Traction

The past few weeks have been spent on letting online content makers know about the site, and seeking feedback. The results are promising:


Attack the competition

First I went after some of the sites that link to competitors. My goal is to replace the links to the competition with links to my site, giving me a PageRank boost while hurting theirs. What I'm missing is a sorted list of high PageRank sites that link to the competition, so I'm reduced to simply running through whatever sites I can find in whatever order Google tells me.

I Google'd "link:www.countrycallingcodes.com" and began emailing every site I could find with the following message (or a variation of it):

"I noticed that on your web site, you give your visitors some assistance in telephoning internationally (at X). Specifically, I noticed that you link them to http://www.countrycallingcodes.com/. The reason I'm emailing you is because a few days ago I launched a web site that's designed to help users like yours find the international country codes they need when calling internationally, without having to deal with spammy sites like countrycallingcodes.com. My goal was to make the process as simple and straightforward as possible, and so I created this:

http://www.simplecountrycodes.com/

Just wanted to share this site with you in case you found it more friendly and useful for your visitors. Whatever you decide, I'd love to hear any feedback you may have the site!"

Up to now, results have been mixed. Some hits, and some good feedback, but I decided to change course and go with a different strategy...

Going after popular travel blogs

Having the experience of the previous effort, I came to realize that the vast majority of the sites that link to country code sites are travel sites. As such I began contacting the popular travel blogs. Finally finding a use for Alltop, I started from the top of the Travel page and sent out emails/Twitters to each one (about 20% through the list). Some examples:

http://twitter.com/lennysan/statuses/1501334699 (with this response)
http://twitter.com/lennysan/statuses/1514620907
http://twitter.com/lennysan/statuses/1514751062
http://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1506645928

Email content: "A couple of weeks ago I launched a web site that I thought you (and your visitors) may find useful: http://www.simplecountrycodes.com/. I'm trying to get the word out about the site, mostly because the existing sites that help you with this kind of thing are spammy or overly complicated. I'd also love any feedback you may have!"

Up to this point, I've received a few responses, mostly by email, with some really promising results:

I plan to continue going through the list of popular travel sites, and hope that the I continue to get a positive response. To track my efforts, I'm probably going to put together an excel spreadsheet to keep track of who I've contacted, to avoid pissing anyone off.


Other efforts

1. Contacting random people on Twitter (http://twitter.com/faceofbass/statuses/1504392728, http://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1514767418) that are looking for country code information.
2. Posting to reddit.com (without much luck, but I will try again later).

Some results

In addition to the Google Analytics graph above, I'm also starting to see some of the hidden pages being indexed by Google:


And more importantly, some sites have already mentioned the site:

http://www.redferret.net/?p=13862
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/simplecountrycodes-find-international-calling-codes/
http://twitter.com/vagabondish/status/1518482124
http://bitelia.com/2009/04/15/encuentra-el-codigo-de-llamadas-internacionales-para-cualquier-pais/

Exciting!


Honorable mentions

These two sites have some extremely useful SEO information:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-tips.html
http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml