Anyone of you guys internet marketing gurus?

[DWarrior]

Did you let the domain expire? Or did you just misspell the link or are trolling? This is your site as I see it:

[PenBoy]

Originally Posted by DudeEMETIB

Are you sure you have the right link up?

Cause your site...is nothing like what you're saying.
It sends me to "poppa.com" is that right?

Wow. Thanks Man. I completely put the wrong link in my sig. It was missing an l. Poppla.com

Thanks for your advice man. Now Lord of the Cock Rings's reply makes a lot of sense.

Sorry.

[BrianAlt]

Whew, glad I found out it was a typo.

Was about to buy a car cover too!

[DudeEMETIB]

Actually, if I cared more about celebrity news....this is a pretty cool site.

Try making an event...like..."join poppla now for your chance to win ___"
It doesn't have to be anything too pricey...a $10 gift certificate to iTunes or McDonalds or something...you know? Again....make sure all your friends on Facebook add you...make a page for Poppla, make a page for poppla on MySpace...twitter the shit out of it.

You said you were a student? Right? Or did I just make that up....
anyway if you are...print out a few tid bits...You don't have to waste too much paper or ink

On one sheet of paper (make it colored, like yellow paper, or blue paper, or something) print out a small black/white photo of a celeb or something relating to a tid bit...for example "Cristina and Eminem headed to Entourage" like what's on your site....super-summarize the thing, one sentence or two...and at the end, write something like "for more info on this story and other celebrity news, visit www.poppla.com"

You could fit like 4 or 5 of those per sheet of paper...and print out several sheets, cut them out and staple them to several bulletin board places around campus...or like Keith and Chemda did with their stickers...just place them in public bathrooms
on a wall at Wal-Mart...

whatever you can do to get your name out, GET IT OUT.

[PenBoy]

Originally Posted by DudeEMETIB

Actually, if I cared more about celebrity news....this is a pretty cool site.

Try making an event...like..."join poppla now for your chance to win ___"
It doesn't have to be anything too pricey...a $10 gift certificate to iTunes or McDonalds or something...you know? Again....make sure all your friends on Facebook add you...make a page for Poppla, make a page for poppla on MySpace...twitter the shit out of it.

You said you were a student? Right? Or did I just make that up....
anyway if you are...print out a few tid bits...You don't have to waste too much paper or ink

On one sheet of paper (make it colored, like yellow paper, or blue paper, or something) print out a small black/white photo of a celeb or something relating to a tid bit...for example "Cristina and Eminem headed to Entourage" like what's on your site....super-summarize the thing, one sentence or two...and at the end, write something like "for more info on this story and other celebrity news, visit www.poppla.com"

You could fit like 4 or 5 of those per sheet of paper...and print out several sheets, cut them out and staple them to several bulletin board places around campus...or like Keith and Chemda did with their stickers...just place them in public bathrooms
on a wall at Wal-Mart...

whatever you can do to get your name out, GET IT OUT.

Sadly most of my friends are not into celebrity gossip either. I should've gone with sports. Oh well. But I like your suggestions a lot. I will def. try them.

[PenBoy]

Originally Posted by Lord of the Cock Rings

just don't misspell your website on the promo material





LMAO

Noted.

[DudeEMETIB]

Originally Posted by PenBoy

Sadly most of my friends are not into celebrity gossip either. I should've gone with sports. Oh well. But I like your suggestions a lot. I will def. try them.

That's part of the beauty of the "giveaway" gimmick...I tell you honestly right now...I'd join your site if it meant I could win something...I'm like that...also I'm like that because I have a good memory of sites I'm a member of...so once that giveaway ends, I'd have left the site...

most people, however...don't just leave the site....
and sometimes the number of members of a site, gives the site a bit of legitimacy...

so maybe you have 100 friends, and 80 join, mostly because they thought they could get $10 for Borders....well, then, probably 70 of them will remain part of the site just because they forgot, or maybe they actually like it.

[PenBoy]

Originally Posted by DudeEMETIB

That's part of the beauty of the "giveaway" gimmick...I tell you honestly right now...I'd join your site if it meant I could win something...I'm like that...also I'm like that because I have a good memory of sites I'm a member of...so once that giveaway ends, I'd have left the site...

Ok, so say I had a Border's gift card to give away, where would I let people know? Twitter? Myspace? Or are there promotional websites meant for that sort of thing?

[DudeEMETIB]

On the front page of Poppla, on Facebook, on Myspace, on Twitter.
Everything you can think of.

[mumblyjoe]

Hey PenBoy,

Sincerely - good luck with your site.

I'm a web developer (wasabidigital.com.au, to put it all out there) and while that's no indication of guru knowledge on the subject, here's a few impressions I had from your site:

- the design is clean but not great just yet. Maybe visit some of the rival sites again and look at the efficiency of space on your site - content needs room to breath, but think about how much space you're giving to the 3 levels of nav at the top of the site as opposed to content that could be 'above the fold' - i.e. how much compelling information will a user see before having to scroll.

- The design doesn't look cheap, but (as honest feedback) it's missing the last 5% to make it look more sharp (irregular corners on the very top orange banner etc). Seems like if you could make the top 3 orange stripes more efficient and really clean them it would improve the look of the site. There's really nothing wrong with the content area. If you're not a designer, beg borrow or steal a designers time to do the little things that will take them no time to fix and save you banging your head against the wall

- Try to find people who'll give you their first impressions on the site - maybe don't even be in the room. Find some people you don't know and sit them with someone who at least seems objective and get some honest feedback.

I think you're going to find that the user interface is not direct enough and people would be confused as to what the site is about - what do you want users to do on your site? register? bookmark as a regular site? Seems from your description that you want people to use your site to save them from going through all the gossip sites manually - make sure that's really really clear. It's not that people are stupid, but they're inundated with content, you've got 20-30 seconds of them viewing the site for them to decide if they give a shit about it.

- As a rule of thumb, if you need to add a video to explain the site, your user interface is letting you down. You can learn about UI principals by yourself and probably find a few quick things that'll benefit the site in no time.

Basically, you want to have a really good idea of how the eye scans the site (top-left to diagonal down-right) and make sure your most important message is where people instinctively look first.

- After having said that, the help vid is not a bad idea, but make sure people don't HAVE to see it to understand the site. Only the ones who want to really understand the features once they've bought in to the idea of the site.

I'm assuming that the voice on the help vid is yours - you are speaking WAY too fast and the vid size is too small to see what you're pointing to. Maybe take a breath and explain the site to a friend while recording yourself. When you're talking to someone you'll put in more pauses and more effort to get your message across and read from them what they might not understand from your description. After that, listen to it all and make a script (even if it's just bullet points) and make it again.

If you have the means, it's a good idea to record the dialog separately and make the vid from a series of screen caps or an animation (flash would work well here if you're comfortable with using it).

Lastly, is your voice the best one to use to describe the site? You sound technical and a little monotone in the vid (I don't blame you, I sound the same) surely you could find a friend who likes broadway too much to give it more life.

- the content items themselves are not interesting enough to click on. Like any newspaper, you really need a title and intro paragraph to have someone decide to give enough shits to click through, otherwise you're almost a niche google. I'd also remove the 'preview' link in the content as loading an entire site in a lightbox above yours is frankly not really a preview...

- side note, take a look at wwtdd.com - I personally don't give two shits about gossip, but the editorial tone he uses (boobies good, lindsay lohan bad) really adds a lot. I know he's doing something more manual and not aggregating like your site, but if you haven't come across it might give you some ideas.

- vet the sources you're aggregating from. Before I decided to respond I took a look on your site and clicked on one story I thought was interesting about arrested development. This lead to another aggregator (allieiswired.com) so I had to click a third time to actually see the story. And by then I stopped caring.

- last one is a suggestion. Look at twitter.com - their business is all about how instant the tweets are and they re-enforce it by the center panel constantly showing new tweets from random people always scrolling down.

I don't think it's the right idea for your center content panel (if I'm reading something I really don't want it constantly moving down) but there might be a good fit for something like this on the site to really show that you're aggregating in real time.



Honest feedback and hope I don't sound like an asshole. Frankly, you have a good idea but us techs sometimes can't express them in the most interesting way because what's most interesting is the code that runs it. If the job is done right no user ever thinks about how it's achieved, just that it's cool that it does a job effortlessly.

These forums are a good example - we're here because we're enjoying talking to other KATG listeners - I'd be really interested to know how many users have stopped to think about the code that makes this all happen (except when it breaks).


Other than that, (can't think of the member's name) but whoever suggested getting your friends to like the site on facebook is a good idea, and pay attention to your drop off rates in google analytics to get an idea of what people think of the site once they've found it.