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.