Feedback Army - Results

The results have come in (amazingly quickly I should add, within 30 minutes) from my Feedback Army submission. Here are the thoughts that I can take away from the feedback:

1. Many users understood what the site was about relatively quickly. This is good news, though not critical, since my use case involves people finding the site through Google, already knowing what they are looking for. Though there were a number of requests to give a better explanation of what the site does up front.
   
2. The tip that is supposed to make it easier to for cell and Skype users to call by using a "+" appears to the confusing people. This needs to be rethought.
3. Design-wise, there seems to be a recurring desire to make the site shinier and more colorful. This is getting a bit worrying, as I keep hearing this. My key differentiation from my competition is the ease of use and the simplicity. If that isn't effective, I'm in trouble.
   
4. More support for showing the results inline, not on a separate page.
5. Suggestion to rename the submit button to "Lookup".
6. Request for a reverse code lookup feature.
7. Request for the "enter the phone number" feature
8. Confirmation that most people use Google to find country codes

Action items:

1. Change the button to just "Lookup"
2. Rethink the design
3. Add to development roadmap a "Reverse country code lookup" feature, though I'll plan on keeping that simple
4. Remove the "+" tip and think it

Short term plans

Here is where I plan to focus the next few weeks:

• Review results from the Feedback Army submission, decide if I'm on the right track.
• Focus on word of mouth marketing, getting more links back to the site. Submit to HN and Reddit potentially.
  
• Refocus on SEO, potentially creating an account on SEOMoz. Determine if I'm focusing on the right keywords, and optimize that effort.
  
• Add support for localization in a couple countries, if nothing else in the auto-complete country names. This will require some refactoring in the way the data is stored on the backend.
  

Back to business

An unacceptable amount of time passed since I last posted, but I'm back. Lack of focus is what kills most projects, and I'm guilty of that. Luckily the site has been doing OK in my absence, but it's time to take it to the "next level". First, let's get an update on or KPI's:

Visits/week
358

Bounce rate/week
45.25%

PageRank
4

Linkbacks
53

Number of pages indexed
487

Delicious bookmarks
109

Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks
6916

The big news is that we've been at PageRank 4 for a couple months now, and the number of indexed pages has gone up dramatically. Unfortunately the big bump in traffic that I was expecting with the high PageRank hasn't materialized. I blame the extremely high PageRank of my competition. I must refocus on building that PageRank number, and getting to within the the top 3 results for my major keywords. Here are the marketing TODO's that I must get back to:


There is also some development I want to do:


To get on the horse and knock a few things out, I've gone ahead and posted the site to Feedback Army. This service lets you submit your site for feedback (for a free), and even though I have enough feedback at this point, I'm hoping I can get some exposure and maybe some new ideas to spark some big ideas. It's only $10 for 10 reviews, so why not:


I'm going to change the KPI's moving forward, based on some new information:

• Adding "Sitemap indexed URLs" based on Google's Webmaster Tools, as this appears to be a much more accurate way to judge how much of my site Google can see.
• Adding "Links to site according to Webmaster Tools" as this again seems to tell you how many links Google see's, which is key.

A lesson learned is that there is indeed a period where Google keeps you at 0 PageRank, and about 5 months later they let you lose based on your real linkback measure. Unfortunately, that doesn't let loose huge amounts of traffic as I expected.

KPI Update

Visits/week
374

Bounce rate/week
32.85%

PageRank
0

Linkbacks
49

Number of pages indexed
365

Delicious bookmarks
106

Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks
3570

Possible explanation for 0 PageRank

From here:

New sites are "sandboxed" for three to six months, meaning you will not have PageRank.

Some more interesting reading along these lines.

The waiting game continues.

Tweaking

A few updates that take care of a few more of the gathered feedback requests:

1. Finally created a FAQ which I've linked to from the footer of over page. I'm hoping this FAQ is useful as a standalone document.
2. Added a tip to all results to dial a "+" when dialing from a cell phone or from Skype. Might be overkill, but I think the tip is valuable. Screenshot below.
3. Changed the original "Tip" about the trunk to "Note" so as to not to conflict with the new "Tip" about the "+".
4. Improved the UX of scrolling through the auto-complete drop down, such that you can press up on the top entry and it'll go to the bottom, and you can scroll in both directions as it auto-wraps to the top/bottom.
5. Cleaned up the CSS, consolidated, and made the footer stick correctly, while also making it just one line (versus two, having the share button on top).
6. Began tracking lookups (from, to, ip, date/time), and working on the design of the "Recent lookups" feature.
   
   

KPI Update

Visits/week
358

Bounce rate/week
39.11%

PageRank
0

Linkbacks
48

Number of pages indexed
266

Delicious bookmarks
103

New metric (since Google linkback's isn't accurate): Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks
2909

Feedback implemented

After prioritizing the feedback I've collected over the past few months, I finally put my head down and implemented nearly every important feature/tweak that has come up. This included (with screenshots below)...

1. Added inline top for leaving off the leading trunk code (e.g. 0, 1, etc.)
2. Updated the auto-complete logic to not populate the text filed as you type
3. Made the auto-select javascript more reliable and quicker
   
4. Changed the front page question text, and I now have it auto-focus on the first box
   
5. Since some countries don't have area codes, removed the hard coded words "area code" and now just have "phone number"
6. Added a "reverse lookup" link to the results page, along with an improved "new lookup" link
7. Added more useful error message for calling from/to same country, and invalid countries
8. Added logic to trim whitespace around country names
9. Added UAE and a few other countries abbreviations
   
10. Improved the javascript list of available countries, to improve performance
11. Merged all of the CSS into a single style sheet, removing inline CSS in a number of places
12. Made the gray text darker

A few things I plan to work on next:

1. Removing the auto-focus logic to see if bounce rate changes, as it feels like it wen up.
2. Allowing users to enter the actual phone number, and giving them the exact number to call
3. A FAQ
4. Local country names
5. Showing recently looked up country codes
   

Feedback prioritized

Having reviewed the feedback and the current list of development work, I've simplified the recent feedback into three groups and shuffled my development priorities (bottom):

Improve the results

1. Inline advice on removing the trunk (0/1) when appropriate ("Omit the first zero of the number", "With Japan...If you want to call 080 7653 9523 you dial 011 81 80 7653 9523")
2. Investigate what countries don't have area codes (e.g. France?)
3. Make the error page more informative (e.g. When no countries selected, when only one country is selected)

Improve the user experience

1. Remove auto-complete in the text field, only complete when clicked from list
2. Add abbreviations for countries (e.g. UAE)
3. Trim whitespaces around country names
4. When pressing up in the auto-complete list when at the top entry, have it go to the bottom?
5. Think about solving the flaw that people will enter cities/states, not always countries (Maybe ask the question differently? Maybe suggest something when submitted? Maybe only allow submitting when it is valid?)
6. Focus the text box without moving the person's cursor (Windows.Forms.Cursor.Position)
7. Make the gray text darker
8. Make the default text disappear more reliably when clicked
9. Easier to return to the front
10. Make results inline?

Add new functionality

1. Allow user to enter the phone number, and return everything they need to dial
2. Dial this number from skype
3. Geo-IP location to auto-populate the from textbox
4. Include time in country, currency
5. Link to wikipedia for the country for more info

Time to knock through some of this and get back into the code!

Consolidated feedback from Hacker News

I've taken all of the comments from the original post, grouped them, sorted them based on popularity (and what I think is most interesting), and consolidated them below:

Give advice on the "trunk" trick

"One important point is missing: If I want to phone to Germany, I have to omit the first zero of the area code. Phoning to Italy I mustn’t omit it."

"Same thing with France; you have to omit the first zero. Furthermore, there really isn't an "area code". You should just say to omit the first zero of the number."

"Same with Japan...If you want to call 080 7653 9523 you dial 011 81 80 7653 9523"

Auto-complete

"Can you make it not autocomplete text in the text field? Eg, type UK and it fills in UKraine ... nicer if it only auto completes when I click a result / select with arrows and press enter/tab."

"Allow a user to specify a country's name by its common abbreviation. For example, UAE for United Arab Emirates."

"Also: trim whitespace. I typed in UK, hit space to remove Ukraine as a match, and it said no matches for "UK "."

"Work on the keystrokes when the type ahead box appears. For instance GR selects Greece ... Great Britain. In this mode the UP arrow should select Great Britain. Currently it is not bound."

"It already supports abbreviations like USA and UK, but not UAE. Also auto-completion should come in only if I press the arrow or down keys. If I enter UK, it should not automatically assume UKraine."

"I like the combobox usage as opposed to a dropdown."

"Although it says 'country' I can see a lot of people typing in cities. Any way to resolve those as well?"

Enter the whole number and show everything you need to call

"Ideally there'd be a third box where I can enter the number I'm trying to call and the service would tell me exactly what to dial."

Default cursor to the first text area

"You should make the cursor snap to the first text box upon loading of the page"

"Personally, I hate it when my cursor snaps to the first open text box. Maybe I'm the only one annoyed by it, but I'd suggest against it."

"I tend to like it. So you'd better do an A/B-test before committing either way."

"I agree, it's much preferable than to tabbing to it (since most sites don't use tabindexes)."

"You can focus the text box without moving the person's cursor. That's a much better approach imho."

"Sure. Search for "Windows.Forms.Cursor.Position"

Dial this number from Skype

"Additionally, wouldn’t it make sense to add some "dial this number now with Skype" or some related service?"

Use geo-ip lookup to determine where they are, autopopulate the location

"You could also think about using geolocation to pre-populate the first box. They have a free database and API that would work for this application:http://www.maxmind.com/app/support"

"And use cookies so that the value in the first box is the same as it was last time."

"Is it possible to try and default to the country the person is actually in? That is, look at their IP address?"

Internationalization

"You don't seem to have a lot of content actually on the site. My suggestion would be to build a phrase table for country names, and set a cookie after the user has entered their home country for use later on."

"Just put up a some simple text: "If you'd like to help translate this site into your language, please feel free to drop me a line at [email]. Thank you!""

"You can also check their translation by putting it back into English with an automated translator. (Google has one for example.)"

Colors

"On this Mac laptop, screen at full brightness in daylight, I can hardly see the grey text."

"Bad gray and make the info text disappear when one clicks in the field."

"Your (barely visible) footer "We hope all of the data here is accurate, but if you find that it is not please send comments/suggestions/bugs to @countrycodes."

Show more info then just the country codes

"While you're at it, why not expand the site so it contains more information about countries, e.g. include internet country codes. Include currencies for the from and to countries and currency conversions."

"Perhaps include current time in the from-country and to-country? Perhaps, also let the user set when they plan to call, e.g., 5pm to-country time, and it gives the from-country time...and vice versa."

"I agree. Of course you can add a link to another single service site of you (or Wikipedia etc), that include that information."

"You can take it one step further and add the area codes to your database. So I can choose to call munich from US, and it'll autofill the area code and the country code."

"I'm sure you would've already seen it, but incase if not, try getting in as many features (OR NOT) fromhttp://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/dialing.html"

"Another comment. Looking at Great Britain -> Australia, you say :: ... 00 + 61 + area code + phone number There are only 7 such area codes. These correspond to an Australian State. Probably it would be worth listing some _example_ phone numbers in each State, with a label to each State. Often I have a local person give the phone number in an email, presuming I'm in the same State."

Make error page nicer

"Make the error page (select 1 country and click submit) much nicer, ideally inline javascript."

Make it easier to return to the front page

"It's also too hard to return back to the home page (assuming you don't do the above suggestion) -- how about a little image at the end of the sentence which when clicked takes you back to the homepage?"

Make results inline

"Make the result inline javascript. One page load less."

"I'd make the results auto generate above the text fields, this way I can easily enter another two countries to calculate simply by pressing tab a few times."

"Very nice. How about if the result appeared inline below the "Lookup" button instead of on a new page?"

Measures of success

In order to measure the forward progress of this project, especially the success of specific initiatives, I first need to know what metrics I should be watching to guage that progress. Every business has different KPI's, and it often take time to uncover the key metrics. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins argues that a company needs to understand what drives their economic engine and then to focus all of their energies on optimizing that engine. In the same vain, developers of online applications must understand the metrics that most directly correlate to the "success" of their application, and focus their energies on optimizing those metrics. It isn't generally easy to determine what those metrics are, especially at the start of the project, and those metrics often change early in the lifecycle, but if you get this right (or even come close), you give yourself a tremendous advantage. Some can argue that only the companies that truly understand this will survive in an age where this data is so freely available. Online application develoers are lucky to have a bevy of online tools that provide amazing insight into the changing behaviors of visitors, in real time, and allow us to know more about the behaviors of our users than any business in the past has ever had (except for maybe the NSA).

At this point in the lifecycle of the site, I've determined that the following six metrics are the key data points I need to watch to track the progress of the site:

1. Visits/week
2. Bounce rate/week
3. PageRank
4. Linkbacks
5. Number of pages indexed
6. Delicious bookmarks

Taking a queue from the Planet Money podcast, I will attempt to post a weekly update of these metrics starting with this week (below). Note a few things here:

1. There is a lot more to this then simply number of hits to the site.
2. At this point in the lifecycle, PageRank is key. As I don't expect the PageRank to change much during the week, I'll be watching linkbacks (which should correlate, eventually).
3. I expect this list to change as the site becomes more popular and the traffic patterns change.
4. Bounce rate is going to be critical, especially if a future revenue source is based on the results page.
5. I'm leaving out "social media metions", such as twittering of the site, for now. I don't think that's a key metric at this point.

On to the current health of the site...


Visits/week
1,352

Bounce rate/week
33.31%

PageRank
0

Linkbacks
20

Number of pages indexed
218

Delicious bookmarks
97

Miscellaneous updates

1. Found that Google'ing "country code [country]" gives you the country code right away:


This isn't going to kill me, but it certainly hurts to see this. I'm going to continue moving ahead with the plan, focusing on the same keywords, and will re-evaluate the SEO strategy soon. As I'm focusing on the people that are looking for more then just the country code, and I don't see this as a deal killer, and I'm confident I can still provide a lot of value beyond the simple country code.

2. I've set up a web site monitoring script to alert me if the site is every down, slow, or returning invalid results (for a select set of lookups). Here's a look at the performance of the site for yesterday (I presume Google App Engine was doing some funky stuff around noon):



3. I moved my project notes from a single page in Evernote to a free account at BaseCamp:


In the BaseCamp setup, I've got a single list for all of the development work ideas I've have ever since the start, a single list of marketing ideas, a list of lessons learned that I'm keeping, and a bunch of "meta data" (domains purchased, analytics services used, accounts, etc.).

4. More and more blogs, still mostly foreign blogs, are mentioning the site (t00 many to show screenshots of)...

http://taringa.net/posts/links/2438503/Encuentra-el-código-de-llamadas-internacionales-para-cualqu.html
http://www.tresxuno.net/tag/telefonia/
http://domixs.com/blog/?p=188
http://aplicacionesutiles.com/2009/04/obten-el-codigo-para-llamar-a-cualquier-pais/#respond
http://thenextweb.com/2009/04/28/simplecountrycodes-painless-check-dialing-codes-calling/
http://beta.friendfeed.com/weloveapps
http://panlogicsoftware.com/wordpress/2009/04/international-dialing/?success
http://cafecombytes.blogspot.com/2009/05/dica-para-fazer-ligacoes-internacionais.html

Social media marketing efforts paying off

My continued efforts in getting the word out through social media channels are showing some really promising results:


Over the past week I've been concentrating on getting some attention for the site while also looking for feedback and additional links to build my PageRank. My efforts are described below...

Apple Web Apps Directory

A friend of mine suggested I submit the site to the App Web Apps directory, along with the iGoogle widget directory. The former being much easier, I went ahead and created a mobile version of the site optimized for display on an iPhone. The simplicity of my site made this process relatively easy, thought it took some time to get the site to automatically recognize that it was being visited by an iPhone and show the optimized screen. All I did to optimize the site was remove the main title, increase the size of the font, and add some iPhone meta tag magic to auto-zoom into the main parts of the page. After some testing, tweaking, and more testing, I submitted the site to the directory, and the next day was pretty excited to see:



In the process of submitting to the directory, I found a couple competitors that have a fairly similar web application. Luckily they don't see to have non-mobile version of the site and so I'm not worried. Thanks to the listing, just in the past few days, I've already received a really impressive chunk of visitors:



Take away lesson: If it isn't a lot of work to make your site iPhone optimized, definitely submit your site to the Apple Web Apps directory. I'm betting that the early traffic will subside once I get deeper into the directory, but I've already gotten in front of over 130 people I wouldn't have otherwise, and the SEO benefits should last a long time.

Hacker News

The big win this past week has been posting the site to Hacker News. I personally check this site more then any other for interesting links and discussions, and I've always had the plan in the back of my mind to seek the expert advice of this community when I had something worth submitting. This community is very different from the digg and reddit's of the world, and requires a real understanding to take advantage of. They key is to be sincere, point to something valuable, and contribute back prior to posting on the site (e.g. have some karma).

In getting ready for the post, I did a bit of research to find the best times to post to the site (to get the most attention), and found general agreement that early in the morning of Tuesday or Wednesday is generally best. With that in mind, at 7:21am on 4/28/09, I posted my request for feedback:


The above screenshot shows the status as of 5/2/09, and as you can see the post received a large number of comments and a fair number of points (it got to the front page for a bit). In the next post I will summarize the feedback I received. As a result of this post, the Google Analytics screenshot at the top of this post gives a clear picture of how much traffic this drove to the site. In addition, I saw a big jump in both tweets (and re-tweets) mentioning the site, and a big increase in delicious bookmarks...

Take away lesson: Posting to Hacker News when you have a valuable online site/services is extremely useful, both in getting feedback, and in getting the word out. Time the posting (early morning Tuesday/Wednesday), and keep your posting short and sweet.

Side note: I specifically didn't post the site to digg or reddit (again) because I first wanted to take the feedback from Hacker News into account. Once that is in place, I'll give those a shot.

Delicious

After the Hacker News post, over 90 people have now saved the site to their delicious accounts:



As the site is designed as a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am single serving utility site, I expect a large number of visitors to simply bookmark the site and move on with their lives. Something I plan to discuss in a future post is the "indicators" I watch to track the success (or failure) of the site.

Take away lesson: Determine if this metric is important to you, and if so watch it to determine what's working in increasing this, and what isn't.

AddThis

I'm trying out the AddThis widget (similar to the ShareThis widget) to see if this helps the site spread faster in any way. The idea behind this widget is to make it easy for visitors to send the link to their friends, digg it, save the bookmark, or do hundreds of other "social media" type actions. I chose AddThis over ShareThis mostly because of the coloring scheme, and the fact that AddThis shows the logos of the popular services that you can use to share. One great feature of both of these services is the insight you get into how visitors share your site:



Take away lesson: Too soon to tell.

All in all, a very successful week. Next I plan to consolidate the feedback, implement some of the ideas, and then come back to the next marketing push.

Some attention from the blogosphere

Very exciting to see some attention coming our way and my efforts paying off:

(I submitted to this site a couple weeks ago)

(nice surprise)

(thanks to MakeUseOf, South American site)

(emailed the Author a few weeks ago, big success!)

(Another international site)

(yet another international site)

(yet another. Wish I knew what they were saying)

(and another)

(I think I'm discovering my target market is international)

That's about it at this point. Pretty insane actually, considering the reach this site is getting. I'm going to have to think about how I can take advantage of the fact that I'm getting a lot of attention internationally, especially since I never considered that in the design.

What's also surprising is that Google still sees no link backs:

Twitter marketing

A lot has been said (and has yet to be said) about Twitter when it comes to marketing your wares. They key to any marketing effort, if you subscribe to the Seth Godin school of marketing, is creating something of value (e.g. remarkable) and helping people discover that it exists. What draws me to Twitter most is how ridiculously easy it makes finding people all over the world that could use your product, and in real time allowing you to connect with those people to help them discover what you have to offer. Below I describe how I've been using Twitter to get the word out about the site.

Tracking

There are hundreds of tools out there built to help you manage your Twitter life, but I've found that the following are all you need in managing your marketing efforts (for basic sites/services):

1. A Twitter account, specifically made for your product/business
2. Twitter Search
3. BackTweets
4. Google News Reader

Step 1. Set up a Twitter account. I originally started using my own personal account, but quickly realized that I was spamming my followers with country code nonsense way too often. So I signed up for @countrycodes:


Step 2. Hop over to Twitter Search. This allows you to search the entire Twitter stream for words or phrases that you are interested in. The most obvious things to search for are your company and product names. Definitely go ahead and do that. The the not-so-obvious strategy is to search for signs of "intent" that a person would find your product or service useful. In my case, I search for things like "country code", "international calling", and "dialing internationally". I presume that most people that use these phrases are looking for country code information. You want to be careful to avoid searches that are too broad, as you'll get back a lot of noise. Expirament and see what returns the most useful results.

I've found that when people are seeing this search tool for the first time, they are blown away by how much is being said about their little part of the world, and how many people could benefit by their product. An example Twitter search:


Step 3. A new service that I've found to be extremely useful is BackTweets. It allows you to search the twitter stream for URL's, which are normally obfuscated by the tinyurl's of the world. You simply search for your domain name (e.g. simplecountrycodes.com), and just like Twitter Search you get back every Tweet that included a link to your site:


The standard Twitter search does not allow you to do this, and I've found this to be extremely valuable. You'll also want to do the same search for your competitors domains, to see why people are linking to them, and what they are saying.

Step 4. Manual searching is all well and good, but this isn't a long term strategy. You need to be able to collect all of these searches into a manageable system, and keep track of what's changed since last you reviewed the results. This is where Google Reader comes in. All you do is add the RSS feed for each of the searches we ran through above to your RSS reader of choice (Google Reader in my case), and from that point forward you'll never miss out on a single mention of your site, your domain, your business, or users online looking for your product. Here are some examples of where to find the RSS feed:




And here's a snapshot of the results in my RSS reader:



One other things you can do once you're comfortable with the above is to track links from blogs using Google Blog Search:


Note: If your product is bigger, popular, and requires more real time awareness, I would replace Google News Reader with TweetDeck, and have a saved search for the search terms you came up with. With that in place, you're able to see new tweets in real time and respond quickly.

Communicating

Having found people looking for your product, the next step is to help them become aware of what you have to offer. With social media channels you must strive to be authentic in your communication, and focus on providing real value (not just advertising your crap). People see right through the interruption based advertising approach, especially in opt-in forums like Twitter. If your product provides real value to a lot of people you have a huge head start.

The process I follow is simple:

1. Scan my RSS feeds (gathered above) for people looking for something my product can help them with.
2. Respond to them with a pointer to that information.
3. Rinse and repeat.

For example, I come across a tweet like this:

and respond with:


Another example, having seen this:


I respond with this:


In each case, I take the time to point them to the specific information they are looking for (e.g the country code for France), and don't try to push anything else on them. On the one hand, it's relatively easy and generally gets a good reaction. On the other hand, this takes time to continue doing (as a result, you can't say this is "free", if you value your time), and it's hard to say if time spent here couldn't be used better someplace else. Only time will tell where efforts pay off most.

That's pretty much all there is to it. As you connect with more people, and assuming they find your responses helpful, you'll notice users Re-Tweeting your information, and hopefully start spreading the word about your service...

Progress

I've been focusing most of my time on promoting the site online, while also adding a bit of new functionality. As of today, here's where we stand:

I'll spend future posts diving into the analytics results, which will get interesting once Google starts sending traffic my way. On a high level though, the bounce rate is looking awesome, as is the pages/visit (considering the simplicity of the site).

Some other signs of forward progress:

1. More pages are being indexed, thanks to the sitemap:

2. My word of mouth marketing efforts are paying of (Google Analytics referral report):


3. One of the biggest surprises so far, 54 people have bookmarked the site on delicious.com:



New Functionality

I am trying to avoid adding new functionality until I see a more substantial amount of traffic. It's too easy to spend all of your time adding "just one more feature" and forget that the key to success is people actually using the site. With that said, during a short marketing lull I went ahead and added functionality to show the country code for a given country:

Two reasons I feel this is going to be important. One, the SEO benefits in terms of offering more targeted pages for Google to point to and allowing more linkage between the pages (I've added a link to the specific country from the standard results page). Two, I can use this in my Twitter marketing efforts to help people find the country codes they need by pointing them straight to one of these pages. I'll discuss my Twitter efforts below.

One issue I still have with this new functionality is that I'm unsure how to best point visitors to it without complicating the front page. Ideally, a visitor looking for the country code on its own would be able to get to this page, while visitors looking to call a country would see the original results page. I can't think of a great way to offer this without hurting the original intent of the site.

In any case, I've created and submitted the sitemap which includes all of the links to the specific countries country codes:


Marketing efforts

Let's start off with some of the simple stuff:

1. Submitted the site to http://feedmyapp.com/
2. Submitted the site to http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Followed by some not-so-simple stuff:

3. Created a separate Twitter account (@countrycodes). Originally, I was hoping to stick with my personal Twitter account and not divide up my efforts in building a following, but I came to realize that no one wants to listen to me pushing the site all day and that I'd lose my personal followers rather quickly. I will describe how I use Twitter in the next post.


4. Created a Facebook Fan Page for the site. I don't expect to see any sort of viral gangbusters reaction, but it wont hurt to have, and it'll be a great learning experience to see what comes of it.



5. Continued efforts in contacting various online sites letting them know about the site and how it could be useful to their readers. Overall, this is going relatively well, considering the sites I'm getting referral traffic from. This is by far the most important thing for me right now, getting high PageRank'ed sites linked back in order to build up my own PageRank, which is the only way to start getting Google to respect me. I'll describe how I'm going about this process in a future post.

In the next post, I'll review how I'm using Twitter to get the word out.