The Golden Hat

It’s really interesting to look at websites that “work” i.e., sites that have been able to capture massive readership, site traffic, repeat visitors, an established revenue flow, and other measures of success. Usually the value-added nature of these sites is easy to identify. Other sites; not so much.

Matt Cutts gained prominence as a search quality guru for the largest and most effective search engine to date. His personal blog then, to no one’s surprise, has been immensely successful in terms of it’s site traffic, readership, and recognition as a hot spot for SEO’ers, Webmasters and other digital players looking for key insights, likely as a direct result of his key position with Google as Google grew into a behemoth.

Other circumstances may contribute to a website’s popularity such as the existing brand value for the individual or organization launching the site (think Richard Branson brand value), an outrageous marketing and development budget (think of that terrible movie with Kevin Costner; Water World), or some other predispositions for success.

How do some websites however grow from nothing to something without such things in their favor as a massive brand or budget? Why is it that Digg is Digg? Sphinn is Sphinn? I cannot answer that question. If I could then I suppose more than 12 people a day would be reading my blog!!! But I wanted to take one case study (hardly a statistical sample) of a social media site that died. This is not an attempt to undermine or undervalue the effort made by this social media site, rather just to understand what may contribute to certain websites growing up and others not growing at all.

After some digging (no, not a reference to Digg.com) I came across a huge list of social media sites and selected a few to research that I’ve never heard of before. I settled on SEOyak.com because I found it’s positioning interesting.

You’ll notice that www.SEOyak.com looks very similar to many social media sites that have done exceptionally well and a laundry list of other social media sites that are catching on bit by bit, such as www.mixx.com and www.kirtsy.com. Some may argue that their added value to the Web is minimal, nonetheless their readership is strong and the amount of content they host is substantial. The design could use some CSS flare to change up the fonts and colors a bit yet for the most part the global navigation and sidebar navigation are simple and effective, there is plenty of page space for content, and it’s very easy to see how you can either vote for content or post some of your own.

Nonetheless my question though is where is the home grown value? If you look at the global navigation at the top of the site you’ll notice some very basic pages/categories such as a “Contact” page, “Blog”, “Login”, etc. Besides the articles that are posted by users on the site for content syndication, the site itself doesn’t really offer much benefit and drive customer loyalty by providing goods, services or information that are desirable to visitors. Unique content or great SEO tools hosted on a site act as excellent link bait and repeat traffic motivators as visitors return to the site several times to use and re-use the tool. SEOyak could have benefited greatly by developing some unique content of it’s own instead of relying solely on users to do that for them.

Another common mistake that young sites make is they try to monetize themselves too soon. SEOyak.com promoted “Ads by SEOyak” in the top navigation as well as “free text ads” in a title section above the fold. Site visitors, especially professionals in the online world, are very weary of sites that push monetization of the site too strongly whether it be by excessive ads in the side navigation, text ads in the textual links on the page, sponsorship buttons in the sidebar nav, or other locations. Since SEOyak was trying to appeal to the SEO vertical it was especially vulnerable to the “spam image” factor since Webmasters and SEO professionals are probably the most critical when it comes to sites that try to make money without contributing any real value.

Moreover I also noticed that SEOyak tried some grass-roots digital marketing by reaching out to forums and communities in the SEO vertical. For example, I found dozens of spammy comments in blog posts and forums that were attempts at piggy-backing off of poor press regarding Digg.com. For a while Digg was catching a lot of heat for banning sites so the SEOyak folks tactically decided to drop links to SEOyak.com throughout comment threads discussing the ill-tainted nature of Digg’s URL banning. Although the approach logically made sense, it still came across as spammy (to me at least). Maybe you would disagree. Nonetheless I still feel that organic marketing results in sustained traffic much more so than comment-dropping techniques do.

Anyhow, I’m sure that there are hundreds or thousands of other failed social media sites floating along the lower shelves of the search engine indexes. I find it worth wile to attempt to unearth these sites and review them for what they did, and did not do, correctly in an attempt to grow. The SEOyak scenario has helped me with respect to my own blog just as much as some of the highly popular sites such as SearchEngineLand and SEW. You may find commonalities between many of the failed sites and use that knowledge to your benefit with your own site.

What are your thoughts? What makes a social media site valuable or doomed to failed?

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Occasionally I like to test out some up-and-coming internet/search/tech sites and (1) see if it is something that I could use and (2) see if it’s something people I know might want to use. I was reading about Meebo in the Wall Street Journal (yeah, I read that crap). Lately the news has been saturated with talk of economic crisis, sub-prime fallout, and yada yada. However my eye did catch an article briefly discussing new social web applications and Meebo was mentioned. So here’s the quick and dirty…

Meebo = Instant Messaging on steroids + omnipresence

It’s a simple way of integrated virtually any instant messaging program you can think of into a basic web app that is accessible irrespective of any software download requirement. You can also play games, share files, launch a video chat amongst other functionality and do so in a collaborative environment with your friends.

So if you’re one of those “I need IM to help me get through my day of work” type of people, then check out Meebo and you’ll quickly find yourself making it through the week, month and year with this cool new tool. For those of you who are more technically inclined you also have a developer API to take IM into hyperdrive (as if steroids weren’t enough already!)

Cheers!

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Social Bookmarking is huge now. Everytime you read an article, or Stumble Upon a funny video, or find a cool widget on a developers website you can quickly and easily save it to your bookmarks. What’s even better is that you can setup feed burners or feed readers to send you fresh content on a daily basis from your favorite sites. Below is a list of 20 social bookmarking sites that you should definitely check out if you want to easily manage your online favorites and share them with friends, or just keep in a tidy web-based inventory:

- backflip
- blinklist
- BlogMarks
- Blogsvine
- BUMPzee!
- Connotea
- DotNetKicks
- diigo
- dzone
- Fark
- folkd.com
- Furl
- Jeqq
- Kaboodle
- Netvouz
- Propeller
- Shoutwire
- Simpy
- ThisNext
- Webride

If you have any other lesser known social bookmarking/social media sites, feel free to add to the comments below or email me and tell me a bit about it. I might just cover it in the next blog

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