So... what are my goals for here this year? At present, only two. Getting the newsletter going and doing a major boost to driving more relevant traffic here. And before anyone starts about who's paying for it... it isn't you, but me... so unless you're contributing to my out of pocket costs, say nothing please.
The newsletter is begun with a small group starting it out, and hoping we get interested people in wanting to publish their own pieces. Otherwise... IMO it will become boring without lots of diverse member and guest input, both questions and their articles and stories of their journeys.
I have also begun the traffic boost at the end of last year. I've been trialling a social networking automated software solution, helping push snippets of threads onto controlled social pages in which can then be boosted externally to boost here, thus the ultimate result is to drive more relevant responses here to members threads. I understand people jump and down about the unknowns, but all anyone ever need think about is that in near 10 years of running this community, I have not once breached a members privacy or done something that would breach anything private of theirs, that isn't already publicly accessible to the world. This is costing me about $600 per annum... but IMHO, worth it.
It takes a couple of months to begin seeing results, and I'm only just seeing the results of this first aspect now, which are positive and certainly going to get more interesting as these external pages build themselves.
I've just released the auto linking feature today, which has several affects. One is for members, especially new and guests, to quickly find the authoritative content. The second is it specifically links specific primary keywords the community is competing for within the world, to help drive those keyword terms upwards in rankings, hopefully.
The third is going to be a private employed digital marketer to do some link work for me, to really push some external social pages as well as some of the authoritative pages within this site, upwards in the rankings for relevant keyword terms. That one will be costly... but extremely worth it for members in relation to relevancy of traffic and thus boosting registrations and new members / guests responding to your content.
This year is really all focused on these aspects. Both are actually quite large projects. The SEO will take all year to perform, measure and adapt. The newsletter has lots of reading, research and writing involved, just to get together a few stories / pieces for each newsletter, let alone allow it to develop its own attitude based on ongoing feedback. The idea of the newsletter is that it becomes what the members want to read, nothing more, nothing less.
See what happens!
