Six hours in: launching a niche microsite | Raleigh Web Desig... - About

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Saved by 2 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-10-29

Imjustcreative on 2009-02-13 - Tags marketing , a , microsite , political , web , design , vote , for , the , best , website , internet , niche
Joel on 2008-10-29 - Tags marketing , lanuch

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Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others. This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly. This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.

Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1. We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more. This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.

Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site. We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out. This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!). In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.

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Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage. By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.

Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level. We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others. If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.

Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites. Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site. This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility. This would be the ultimate win.

Highlighted by joel

Six hours in: launching a niche microsite | Raleigh Web Desig...