Votepages Blog

Comment Spam Holy Cow

tim — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:11:52 +0000

Here at Votepages.com headquarters located in a beuatiful penthouse in Buenos Aires we are excited about our little creative writing game. We got this blof to write about stuff, we havea wiki for our help section (which is the hip thing to do these days) and we just want people tio have fun. So one day I see that we have some new comments on our blog and I think Hey! maybe people are using our game! Also, no… all of them are spam. We have 69 comments of complete horse shit spam. I did not think I would need spam protectors like Akismet but I have learned my lesson!

This is spam…

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Vonnegut: How to write a good short story

tim — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:05:54 +0000

I really like lists. I like lists because they tell me things in a concise way and I dont have to read any sentences in between. The sentences in between are annoying and I will typically forget them. In this video Kurt Vonnegut has eight rules or tenets or suggestions or whatever to follow to write a good short story.

First page for creative writing on google

tim — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:31:51 +0000

Getting natural search engine traffic for a small website like ours can be a little cumbersome. But after about a month of being online we are now on the first page of google for “creative writing game”. From the data that I can see, google averages around 90 searches per month for this topic (pretty small) but it is a start. We have a couple more possible link-backs coming up so this might bring us to the top of this search term in the coming weeks.

Check it out here…

Getting traffic and getting users for our application

tim — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:24:53 +0000

My ongoing strategy for getting traffic and active writers to our application consists of the following:

1. Continue to use StumbleUpon to find niche creative writing blogs that will write about our site and link to it. I also plan on using search engines under “creative writing” and “web 2.0″ and similar terms. I have received some interest so far from bloggers.

2. We need to look at how users perceive the game and somehow lure them into the game easier. It seems we have a steady flow of users now but we do not have new users logging into the game. The game needs to be more appealing and easier to get started.

We currently have two Votepages started by users that neither Dan nor I are familiar with which means that the system is usable by others but we do need to make it easier. Unfortunately, this is an exhausting portion of launching a site where nobody seems to be using the site. However, there is a “feather in our caps”. From our google analytics account we found there are 83 people that have returned to the site two times. That means they left the site and then came back which is a good sign.

My goal for October is to contact 100 sites.

StumbleUpon huge spike and decline

tim — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:01:10 +0000

From a previous post I discussed the power of StumbleUpon to bring in new visitors but also a quick decline after one day. On September 23th we saw 486 unique visitors to our site and then on September 24th we saw 1296 unique visitors. We received all of these visitors simply by filling out a review on our site, giving it a thumbs up, and then letting stumblers look at it. Yesterday on September 25th we saw 11 visitors. Not 1100, we saw 11. So I think that this has to do something with how StumbleUpon works. It takes new pages and presents them to its members and then after a certain amount of time, stops presenting those pages. I am not sure, but 1296 to 11 means to me that nobody is getting in their stumbles anymore.

Another Stumbleupon Spike and some reviews

tim — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:46:29 +0000

Yesterday we saw about 500 users from Stumbleupon view our website which is great news. This tells me that there is a market out there for people that want to see websites about writing. We have also seen a few positive SU reviews about the site which are here.

However I have to agree with the sentiment of this article when the author says that the bounce rate is really high. With Stumbleupon you will get lots of visitors but I really think they are just hitting that ‘Stumble’ button over and over again until they find something they like. Which is pretty much what Stumbleupon was designed to do. StumbleUpon is a way to actually ’surf’ the net and not really think about your next destination. So Votepages is getting lots of viewers, but TONS of people that are just taking a peek and hitting that Stumble button again. This makes me think that we will need to make our invitation to the game a little more compelling rather than a “Play the Game” button on the homepage. OR make it even easier to submit creative writing - meaning we could do away with the registration component temporarily (I seriously doubt we will do that). We do have two new votepages started in the application so that is promising.

Stumbelupon Spike then decline

tim — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:08:15 +0000

I posted Votepages on Stumbleupon to get some traffic and have people check it out. On the first day 100 people came to the site which is great ot see. I was very happy with 100 visitors. But then the next day we had none. This is very confusing to me. If the site is listed on Stumbleupon and users can browse it, then why doesnt the level of browsers stay around 100 per day or at least a few per day. Instead it is like there are no visitors. The site does have a couple bugs and does not have tons of content yet, but I would still assume that at least a few Stumbeupon visitors would show up. Its almost like we were banned. Does anyone know why this happens and if there is a cure? Please! :<

Spike and drop in traffic

Website is open for writers

tim — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:39:49 +0000

We fixed some security bugs and now the site is ready to go. I am creating links across the internet on pertinent sites and asking people to link back. So far I have used StumbleUpon, Digg, and several writing-oriented sites. I checked our Google Analytics tool and we have had several vists (around 100 uniques) to the homepage but nobody has created any stories. For an application like this ours, I think the learning curve is a little higher so getting people to actually sign up might take a little time as well as word-of-mouth.

In case anyone is listening

tim — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:21:34 +0000

I have noticed that we have a few visitors to our blog so I want to notify you of what is happening. The tech guy on this project My brother Dan is moving the hosting for the application to another server. Once that is finished, the application will be open for business and I will be sending links to every person on the world wide web. We hope the move will be completed in the first half of September.

Our homepage is not that important

tim — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:31:58 +0000

Web designers and new website owners tend to spend gobs of time scrutinizing the homepage of a new site. In my opinion the homepage (at least for a site like ours) is not that important. These are the reasons why:

1. The homepage is rarely the entry point for visitors to a website. Web sites are typically found through searches and viral link exchanges. I cannot control whether the engines pick up the homepage of our site or one of the internal pages like the library or this blog.

2. For our site, there are several destinations within the site and the homepage is really just a place that has links to those destinations. The homepage is doing exactly what it was originally created to do which is be a guide or index to the rest of the site. So I could just put a list of links on the homepage, some text, and thats it. So for now, thats exactly what is up there.

3. Keeping the homepage simple will direct to people to the few links you have listed on the homepage. There are six links on our homepage.

Check out our new homepage here and please comment if anyone thinks my theory on a simple homepage is horse hockey.