are sometimes, when you get a great idea..it needs to be acted upon or the opportunity is often lost.
But even a "good idea" needs to go through the proper process. So after telling Diane about my idea, we had to then go to work and prove the model.
That (in our terminology) means RESEARCH.
People come up with inventions every day, but how many ever make it to market? Do you think most manufacturers do their "homework" and research a product or a market before they enter it?
In our case, there was no question there were more than a few Blog Award sites, and many have been around a good number of years. Now if you think that kind of research showing lots of competition is a signal to get out and look at something else..I'm going to to disagree.
Lots of competition means there is a market! so we continued and looked closer at the competition. What were they doing (in our opinion) right, and what were they doing wrong, and where was the money>?
We found sites that weren't always easy to understand or navigate, sites that had little visual imagry to generate excitement, and apparently sites that used a fair amount of "automation".
So our goal then was to see what we felt we could do to improve on those examples, and was there enough room for us in the market.
Short answer. Yes.
I'll leave this up to Diane now to pick up, fill in any blanks, and add her own perspective before we move on to the actual creation of the site, and of course the Launch of Blog Net Awards.