Livermore The Online Novel
by john and emily
Livermore
Site: Livermore Emily and John, I'm excited for you. For your potential success. To my eye, you're looking to repeat the success of The Blair Witch Project. Of course, everyone would like to repeat the success of The Blair Witch Project. Probably even the pope would enjoy that kind of success. BWP was a massive phenomenon. It went viral. Presumably, YOU would like to go viral. You'd like the same "perfect storm" to converge on your project. Well, I'm no viral marketing expert. But I think we agree that it starts with people discovering your site. You want to get that snowball rolling. After all, people who don't know about your site can't tell other people about it! My area of expertise is in attracting search engine traffic. You're getting almost none. And that makes sense. No one, after all, knows to look for YOUR Livermore project. But look what I just found out... 90,500 per month still Google the term "Blair Witch." (See for yourself by entering Blair Witch in this tool.) What does this tell us? That the best way to get search engine traffic is to already be famous! Of course, that doesn't help you. Or does it?... One of your most likely customers is someone who lived for The BWP. Right? Well, you know what I'd do? I'd create an entirely new site - text based, not visually based - on the subject of The Blair Witch Project. Why? Because 90,500 people per month look for that kind of information. Haven't you been listening? ;-) I'd provide those folks the information they're looking for, because that's the only reason the search engines would send you their traffic. But I would ALSO provide them information on Livermore, the NEXT Blair Witch type phenomenon. And I'd link them to your site. Now, all of a sudden, the fans who can take you viral are discovering you - not because you mimicked BWP but because you paid homage! Sound interesting? An important aside: For search engine purposes, I think it's important that you realize that in naming your project Livermore you gave yourself a problem that the Blair Witch folks smartly steered themselves around. Livermore is a city, and Livermore hosts a famous national laboratory. When people started hearing about Blair Witch, they could Google it and know it would come up at the top of the listings. Why? Because the only Blair Witch thing to look for was the Project. If you do go viral, you're still gonna be competing for attention with a city in California and a bunch of scientists. So, aside from creating a new site to attract BWP fans, I would recommend reconsidering the name of your project. Either get rid of Livermore, or add something to it to identify it. The Livermore Orphan, for example. The internet is the home of the "If you build it, they will come" mentality. Unfortunately, this misbelief leads to a lot of people building sites and not getting the traffic they hoped for. If you haven't yet gone viral, if you don't yet have obsessed repeat visitors, the search engines are where the action is at. You need another site, one that will drive traffic to your existing one. And that means creating a site designed to meet the needs of hordes of people already searching for information on a particular subject. Then, once you fill that need, you need to have something to offer these people - something that they didn't already know about. That's Livermore, and you've already got it. (Or will once you finish the Under Construction sections.) I build my sites using SiteBuildIt, and the search engines send me a steady, substantial stream of visitors that grows rather consistently over time. You use this suite of traffic-building tools to design a site that the search engines will love. It's not a breeze. Those oodles of time you've spent designing the look of thelivermoresite? You'll be spending similar time on the project I'm proposing, only the time would be spent much more on writing than designing. But the result would be a dependable stream of traffic - if you do it right - traffic that could be steered to Livermore. It doesn't have to be a site on the subject of Blair Witch. It might be something wider, say Cult Movies, or Homemade Movies or Horror Films or Mockumentaries. But a site CAN be built from which you could harvest traffic because of existing interest in another subject. It works!
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