I have been busy.
Personal Dividends was started in January 2009, and in the intervening months it has grown significantly. We now have over 40 contributors writing for the site, hundreds of subscribers (RSS and email) and a good amount of traffic through referrals and search engines. However, for the past few months, it all seemed to have stalled. We are still growing, and the community that has built around Personal Dividends is amazing, but it is now time, I think, to put an oomph in its popularity.
A great site needs 3 things to be successful:
- Excellent content, that is genuinely useful, thought provoking or entertaining to the readers
- Loyal readers, who keep coming back, explore the site and read past articles, engage by commenting, and spread the word, and,
- Visibility – Getting known, brand building, reaching the right influencers, etc
The Infrastructure is Already There
Technically, the site can support a significant scaling up from where it is now today. It is on its own VPS server that can easily handle a sustained level of traffic that is many multiples of the current level. I have tested this out by getting several stories on the Digg front page, and the resultant traffic spikes were easily handled. There is also burst memory available, and if it becomes necessary, upgrading is easy and should be seamless.
As for the content, we are now producing more content than ever before. The number of contributors keep increasing and I am now in a position to pick and choose what to publish in order to keep the quality of the content high.
Moving the Site Forward
First order of business is to publicize and increase user engagement. There are several things I have already done and there are other initiatives I am planning (that I will write about later).
User Engagement: I just rolled out the Personal Dividends Wealth Forums, where anyone can join for free and engage in a discussion with the larger community around the topics of personal finance, wealth and lifestyle. Of course, just like the site, we cover a wide range of topics. The community is already coming together and we have quite a few interesting discussions on going so come on in and join us at the Wealth Forums. An engaged reader is more likely to keep coming back and explore other parts of the site as well as share it with his or her social circle.
Publicity: Apart from increased networking activity on social sites (check me out on twitter: @arohan), I recently had the opportunity to get the word out about Personal Dividends and announce the launch of the Wealth Forums. Here are a few places where this announcement can be read PRWeb, Yahoo News, URL Wire. The announcement was also picked up on Google News and it should have reached a few influencers who are willing to write about it or comment on it. The URL Wire service is run by Eric Ward, who as many in the business might recognize, is one of the best content publicist around.
The Goal or as Napoleon Hill Would Say, My Chief Definite Aim
Quite simply, I want to achieve 100,000 page views per day by the end of Dec 2010. Sure it is a leap, but than any goal that is worthy of achieving generally is. Is it possible? Yes. Will it require lot of hard work? Of course. But more than hard work, it will require a lot of ‘doing right things at the right time’.
See you on Dec 31st when I announce that this goal has been achieved and exceeded 