Last night I did as I promised. I started moving things forward.
Firstly, I signed up to Technorati and Del.icio.us which will improve traffic to my site. I have to say it made a difference pretty quickly after checking before and after stats.
Secondly my husband let me use him as a sounding board to start action planning. "I’ll only take about half an hour of your time" I said, as nearly two hours later we agreed it was time to pack up and get some sleep.
My husband did smile at me (or was that a gentle laugh) as I pulled out felt tip pens and started writing up my action plan with colour coded titles. I adore stationery and it seemed reasonable enough to me to make it pretty!
I came up with the first 6 titles for the ‘regular features’. For each of these areas I discussed with my husband the frequency for changing the articles on the website, how many articles I needed to launch with ie how many I need in my back pocket to ensure I don’t run out.
I then totalled up how many articles I had written for each area (or how many I hadn’t in some cases) and then where I will be sourcing material from.
A lot will be coming from family and friends, but we discussed looking for ‘article writers’ which will be a job in itself to find writers who will cover the topics I want and write in a similar vein to the existing people.
We did discuss ‘new ideas’ which will bring in even more research work, but I have to say it was a really good exercise to just talk about it. I needed this to motivate me again. Plus I have some information to talk to my friends and family about and how they can help and contribute.
Tonight I shall continue the action planning and look more closely at the ‘in-depth’ items we discussed last night. I will also start drip feeding some information via the blog to give little tasters of what the site will be about.
August 31st, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Just a thought that it may be a little overboard to have all writers and articles writing in the same vein. Otherwise you could be in fear of alienating first timers to the site from re visiting due to a lack of variety of writing. what think you?
August 31st, 2006 at 8:59 pm
I understand what you are saying. To begin with I need to find writers that I feel comfortable with and that I don’t have to do much work with editing and altering what they say. It’s a trust thing I suppose, but I am trying to start the website off with a certain feel to it.
Because this is new to me I am probably starting off with the ’safe’ approach, but will certainly look at different writers when I begin expanding the articles. I know where I am starting from, at this point, I don’t know which way it will go, if that makes sense. It’s a bit like working for an expanding company. As more people join the site, more people will hopefully ask for different things.
Thanks again for your comment, it’s good to make me think about things.