The four stages of the Website Life Cycle are:
- Inception
- Growth
- Stabilisation, and
- Decline
Wherever your site is within these stages dictates where you should spend your effort.
For example, if your site is in the Inception stage (like my blog), there is little point in going all out marketing it. If you do manage to drive traffic towards your site, that traffic isn’t going to get the experience you’re planning – and may well leave disappointed.
(Note: most commercial sites are finished with this stage before the public ever sees the site. It’s generally only those managed by individuals, in their spare time, that are ever visible before getting to the Growth stage.)
For my blog, this means I’m spending only a small handful of hours actively promoting it (as yet). Those hours are spent not madly trying to generate immediate traffic, but instead aiming for the long-term strategy.
I’ve joined a couple of communities (social networking – see my Site Promotions Methods Defined Post), and I’m engaging in low level link building. In particular, I’m:
- slowly building a following on Twitter by posting regular, useful tweets
- establishing myself in a blogging community called Blogcatalog by being reasonably active in discussions, and
- writing comments on related blogs (the comments link back to my site).
My focus in this stage has to be getting my content to a level that I’ll be happy with. I figure this will mean about thirty posts: enough to keep it interesting, and show the range and depth of knowledge I’m sharing.
When I get to the Growth phase (maybe in a month or two), I’ll switch focus. That isn’t to say I’ll stop posting, because I certainly won’t. But I will spend considerably more time promoting. As well as I’ll write Squiddoo lenses and look for guest posting opportunities, and maybe start a few discussions on Blogcatalog. But the real difference will be my approach to Twitter.
There are a few Twitter strategies that I’ll detail later that show significant potential. It’ll be really interesting to see how they go.
If your site is already in the Growth phase, you should be doing all you can to keep it there. I’ve listed what I’ll be doing, but there are many possibilities. Go nuts.
If your site is in the Stabilisation phase, it’s time to sit back and reassess. What has changed? Is it something you’re doing? Or a factor outside your control?
Take a look at your market, your competition, in fact anything in your website environment. Take a look at what you’re currently doing, and measure that against what you were doing six months ago. Assess as actively and realistically as you can what the impact of these environmental conditions – and any changes to your actions – might be on your site.
It’s now time to revisit your Content Strategy. Are you still acting in accordance with it? If so, is it going to be effective in the current environment?
If not, then you need to update it to reflect what’s currently happening.
If you don’t, your site will start to Decline – and the whole idea is to stop it before it gets to that point, and start another cycle.
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