Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Interview I Did For BuyersVote.com
In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong
16 Jul 2009I did a great interview with Gordie Rogers recently about BuyersVote.com.
I think it turned out really well, and you can read the full post here.
It really helped me clarify my own ideas to write some of them down.
Here’s an excerpt:
I think the biggest challenge for BuyersVote moving forward will be reaching critical mass. There is a definite network effect where the more votes you have, the more people want to vote and the more valuable the site is. So the biggest challenge will be getting those early adopters who really believe in the idea and are willing to participate before it’s huge. I think the central idea of the site, which is that the content is 100% controlled by you and that the site will always be 100% free, will help contribute to this. There is also a huge “make the world a better place” potential to this project which I think is enticing. Scams and bad companies can be eliminated, people will get more value for their money, etc. It’s basically a free and more useful version of Consumer Reports and the Better Business Bureau. To me these are important ideals, and hopefully others will see the potential in it as well.
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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matt
July 16th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Nice interview Brian/Gordie. One question–in the first answer you mention that “Google searches returned pages full of affiliate links trying to sell me something, or endless forum posts with no conclusion.” This may be a dumb question, but how will BuyersVote start appearing on Google searches? If I put in the keywords “sushi restaurants in boulder buyersvote”, it doesn’t show up. In general, is there a way to boost a website into search results, or will that only come when the site becomes more popular on its own?
Brian Armstrong
July 17th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Hi Matt, good question. BuyersVote pages will start showing up in Google searches like that shortly (some already are, the one you mentioned hasn’t been indexed by Google yet – probably another few weeks). They will show up mostly due to a few on page SEO elements like the keyword being in the title of the page, h1 tag, and url. You notice that I’ve appended the word “reviews” to most of the pages – this is deliberate to target people typing “cell phone reviews” or similar keywords in Google. It will start by ranking for a lot of long tail searches first (like sushi restaurants in Boulder, CO) first…it wouldn’t rank for a more competitive term like “cell phone reviews” until the site has built more cred. Hope that answers it.
matt
July 18th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Yes that does answer it. Thanks. I’m interested to watch the progress.
College Town Menus (CTM)
July 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am
I’m confused why this post is “part 17 of 17 in the series UniversityTutor.com” when it’s talking about BuyersVote and not UT at all?
But I agree, the hardest thing will certainly be the critical mass. I’m having the same issue with my site. People dont like being the first one, but would feel more comfortable if it was already established before. Welcome to the constantly revolving “catch 22″ – you need content for traffic, but you need traffic in order to get more content.
For my site, the problem is expanding to new colleges and adding restaurants there, then targeting those students–each year. Your problem is similar but that you face the same dilemma for each category/product; so I think yours may be a bit harder.
I’d be interested in learning strategies that others suggest to help combat this constantly revolving problem.
Brian Armstrong
July 17th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
You’re right, that’s a mistake on the series…I’ll fix that. Thanks for letting me know!
As for the critical mass catch 22, only solutions I know of are to (1) have a permission asset like a blog who you can ask to be your first users or (2) buy your critical mass with a marketing budget. Obviously I’m working on the first one :) The SEO comment I mentioned above will help with #1 also since I expect to start getting more organic traffic on it soon. There will be a positive feedback loop there.
Hubtonomy
July 18th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Matt, I’d like to add to that the reams of those coupon/offer type sites that offer no relevant information to your query yet still seem to rank for everything.
Brian Armstrong
July 18th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Good point, those come up a lot too.