The Web Has No Limits, BUT YOUR TIME HAS!

Honestly, have you checked your site stats recently?
Not growing fast enough, hum.
Well, if you have a really big website, that's not entirely true. You may be growing, but only on small pieces of your big empire, here and there. Why? Because you're still self-centered.

The web has (we dream) no limits. We can upload millions of web pages and links, and still Google manages it finely and decently well. But the problem is still the same today as it was in 1957. Of course, X generation, Y generation (or Millenials), Young Boomers - we all learned to do more in 24 hours. Multi-tasking. Wow! Cooool.
But you know what: you can also do multi-tasking all at once in one single type of website: social networks. And they're eating all the time we have.

Social networks are becoming more engaging and, more than that, remarkably notable for their capacity to show the best of the web in one single place: you choose friends and automatically you are subscribing their thoughts and blog feeds, photos, tweets, videos, etc, etc. Just like you did until a few months using bookmarks. You enter, and you no longer leave. You spend 20 minutes, 24 minutes, 30 minutes!

http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/time-spent-on-social-networks-soaring-but-traffic-down-a-bit-4991/hitwise-social-network-sites-time-spent-may-2008jpg/


So you really need to start thinking outside of the box. Your content matters. Much more than you think. More than technology, for instance. Friends matter. Sources matter. References matter. Sharing matters. Your domain surely matters for ads, Google and other stuff, but don't expect people visiting you each time more just because you have a cool brand. Sure. Brands matter, but for the championship against other similar brands. You know why? Because content moves along with time. Just like soccer players. And TV hosts. Today you have a big host on channel1, tomorrow he may be at channel2. For the public it doesn't matter. They won't watch and search because you have a cool channel. All they wanna know is the name of the new host's TV-show or the photo of the new girlfriend.

So stop making your pages so cool and thinking that it will kick your competitors' ass! It won't. Just take a look at Newsweek.com. One of the finest websites remade on the last 2 years. And it still can't climb high. Now they even say they're thinking on a paid access.

And look at blogs.
They're so simple, most of them. Titles. Body with text and pictures. A comments box and a right column with links. And they are read every day by millions. Should we continue making news pages so over-clustered? Humm... I wonder now why BBC news pages look so similar to blogs...

If people are spending each time more time on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc, etc, try to be there. And now that you know this, don't start running for creating a fan-page on Facebook. Think at links. Remember? That tiny easy simple thing that Tim Berners-Lee integrated in 1990 for creating the world wide web? The same thing that makes possible for Google to index and rank pages?

Be linked.
How?
K.I.S.S. - make really good content for your audience. Make it available. Promote it. Make it shareable. Better - linkable.

Labels: blogs, ideas, social, tips+tricks, usability, web