Comments on: Interview I Did For BuyersVote.com

By: matt

matt — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:55:27 +0000

Yes that does answer it. Thanks. I’m interested to watch the progress.

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:41:35 +0000

Good point, those come up a lot too.

By: Hubtonomy

Hubtonomy — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:52:47 +0000

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.

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:30:08 +0000

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.

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:27:23 +0000

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.

By: College Town Menus (CTM)

College Town Menus (CTM) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:13:51 +0000

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.

By: matt

matt — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:02:37 +0000

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?